rates steadily to about 90 percent of children aged six to 14 years. In Pakistan the primary net enrollment rate jumped from 58 percent to 74 percent between 2000 and 2011, though that is still lower than the regional average. Moreover, according to data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, between 2000 and 2010 South Asia’s lower secondary enrollment rate increased from about 44 percent to 58 percent.

In addition, there has been significant movement towards gender parity as well as some success in drawing the more marginalized into school. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka both now have more girls than boys in grades six to twelve; in India the percentage of girls in secondary school went up from 60 percent in 1990 to 74 percent in 2010.

While there has been progress to improve the access to education in the region, access for all remains elusive, particularly in getting the disadvantaged and marginalized into school, and in particular into post-basic education. Still, the key challenging policy agenda now is on enhancing the quality of education and making progress towards improving learning outcomes – the ultimate goal of any educational system and (as e.g. shown by Hanushek and Woessmann, 2012, and Hanushek, 2013) a stronger driver of economic growth than years of schooling. A recent report on challenges, opportunities, and policy priorities in school education in South Asia, Dundar et al. (2014), established that mean student achievements in mathematics, reading, and language are very low throughout the region, except maybe for Sri Lanka. Mean student achievement in arithmetic tends to be particularly low. For example, India’s National Council of Educational Research and Training found that only a third of grade five students could compute the difference between two decimal numbers. Similarly, in rural Pakistan, only 37 percent of grade five students can divide three-digit numbers by a single-digit number, while in rural Bangladesh more than a third of fifth graders do not even have grade three competencies (World Bank, 2012). Mean student achievement in reading and language is low in most South Asian countries, too. The Annual Status of Education Report found, for instance, that less than half of fifth graders in rural India were able to read a grade two text in their native language. This meant they were already three years behind in grade-appropriate competency. In rural Pakistan, the situation seems not to be much better. According to the South Asian Forum for Education Development, only 41 percent of grade three students are able to read a sentence in Urdu or Sindhi. A recent national assessment of both rural and urban learning competencies in Bangladesh showed that only 25 percent of grade five pupils had attained the reading achievement expected of their grade (World Bank, 2012). Moreover, within countries mean levels tend to be low but variances high. Thus, a small proportion of students can meet international benchmarks while the rest perform very poorly (Dundar et al., 2014).

While the progress to date on access to education is notable, there are several reasons why the next set of challenges of improving quality and reaching the most disadvantaged children will be even more difficult. First, the two challenges are jointly determined, for if primary education is not viewed as providing quality learning that leads to improved life choices, then families will not view it as important to make other sacrifices, like paying for uniforms and text books or foregoing other earnings behaviors, to send children to school. Further, while it is relatively straightforward to measure whether

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