Getting to Education Outcomes: Reviewing Evidence from Health and Education Interventions

Excerpt

Over the past several decades, efforts to fight infectious diseases and malnutrition have increased alongside attempts to enroll children in basic education, demonstrating a global commitment to equity and quality in child health and education. Health and education interventions can be complementary, as discussed in chapter 30 of this volume (Pradhan and others 2017). Improvements in access to quality education have contributed to preventing disease—for example, an encouraging drop in infant mortality rates is attributed not only to health services but also to worldwide improvements in education. Work commissioned by the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity found that about 7.3 million lives were saved between 2010 and 2015 in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) because of increases in educational attainment since 1990 (Pradhan and others 2017). Poor health is linked to poor student outcomes. Disease and malnutrition reduce children’s capacity to attend school and their ability to learn, particularly in poor communities lacking quality education services (Jukes, Drake, and Bundy 2008).

Indeed, some development strategies have explicitly pursued cross-sector synergies. For example, the 2015 Incheon Declaration states that quality education instills skills, values, and attitudes that lead to healthy lives. Explicit recognition of the role of health in promoting education is less common. As a complement to the global state of education, as detailed in chapter 4 of this volume (Wu 2017), this chapter outlines the theoretical role of health interventions in increasing education access and quality. It then surveys evidence from LMICs on the extent to which common education interventions and school-based health interventions improve education outcomes. It considers the potential of primary and secondary schools to serve as platforms for health interventions, focusing on interventions targeting middle childhood through adolescence, understood to be the range comprising ages 5–19 years. This focus precludes a discussion of the high returns to investment in early childhood, but the studies included are particularly relevant to policy makers in countries where participation rates in early childhood education are still very low. Definitions of age groupings and age-specific terminology used in this volume can be found in chapter 1 (Bundy, de Silva, and others 2017).