Holy alliances: public subsidies, Islamic high schools, and female schooling in Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper documents the experience of incentive‐based reforms in the secondary Islamic/madrasa education sector in Bangladesh within the context of the broader debate over modernization of religious school systems in South Asia. Key features of the reform are changes of the curriculum and policy regarding admission of female students. In return to formal registration and curriculum modernization, madrasas receive financial aid from the government towards teacher salary. Using a cross‐sectional census data‐set (containing current and retrospective information) on formal secondary schools and madrasas, we first point out that a significant fraction of the existing post‐primary registered madrasas today comprises of ‘converts’; that is, formerly all‐male, unregistered religious schools that previously offered traditional, religious education. Furthermore, these madrasas have embraced female students in recent years following the introduction of yet another incentive scheme, namely a conditional cash transfer scheme for secondary girls. Drawing upon school enrolment data aggregated at the region level, we show that regions that had more (modernized) madrasas were more likely to achieve gender parity in secondary enrolment during 1999–2003, holding the number of secular secondary schools constant. This finding highlights the previously undocumented role played by religious schools in removing gender disparity in rural Bangladesh.

Keywords:

• female education
• educational subsidy
• madrasa reform
• religious education
• South Asia

Acknowledgements

The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 2007 Royal Economic Society Conference (Warwick University), at the World Bank–Department for Foreign and International Development (DFID) South Asia Regional Conference on Education, October 2007 (New Delhi), at the Bangladesh Development Initiative Conference, June 2008 (Harvard University), and at seminars at the Independent University of Bangladesh, the University of Reading and the Oxford University. The authors are also thankful to Sayed Rashid Al‐Zayed for help with data preparation.

Notes

1. The Deoband (Darul Ulum) system, introduced in 1866 in Northern India, is considered by many as a reaction to the Anglo‐Oriental education in colonial India. The Deobandis shun modern scientific and technical education and follow the ‘Dars‐i‐Nizamia’ – a syllabus comprising of authoritative texts that dates back to the eleventh century. The nature of other learning materials used therein remains unknown. Being unrecognized, they do not follow government‐approved curriculum and, hence, are open to exploitation by extremist quarters.

2. The origin of registered madrasas in Bangladesh can be traced to 1780 when, under the British initiative, the first ever madrasa in the public sector was established in the subcontinent, namely Calcutta Aliyah madrasa. The madrasa went through a major reorganization in 1850 when it was divided into two separate divisions, the Arabic and the Anglo‐Persian. However, only the purely religious side of the Calcutta madrasa moved to Dhaka in 1947. The handful of registered madrasas in Bangladesh between 1971 and 1980 are all inspired by the Calcutta madrasa, and hence are popularly known as Aliyah madrasas (Zaman 1999).

3. Those few who succeed in securing wage employment perform relatively poorly in the labor market. Studies comparing wage earnings of graduates of madrasa and secular schools suggest lower returns to religious education (see, for example, Asadullah 2006, 2009).

4. All madrasas in Bangladesh are privately owned and managed. There are just three state‐run Islamic seminaries in the country.

5. Recently, humanities, science and business education have been introduced at secondary stage.

6. In recent years, most of the Quomi madrasas have also replaced Urdu by Bangla as the medium of instruction. Amongst other notable changes, some Quomi madrasas have voluntarily introduced modern subjects into their curriculum. In other words, apart from the usual Islamic education, students are also taught English, mathematics and social science (Ahmad 2004). However, such changes are allegedly limited to those that are member of a regional confederation of Quomi madrasa. In the absence of a single central association, the extent and nature of curriculum modernization within the Quomi sector is said to differ significantly across various regional associations. We are not aware of any study that documents the extent of curriculum reform in the Quomi sector. These sporadic and uncoordinated curriculum changes aside, there have been little changes in other areas such as attitudes towards females. For instance, no Quomi madrasa in the country approves co‐education.

7. In contrast, Aliyah madrasa degrees are recognized by all universities in Bangladesh.

8. This figure is from Kennedy (2004).

9. At present, only seven Indian states (Assam, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal) have government‐sponsored madrasa education boards, to which a number of madrasas are affiliated.

10. Outside South and South‐East Asia, Egypt and Turkey are two countries with considerable experience in madrasa reform.

11. This followed amendment of the Indonesian Educational Act No. 2/1989.

12. Another noticeable difference between the two countries is that recognized madrasas in Bangladesh are supervised by Ministry of Education, whereas in Indonesia they remain under the control of Ministry of Religious Affairs.

13. Given that Quomi madrasas are overwhelmingly unregistered, information about them from administrative sources is essentially non‐existent. Therefore, we do not know the exact size of the Quomi education sector in Bangladesh. However, the authors are currently in the process of conducting a specialized survey to specially look at Quomi madrasas.

14. In contrast, Madrasas in Pakistan account for less than 1% of total school enrolment (Andrabi et al. 2006).

15. According to Sattar (2004), however, at the time of independence, there were 1371 registered madrasas in Bangladesh. However, no basis could be found for this figure; the author used past newspapers clippings as a data source. If one takes this estimate as authentic, the fraction of converts as a percentage of total registered secondary madrasas becomes 34%.

16. The ‘recognition year’ corresponds to the year in which a madrasa first received grants from the government. For 14% of the madrasas in the census data‐set, however, this information is missing.

17. The remaining 3% constitute pre‐existing registered madrasas that were inspired by the Arabic branch of Calcutta Aliyah madrasa and specialized primarily in medieval Arabic/Islamic texts.

18. Indonesia is another Muslim country that has achieved similar gender parity in madrasa enrolment.

19. See online (Table 7): http://www.banbeis.gov.bd/db_bb/madrasah_education_2.htm.

20. Administratively the nation is divided into divisions, districts, subdistricts (upazilas), unions, cluster of household (mouzas). As many as 24% (n = 1179) of the unions in Bangladesh do not have a secondary madrasa.

21. A similar pattern is observed from gross enrolment statistics. According to Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics (BANBEIS), gross female enrolment rate at secondary level in school (total number of females enrolled in secondary school/total number of 11–15 year olds in the population) has increased from 42.5% to 48.4% between 1999 and 2003.

22. In a companion paper, we also investigate the correlation between female enrolment and the number of madrasas in the union using a similar regression specification (see Asadullah and Chaudhury 2008). Once again, we find that Bangladeshi regions with higher number of madrasas experience higher growth in female enrolment.

23. Our position is not about relative advantage but about expanding the option of service providers in rural areas. There are essentially no government schools in rural Bangladesh. Besides secular aided‐schools, the government strategy is to expand supply of schools by giving incentives to religious schools to register, to modernize their curriculum, and to admit female students.

24. This, however, simply demonstrates that quality of education remains very low in the rural area so that private secular schools do not have an advantage over Aliyah madrasas in attracting prospective students.

25. Asadullah and Chaudhury (2006) present an attempt in this direction. However, the authors only focus on a sample of females to study the relationship between religious school attendance and social attitude of graduates.