Overview
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Overview of Girls' Education
What are the challenges to Girls' Education?
What has the World Bank been doing to support Girls' Education?
Overview of Girls' Education
Girls’ Education a corporate priority:
The World Bank is committed to fighting poverty and has embraced the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals as a corporate 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.
The World Bank is a partner and one of many players in the international drive to improve gender equality and empower 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 and women 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.
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 - a differential of 24 percentage points. Today, the gender gap has narrowed with girls representing 45 percent and boys 55 percent, a differential of only 10 percentage points. 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.
 
What are the challenges to Girls' Education?
Challenges:
- Just over 100 million children are out of primary school and almost 60 percent of them are girls.
- Girls are dropping out of school before completing secondary schooling, where some of the greatest benefits to girls’ schooling accrue : In South Asia, only 47 percent of secondary school-aged girls are enrolled in school. In Sub Saharan Africa, only 30 percent are enrolled (UN MDG Task Force 2004). Current estimates predict that not only will the 2005 gender parity goal be missed by almost all developing countries but only 27 of 118 countries studied are projected to reach gender parity in secondary education by 2015 (UNESCO 2003).
- Girls in developing countries are performing at much lower levels compared to boys than girls in developed countries. In three recent international assessments of reading, girls in developed or middle income countries always outperformed boys at statistically significant levels — 32 out of 32 countries in PISA 2000, 42 out of 42 in PISA 2003, 35 out of 35 in PIRLS 2001. Conversely, boys are almost always ahead or equal to girls in all of the 18 tested low-income countries of Francophone Africa (PASEC) and all of the 14 tested low-income countries from Eastern and Southern Africa
(SACMEQ).
- The HIV/AIDS pandemic is presenting enormous challenges in education and girls’ are disproportionately affected whether they are infected or not. Globally, more than half of all people living with HIV are female. In sub-Saharan Africa, the region hardest hit by HIV/AIDS, more than two out of three newly-infected 15-24-year olds are female. For adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19, five or six girls are infected for every boy in worst-affected areas. Girls who are not infected are affected by being caregivers to infected parents or family members or orphans when the parents die.
What has the World Bank been doing to support Girls' 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, Pakistan
- Middle East and North Africa: Morocco, Yemen, 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
Working closely with other partners:
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:
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