RESOLVING THE GAP IN ACCESS TO EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION THROUGH UNIVERSAL CHILD GRANTS PROGRAMME IN RWANDA

Rwanda is one of the sub-Saharan African countries that demonstrably achieved MDGs performance indicators of progress in education. Inclusive education in Rwanda follows a rights based approach whereby every child regardless of their economic status or sex has access to school. The universal primary and 12 Year Basic Education (12YBE) programme has addressed access and equity constraints yielding to increased enrolment and encouraging effects at national level. The highest participation rate of 98.7% is observed in population aged between 7 and 12 years. The Rwandan legal framework that promotes education for all shows strong commitment towards meeting the rights of children to education. Following the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC) coupled with the ambition of becoming a knowledge based economy, the Government of Rwanda (GoR) has invested in and initiated several steps in the direction of addressing the rights and needs of children in the country.  Participation in primary school is the highest at 98.7% observed in population aged between 7 and 12 years (official school age for primary education).

Whereas the GoR has promoted basic education, a visible gap in promoting and provision of services in Pre-Primary Education (PPE) persists in practice, despite fairly supportive education legislation. The Sustainable Development Goals’ agenda now invites the extension of this success in primary education be strengthened with comparable achievement at the pre-primary level (UNICEF, 2015).

According to the education statistics year book, Gross Enrolment Rate (GER) in PPE has grown steadily over the years increasing from 16% for boys and 17% for girls in 2008 to 23.7% for boys and 24.1% for girls in 2017.  Net enrolment rate (NER) for both boys and girls remains lower compared to GER by a difference of 4%. Obscuring factors in pre-primary were reported as follows: Funding of pre-primary services at national level remains low accounting for only 0.4% of the national education budget. Low investments in PPEs have called for a fee-based education programme in the country yet other education levels are fee-free. Pre-Primary Education is largely financed by parents who contribute towards paying teacher salaries. The contribution for teacher reimbursement in Rwanda creates disparities in PPE attendance because of household inability to afford the contributions. By 2010, poverty incidence in Rwanda was at 44.9% while extreme poverty was at 24%. According to integrated household living survey data, income poverty incidence was reported to as 16.4% in 2013/14 for children between age of 0-4. This makes PPE expenditure a luxury for the majority Rwandan households. Also, considering its post conflict context, households’ perception of the importance of PPE is still a deterrent to access. Child Grants and other social protection benefits, in several countries, have been found to elicit and motivate positive behavior for child-related beneficial outcomes. This paper posits that introducing a Universal Child Grant in Rwanda, conditioned on access to PPE would be a viable policy solution that would further bolster the PPE GER.   It examines and analyses the impacts that Child Grants have had on ECE globally and the Rwandan Social Protection policy context and suggests ways that UCG would increase Social Protection coverage for Children while also increasing their access to PPE.