According to United Nations (2003) forecasts, by the year 2030 the world’s
population will exceed today’s total by some 2 billion persons. Almost all of this
population growth—1.9 billion people—is expected to be absorbed by the cities
and towns of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Although it has not yet succeeded
in forcing a recognition of urban poverty—often overlooked in country development
strategies and international lending—the continuing urbanization of the developing
world is inexorably reshaping the spatial composition of national poverty
and, in time, can be expected to recast the terms upon which national poverty debates
are conducted. This paper explores the implications of urban poverty for
children’s educational attainment, a central measure of human capital that has a
well-documented and pervasive influence on later-life demographic and labor force
behavior. We compare levels of children’s schooling in Cairo and urban Egypt with
those of Allahabad, India, a rapidly growing city of some 1.1 million persons in the
northern state of Uttar Pradesh, looking for poverty effects at both household and
neighborhood levels.
In both settings data are available on slum populations, that is, on spatial concentrations
of the urban poor. For Egypt, we draw upon the 2003 Egypt Interim
Demographic and Health Survey (EIDHS), which includes a large supplementary
sample of slum-dwellers in the Greater Cairo region. The Allahabad analysis rests
on data that were also collected in 2003 in 14 of this city’s registered slums. The
slum definitions employed in these surveys are sensible-sounding and thoroughly
conventional, resembling the definitions used across much of the developing world
(UN-Habitat 2003). But however sensible and conventional, these definitions need
to be viewed with a critical eye. We will assess whether the definitions used in
Greater Cairo and Allahabad add analytic value in understanding the conditions of
children’s lives. In particular, we ask how successful the slum definitions prove to
be in capturing the spatial concentration of urban poverty. We then ask whether the
spatial concentration of poverty exerts additional influence on children’s schooling
when the household’s own poverty status is held constant.
To pursue these issues, we must devote much of our analysis to basic issues of
measurement: how to measure poverty in the absence of data on income and consumption.
Despite decades of attention to developing-country poverty, surprisingly
few data sets have given educational researchers much purchase on the concept of
living standards. Although exceptions exist—notably the World Bank’s Living
Standards Measurement Surveys—surveys with detailed information on children’s
schooling have not often gathered comparably detailed data on household incomes
and consumption expenditures. In consequence, researchers interested in poverty
and children’s schooling have had little recourse but to use a grab-bag of proxy
indicators for living standards.