Girls’ education is one of the best investments that we can make—for girls’ empowerment, for poverty alleviation, for health and well-being, and for economic growth more broadly. As former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan once put it, “to educate girls is to reduce poverty.” Similarly, former First Lady Michelle Obama observed that “educating girls doesn't just transform their life prospects — it transforms the prospects of their families, communities, and nations.”
The more years of education a woman has received, the healthier she tends to be. The more education she has, the greater her participation in the formal labor market, and the higher her wages will be. She will be older when she marries—and be significantly less likely to wed while still a child—and she will have fewer children. The benefits that a woman garners from her education spill over to her family—in the form of better nourished children and greater resources allocated towards family needs—and to her community and society. Evidence shows that increasing national rates of female secondary education attendance leads to greater per capita economic growth. In fact, the rate of return on investment in girls’ education is higher than that of boys’.
This overwhelming potential puts the need for girls’ education into sharp focus. To be sure, progress has been made in recent years: two-thirds of countries met the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of gender parity in primary education by 2015. But girls are still less likely than boys to attend school. Today, 130 million girls between the ages of 6 and 17 are not in school, and 15 million girls of primary age will never enroll—and half of these live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Even with the progress that has been made in terms of primary school attendance, girls’ enrollment rates for secondary and university-level education have not caught up. The lack of education for girls, moreover, is exacerbated for ethnic minorities and households in rural areas, and conflict and displacement in particular pose enormous barriers for both girls’ and boys’ education.
Gender Norms and School Quality Impede Girls’ Ability to Learn
Families living in poverty who cannot afford to send all of their children to school may favor their sons’ education, due to the labor market opportunities available to boys and cultural norms about a woman’s role in her family—although these are by no means universal attitudes, and such norms are also shifting in many places. In rural areas in particular, long geographic distances may make traveling to and from school unsafe for girls—and unfortunately, lack of safety standards or sanitation facilities can make schools themselves an unsafe or uncomfortable place for girls, particularly as they get older.
Even when they are enrolled in school, the quality of education that girls receive is often substandard, as time spent in school does not always lead to effective learning. A survey of women in 51 countries, for example, found that increased years of schooling were only weakly correlated with increases in literacy. Of the women in the survey sample who had completed school through the sixth grade, only half could read a single sentence. The lack of quality education is an issue that affects girls and boys, and is more difficult to measure, particularly at a global level, than enrollment alone.
Closing the Gap
The importance of ensuring girls’ access to quality education is prominent on the global stage. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 ambitiously calls for “By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes.” It also targets the elimination of gender disparities in education and “safe, non-violent, inclusive and effective learning environments for all.”
And, to be sure, numerous interventions at a local level can make girls’ enrollment in school more feasible: safety standards, sanitation facilities, and reduced distance to educational facilities can make schooling a safe and comfortable experience for girls. Female teachers and gender-sensitive curriculum can also make sure that education reaches and includes girls’ needs and experiences.
At a broader level, innovative economic measures can also be effective: through mechanisms like conditional cash transfers (CCTs), governments give cash payments to families conditional on their children’s school attendance. In Pakistan, a CCT program increased school enrollment among girls between the ages of 10 and 14, while CCT programs in Mexico and Cambodia have led to significant decreases in dropout rates among girls and boys after sixth grade, when primary school is completed. Other innovative efforts to incentivize educational enrollment include subsidized remittance payments directed towards educational expenses, such as EduRemesa, which matched remittance payments by Salvadoran migrants in the United States to the student of their choice in their home country.
It’s also important to note that education does not end with adulthood. For farmers, for example, access to continued education and training through extension services is a critical component of their economic success and ability to adopt new technologies and adapt to changing markets, demand, and climate pressures. But most extension services target men farmers, and most extension workers are men. As the first post in this series noted, ensuring that women have the same access as men to extension services is one of the critical factors for closing the gender gap in agriculture, which would enable women to increase their yields by 20 to 30 percent.
It is clear that with a quality education through secondary school – and beyond – girls are better equipped and empowered for the rest of their life.