PHL loses .18% of GDP because of out-of-school children – UNESCO

A recent report by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said that there were major economic consequences to having high numbers of out-of-school children (OOSC), especially for Southeast Asian countries.

"We demonstrate that enrolling out-of-school children is not only a moral obligation but a productive investment, and that all seven Southeast Asian countries, regardless of the seriousness of their OOSC challenges, suffer a far greater loss from maintaining OOSC than they would from increasing public spending to enroll those children in primary school," The Economic Cost of Out-of-School Children in Southeast Asia report said.

Co-published by UNESCO Bangkok and Results for Development Institute (R4D), the report said that countries in Southeast Asia--specifically Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, the Philippines, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Viet Nam--stand to lose billions of dollars in the near future unless urgent measures are taken to enroll millions of out-of-school children in the region.

It estimated that the economic cost of out-of-school youth in the Philippines was 0.18% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Thus, the report concluded that educating OOSC can have a large economic impact, aside from direct productivity gains.

According to the report, the education problem has two halves: education quality and access issues.

"For low-income countries, they find that the return to improving quality of schools is three times higher than the return to expanding enrollment at current quality levels. Thus achieving universal primary enrollment is just a first step toward unlocking the full economic returns to education," the report stressed.

The report also pointed out that some of the barriers to implementing universal education in the Philippines included lack of finances, lack of interest, illness/disability, distance from school, and domestic responsibilities.

The report also lamented that young people from the poorest households in the region were "overwhelmingly overrepresented" among out-of-school children.

"Universal primary enrollment would reduce inequality in the region, which is high particularly in the three largest economies (Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand) we analyzed," the report stated.

According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, there were 1,223,909 out-out-school children and 532,896 out-of-school youths in the Philippines in 2013. — Trisha Macas/DVM, GMA News