Towards Inclusive Education
The impact of disability on school attendance in developing countries

Publication date: 2016-03
Publication series:
Innocenti Working Papers
No. of pages: 40
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Abstract
The paper aims to reduce the global knowledge
gap pertaining to the impact of disability on school attendance, using cross-nationally
comparable and nationally representative data from 18 surveys in 15 countries
that are selected among 2,500 surveys and censuses. These selected surveys
administered the Washington Group Short Set (WGSS) of disability-screening
questions, covering five functional domains of seeing, hearing, mobility,
self-care, and remembering, and collected information on educational status. The
paper finds that (i) the average disability gap in school attendance stands at
30% in primary and secondary schools in 15 countries; (ii) more than 85% of
disabled primary-age children who are out of school have never attended school;
(iii) the average marginal effect of disability on primary and secondary school
attendance is negative and significant (-30%), and (iv) countries that have
reached close to universal primary education report high ratios of disabled to
non-disabled out-of-school children and (v) disabled children confront the same
difficulties in participating in education, regardless of their individual and
socio-economic characteristics.
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