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Girls’ education: Why it can change the world, and what we need to make it happen
Education is a fundamental human right. But, for millions of children around the world, this right often goes unacknowledged.
This is especially true for girls: According to UNESCO , 132 million girls worldwide were out of school at the beginning of 2020. This was before COVID-19 lockdowns further compromised gender equality in education. Schooling was disrupted for 1.5 billion students, and millions of girls might not return to school. That would be a major setback for multiple reasons.
Girls’ education: Facts and figures
- Before the COVID-19 pandemic, UNESCO estimated 132 million girls around the world were out of school
- The pandemic interrupted education for 1.5 billion students worldwide
- Adolescent girls (12-17) are the highest risk for dropping out of school in low-income countries
- About 40% of low-income countries have not taken any measures to support students who are most at-risk for exclusion
- Three-quarters of all primary-age children who may never set foot in school are girls
- Women still account for almost two-thirds of all adults unable to read
Why is gender equality important in education?
We need gender equality in education to ensure that both girls and boys can access and complete programs of study, as well as become empowered equally in and through education.
Large gender gaps exist in access to education, learning achievement, and continuing education, usually at the expense of girls. Despite global progress, more girls than boys remain out of school: 16 million girls will never attend school. What’s more, women account for two-thirds of the 750 million adults who are illiterate.
Globally, only 66% of countries have achieved gender parity in primary education. At the secondary level, the gap widens significantly, with only 45% of countries achieving parity in lower-secondary education and 25% achieving parity in upper-secondary education.
What are some of the problems encountered by girls in education?
There are many barriers to education for both girls and boys, including poverty, geographic isolation, and minority status beyond gender. However, girls face some unique challenges to accessing education.
Harmful gender norms
Harmful gender norms result in many inequalities between girls and boys. While gender norms affect all children, they disproportionately affect girls. More than 575 million girls live in countries where inequitable gender norms contribute to violations of their rights, including to education.
School-related gender-based violence and unsafe learning environments
School-related gender based violence (SRGBV) is also a significant issue of gender inequality in education. Girls are often forced to walk long distances to school, increasing their risk of gender based violence (GBV) including sexual harassment, exploitation, and abuse. In the classroom, corporal punishment remains a reality in many schools, impacting overall well-being and also leading to lower attendance rates and higher dropout rates. One of the key challenges with SRGBV is that teachers may not be trained to identify or respond to GBV issues in school. They may also be the perpetrators of such violence. With poor accountability mechanisms, an unsafe learning environment will continue without any recourse.
Inadequate sanitation facilities
Adolescent girls face additional challenges. Limited access to sanitary products, coupled with a lack of private space to wash, change, or dispose of them makes it more difficult for girls to attend school when they are menstruating. Additionally, shame and stigma around this is one of the main examples of gender discrimination in education, often discouraging girls from attending school when they have their periods.
Teenage pregnancy and child marriage
Girls who become pregnant often face significant stigma and discrimination from their communities. In many countries, government policies exclude pregnant girls from attending school. This can lead girls to drop out of school early and not return. Child marriage and education reach similar conclusions, with girls forced into early marriages and then expected to drop out of school to tend the home and start a family.
Why is girls’ education important?
In the long term, more years of education can break the cycle of poverty by improving gender equality. This can be good for entire countries, but also have significant benefits for individual girls.
Girls’ education delays early marriage and leads to smaller families
Researchers from the World Bank and the International Center for Research on Women examined 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (one of the regions of the world that is least conducive to education for girls). They found a strong relationship between education and child marriage. Each additional year of secondary education reduced the chances of child marriage.
The study also showed that educated women tend to have fewer children and have them later in life. This generally leads to better outcomes for both the mother and her kids, with safer pregnancies and healthier newborns.
Girls’ education is linked to better health
USAID found that girls with a basic education are generally more aware of safe sex. With a comprehensive sexual health curriculum, they are three times less likely to contract HIV/AIDS. Moreover, if all mothers completed primary education, maternal death rates would be reduced by two-thirds.
Education also helps students to develop skills like critical thinking, decision-making, and responsibility. Educated girls are also more likely to seek healthcare for themselves and their families. This is why the children of educated mothers are twice as likely to survive past the age of five.
Girls’ education increases their earning potential…
Educated women are more likely to work and even own their own businesses and generally earn higher incomes throughout their lives. According to UNESCO, a single year of primary education can increase a girl’s wages later in life by up to 20%. An extra year of secondary school can increase their wages by up to 25%. What’s more, women invest up to 90% of their income back into their family, compared to the average 30–40% that men invest back into their households.
…as well as that of their country’s
It’s not just a girl or woman’s immediate family that benefits from her quality education. Studies have shown that, when 10% more girls in a given country attend school, that country’s gross domestic product increases by an average of 3% — which can make a huge difference in a developing economy.
How does education promote gender equality?
Gender inequality is both a cause and consequence of inadequate or low-quality education.
Gender-equitable education systems empower both girls and boys to develop life skills that help young people succeed, including self-management, communication, negotiation, and critical thinking. And both boys and girls benefit from this approach.
Education also empowers girls and women to know and fight for their rights, and protects them from harmful gender practices, including child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM). For men, education — especially gender-equitable education — helps them to be more equitable with the women in their lives. Educated men are also more likely to seek mental health support and less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol or engage in other high-risk behaviour.
Girls’ education: Concern’s work
Concern’s work is grounded in the belief that all children — regardless of gender — have a right to a quality education. We integrate our education programmes into both our development and emergency work to give children living in extreme poverty more opportunities in life and supporting their overall well-being. Concern has brought quality education to villages that are off the grid, engaged local community leaders to find solutions to keep girls in school, and provided mentorship and training for teachers.
Our education programmes are designed to be gender-transformative, in keeping with the core values of all Concern programming. In addressing the unique barriers that each community faces to education, we also look at the barriers faced by girls within those communities, including lack of sanitary facilities, SRGBV, and other harmful gender norms that keep girls at home.
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Why girls’ education should remain a priority
Raja bentaouet kattan, laura rawlings, courtney melissa merchant.
A decade after the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development we have seen encouraging improvement in education outcomes for girls. Primary school completion rates are almost equal between boys and girls, and there has been significant progress in secondary education enrollment rates.
Girls’ education matters, but our focus must evolve to meet new challenges.
First, girls in high poverty and settings of fragility, conflict and violence (FCV) still face challenges in attendance and enrollment. Learning remains a critical issue for both boys and girls alike.
Second, ensuring that girls access quality education is a central part of building and protecting human capital for themselves today, for their future economic prospects and for successive generations. Human capital promotion and protection are a key outcome of the proposed World Bank Group Gender Strategy 2024-30 . In Achieving Gender Equality in Education: Examining Progress and Constraints , an underpinning for the new gender strategy, we take a close look at the latest research and findings on gender equality outcomes in education, as well as issues, evidence on promising solutions, operational good practices, and areas for future engagement.
We need multipronged approaches based on what works to close gaps in girls’ education
The benefits of girls’ education are clear, including across health, social and economic outcomes. And the evidence is decisive on many areas of what works to overcome barriers that girls face—for example, tackling obstacles of distance and cost through interventions including scholarships, stipends, and cash transfers.
At the same time, there are fewer studies in many areas such as the utility of social campaigns for boosting girls’ education enrollment; how gender-sensitive curricula, textbooks, and teaching can reduce bias and further girls’ achievement; and the impacts of school-based interventions for girls, such as separate toilets, school safety, and gender-based violence (GBV) reduction mechanisms. Studies are beginning to emerge in these areas, and more are needed.
This research informs policy approaches that target multiple barriers faced by girls, providing a strong base to continue to test, learn, adapt and expand on these approaches.
Schools are social incubators, playing a pivotal role in empowering girls and shaping norms
Research shows the clear impact of social norms on gender outcomes , including schooling and education outcomes. Importantly, we know that schools have the power to shape these norms and give both girls and boys the ability to positively transform their roles, behaviors and futures. We consider schools as “incubators” where students develop a view of their own potential and rights, and as critical to empowering all students.
One way we can bolster this link is through empowerment programs targeting adolescent girls. Evidence from Africa and South Asia has demonstrated the impressive impact of adolescent girls’ empowerment programs, for example from the World Bank’s Adolescent Girls Initiative . The World Bank is now supporting a “new generation” of projects in Angola, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Mozambique that build on lessons from previous efforts, including the Adolescent Girls Initiative and the Sahel Women's Empowerment and Demographics Project. These approaches target sexual and reproductive health and rights, GBV, and women’s economic participation. For example, the Sudan Basic Education Support Project includes activities to train schools and their surrounding communities on GBV reduction.
We must bridge the broken link to employment
There are clear disparities in women and men’s labor market outcomes, and education has a pivotal role in this tackling this. We see an education-employment paradox, in which high learning outcomes are not translating to labor market outcomes for girls. On the flip side, boys often face the challenge of underperformance in schools , but have higher labor market outcomes.
As more and more girls are accessing education, we need to look at how we can help them translate education into successful outcomes. A striking 1 in 4 girls aged 15–19 globally are not in education, employment or training (NEET), compared to 1 in 10 boys. That is a quarter of girls who are not able to engage fully in developing higher order skills or realizing the returns to their education in the workforce. In Latin America, a recent World Bank study finds the share of girls who are NEETs is significantly higher than among young men, and can be as high as 46%. They find that the challenges girls face are often different than for boys and are often strongly impacted by gender norms.
Access to reproductive health services among adolescents, encouraging girls’ agency and aspirations including for employment in higher paying occupations, and using proven approaches such as mentoring to address occupational segregation are all needed.
How can education programs contribute to address this problem? The Economic Acceleration and Resilience for NEET Project in Bangladesh , for example, is working with girls and their family members to increase access to education and skills training and promote the employability of the NEET youth, especially girls and women. The project also promotes equal access and opportunities for other subgroups, including persons with disability, transgender, and ethnic minorities.
Girls’ education is essential for sustainable, resilient, and inclusive development
This year, the World Bank has created a new vision for an evolving mission, one that emphasizes addressing global challenges on a livable planet . This cannot be achieved without gender equality in education.
Girls’ education is highly vulnerable to disruption from fragility and crises including conflict and climate change effects. Notably, girls in FCV situations are some of the most marginalized. At the same time, educating girls strengthens countries’ resilience to shocks . Girls and women also have a pivotal role in addressing climate change, whether at the household level, in the community or in the labor market. One way to support this is through STEM investments, which empower girls to shape their societies and environments as scientists, innovators and active citizens . In Tanzania, for example, the Higher Education for Economic Transformation Project is making a strong, multi-pronged push to promote more girls and young women in STEM subjects.
Where do we go from here?
It is increasingly pressing to support girls’ abilities to thrive in an ever-changing world and to be able to tackle global challenges. These ideas and more are detailed in our policy note. You can download it here , and share your feedback on the WBG gender strategy to help us shape the path ahead.
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Advisor to the Education Global Practice
Lead Economist, World Bank
Consultant, Education Global Practice
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