Bangladesh has made significant progress in education over the past two decades. With nearly 18 million children enrolled in about 80,000 primary schools in the country. Despite this progress, considerable challenges remain. These were the children who had missed out schooling at the right age or had been forced to drop out, mainly because of poverty. In the context of diverse necessities in primary education, and time needed to put in a single mechanism to cater to all groups of children, the Government of Bangladesh, with IDA support, introduced an innovative Reaching out of School Children (ROSC) project to achieve the country’s Education for All goals.
From April 2013, ROSC II has been funding disadvantaged students to continue their education and it has been implementing under the same arrangements as in the first ROSC project to reduce the number of out of school children through equitable access, retention and completion in quality primary education in selected underserved areas. The study investigates how children with disabilities, a population very often left out of the education system, have been impacted by the project.