Educational attainment and enrollment around the world-Overview

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Quick overview This site presents "profiles" of education outcomes for many developing countries, as derived from an analysis of Demographic and Health Survey data. For example, you will be able to find the proportion of 15 to 19 year olds who have completed grades 1, 2, 3, and so-on, or the proportion of children of each age between 6 and 14 who are currently reported as being in school. Moreover, you will be able to compare these profiles across subgroups of the population (wealth groups, males and females, etc...).

The idea behind these pages is to let you navigate through the different profiles, and discover the patterns in educational outcomes and how they vary across countries and groups within countries. In many cases, clicking on a figure will show additional information, for example, breakdowns across different population groups for a given country.

Please read on if this is your first visit to this site, it will hopefully make your browsing more productive. To select a dataset, or several datasets, go to the main selection page .

Details on profiles, population subgroups, and data sources

Profiles: There are three main types of profiles that have been generated: cohort attainment profiles ; cross-sectional enrollment profiles ; cohort grade survival profiles , and cross-sectional enrollment pyramids .

Attainment profiles for the current cohort aged 15 to 19 years old.

These figures show the proportion of the cohort of individuals currently between the ages of 15 and 19 --inclusive-- who have completed each of the grades.

The figures enable one to see, not only the aggregate proportion of the particular cohort of 15 to 19 year olds who have completed a grade, but allows the synthetic decomposition of that proportion between those who "ever enrolled", and those who left the school system at each grade (synthetic because the figures do not track individuals over time, but are averages for the cohort). For example in Bangladesh in 1996-97, 53.5 percent of all individuals had completed at least grade 5.

In Benin for example, only 26 percent of the those aged 15 to 19 from the poorest 40 percent of households (as ranked by an index of household asset ownership) had completed grade 1 or higher, meaning 74 percent had never attended school or not completed even one year of schooling. Only 7.9 percent had completed grade 5 or higher, and only 0.7 percent had completed grade 9 or higher.

Among the richest 20 percent of household, 80 percent of 15 to 19 year olds had completed grade 1 or higher but drop-out was such that only 54 percent had completed grade 5. Even among the rich only 17 percent had completed grade 9.

Attainment profiles for different cohorts.

These figures show the attainment profiles, not only for the cohort of those aged 15 to 19, but also for the cohort of those currently 20 to 29 years old, and those 30 to 39 years old.

This allows one to see how the attainment patterns for a given country have changed over time. For example in Bangladesh in 1996-97, 49 percent of those aged 30 to 39 had completed grade 1, 56.6 percent of those aged 20 to 29 had done so, but 72.5 percent of those 15 to 19 years old had completed grade 1. Note that making the simple comparison of attainment across these different cohorts assumes that mortality rates are constant across education groups.

For example, in Bangladesh, 77 percent of males currently aged 15 to 19 had completed grade 1, and 69 percent of females had.

Only 26 percent of females currently aged 15 to 19 had completed grade 8. but among those currently 20 to 29, only 20 percent had, and among those 30 to 39, only 12 percent had.

For males, the percentages were 32, 34, and 28 percent.

Cross-sectional enrollment profiles for ages 6 to 14.
These figures show the proportion of children of each age who are currently enrolled in school (the numbers are derived not from official records but from answers to a question such as: 'is this child still in school?').
The figures enable one to see the ages at which children tend to enroll in school, and subsequently drop out.
For example, in Nepal only 55 percent of girls aged 7 are currently reported as 'in school' whereas 75 percent of 7 year old boys are.
For boys, 84 percent are currently enrolled at age 11 and for girls 48 percent are currently enrolled at age 13.

Cohort grade survival profiles for ages 10 to 19.
These figures show the proportion of children of the cohort of 10 to 19 year olds who have completed each grade (including grade 1) each age, using techniques adapted from "survival analysis". The technique estimates the proportion of the cohort that has completed a grade--adjusting for the fact that some students are still in school and we cannot observe their ultimate grade completed (the observation is said to be "right censored").
The figures enable one to see the estimated grade-to-grade progression of a current cohort.
For example in Angola, 84 percent of the current cohort of children (ages 10 to 19) has survived to grade 1, and and estimated 53 percent have survived to complete grade 9, adjusting for those that are still in school and may yet complete grade 9.

Enrollment pyramids for ages 6 to 24.
These figures show the proportion of 6 to 24 year olds who are currently enrolled in school, and specifies the level of schooling they are enrolled in.
For example in Nepal, while 79 percent of 7 year old boys were enrolled in primary school in 2001, while only 66 of 7 year old girls were. And 42 percent of 14 year old boys were enrolled in primary schoo, while 33 percent were enrolled in secondary school.

Population subgroups: The profiles can be presented for different subgroups of the population:

All

By economic status group. These are for individuals from households in the poorest 40 percent, the middle 40 percent, and the wealthiest 20 percent as defined by an index based on the ownership of various assets by members of the household, the "asset index". For more on this see the paper Estimating Wealth Effects without Expenditure Data--or Tears: With an Application to Educational Enrollments in States of India (Filmer and Pritchett, 2001).

The economic status groups are redefined for each country so that the groups are relative within countries. That is, a household defined as 'poor' in one country might well be considered 'rich' in another country.

Since household economic conditions at the time of schooling of older cohorts (those aged 20 to 29, and 30 to 39) are less likely to be well captured by the current measure of wealth, the profiles for these cohorts are not disaggregated by wealth group.

By economic status quintiles These are simply a more disaggregated version of the economic status groups with individuals grouped into the poorest 20 percent, the next 20 percent, and so on.

By household per capita expenditure groups or quintiles These use the more common consumption expenditure based measure of welfare to rank individuals from poorest to richest. This measure in not available for the DHS or MICS2 surveys

By gender

By urban/rural residential location

By the combination of the gender and location groups

By the combination of the gender and economic status/per capita expenditure groups

Data sources The profiles presented here are derived from from analysis of data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) collected since 1990, the End-of-Decade Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS2), and a collection of integrated household surveys from the Living Standards Measurement Study surveys as well as other country specific integrated household surveys.

All of these datasets are large household surveys that aim to be nationally representative (although in some cases, parts of countries are excluded when surveys could not be implemented in certain regions).

The education variables analyzed are typically based on four questions on (1) whether each household member has ever been to school, (2) if they have, what is the highest level of schooling attended and (3) the highest grade completed at that level, and (4) if the member ever attended school whether they are still in school.

The figures presented on this site are the result of the analysis of these household data sets. As such, they represent outcomes at the time of the survey and are not always representative of the current state of education in a given country.

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