# **1. Introduction**

With more than 100 million children of primary school age not in school around the world—the majority of those in the poorest countries of Africa and Asia—the task of achieving Education for All is a difficult one. A range of policy interventions to increase school participation are typically discussed: for example increasing the availability of schools; providing demand-side subsidies such as cash transfers that are conditioned on school participation; or promoting school quality as a way of increasing the value of schooling and therefore its perceived benefits (for an overview see World Bank 2004). In many instances, increasing the number of schools—thereby lowering the distance to schools for any given child—is an attractive option to policymakers as well as the international agencies who support them through funding. The intuitive appeal of school construction as a pre-requisite to schooling is obvious. In addition, building schools is a fairly straightforward task, especially when compared with the more difficult job of ensuring high quality learning in a vast number of schools around a country. Moreover, the political benefits of sponsoring the construction of a visible and tangible school are potentially greater than those accruing to supporting efforts to ensure quality—an elusive concept at best.

But how much should one expect school enrollment to increase as a result of such a “bricks-and-mortar” approach to expanding education opportunities? This paper investigates the answer to this question by simulating the impact of lowering the average distance between a child and schools on school enrollment using data from 21 low-income countries. The results imply that although increasing school availability can be a tool for increasing enrollments, it cannot typically be expected to have a large effect. Estimates of the association between the distance to the nearest school, or the availability of a school in a close geographic area, are often statistically significant—but they are typically very small in magnitude. For example, in rural Chad where only 26 percent of 6 to 14 year olds are reported to be in school, reducing the distance to all primary schools to zero would be associated with only about a 6 percentage point increase in school participation. In only a small number of countries—particularly those in which the average distance is high—would reducing the distance to the nearest secondary school be associated with a sizeable increase in the enrollment of 6 to 14 year olds (who are mostly of primary school age). Moreover, there is little evidence that increasing school availability is associated with large changes in inequality—by household wealth or by gender—in school participation. However, in some countries, particularly where overall enrollment is low, increasing school availability may initially exacerbate inequalities in enrollment.

The data used are mostly cross-sectional and therefore it is difficult to assess the degree to which results might be driven by endogenous school placement: if schools are placed in communities where they are “most needed” (in the sense that in their absence enrollments would be lowest) one could observe a small cross-sectional association that could still be consistent with a large causal impact of increasing school availability on enrollment. Results for the three 1