Investing in girls' education alone risks leaving boys behind, new study shows

Kakamega High school students reading books in the school library. [Photo by Mumo Munuve)

For the past two decades, investing in girls’ schooling has been hailed as a cornerstone of promoting gender equality in sub-Saharan Africa. Between 2016 and 2018 the World Bank Group invested US$3.2 billion in education projects benefiting adolescent girls.

The logic is straightforward. Girls face significant barriers to education, among them poverty, insufficient academic support, adolescent pregnancy, child marriage, and school related gender-based violence. Reducing these barriers can substantially improve their educational outcomes.

But is this approach – investing in girls’ education – fair to boys, and enough to make a meaningful impact on girls’ lives in the long term? Having studied the relationship between interventions and the way people’s lives develop in adverse contexts, we argue that the answer is no on both counts.

We explain this view in a recent paper. In it we compare the different effects of directing development assistance: improving girls’ school enrolment, prioritising schooling for both girls and boys, and addressing barriers to gender equality throughout life.

We used publicly available data for 136 low-and middle-income countries, including those in sub-Saharan Africa. We calculated the female-to-male ratio for important education indicators in each country to show where girls are ahead, on par or behind boys.

Our findings suggest that the current focus on girls’ schooling may both unintentionally disadvantage boys and be a relatively inefficient means of advancing gender equality.

Girls’ and boys’ education

We focused on two indicators to assess the current state of girls’ and boys’ education in the region:

Student performance in standardised test scores, known as harmonised learning outcomes.

Harmonised learning outcomes measure learning and progress based on the results from seven different types of tests combined and made comparable among children attending school. They reflect the environmental inputs into learning and achievement, such as school quality. Completing secondary school, meanwhile, has been shown to increase a person’s potential for future development, opportunities for employment and higher education.

In most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, girls are behind boys on secondary school completion. The average completion rate for boys is 30 percent. For girls it is just 24 per cent. In southern Africa specifically, girls have higher completion rates than boys.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the average harmonised learning outcomes score for boys is 301; it is 303 for girls. Our results show that, for most countries in the region, girls are achieving roughly equal scores to their male peers.

This suggests that gender gaps in education are not as pronounced as is often portrayed.

Firstly, although school completion rates are higher for boys, this gap is small, and overall completion rates remain low for both genders.

Secondly, where boys are averaging higher levels of completed schooling, it is not due to better academic performance. Once enrolled, girls in the region tend to keep up with boys in school completion and academic performance.

Large disparities in later life

Rather than asking who is ahead, it’s more important to note that neither boys nor girls are doing well. Our results show that educational outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa are alarmingly poor for both girls and boys. So, if all children in the region are clearly in need of support, why target education interventions at girls alone?The key to gender equality lies in ensuring girls and boys, and men and women, have the same opportunities to reach their potential from early life, through late childhood and adolescence, into adulthood.

Research emphasises that human development does not hinge on any single factor such as schooling. Rather, it depends on capabilities built throughout life.

In early childhood, proper nutrition, among other things, is crucial for developing a child’s basic physical and cognitive capabilities. These early investments protect the potential for human development.

During childhood and adolescence, factors like quality schooling and social support allow young people to realise that potential.

Finally, in adulthood, social norms and job opportunities determine how fully a person can use their realised potential.

Our findings suggest that, on average, in low- and middle-income countries the development potential of girls and young women is protected and realised better than it is for boys and young men. But later in life, women don’t have as many opportunities as men to use that potential.

This implies that initiatives focused on girls’ schooling are likely not the most effective means of promoting girls’ development or reducing gender gaps.

Large disparities emerge later in girls’ lives.For example, our findings show that women earn less than men in almost every country in sub-Saharan Africa. These results reflect how patriarchal norms, particularly the unequal burden of housework and childcare, tend to push women into lower-paid informal or part-time work. Even when similarly qualified and in comparable positions, women typically earn less than men.

These findings, when considered in the context of the current state of education in the region, challenge the idea that focusing solely on girls’ education is enough to promote their lifelong development or meaningfully reduce gender inequalities.

The argument that boys should not receive the same support as girls is weak.

How to promote gender equality

Targeted interventions are likely to have the greatest impact where girls and women face the greatest barriers: in using their potential. That means, for example: Recognising the unpaid household and caregiving work that women shoulder, improving women’s access to better job opportunities in paid and formal work and challenging discriminatory laws and social norms.

Social protection policies, including childcare and reproductive health services, can ease women’s caregiving burden and give them the time and agency to fully participate in politics, the economy and society.

There are also opportunities beyond government, where support for trade unions, for instance, has been shown to help narrow gender wage gaps. Addressing gender inequality requires a life-course approach. It should involve quality education for both genders, and tackling the policies, practices and social norms that marginalise women and girls, especially in the later stages of their lives.