Keywords

1 Introduction

As stated by several United Nations organizations such as World Education Forum and UNESCO, the access to education is one of the fundamental human rights. The right to benefit from education is also addressed as one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set up by United Nations, aimed to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Among the several dimensions involved in the concept of access to education, spatial accessibility is particularly interesting from a geographical point of view. In principle, spatial accessibility refers to the ease of reaching a place or the ease for a place of being reached, and such a dimension is fundamental in the order to guarantee the provision of fair and equal access to educational opportunities.

Accessibility of educational sites has been one of the issues investigated within the projects carried out by the University of Florence team for the area of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, starting from the preparation of the Strategic Masterplan onward (LaGeS 2018). The work has been based on several on site surveys, related to spatial and functional land characteristics such as population, settlements, facilities, transport networks. Referring to these projects, this paper shows a further development dealing with spatial accessibility, id est an application method aimed to estimate the degree of accessibility to schools.

Although the work is based on the approach proposed by the Ministry of Urban Development and Land of Afghanistan (MUDL) in its Guidelines for Urban Detailed Plans (Urban detailed plan instruction (Dari version) 2019), it can be suitable for assessing the spatial accessibility of a system of educational facilities in a generic spatial context.

2 Theoretical Background

2.1 Education as a Human Right

According to United Nations, “human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status” (United Nations Human Right Webpage 2023). This powerful concept is supported by the International Human Rights Law, a comprehensive body of human rights law which includes—besides several international human rights treaties—the so-called International Bill of Human Rights. The latter in turn is made by both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (United Nations (General Assembly) 1948) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, and the two international treaties that would further shape international human rights: the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) (United Nations (General Assembly) 1966a), and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) (United Nations (General Assembly) 1966b). In addition to many basic rights of people, the ICCPR especially focuses to some rights linked to educations, such as the right to education itself, the freedom of parents to choose schooling for their children, the right to take part in cultural life, the right to enjoy benefits of science, and so on.

Starting from these milestones, the right to education is currently promoted and supported by several governmental bodies and international non-governmental organizations.Footnote 1 In particular, it should be mentioned as the position expressed by the World Education ForumFootnote 2 in the Dakar Framework for Action (UNESCO 2000), following the 1990’s UNESCO World Conference on Education for All: “Education is a fundamental human right”, and “all children, young people and adults have the human right to benefit from an education that will meet their basic learning needs”. Moreover, UNESCO recently reiterates that “UNESCO education sector is committed to ensure every child, youth and adult has access to quality education throughout life” (UNESCO 2022). Finally, the definition of education as a fundamental right is confirmed by its inclusion in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, as Goal number 4 is stated as “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (United Nations 2023).

For making use of education systems, it is of course necessary to access its facilities. Hence following the international agreement about the education as one of the basic human rights, it is now almost universally accepted that such right has to be ensured by guaranteeing the provision of fair and equal access to educational opportunities is a fundamental right for all citizens (Rekha et al. 2020). However, the concept of access is considerably complex, and it involves different dimensions, only few of which are specified referring to the notion of geographical space (Table 1).

Table 1 The different dimension of the access to educational facilities
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Although some literature items investigate access dimensions like affordability, acceptability and adaptability or appropriateness (see Sharma and Patil 2022, p. 2), most of the studies about access to school are focused on spatial accessibility, as illustrated in the next section.

2.2 Spatial Accessibility to Schools

Even though spatial accessibility has been defined in several ways by different authors, it generally refers to the ease of reaching a place, or the ease for a place of being reached. Starting from the first notable definition given by Hansen as the “potential of opportunities for interaction” (Hansen 1959), the concept of accessibility has been largely investigated in the last fifty years. However, different definitions of spatial accessibility can be found in several research papers, under different points of view, as illustrated for instance in Vannacci et al. (2015). While the majority of the definitions retrieved from literature are focused on one single topic, such as the relevance of destinations (Vandenbulcke et al. 2009) or the structure of land-use (Geurs and Ritsema van Eck 2001), some researcher tried to give a more comprehensive definition of spatial accessibility. One interesting example of extensive definition of accessibility is included in Geurs and Wee (2004), where four different categories of accessibility are identified: infrastructure-based, location-based, person-based and utility-based.

Each point of view in defining accessibility can lead to specific accessibility measures or indicators. Indeed, the main determinants of accessibility are the land-use system (the spatial distribution and the characteristics of both destinations and opportunities), the transport supply (its structure, the available modes and the levels of service that produce a given impedance in accessing), time constraints (availability of opportunities and people willingness to access them), and people (people access demand, people needs, abilities and resources of individuals).

All these concepts can be specialized for investigating the accessibility of the educational facilities, so that the land-use is mainly represented by school complexes and residential settlements; transport supply is given by the available transportation networks and services; time constraints are given by educational schedules, transportation service timetables, and people daily organization; and people are represented by the student’s population with their needs and abilities.

The notion of spatial accessibility to school systems could be used to focus different issues related to education, such as the equity of a school system in a territory (see some recent examples in Sharma and Patil (2022); Marques et al. (2020); Pizzol et al. (2021)), the improvement or the optimization of the school system (see for instance Armas et al. (2022); Han et al. (2023)), the land planning process (see one example in Sá Marques et al. (2019)), and even sustainability (see Gao et al. (2016)).

Whatever be the point of view of a study about educational spatial accessibility, it needs to have some analytical tool at disposal, aimed to calculate indicators for estimating accessibility levels. For this goal, a very suitable category of techniques is represented by geographic information systems and spatial analysis tools. Indeed, they are more and more used for this kind of studies, especially when fostered by the increasing availability of geospatial information (Park and Goldberg 2021). Interesting examples of application of these techniques for analyzing spatial accessibility to school systems can be found in Rekha et al. (2020); Gao et al. (2016); Aule et al. (2023); Deniz (2023)).

3 Research Design

3.1 The Case Study: The Educational System of Bamiyan, Afghanistan

The city of Bamiyan is characterized by a unique territorial confguration, mainly due to its geographical position in a fertile valley at about 2,500 m above the sea level, surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of mountainous, bare and scarcely populated land. Such location, almost isolated in the middle of Afghanistan, has provided a relative security to the city even during the most dramatic events in the country’s history (Loda and Tartaglia 2020).

The mentioned territorial characteristics, together with the socioeconomic and political evolution of the whole Country in the last decades, resulted in a quite poor condition of the urban facilities, including the school system network. Nevertheless, the urban area is provided by all the pre-university educational levels. The General Education framework of Afghanistan comprises three levels: the primary (grades 1–6), the (lower) secondary (grades 7–9) and the higher secondary, or simply ‘high’ (grades 10–12) (MoE 2015; UNESCO 2015; NUFFIC 2018). Only the primary and secondary levels are compulsory. Moreover, a parallel system of Islamic education, technical and vocational education is available.

In the Bamiyan urban area, 27 different school complexes have been surveyed by the LaGeS team in 2021. They supply more than one education level: the high schools also include primary and secondary schools; the secondary schools also include the primary school level. As shown in Fig. 1, the Bamiyan school facilities are almost fairly distributed within the municipality area, even if different levels of education are provided in different locations of the city.

Fig. 1
A map of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, highlights the primary school, secondary school, high school, residential parcels, road network, and municipal boundary.

(Source author’s processing of LaGeS data)

Spatial distribution and type of the Bamiyan’s school complexes

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3.2 Methods and Data

Il metodo di analisi sviluppato nel presente studio è basato sull’utilizzo di funzioni di analisi spaziale normalmente disponibili in un generico Geographic Information System. È stata inoltre posta particolare attenzione nell’assicurare la compatibilità della procedura di calcolo con l’approccio normativo dettato dal competente ministero del governo Afghano ed in particolare con the Guidelines for Urban Detailed Plans released by the Ministry of Urban Development and Land of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (MUDL), that contain some accessibility rules for educational facilities (Table 2).

Table 2 Accessibility rules for educational facilities (Source Urban detailed plan instruction (Dari version) (2019))
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However, the mentioned guidelines have got some haziness. They don’t specify any distance measurement methods so that it is unclear which type of distancing system they refer to, e.g. Eulerian, network constrained, or others. Moreover, the maximum accessibility radius and the target population values are defined as a range, giving room for a large number of different possible choices in their usage for the analysis. In addition, association between the proposed walking times and distances leads to speeds between 3 and 8 km/h. These does not fully comply to the pedestrian average walking speed that it’s generally considered around 5 km/h, and the criteria of their variation is unclear as well.

Come già accennato sopra, i dati sul sistema scolastico sono stati direttamente rilevati dal team di ricerca attraverso survey in situ, includendo informazioni sulla posizione geografica, the education level provided, the school ownership, the gender allowed, the number of shift, the average number of students and more. According to these data, among the 27 school complex surveyed, only 16 are high schools providing all the three educational levels, 3 are secondary including the primary level, 8 are just primary schools and no kindergartens have been found during the survey. Nineteen schools over 27 are public and most of the schools are open to both genders; only 6 are only for female and 3 only for male students.

Oltre ai dati relative alle scuole, è stato ritenuto necessario includere nell’analisi due altri set informativi chiave rilevati in situ dal team di ricerca. Il primo è dato dall’entità e dalla distribuzione geografica della popolazione dettagliata per residential parcel nell’area in esame. Il secondo è costituito dalla struttura della rete stradale, specificata attraverso la sua geometry, topology and plano-altimetric characteristics, including the slope of each road section. Mentre il primo set di dati è utile a rappresentare l’entità della domanda di educazione, il secondo consente di calcolare la difficoltà di accesso ai diversi siti.

La metodologia messa a punto è descritta nella Fig. 2 nella quale si vede che a partire dai dataset sopra menzionati, l’accessibilità di ogni school complex viene modellizzata utilizzando funzioni dell’analisi spaziale finalizzate a costruire both the iso-distance geographic shapes from which it is possible to get to the educational facilities from different distances, and a potential accessibility indicator able to take into account also the educational demand.

Fig. 2
A flow diagram. Educational facilities, spatial distribution, population spatial distribution, and road networks lead to assessments and proposals. The keys of scenario, input data, models, and output are labeled.

(Source author’s own processing)

Diagram of the developed methodology for assessing the spatial accessibility level to educational system

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According to this framework, two different measures for estimating accessibility to schools have been adopted in the present study:

  1. 1.

    the accessibility distance, id est the distance that students living in the study area are expected to travel, on average, to reach the closest school.

  2. 2.

    the potential accessibility, id est the percentage (or the number) of students in the study region having the closest school within given distance from their residence site.

Since 80% of daily trips are made on foot, and also considering that this percentage should be higher for the school-aged population, the distance bands considered in the calculation have been thought compatible with walking. Moreover, the potential accessibility indicator is calculated as the number of people belonging to the age class corresponding to the educational level that is resident within a given iso-distance geographical shape.

The road slope has been estimated by assigning the average slope of the terrain to each road section, using a suitable open source Digital Terrain Model. The need of this additional calculation derives from the mountainous nature of the considered land; indeed, the effect of the slope is clearly visible in Fig. 3, where the red coloured higher grades are concentrated on the mount sides apart from the valley axes, especially in the north. After determining the iso-distance shapes and the potential accessibility indicators for each school or school level, it is possible to develop an evaluation of the accessibility level and hence assessing it against the chosen standards or guidelines. Such benchmark analysis finally leads to the development of proposals or projects aimed to improve the general level of service of the educational system.

Fig. 3
A map of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, represents the average road slopes. It highlights the schools, road network, and residential parcels. The majority of the areas have lower slopes.

(Source author’s processing of LaGeS data)

Spatial distribution of road average slopes in Bamiyan

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4 Results and Discussion

The application of the illustrated methodology first led to build several sets of iso-distance geographic shapes around each school complex. The overall picture of the calculated iso-distance areas around the schools in Bamiyan isshown in Fig. 4, where one can see that the populated land is broadly included within a walking distance of 2 km, with the exception of the mount sides in the North-East (village of Jugra Khail) and the valley the runs towards South-West. Anyway, all the central part of the urban area is included in the 2 km iso-distance shape, as well as the main West–East valley, the southern valleys and the cliffs limiting the city in the North.

Fig. 4
A map of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, represents the iso distance areas around the school complexes. It highlights the primary schools, road network, and residential parcels. The majority of the areas have an iso distance of 1001 to 2000.

(Source author’s processing of LaGeS data)

Iso-distance areas around the school complexes in Bamiyan

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A different picture emerges considering only the accessibility areas to the primary schools as defined by the MUDL guidelines, i.e. limiting the walking distance to 500 m. In this case, as shown in Fig. 5, most of the settlement are excluded from the accessibility areas, due to the short accessibility radius adopted and in spite of the fact that all the school complex hosts primary teaching. As regards to the gender of allowed pupils, about the same surface is available for boys and girls.

Fig. 5
A map of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, represents the accessibility areas for primary schools. It highlights the primary schools, road network, and residential parcels. 22% of males and 21% of females have access to primary schools.

(Source author’s processing of LaGeS data)

Accessibility areas for primary schools in Bamiyan, according to the 500 m MUDL accessibility radius

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The accessibility areas for secondary schools, illustrated in Fig. 6, cover a larger portion of the land, including more settlement units; although the number of school complex is smaller, thanks to a higher accessibility radius considered. It’s to be noted that most of the northern faces are excluded as well as the northern side of the South-West valley. Also in this case, the amount of settlements included in the accessibility areas available for boys is slightly greater than the one available for girls.

Fig. 6
A map of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, represents the accessibility areas for secondary schools. It highlights the secondary schools, road network, and residential parcels. 50% of males and 48% of females have access to secondary schools.

(Source author’s processing of LaGeS data)

Accessibility areas for secondary schools in Bamiyan, according to the 1,000 m MUDL accessibility radius

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Finally, adopting a maximum walking distance of 2,000 m, the overall accessibility area associated to the high schools cover most of the urban land, although the high school complexes are fewer (Fig. 7). An unsupplied area stands out in the upper western sector to the North, corresponding to the villages of Sang-e Chaspan, Khwaja Kamalodin and Surkh Qol, where only a primary school site is present. Another unsupplied cluster of parcels is located in the South of Dasht-e Esa Khan new development zone. As for the lower school categories, the accessibility area of the schools available for male pupils is slightly larger than the one available for girls.

Fig. 7
A map of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, represents the accessibility areas for high schools. It highlights the high schools, road network, and residential parcels. 92% of males and 89% of females have access to high schools.

(Source author’s processing of LaGeS data)

Accessibility areas for high schools in Bamiyan, according to the 2,000 m MUDL accessibility radius

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Even if it shows an interesting insight about the accessibility areas to the schools the situation depicted by Figs. 4, 5, 6 and 7 remains purely geometric, i.e. based only on the supply facilities available, as far as one doesn’t consider the real distribution of population on the land. For this reason, our analysis went forward and took into account also the population distribution by age classes. In the absence of detailed data about this item, such variable has been calculated starting from the distribution of the inhabitants over the residential parcels by means of the same demographic model implemented for the Bamiyan Masterplan (LaGeS 2018). The population distribution by age classes well represents the real educational demand since each age class corresponds to an educational level among primary, secondary and high. Hence, a significant indicator of the educational spatial accessibility classified by level is the number of people belonging to the age class matching a given educational level included in the corresponding accessibility area. Such an indicator is shown in Fig. 8, from which it is evident that the potential accessibility pattern looks like a negative exponential curve as a function of distance, according to literature. Moreover, it should be highlighted that the average potential accessibility to schools is rather low for the shortest distance catchment areas (e.g. 50% student population located within 1 km), while it is quite high (90%) if we consider catchment areas extended to within 2 km walking distance. In general, in over about 20,000 people in the school age range as calculated in this study, we found that about 18,000 are resident within a 2 km accessibility radius from the schools.

Fig. 8
A multi line graph of the number of students versus the distance from the nearest school in meters plots 3 lines for primary, secondary, and high school students. All the lines depict upward trends. The nearest school to the 19155 primary school students is 7000 meters away.

(Source author’s processing of LaGeS data)

Potential accessibility of Bamiyan schools by type

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However, with reference to the MUDL guidelines about spatial accessibility, only high school students result to be supplied with a reasonable level of service, being 90% within the admitted range. Quite the opposite, the secondary and primary school students are only 50% and 20% within the accessibility range respectively.

5 Conclusions

An accessibility assessment method based on spatial analysis techniques has been developed and applied to the case of the school system of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in the order to check the agreement to the requirements expressed by the MUDL guidelines about urban development plans.

The application to the Bamiyan case showed that the compliance to the MUDL spatial accessibility requirements is poor for primary schools (slightly more than 20% students in the 500 m catchment area); not satisfactory for secondary schools (around 50% students in the 1000 m catchment area); quite good for high schools (around 90% students in the 2000 m catchment area). However, the school spatial availability is slightly lower (1 ÷ 3% percent) for the female student population. Moreover, the calculation showed that some urban zones are clearly disadvantaged as regards the spatial accessibility to schools, due to long distances to be walked, with differences according to the different school grades. Some other urban zones are disadvantaged due to terrain slope along the road network.

These results allow to develop some proposals for improving accessibility to the Bamiyan school system as regards the spatial accessibility. First, as the school specialization by gender lower the accessibility level, the number of schools available for both genders should be increased. Moreover, concerning primary and secondary schools, as a large part of urban settlement is out of the MUDL accessibility range, and several schools are clustered in specific areas, the spatial distribution of schools should be optimized, in the order to increase the accessibility of some urban zones (South-West Valley, Karak Valley, Petab-e-Laghman and Mullayan to the East, the middle of the city, Jugra Khail close to Zargaran). About the high school situation, the accessibility to schools should be improved in a few urban zones: Surkh Qhol and Sang-e-Chaspan to the North, Petab-e-Laghman to the East, Azhdar to the West, and the South-West Valley). All these proposals could be obtained by enhancing the transport system or increasing the number of school complexes, or even by a combination of these two measures.

Finally, the method aimed at the assessment of spatial accessibility to school systems illustrated in this paper can be considered a useful tool for assessing the spatial accessibility of a system of educational facilities in a generic spatial context.