The Last Mile in School Access: Mapping Education Deserts in Developing Countries

Resource type
Journal Article
Authors/contributors
Title
The Last Mile in School Access: Mapping Education Deserts in Developing Countries
Abstract
With recent advances in high-resolution satellite imagery and machine vision algorithms, fine-grain geospatial data on population are now widely available: kilometer-bykilometer, worldwide. In this paper, we showcase how researchers and policymakers in developing countries can leverage these novel data to precisely identify “education deserts” - localized areas where families lack physical access to education - at unprecedented scale, detail, and costeffectiveness. We demonstrate how these analyses could valuably inform educational access initiatives like school construction and transportation investments, and outline a variety of analytic extensions to gain deeper insight into the state of school access across a given country. We conduct a proof-of-concept analysis in the context of Guatemala, which has historically struggled with educational access, as a demonstration of the utility, viability, and flexibility of our proposed approach. We find that the vast majority of Guatemalan population lives within 3 km of a public primary school, indicating a generally low incidence of distance as a barrier to education in that context. However, we still identify concentrated pockets of population for whom the distance to school remains prohibitive, revealing important geographic variation within the strong countrywide average. Finally, we show how even a small number of optimally-placed schools in these areas, using a simple algorithm we develop, could substantially reduce the incidence of “education deserts” in this context. We make our entire codebase available to the public – fully free, opensource, heavily documented, and designed for broad use – allowing analysts across contexts to easily replicate our proposed analyses for other countries, educational levels, and public goods more generally.
Publication
Development Engineering
Volume
6
Pages
30
Date
2021-01-01
Journal Abbr
Development Engineering
Language
en
ISSN
2352-7285
Short Title
The last mile in school access
Accessed
18/04/2022, 18:27
Library Catalogue
Zotero
Notes

From the conclusions:

“We find that it would take only 350 new optimally-placed schools to match the actual reduction of population living in a 3 km education desert by 2017, the hypothetical circumstance represented by the green line. Put another way: 350 optimally-placed schools had the same impact on the share of population in an education desert as the 7,070 schools actually built between 2008 and 2017. We take this finding as especially hopeful and actionable for policymakers because it roughly indicates that – at least in the Guatemalan context – substantial strides in physical access can be made even if only one in 20 schools are constructed with physical access in mind. Conversely, it also makes clear that even a large amount of school construction may not necessarily increase physical access to school across the country by default (e.g., new schools are built in locations already being served by other schools). Policymakers are the best suited to determining when and to what extent physical access should be a consideration for new school construction, but so long as it remains even a minute priority, progress can be made with the help of these proposed algorithms.” (Rodriguez-Segura and Kim, p. 18)

Citation
Rodriguez-Segura, D., & Kim, B. H. (2021). The Last Mile in School Access: Mapping Education Deserts in Developing Countries. Development Engineering, 6, 30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.deveng.2021.100064