• Working children and education

Working children and education

This paper uses statistical analysis to identify the major drop-out and push-out factors that lead to school abandonment in the urban shantytowns of Fortaleza, northeast Brazil.

Based on surveys of young people, the analysis identifies the following features of school attendance in the region:

• similar to other studies in Latin America, more boys than girls drop out of school early
• three quarters of those who dropped out before completing high school failed to complete elementary school
• many who drop out of school aged 16 and over do not work, raising doubts about the extent to which work is the primary motivation for early school-leaving
• race does not appear to have an effect on early school-leaving
• most notably, one-third of those out of school were parents, compared with 4 per cent of those in school

The paper concludes that the schooling level of the mother does not have a significant impact on the probability that the teenager will drop out of school. Instead, results indicate that early parenthood has a strong impact driving teenagers out of school. Extreme poverty is another factor lowering school attendance, as children who have suffered hunger at some point in their lives are less likely to attend school. The study also concludes that working does not necessarily have a detrimental effect on school attendance. Dropping out of school leads most often to inactivity, and not to work, which could be due to the lack of employment opportunities. Another possible reasoning points to the role that working for some hours can have helping fund schooling such as the costs of transport to school.

The authors recommend efforts to reduce or subsidise the direct and indirect costs of school for children aged up to 18 years, together with early childhood development programmes and improved nutrition and health.

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