Custodes Futurifor the advancement of humanity

Educational factor, barrier 2 of 6

Children out of school

Hundreds of millions of children and youth are out of school.

Evidence

  • Scale. UNESCO's 2026 Global Education Monitoring Report estimates 273 million children and youth are out of school, about 1 in 6 of school age. The number has risen for seven years in a row.
  • By age. In UNESCO's June 2025 estimate of 272 million, the rate rose with age: about 11% of primary-age children (78 million), 15% of lower-secondary-age (64 million), and 31% of upper-secondary-age youth (130 million).
  • Conflict. Conflict makes this worse. UNESCO estimated in 2025 that conflict-affected countries add at least 13 million more children out of school who are not in the main count.
  • Progress. Since 2015, out-of-school numbers have fallen by less than 1%.
  • What helps. Reducing cost, conflict, and exclusion. The scale of the problem is measured directly, but no intervention evidence is presented here.

Proposed and experimental methods

Methods that are proposed, under trial, approved in some places, or tried and then failed. Each shows a stage label and an evidence rating. A stage label shows how far a method has progressed, not whether it works. The stage labels are explained on the educational factor page.

  • Lottery-based free secondary school scholarships (Large trial, B). In Ghana, 682 of 2,064 students who had been admitted to senior high school but could not pay fees won four-year scholarships by lottery. Completion rose from 39.8% to 67.2% for women and from 49.7% to 77.9% for men, and among the children of female winners, death before age one fell from 3.5% to 1.7% and cognitive scores at age five were 0.238 standard deviations higher (Duflo et al., 2024). Children of male winners showed no such gains. This is one trial and the follow-up paper is not yet peer reviewed.
  • Government school meals tested at scale (Large trial, B). A randomized trial of Ghana's national school feeding program found moderate gains in math and literacy after two years, with larger gains for girls and for disadvantaged children and regions (Aurino et al., 2023). Unlike most earlier school meal studies, this tested a program run by the government itself.
  • Reversed: Mexico's conditional cash transfer program Progresa, later Prospera (Failed or reversed, B). The program paid poor families on condition that children attended school and was ended abruptly in 2019. About six months after the rollback began, enrollment of teenage boys in affected areas fell by 12 percentage points (about 17% of a base of roughly 70%), and by 18 percentage points among the most disadvantaged, while work among boys rose. Girls' high school enrollment did not fall much, and the replacement scholarship program showed little evidence of protecting enrollment (Marquez-Padilla et al., 2025, Marquez-Padilla et al., 2025b). The study is a working paper.

Sources cited on this page

  1. UNESCO (2026, March 25). More children out of school for the 7th year in a row, 273 million (2026 Global Education Monitoring Report) B Moderate: agency estimate
  2. Aurino, E., Gelli, A., Adamba, C., Osei-Akoto, I., & Alderman, H. (2023). Food for thought? Experimental evidence on the learning impacts of a large-scale school feeding program. Journal of Human Resources, 58(1), 74-111. link B Moderate
  3. Duflo, E., Dupas, P., Spelke, E., & Walsh, M. P. (2024). Intergenerational impacts of secondary education: Experimental evidence from Ghana (NBER Working Paper No. 32742). National Bureau of Economic Research. link B Moderate
  4. Marquez-Padilla, F., Parker, S. W., & Vogl, T. (2025b, April 29). Rolling back Progresa: What happened when Mexico's landmark cash transfer programme ended. VoxDev. link B Moderate

Every source for this factor is listed on the educational factor page.