How various types of disabilities impact children’s school attendance and completion - Lessons learned from censuses in eight developing countries

Abstract

Equity in education is a central issue for researchers and policymakers, and inequality in access to education for students with disabilities is one of the most critical challenges. Existing studies treat school-age children with different kinds of disabilities as a homogeneous group due to sample size limitations, while this study sheds light on the interaction between education systems and heterogeneous disabilities using census data from eight developing countries in 2006-2012, overcoming the problem of small sample size. We find that there are consistent gaps in education indicators between students with and without disabilities and students with different kinds of disabilities.