Impact of Microenterprise Participation on Child Education: A Case Study in West Bengal

Abstract

At the doorstep of twenty first century, education has been adopted as a central theme in the development policy dialogue both in national and international arena. As education is the basic pre-condition of economic prosperity, the reconstruction of rural society at a very high social and cultural level is bound up not only with the eradication of poverty but also with the elimination of ignorance, superstition and unconsciousness with the light of education. Thus, microfinance programme through financial inclusion has attempted to address this challenge among other components of poverty alleviation. But it has been observed that total labour demand increases due to increasing credit supply into family enterprises through financial inclusion and thus increases the children’s workload. An attempt has been made in the present study to evaluate the impact of microenterprise participation on schooling and child labour issue has been examined through the empirical evidence of West Bengal by collecting primary data in the selected districts of West Bengal. This study unfortunately exhibits persistent dropout of children from school and this phenomenon appears to be exacerbated by growing demand for labour due to the growth of the household enterprises. It has been also found that many of microenterprises have tried to achieve expected level of sustainability by engaging their children in enterprises instead of using hired labour.