ABSTRACT
Nearly 130 million children in the developing world do not attend school. These children mostly belong to poor households and are the very children who need an education to pull themselves out of poverty. The consequences of non-enrolment in the world today has the potential to widen the gap between the haves and have nots. Nearly two thirds of the population nonenrolled is girls. As was discussed in Chapter three, children in rural areas, urban slums, ethnic minorities and communities in arid regions in general have very high non-enrolment rates. Particularly in South Asia as compared to the rest of the developing regions, a significantly higher proportion of girls than boys do not attend school. As a s result, a high proportion of those who will be trapped in poverty in the near future will be women. The magnitudes of gender gap in South Asian countries is unevenly distributed. The two predominantly Muslim populations in Pakistan and Bangladesh have different levels of gender gap in terms of enrollment. The gender gap is very high in Pakistan. Bangladesh reports low gender gap levels.
