Early Childhood Health and Education Outcomes and Children's Exposure to Multiple Risks in Turkey

Abstract

This paper considers changes in children's early health and education opportunities and outcomes in Turkey. The study aims to look at changes in health utilization, nutrition, access to early childhood education and school enrollment rates for children between 2003 and 2008. The findings suggest that health utilization has improved over time in these years and access to health care has increasingly become delinked from initial circumstances of children in the household, in parallel to Turkey's expansion of the Health Transformation Program. On the other hand, nutrition outcomes remained correlated with maternal education and household wealth status. Access to early childhood education and care programs also came out to be highly regressive, with only households and children in the top quintile having access to child care programs outside the home. The paper also considers later educational attainment outcomes for older children, by circumstance groups and finds that while some progress has been made in enrollment in basic education in these years, variables that define gender, mother tongue spoken at home and parental education remain significant determinants of early drop-outs as of 2008. In the final section, the paper investigates exposure of a certain small group of children in Turkey to multiple risk factors at the same time, and evaluates the incidence by circumstance group the probability of facing overlapping risks in early childhood. the paper argues that children in these circumstance groups, and that have exposure to multiple risk factors, should be the primary target of social protection and early childhood intervention programs.

Keywords: Early Childhood, ECD, preschool, health, education, gender, Turkey

JEL Classification: I3, O15, D31