About 1.2 million children between 5 and 17 years are not enrolled in school in 2021-2022. If those attending vocational schools are added, the number rises to 4 million students. Meanwhile, education drops from 10.7 per cent to 9.7 per cent of the government‘s budget. School books and lunch weigh heavily on families.

Istanbul (AsiaNews) – Turkey’s economic crisis and the consequent rise in poverty are pushing more and more families to pull their children from school, resulting in an “unprecedented” school dropout figure.

Activists and experts note that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to remote learning, exacerbated this social scourge.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of children and young people could be deprived of a future and a chance to study, forcing many to work, often in conditions of intense exploitation.

For Omer Yilmaz, president of the Student-Parent Association, this has led to the largest mass school dropout in Turkey's modern history. “According to official statistics, some 1.2 million children aged 5-17 were not enrolled in any school in the 2021-2022 period,” he said.

Counting students attending vocational schools and open schools where they work four days a week, “nearly four million children are outside the regular education system,” some of them “working for low wages or searching for jobs”.

With prices rising in the past two years, 85.5 per cent in October, the highest increase in the last 24 years, at least one in two students in Turkey suffers from malnutrition.

The income of most families is around minimum wage, 5,500 liras (about US$ 300), Yilmaz noted. “A lunch costs at least 35 liras (US$ 1.9). For a family with two children, the monthly cost of a meal per day in school amounts to about a third of a minimum wage,” he added.

While the cost of education follows the rise in the cost of living, the government has further cut the education budget, from 10.79 per cent in last year’s budget to 9.74 per cent in next year’s.

Yet, “with millions of students leaving the regular education system, it should have been raised to 30 per cent,” Yilmaz said.

“In the past seven months alone, the number of students who entered vocational schools rose to 1 million from 160,000,” he stressed. For students, this is a way to avoid unemployment.

If the government put more money in education, families would have to pay less, as evidenced by the story of a family from Adana, in southern Turkey, as reported by al-Monitor.

Baran, 16, is the eldest of three children. Every day, practically seven days a week, he leaves home in a poor suburb to work in a wealthy part of the city.

To do this, he had to drop out of the ninth grade in order to support his family, helping his two siblings stay in school. “My favourite class was math,” he said. “But I have to work to live.”

His father Mehmet explained that “just the books for three of them cost 1,500 liras [ dollars).” With a daily wage of only , he often cannot afford to buy basic groceries. And, as time goes by, doubts grow about the possibility of the youngest to continue going in school.

Simple proposals to cut the costs of education for the poorest families have come from the government’s opposition.

Hacer Foggo, founder of Deep Poverty Network, now works with the Republican People's Party (CHP). She wants the government to guarantee free meals for everyone in school canteens.

“Children who can’t take food to school are getting traumatised,” she explained, drawing from her decades-long experience of helping the poor.

According to UNICEF, school nutrition and health programmes for impoverished children extend their stay in school by two and a half years and increase their enrolment and attendance rates by 9 per cent and 8 per cent respectively.

• turkey
• economic crisis
• education
• school dropout
• poverty
• malnutrition
• food programmes