Seasonality, academic calendar and school dropouts in South Asia

Rural families in developing countries often face a critical trade-off: keeping children in school or involving them in seasonal agricultural labor. Misaligned school calendars intensify this challenge, significantly increasing school dropout rates. Leveraging the timing of Ramadan school holidays as a natural experiment, we find that annual exams coinciding with the harvest season increase school dropout rates by 6.6 to 9.0 percentage points (from the base of 25% dropout) among children from agricultural households in Bangladesh. This effect is predominantly driven by boys who participate in peak seasonal agricultural activities. Our findings are robust to varying age cut-offs and definitions of agricultural households. Long-term analyses employing age-specific cohorts using national household surveys corroborate these results. Complementary evidence from India, exploiting state-level academic calendar variations, further supports the findings. This study underscores the importance of carefully designing school calendars in rural areas that align with local agricultural seasonality.