Evaluating the accessibility and equity of basic educational facilities in China during the poverty alleviation and elimination campaign (2015-2021)

Abstract

China’s poverty alleviation and elimination campaign (PAEC, 2015-2021) aimed to eliminate absolute poverty and reduce social inequality, making improvements in the accessibility and equity of basic educational facilities a key component. However, existing research on the accessibility of educational facilities in China has predominantly focused on developed urban areas or specific regions, lacking nationwide spatiotemporal assessments. To address this gap, this study systematically evaluates the accessibility and equity of basic educational facilities (kindergartens, primary, and secondary schools) across mainland of China during the PAEC. Travel time cost, derived using multi-source geospatial datasets and the nearest neighbor method, was adopted as the primary indicator for assessing educational accessibility and equity. The results revealed pronounced disparities in accessibility between Eastern and Western China. Overall, both the accessibility and equity of basic educational facilities improved substantially during the campaign, with the average travel time per person reducing by approximately 50 %. Notably, the rate of improvement in impoverished regions was nearly double that observed in non-impoverished areas. Although widespread improvements in educational equity have occurred, the urban-rural disparity persists as a primary barrier to achieving comprehensive educational fairness. This study offers empirical evidence and methodological innovations for optimizing educational resource allocation and provides high-resolution temporal data to support the monitoring and evaluation of progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in education.

Keywords

Basic educational facility accessibility / Educational equity / Poverty alleviation and elimination campaign / Spatiotemporal dynamics / Regional disparities / Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Data availability

The code related to this article and method has been uploaded to GitHub (https://github.com/YYCCY7/educationAccessibility). The data has uploaded to Figshare repository (https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/education_Accessibility/29180180).

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yichen Yang: Writing - original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Qiang Wang: Writing - review & editing, Software, Methodology. Xiaoliang Dai: Writing - review & editing, Visualization. Shu Wang: Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Shifeng Fang: Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Yunqiang Zhu: Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDB0740000); and the Key Project of Innovation LREIS (Grant No. KPI009).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2026.100422.

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