- In Tanzania, overall, the distance to the nearest primary school increased the age at which a child enrolled in school, and shortened the number of years spent in school (Bommier and Lambert 2000).

- Longer travel time to the nearest school in Mozambique was significantly negatively related to enrollment, with boys being more sensitive to distance than girls (Handa 2002).

- Travel time to the school was not associated with primary level enrollment in Peru (Younger 2000). Enrollment at the secondary level was responsive to distance to school: on average, a one-kilometer increase in the distance was associated with about an 8 percent decline in enrollment (Younger 2003). The latter study interacts distance to school with household income and finds that the interaction is not statistically significantly different from zero, suggesting that the effect is neither larger nor smaller for poor children.

Despite the variability in methodologies of these published results, it is clear that there is enough to support the notion that distance can matter for enrollment. There is a wide range in terms of the estimated magnitudes of the impact—and ambiguity on whether it matters more for girls. Of the two studies that interact availability and poverty, one suggests that the poor are more responsive to availability (Duflo 2001) the other that they are not (Younger 2003).

# **3. Using demographic and health survey data for analyzing school participation and distance to schools**

_DHS data_ This paper uses 24 data sets from 21 countries to consistently investigate the relationship between enrollment and school availability. The data are from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) carried out in the 1990s. This is a particularly attractive collection of data sets. They are large-scale household surveys that aimed to be nationally representative—the sample of children aged 6 to 14 was never less than 2,500 (Cameroon) and exceeded 5,000 in all but 7 of the 24 data sets (Table 1). The data collection methodologies (sampling strategies and survey instruments) were very similar across all the surveys. In the countries analyzed here, unlike most countries with a DHS, the survey included a community level module covering at least rural areas that asked about the distance to various facilities and amenities, including primary and secondary schools.

The percentage of children aged 6 to 14 enrolled in school ranges substantially across these data sets: from 10.4 in Niger (1992) to 83.8 percent in Bolivia (Table 1). Likewise the availability of primary schools—as measured by the distance to the nearest school—ranges from 0.2 kilometers in Bangladesh to over 7 kilometers in Chad with an unweighted average across these data sets of about 2 kilometers. Access to secondary schools is much more restricted. The average distance to the nearest secondary school ranges from 1.8 kilometers in Bangladesh to over 71 kilometers in Mali, with an unweighted average of 21.5 kilometers. Across countries there is a sizeable correlation between enrollment and the average distance to schools. The correlation coefficient is –0.64 between the enrollment of 6 to 14 year olds and the average distance to the nearest primary school, and –0.76 between their enrollment and the average distance to the nearest secondary school.

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