The top 10 reasons why children stay in schools in Pakistan

5 min readJul 21, 2020

A data based approach using ASER’s 2019 Annual Report Data

Introduction

Intuitively, one might be inclined to say that the location of a child’s house and the household’s income are the most important factors in deciding if the child will enroll in a school or not. Some might argue that parents’ education is a very huge factor in deciding the child’s prospects to receive education.

You may have heard Napoleon Bonaparte’s famous quote:

“Give me an educated mother, I shall promise you the birth of a civilized, educated nation”

But do these intuitions/quotes hold true when we analyze the underlying data?

In this article, we will see all the interesting things I found out when deep diving into the data set for 288,776 Children from all over Pakistan.

We’ll also try to answer what it is about households, locations and parents that keeps children in schools.

Part 1: Top factors influencing the child’s education

After training a (trivial) statistical model on 99% of the data, the following factors were found to affect children enrollments the most:

Top 20 factors giving children an advantage:

Age (by far the highest impact)
Living in district Surab or Kasur
Being a boy
Living in district Kharan, Nagar, Okara, Malakand, Rondu or Nowshero Feroze
Living in Azad Jammu and Kashmir or Gilgit Baltistan
Living in district Jacobabad, Panjgur or Hunza
Having an electricity connection
Living in district Gupis Yasin or Rawalpindi
Living in Punjab
Living in district Chaghi

Top 20 factors giving children a disadvantage:

Living in district Zhob, Dukki, Loralai
Living in Balochistan
Being a girl
Living in district Tangir
Living in FATA
Father’s education data not filled in the survey form (can’t be assumed as uneducated according to ASER)
Living in district Jhang, Matiari, Diamer, Awaran, Bannu, North Waziristan, Sukkur, Rajanpur, Nasirabad, Jafarabad, Sargodha or Bolan

Part 2: What is it about the households and parents that’s more likely to keep children in schools

Disclaimer: This data has to be taken with a pinch of salt because it has been stripped of the location context.

After training a statistical model on 99% of the data, the following factors affected children being in and out of school the most:

Top 10 factors having a positive affect:

Age (has the highest affect by far)
Being a Boy
Having a Pucca (permanent) house
Having a father who has attended school
Having higher number of total members in the house
Having an electricity connection
Having a self-owned house
Having a mother who has passed 10 grades
Having a father who has graduated
Having a father who has passed 10 grades

Top 10 factors having a negative affect:

Having a family that’s a recipient of PSPA social assistance
Having a higher number of males in the house
Being a girl
Having a kutcha (temporary) house
Having a family that’s a recipient of ehsaas social assistance
Mother’s education data not filled in the survey form
Having a solar panel available
Father’s education data not filled in the survey form
Having a father who has studied till grade 5
Having a motorcycle at home

Part 3: Age vs Enrollments

Zooming in on the Age data shows that parents generally pick the 5 Year mark to get children enrolled in schools. Very less parents put their children in school at ages 3 and 4.

It’s either that, or the general state of education in the country is on the decline from the last 2 years. I’m not an educationist, and would love some input on this.

Part 4: How Parents’ years of education affect the child’s enrollment chances

The Mother’s number of years of education seems to play a very important role in the enrollment percentages of children. Children whose mothers have less than 3 years of education tend to have a significantly lesser chance of getting enrolled.

The 6 year mark for mother’s years of education and 7 year mark for the father’s education looks like a boundary that influences children’s enrollment percentages.

There’s some unexplainable data for parents’ years of education is exactly 4 years

So this answers our question above about affect of mother’s education.

Extra: What the respondents say about “out of school” children

Non Enrollment

According to 40,662 recorded responses, here are the main reasons why children haven’t enrolled in any school segregated by Provinces. I noticed that ~40% non-enrollment in Punjab due to “Law and Order” looks counter-intuitive

Drop Out

9,771 responses felt that these are the main reasons for children dropping out

Conclusion

The data validates most of our hunches about the main factors. It seems to agree with Napoleon’s saying as well.

Want to deep dive yourself?

The code for this analysis can be found in this github repo. I’ve also answered some other questions that I had about the data in the Jupyter Notebook.