Sustaining Women's Literacy in Bangladesh: The Impact of Schooling and Employment Status

Investment in women's schooling is widely seen as an important channel to improve the life chances of the next generation. However, majority of the women in developing countries face the risk of literacy loss not at least... [ view full abstract ]

Investment in women's schooling is widely seen as an important channel to improve the life chances of the next generation. However, majority of the women in developing countries face the risk of literacy loss not at least two reasons. First. the overall school quality is poor. Second, the environment in which women can acquire and retain literacy skills in non-institutional settings is shaped by various forms of social restrictions and norms. For instance, women are confined to non-market (house) work which neither provides sufficient opportunities for acquisition of new cognitive skills, not help sustain literacy skills in post schooling years. In this paper, we examine the empirical relationship between schooling and literacy skills among working and non-working women in Bangladesh using data from the 2014 Women's Life Choices and Attitudes Survey (WiLCAS) which interviewed over 6000 women across 64 districts and asked women to self-report their literacy status (whether they can read and write) alongside taking a simple test of literacy, numeracy, and cognitive ability. While two-third women reported themselves as literate, the majority could could not read two simple sentences in vernacular language. Overall, we report a weak relationship between years of schooling completed and literacy skills which remains unexplained by differences in school type, innate ability, religious membership, parental education and wealth. Instead we present evidence that less schooled working women benefit from gains in verbal numeracy skills over secondary schooled housewives. We also explore how employment participation in the readymade garments factories help sustain literacy skills. The findings suggest that alongside policies that emphasize improvement in school quality, interventions that give women better access to the market economy can help them acquire important numeracy skills and/or avoid loss of literacy skills. Increased access to learning opportunities is not enough if opportunities to use and retain literacy skills are low. Therefore we conclude that achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 4.6, including the targets of universal literacy and numeracy will require addressing social customs and norms that not only hold girls back from school, but also those that keep women away from market work in developing countries. In doing so, we also add to the growing international evidence (e.g. Pritchett and Sandefur 2017) that achieving schooling targets alone won’t reach learning and literacy goals among women in developing countries.