Brunei - Poverty line needed to assist disadvantaged pre-schoolers

A COUNTRY needs to establish a poverty line first before they reach out to preschoolers who came from poor or disadvantaged families and in need of early childhood care and education

The Regional Education Advisor under UNICEF, East Asia Pacific Regional Office (EAPRO), Dr Clifford Meyers (picture) pointed this out at the opening of a "Conference on Early Childhood Care and Education and Regional Forum on SEAMEO Project Five (Preschool Programme for All)" yesterday afternoon.

Speaking during an interview, Dr Meyers emphasised the importance of early childhood care and education and said that it was one of the most important elements to education that a government can invest in.

Early childhood care and education is not only good for reducing disparities, but it was also good for the growth of the whole country, he added.

"We need to invest more for children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, because that is where the biggest return on the investment will be," he said.

In the case of identifying a poverty line, he cited Indonesia as an example, who he said, had already established this line and are making efforts to ensure their children are going to school. "Indonesia have done this in both regular primary school and preschool pupils. If their families are below the (poverty) level, their kids become a prerequisite for receiving social welfare benefits but they need to have their kids give a regular school attendance," he said.

For countries like Brunei, who have yet need to define a poverty line, The Brunei Times asked Dr Meyers how Brunei can go about helping poor or disadvantaged students in rural areas, for example.

He said that countries like Mongolia, whose population was also relatively small similar to Brunei, found out that the cost of monitoring and reaching out to the most disadvantaged student is more expensive than reaching everybody.

"So what Mongolia did was that they made (early childhood care and education) universal," he said.

Brunei may decide to do the same thing, where a parent could request to receive an allowance or incentive for enrolling their kids in preschool.

Those who don't need the incentive may never apply, but no one would be denied it, he added. "Because sometimes to monitor these types of situations can create more problems. It's like a situation of whose rich or whose poor. Sometimes people are proud in saying they are not poor and need help but there are others who want to be richer, and capture these incentives so the people who need it the most don't get it," he said.

One strategy that Brunei could also adopt in terms of investing in children with poor backgrounds was to strategise by adhering towards a "one size does not fit all" policy.

"(In terms of policy) You don't want to make everything uniform, you want to make everything adaptable to the context of the children themselves," Dr Meyers said.

He admitted that he was not an expert on Brunei education, but said that some people would say Brunei was considered a "small country and everything was uniform". "There is no place that was to small to say that everything is the same. It's all a matter of doing a bit of situation analysis to see where the biggest gaps are in terms of kids not being in preschool and what are their family's reasons for not sending them to school," he said.

In some countries, families have blamed the cost of bringing their children to and from a remote school. "They say it's just not worth taking their time and some countries will provide a food incentive such as cooking oil, rice rations once a month just for bringing in their children into the child centre every day," he said.

However, he did admit that sometimes a poverty line was not worth defining as the definition can be a bit "skewed". He said that in some cases, "it was not worth" drawing the poverty line, because defining the line, for example whether it depended on the number of material items one would have in their apartment, as well as monitoring the line, can be very diverse. Dr Meyers reiterated how important it was to invest in early childhood and care education and that extended help should not just come from the Ministry of Education but multi-sectoral.

Hana Roslan

The Brunei Times

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