Is Mother’s Education or Household Poverty a Better Predictor for Girl’s School Dropout? Evidence from Aggregated Community Effects in Rural India

Neighbourhoods and families are key social institutions instilled with development of early life course of adolescents. Limited research in India has examined exposure to community along with socioeconomic conditions for school-dropouts of girls. Multidimensional benefits of female education are increasingly recognized in recent years; hence, it becomes imperative to study the community components of school discontinuation particularly in rural area. This study aims to analyse effect of mother’s education, community poverty, and gender equitable attitudes associated with a girl’s school dropout. This study uses baseline survey data from an intervention program from poor-performing districts of India. Collinearity among individual predictors validated by variance inflation factor proceeded step-wise binary-logistic regression. Result suggests that communities with high concentrations of poverty and mother illiteracy are disadvantages with low gender perception and high levels of dropouts. Result suggests that girls living in poor communities are three times more likely to dropout and 70% more if belonged to communities with lower mother literacy. Girls who scored low on Gender Equitable Scale had less probability to dropout. The study concludes that girls from poor communities with low levels of mother literacy and non-egalitarian gender attitudes are at higher risk of school dropout.