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Youth is an important and critical transition stage towards adulthood, during which time individuals are supposed to prepare in the best possible conditions for adulthood. Moroccan youth are facing unequal opportunities to develop because of the circumstances of their household background and childhood deprivation. This paper measures the level of poverty and the equality of opportunities among Moroccan youth aged 18–29 years utilizing the Human Opportunity Index (HOI). It analyzes poverty from a multidimensional perspective. The findings demonstrate that younger youth are at substantially higher risk of poverty than older young. Poor youth have low educational attainments. The unemployment rate for the non-poor youth is lower than for the poor. Unemployment rates continue to be high for secondary and university graduates, particularly for the poor. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that education deprivation followed by healthcare deprivation is the most prevalent severe deprivation among youth. The results from both the logit regression and the descriptive analyses show that youths of illiterate parents are more likely to have poorer health, drop out of school themselves, and work rather than attend school. Youth in rural areas are least likely to have the opportunity to complete secondary and university education as well as to attend school/university than those in urban areas. Moreover, the decomposition of the total difference of HOI between urban and rural areas into access and equality of opportunities indicates that the differences are mainly due to the coverage effect. Full article

Providing all children equal access to essential services, such as primary education, has been set as a priority in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)’ agenda during the last two decades. Yet the Global Education Monitoring report in 2016 reveals that wide disparities between the rich and the poor persist in access to education of high quality. This study uses the Human Opportunity Index (HOI) to examine the equality of opportunity in access to basic education of high quality. By using enrollment and admission data from a case study in a large school district in the US in 2015/2016, this research evaluates the capacity of the HOI, in order to reveal disparities in access to school opportunities and examines how much of this inequality is explained by families’ pre-determined circumstances. The way of analyzing equality is by disaggregating applications’ data into circumstance groups, according to gender, geography, race/ethnicity, and other criteria. To capture the contribution of each circumstance to inequality of opportunity, the Shapley decomposition method is used. Findings show that the HOI is capable of systematically monitoring and examining existing admission policies and identifying inequality problems. Furthermore, the analysis of the contribution of each circumstance group can reveal admission criteria that have the potential to harm the educational opportunities for children. This assessment should provide valuable insights into the capability of the indicators to reveal where policy intervention is necessary and supply points of view on how policy can be improved. Full article