Reaching the marginalized: EFA global monitoring report, 2010; 2010

0120CHAPTER 3Education for All Global Monitoring ReportWithoutredistributivefiscal transfers,whole regionsand historicallydisadvantagedgroups canbe left behindSocial protection provides a mechanism forintegrating child labour into wider national povertyreduction efforts. Evidence from Latin America andbeyond highlights the potential. Reductions in childwork by beneficiaries of conditional cash transfershave been found in Brazil, Cambodia, Ecuador,Mexico and Nicaragua. In Cambodia, the averagechild receiving a transfer was ten percentagepoints less likely to work for pay. Reduction of childlabour as a result of these programmes is oftena by-product of school attendance conditions,or, as in Cambodia, a result of direct transfersfor education (Fiszbein et al., 2009).Programmes could go further to target householdswhose poverty forces them to rely on child labour –but transfers need to be big enough to compensatefor the lost income. Targeting the Ultra Poor, aprogramme launched in 2002 by the Bangladeshinon-government organization BRAC, includeschild labour as one indicator of eligibility. Inthe programme, carefully targeted ‘ultra poor’households in rural Bangladesh receiveunconditional cash and asset transfers, credit,training and equipment. Income poverty has fallen,nutrition and health have improved, andbeneficiaries have increased their access toproductive assets. However, the effects on childlabour and enrolment have been more muted. Asone response, BRAC now includes school enrolmentas a monitoring benchmark for graduation fromultra poverty (Sulaiman, 2009). Conditions mayalso be needed to ensure that children are not keptout of school to take care of livestock assets thatthe household has been given. At the same time,benefits from the programme need to be sufficientto compensate for lost income from child labour.Budgeting against marginalizationGovernment budgets are a major policy toolfor combating marginalization in education.Reaching the most marginalized often requireshigher spending than for wealthier areas, with aredistribution of public finance helping overcomeinherited disadvantage. Yet the marginalizedoften live in regions with little capacity to mobilizefinance. Without redistributive fiscal transfers,whole regions and historically disadvantagedgroups can be left behind.Financial decentralization has often widenedopportunity gaps. Devolving responsibility forrevenue-raising can bring decision-making onfinancing closer to the communities affected,but it can also widen financing gaps between richerand poorer regions, and between schoolswithin regions (UNESCO, 2008a). In China’shighly decentralized financing system, per studentexpenditure on junior middle schools is eighteentimes higher in Beijing and Shanghai than inthe poorest provinces (Dollar and Hofman, 2006).Governments can seek to direct public spendingtowards marginalized regions and groups throughvarious mechanisms.Mobilizing resources. Ensuring that excludedgroups get a stake in new sources of national wealthis one way to combat marginalization. In practice,this is often a politically fraught exercise becauseredistribution between subnational bodies involvescomplex bargaining by central government. TheBolivian Government has introduced several newfiscal transfer mechanisms financed by a DirectHydrocarbon Tax. Two of these are directlyredistributive. The tax finances a cash transferof around US$50 million to the Juancito Pintoprogramme. Covering close to 2 million children,it targets districts with high dropout and lowattendance. Another social transfer programmeprovides minimum income support. Together thetwo programmes represent around 2% of GDP.By far the largest part of the Direct HydrocarbonTax revenue takes the form of a block grant tosubnational governments. This transfer, estimatedin 2009 at US$902 million, or 9% of GDP, is notpro-poor and tends to favour gas-producingdepartments with relatively low poverty. Thus,the Direct Hydrocarbon Tax has increased overallfinancing for marginalized children in education,but has done little to narrow financing inequalities.Scaling up the Juancito Pinto programme wouldstrengthen equity by making the tax systemmore progressive (Gray Molina and Yañez, 2009).Other countries with significant mineral wealth,such as Angola, Nigeria and Peru, could alsosystematically target transfers to regions ofhigh deprivation in education.Prioritizing equity. Many countries have adoptedrules for the transfer of public finance that attachweight to poverty-related factors, including deficitsin education (UNESCO, 2008a). One recent examplecomes from India. Before 2007, equity played onlya limited role in determining resource allocation.District population size was the main criterion usedin estimating need. A new formula attaches moreweight to social indicators, including a district-levelEducation Development Index. In 2005/2006, thedifferences in per child allocation between high210