Its success comes on the heels of a long-running effort, supported by UNICEF, to boost enrolment rates and educational achievement in rural areas – particularly among Orang Asli children in Peninsular Malaysia and indigenous children in distant areas of Malaysian Borneo's Sabah and Sarawak States.
The new data do, however, suggest one easy way to boost enrolment.
Measures like these helped to boost enrolment in such schools by nearly 50%, to 6.9m, in the decade to 2011.
Cash is less wasteful and economically distorting than food or fuel subsidies (though school lunches can boost enrolment and cut micronutrient deficiencies).
Regardless of provincial efforts to boost enrolments, the consensus among those in education is that the public school system will invariably have trouble competing with the more attractive salaries and better opportunities offered in the private sector, particularly in high shortage areas such as computer science, science, and mathematics.
The educational targets in the MDGs have been criticised for focusing on boosting enrolment without improving the quality of learning.
With swelling numbers of people becoming middle class and boosting enrolment rates as well as investment in higher education and research compared with reductions at some Western institutions Asia's position in the global rankings is likely to improve for years to come.
The Sea School for merchant sailors in St Petersburg, for example, has boosted enrolment by offering a course in how to handle Somali pirates.
Boosting enrolment Wahi, 4, attends one such pre-school in Sinende, a town in central Benin.
Specific measures to boost girls' enrolment include the prohibition of school fees of all kinds, the integration of education policies into national plans for poverty reduction, the inclusion of girls' education as an essential component of development efforts and increased international funding for education.
