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Girls’ Education: A World Bank
Priority
The World Bank is committed to
fighting poverty and has embraced the achievement of
the Millennium
Development Goals as a World Bank priority. It
has recognized the striking body of empirical evidence
that demonstrates strong benefits of girls’ education,
which span across a wide range of areas including
maternal and child health, social stability,
environmental benefits and economic growth. Girls’
education and the promotion of gender equality in
education are critical to development, and policies and
actions that do not address gender disparities miss
critical development opportunities.
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The World Bank is a partner and one of many
players in the international drive to improve gender
equality and empower girls and women. World Bank
activities focus on assisting countries’ own efforts to
advance gender equality. Through its lending and
non-lending activities, the Bank has helped to improve
the lives of girls in client countries. Since
the World
Conference of Education in Jomtien in 1990, the
Bank’s emphasis in the area of girls’ education has
increased and gender equality has been integrated as an
important component of the Bank’s poverty reduction
mission.
How are girls
doing?: Challenges
Grounds for Cautious
Optimism:
Girls’ enrollments are trending upwards.
Thirty years ago, girls represented 38 percent of
primary enrollments in low-income countries and boys
represented 62 percent. Today, the gender gap has
narrowed with girls representing 45 percent and boys 55
percent. Gross enrollment rates for girls in low-income
countries have gone from 52 percent to 88 percent over
that same period - a remarkable achievement, but
certainly not good enough.
Many countries
have registered improvements in primary school
completion rates with the rate of all developing
countries increasing from 73 percent in 1990 to 81
percent in 2000. Even though gender disparities remain,
the completion rate for girls increased faster by 11
percentage points from 65 percent in 1990 to 76 percent
in 2000, whereas the primary school completion rates for
boys increased only from 79 percent to 85 percent during
the same period. These averages however hide the sharp
differences among regions and countries within them.
The goal of gender parity by 2005 for primary and
secondary education will clearly not be met. The rate at
which the gender gap is closing will need to be
accelerated (modestly for primary and significantly for
secondary education) if gender equality is to be
achieved by 2015, and attention will need to be focused
not only on access but also on retention and
quality.
 
Why is girls'
education important?
Investment in
girls’ education yields some of the highest returns of
all development investments, yielding both private and
social benefits that accrue to individuals, families,
and society at large by:
- Reducing women’s fertility rates. Women with
formal education are much more likely to use reliable
family planning methods, delay marriage and
childbearing, and have fewer and healthier babies than
women with no formal education. It is estimated that
one year of female schooling reduces fertility by 10
percent. The effect is particularly pronounced for
secondary schooling.
- Lowering infant and child mortality rates. Women
with some formal education are more likely to seek
medical care, ensure their children are immunized, be
better informed about their children's nutritional
requirements, and adopt improved sanitation practices.
As a result, their infants and children have higher
survival rates and tend to be healthier and better
nourished.
- Lowering maternal mortality rates. Women with
formal education tend to have better knowledge about
health care practices, are less likely to become
pregnant at a very young age, tend to have fewer,
better-spaced pregnancies, and seek pre- and
post-natal care. It is estimated that an additional
year of schooling for 1,000 women helps prevent two
maternal deaths.
- Protecting against HIV/AIDS infection. Girls’
education ranks among the most powerful tools for
reducing girls’ vulnerability. It slows and reduces
the spread of HIV/AIDS by contributing to female
economic independence, delayed marriage, family
planning, and work outside the home as well as greater
information about the disease and how to prevent it.
- Increasing women’s labor force participation rates
and earnings. Education has been proven to increase
income for wage earners and increase productivity for
employers, yielding benefits for the community and
society.
- Creating intergenerational education benefits.
Mothers’ education is a significant variable affecting
children’s education attainment and opportunities. A
mother with a few years of formal education is
considerably more likely to send her children to
school. In many countries each additional year of
formal education completed by a mother translates into
her children remaining in school for an additional
one-third to one-half year.
What is the World Bank doing to
support girls' education?
The Bank
complements its lending services with substantial
non-financial assistance, largely in the form of
analytical, advisory, knowledge-sharing, and capacity
building activities but also including efforts to
mobilize funding from donors or from the private sector
to meet countries’ large financing needs for
education.
Targeting countries with significant gender
disparities in schooling:
The Bank has provided
financial resources and technical assistance to
countries worldwide that have significant gender
disparities in educational enrolments at the primary and
secondary levels. For example:
- Africa: Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon,
Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea,
Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal,
Sierra Leone, Togo, Uganda and Zambia.
- East Asia: Papua New Guinea, Lao PDR
- South Asia: Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and
Pakistan
- Middle East and North Africa: Morocco, Yemen, and
Djibouti
- Europe and Central Asia: Turkey
- Latin American and the Caribbean: Bolivia and
Guatemala.
Providing a depository of Knowledge on girls’
education issues:
The Bank has
supported:
- several research studies on factors that affect
girls’ participation and learning;
- development of capacity and training programs in
Ministries of education for the implementation of
girls’ education strategies;
- organization of regional and country level
workshops in collaboration with other partners to
share country experiences and best practices on the
improvement of girls’ education;
- dissemination of information on what is known and
best practices of strategies that work in girls’
education through publications, electronic media,
videos and presentations;
- mainstreaming gender in country and sector policy
dialogue with client countries.
Financing strategies that work:
Drawing from
findings in its analytic work, the Bank has financed
strategies that have been found to work for the
improvement of girls’ education through its operational
work. Examples of strategies supported include those
that:
- Are System-wide and cross-sectoral;
- Balance supply and demand side
interventions;
- Focus on educational quality improvements;
- Adopt a holistic approach to gender issues;
- Are based on a strong analytic framework.
Who are we
working with?
The World Bank works closely with
other development organizations on Girls' Education
issues. It has developed partnerships to help identify
interventions that improve girls’ education outcomes and
to provide resources necessary to support countries
implementing such initiatives. The World Bank is an
active member of the global partnership for girls’
education and the
United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative
(UNGEI), which is comprised of donors including
the following:
- UNICEF,
- UNESCO,
- Department for International Development
(DFID),
- SIDA,
- NORAD,
- DANIDA,
- Global Campaign for Education
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