Abstract
The objective of this paper is to assess the factors affecting access to early childhood education and care in post-soviet countries. We focus on enrollment in Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan during the late period of transition from communism to a market economy using the data from nationally-representative Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys conducted by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Multilevel regression models are used to account for individual, household, and community factors explaining enrollment. Having mother with lower educational attainments, living in non-capital cities and in poorer households are associated with lower propensity of enrollment at individual and households levels. At the community level, children living in poorer communities and in communities with lower level of women education have lower propensity of enrollment. The policy measures aimed at increasing access on individual, household, and community are described and discussed.
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Notes
Less than 1 % of children are taken care of, not by the mother but by other relatives, for instance, fathers or grandmothers. We included all caretakers in our analysis, but used the term “mother” throughout the paper since the overwhelming majority of caretakers are mothers in all countries under investigation.
Since household size could potentially be correlated with the number of children under 5, we estimated all models with and without it. Neither sign nor significance of regression coefficients changed, so we decided to stay with household size.
In the preliminary stage of analysis, we attempted to estimate a three-level model where individuals were nested in households and households were nested in communities. However, this model never concaved regardless of the wide range of specifications we attempted to use.
The formulas of interclass correlation coefficient rho (ρ) computation are discussed on page 117 of the Stata manual that is available here http://www.stata.com/manuals13/me.pdf.
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Habibov, N. On Individual, Household, and Community Factors Explaining Enrollment to Early Childhood Education and Care in Post-Soviet Transitional Countries. Child Ind Res 8, 825–843 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-014-9277-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-014-9277-z