School dropout: Do we blame family poverty?

IN LINE with her aspirations to become a knowledge-based society, Rwanda prioritised access to education partly by offering a fee-free and compulsory primary education to all children. And considering that the cost of education can be relatively high for poor families, the government reduced such problems by ensuring that at least twelve basic years of education are free. However, recent reports in the media claim that school dropout rates in Rwanda remain high despite measures undertaken by all relevant parties to combat the problem which is increasingly becoming chronic. In fact, The New Times reported last week that dropout rates in schools are overwhelmingly high at 11.6 – 12.3 percent among boys and 10.6 – 12.2 percent for girls respectively. By all measures, these worrying figures should serve as a wake-up call for all parties involved in educating Rwanda’s most valued resource – its human capital, to ensure that the country can assuredly transition into a knowledge-based economy as stipulated under the Vision 2020 road map. Evidently, there is not a single cause of children dropping out of school. School dropout is often a process rather than the result of one single event, and therefore has more than one proximate cause. This observation was also the conclusion of a recent research piece into the causes of high rates of school dropout associated with less developed countries. Indeed, research has pointed to many factors associated with dropout, some of which emerge from children household circumstances such as child labour and extreme poverty. Others are attributed to individual traits of the pupils, including lack of personal motivation, poor health or malnutrition. School-level factors may also play a key role in increasing pressures to drop out. Some of these factors include teacher’s absenteeism, school location and general poor quality of education provision. Nevertheless, in Rwanda, assumptions have been made that children dropout essentially to help supplement family incomes, a suggestion which may indicate that poverty is at the centre of high rates of school dropout. But how accurate is this assumption? Family poverty appears to be the decisive factor for many children in Rwanda not graduating from high school. Poverty seen as a multifaceted concept that involves mainly economic and social elements, appears to influence the demand for schooling, not only because it affects the inability of households to pay school fees beyond basic free education, but also because it is associated with a high opportunity cost of children going to school. It is argued that as children grow older and subsequently progress in the level of education, the opportunity cost of education becomes even larger, hence increasing the pressure for children to work illegally to supplement their family’s income as opposed to spending time in education learning key skills. In addition, children who come from poor families are the ones likely to leave school with no qualifications in search of manual jobs in plantations, factories, construction sites and other casual places of work in order to contribute to their family’s income. Others are forced to stay at home to look after their siblings when their parents are away trying to make a living. For such families, it is a matter of priority to answer the call of the day, which is often to put food on the table rather than look to future benefits of education. By and large, we all know that failure to complete a basic cycle of secondary school education not only limits future opportunities for children but also represents a significant drain on the limited resources that Rwanda has for the provision of free basic education. Billions of Rwandan francs have been invested in education so that children from all levels of society are afforded a chance to compete for future career opportunities so that they may improve their standards of living as well as contribute to the development of Rwanda. In light of this, although it is reasonable to argue that poverty plays a key role in driving up dropout rates, policymakers should look to curb this threat by drawing up a number of remedies, including more public awareness campaigns of the benefits of education, more support to families in extreme poverty, and equally important, strict implementation of monitoring mechanisms aimed at identifying and cracking down employers involved in recruiting child labour. Penalties should be enforced to deter employment looking like the best option for unqualified often underage school dropouts. The writer is a UK Parliamentary Intern and holds a Master of Science in Public Service Policy. Twitter: @Jsabex

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School dropout: Do we blame family poverty?