Thought for food

Published October 2, 2013
Formulating the education policy in Pakistan for the very poor, especially in rural areas, cannot merely focus on books and teachers. The education policy has to include free meals. -Photo by Reuters
Formulating the education policy in Pakistan for the very poor, especially in rural areas, cannot merely focus on books and teachers. The education policy has to include free meals. -Photo by Reuters

It’s a tradeoff between books and meals – the food insecure in Pakistan often forego children’s education to be able to feed and clothe them. Educating the poor in Pakistan must therefore include free meals to keep children in schools in times of high food price inflation.

A recent report by the World Bank paints a sordid picture of the state of education for the food insecure households in Pakistan. The enrollment rates for children between the ages of five and 14 are directly tied to poverty status of households, with the enrollment rates being the lowest for the very poor households. Even more disturbing is the fact that a very large number of girls are forbidden to work or to attend school.

Pakistan has improved literacy rates in the recent past; however, these gains are neither sufficient nor universal. The poor are forced to make the hard choice between sending children to school and engaging them in revenue generating activities. Educational prospects for the girl child continue to suffer the most. Formulating the education policy in Pakistan for the very poor, especially in rural areas, cannot merely focus on books and teachers. The education policy has to include free meals and special provisions to educate young girls at their homes in case the parents refuse to send them to school.

The World Bank’s study authored by Xiaohui Hou and Seo Yeon Hong estimated the impact of food price inflation in 2007-08 on children’s education in Pakistan. During 2007-08, the price of wheat in Pakistan rose by 121 per cent and that of rice by 76 per cent. With wheat and rice being food staples such massive price inflation impacted not merely the low income households, but also the mid income cohorts. Using data from the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement survey, which collected information from 15,000 households in 2008 and from a subset of 6,252 households in 2010, the study found that 77 per cent of the households were at least moderately affected by the food price crisis in Pakistan. These households either reduced their food intake or switched to lower quality and inexpensive food items.

Median price of a 10-kg bag of wheat in Pakistan:

Source: Xiaohui Hou and Seo Yeon Hong. The Heterogeneous Effects of a Food Price Crisis on Child School Enrollment and Labor: Evidence from Pakistan. The World Bank, August 2013.
Source: Xiaohui Hou and Seo Yeon Hong. The Heterogeneous Effects of a Food Price Crisis on Child School Enrollment and Labor: Evidence from Pakistan. The World Bank, August 2013.

The World Bank study concluded that “the food price crisis in 2008-10 in Pakistan had a negative impact on children’s schooling.” While the study found that only 3 per cent of households switched children from schools to work, and another one per cent removed children from school because of the food price crisis, the more important findings of the report are the ones that reveal the differentiated enrolment landscape across Pakistan, where children in rural and poor households are less likely to be educated even at the primary level. If access to primary education remains a barrier for low income households, it is likely to push them deeper into poverty over successive generations.

The link between poverty and child labour is well-known. In fact, one of the most widely quoted study on this topic by Kaushik Basu and Pham Hoang Van coined the term the luxury axiom, which states that “a family will send the children to the labour market only if the family’s income from non-child-labor sources drops very low.” And since the labour markets in places like Pakistan consider child labour a substitute for adult labour, a phenomenon Basu and Van refer to as the substitution axiom, children from very poor households are forced to leave school for work when family income is not sufficient to sustain the household.

The latest study by the World Bank confirms the luxury axiom. However, what is stunning about the study is how closely the situation in Pakistan fits to the axioms forwarded by Basu and Van. Amongst the poorest households, 60 per cent of the boys attended school compared to 92 per cent from the richest households. The bias against the girl child is more pronounced amongst the lowest income strata where only 29 per cent of the girls were schooled while another 60 per cent were kept idle at home.

Surprisingly, the share of girls being schooled from the richest households was the same as for the boys (92 per cent). Furthermore, while 78 per cent of the 10-14 years old boys attended school in 2008, only 62 per cent of same aged girls were schooled. In fact, one in three girls was kept idle at home. Two years later, the share of idled girls increased to 38 per cent.

Another key finding of the Hou and Hong study is the stark difference between urban and rural populations as they cope with food price crisis. Whereas, the wheat price inflation was seen to lower enrollment rates for children belonging to the lowest income strata in rural areas, the same effect was not observed for even the very poor in urban areas.

Educating the future generations of Pakistanis should be the primary objective of the State and the society. However, abject poverty amongst the very poor has resulted in a trade-off between books and meals. A pragmatic primary education policy should therefore feed both, the bellies and the intellectual curiosity of young learners.

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