The last mile in school access: Mapping education deserts in developing countries

Artikel

With recent advances in high-resolution satellite imagery and machine vision algorithms, fine-grain geospatial data on population are now widely available: kilometer-by-kilometer, 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 cost-effectiveness. 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 country-wide 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, open-source, 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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Journal: Development Engineering ; ISSN: 2352-7285 ; Volume: 6 ; Year: 2021 ; Pages: 1-17 ; Amsterdam: Elsevier

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft
• Subject: Access to education ; Education deserts ; Education in developing countries ; School placement

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Rodriguez-Segura, Daniel ; Kim, Brian Heseung
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Elsevier
• (where): Amsterdam
• (when): 2021

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.1016/j.deveng.2021.100064
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/242322
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET