School Drop-Out Risk Hotspot Analysis

COVID-19 poses a serious threat to a country’s development, particularly in the education sector. In partnership with CARE International, and as part of Cambodia’s GPE-funded COVID-19 Accelerating Funding Response and Recovery programme, UNICEF has awarded SCI with implementing the Communication for Education and Improved School Governance. The purpose of the project is to support the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport in the process of reopening schools and, in particular, reach the most vulnerable families and their children. To support the above project, this study was proposed and conducted. This study had two objectives:

To meet the objectives of the study, data from joint COVID-19 rapid education assessment were employed. In this study, only student and caregiver data were used. To map school drop-out risk at the district and province levels, school drop-out risk was

aggregated to the district and province levels using weighted averages. The study employed both descriptive and inferential statistics. Frequency analysis was used to analyse the proportion of dropout risk. A chi-square test was employed to examine the relationship between drop-out risk and other categorical variables such school level, gender, disability, ethnicity, poverty, occupation of household head and child labour. To examine the determinants of the school drop-out risk, logistic regression was employed to analyse a dummy variable of being at risk versus no risk of drop-out.