The Fruits of Girls’ Education

For millions of women around the globe, lack of education is a handicap for which they pay a heavy price. Some 565 million women are illiterate, mainly in poor rural areas. These women cannot sign their names, decipher simple instructions, or fill out an application form. Their lack of education limits their ability to earn money and get credit, to participate in decisionmaking in their families and communities, to delay childbearing, and to offer their children the best life chances. The failure to educate these women when they were girls is the result of a range of factors, including the need for girls’ labor in the home, attitudes that devalue education for girls, fears about girls’ security outside the home, and lack of resources to pay for education.

Research has shown that educating girls offers a multitude of benefits for girls themselves, their current and future families, and their societies. Many of the benefits of educating girls are the same as those of educating boys: education helps create more productive workers and thereby improves income equity. It helps people participate more meaningfully in political and civic life. It improves overall economic growth and leads to greater care of the environment. And it helps people adapt to the demands of globalization and to shape it. Other benefits are particular to educating girls, such as the improvements in quality of life both for educated girls and for their future children. In 1992, Lawrence Summers, then vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and now U.S. treasury secretary, said, “When one takes into account all its benefits, educating girls yields a higher rate of return than any other investment available in the developing world.”

The barriers to girls’ education, however, are complex and persistent. Although national governments, local communities, and development organizations around the world now recognize the need to educate girls and are implementing programs for doing so, 73 million girls of primary school age are still without access to basic education, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). But if the world is to make a sizable dent in poverty and hunger in the next two decades, getting these girls into school will clearly have to be part of the equation.

Education for a Better Life
Evidence is irrefutable that education improves girls’ own lives now and in the future. “Women understand this quite acutely themselves,” says Michelle Adato, a research fellow at IFPRI who has examined the effects of a Mexican antipoverty program that gives cash and in-kind benefits to poor rural mothers whose children attend school and visit health clinics. “Rural Mexican women we interviewed emphasized the importance of girls’ education. Most of them stated that it led to some or better employment. Others simply said that education led to a better life. And still others told us that it enabled girls and women to improve their standing in relationships, that it allowed them to better defend themselves and to take care of themselves and their children if their marriage did not work out.” Here, for example, is how one rural woman put it: “In my case I didn’t study, so I didn’t know anything. If I had a daughter, I would say it would be better for her to study so she wouldn’t be the same as I was.”

One of the strongest nonmarket effects of girls’ education—one that nonetheless reverberates across households and national economies—is the reduction in fertility. Better-educated females marry later and have fewer unwanted pregnancies. And their higher earning power may lower the number of children parents want as income earners. Moreover, educated females reduce the infant mortality rate through better childcare, thus reducing the number of replacement babies they have. A 1992 World Bank paper showed that one additional year of female education reduces fertility by 5 to 10 percent.

“Educating boys does not have noticeable effects on fertility rates,” says Beryl Levinger, senior director for global learning at the U.S.-based Education Development Center and distinguished professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “Schooling for girls, on the other hand, is a potent population intervention. And these girls will pass down what they learn to their children. The policy some countries have of expelling pregnant girls from school is extremely counterproductive.”

A dramatic example of reduced fertility is provided by a girls’ education project in rural Zimbabwe run by the Cambridge Female Education Trust (CamFed). Ann Cotton, CamFed’s executive director, says that only 5 percent of the 387 girls who graduated from secondary school with the help of CamFed became mothers between the ages of 18 and 24. This represents a sharp turn away from the national average of 47 percent of girls aged 20–24, many of them with little education, who gave birth by the time they turned 20. “The social safety net we provide, in conjunction with the community committees that we’ve helped set up, provide the vital support a girl may need to complete the education she desires,” says Cotton. “The value of education is so strong that girls do want to continue it if they are given the chance. Moreover, they want to secure their economic situation before starting a family,” she adds. There are now 79 growing businesses run by young women in the CamFed project areas in rural Zimbabwe, where there were none before.

The income-earning benefits that girls’ education confers can hardly be in dispute. But its advantages relative to other means of acquiring wealth are less well known. A study by Agnes Quisumbing, a senior IFPRI research fellow, and two colleagues from Tokyo Metropolitan University shows that of the two key means of transferring wealth to the next generation in the Philippines—bequeathing land and investing in schooling—the latter carries far larger effects. “We found that sons inherit 0.19 hectare of land more than daughters, on average, while daughters stay in school for 1.5 years more than sons. Because of higher rates of return to education in nonfarm jobs, the average additional lifetime income of daughters is 10 to 100 percent higher than the additional lifetime income of sons. For other countries this finding implies that as jobs and wages for women increase, parents may close the education gap and invest more in their daughters’ education.”

According to a recent World Bank study by David Dollar and Roberta Gatti, closing the education gap would help not only women, their families, and their communities, but also the economies of the countries they live in. They report that “girls’ access to education creates a better environment for economic growth and that the result is particularly strong for middle-income countries. Thus, societies that have a preference for not investing in girls pay a price for it in terms of slower growth and reduced income.”

Girls’ education also has effects that cannot be quantified but are powerful nonetheless. It can transform consciousness, not only of women but of men as well. Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College, says that as girls get educated they begin to see themselves as decisionmakers beyond the household and as carriers and makers of knowledge. A whole new political, social, and economic narrative comes into view. “And boys,” says McIntosh, “are better for it because they begin to take girls seriously.”

A Boon for the Next Generation
Besides improving the lives of girls themselves, education makes them better caregivers when they have children of their own. A forthcoming 2020 Vision discussion paper by IFPRI researchers Lisa Smith and Lawrence Haddad examines the factors contributing to reduced child malnutrition in 63 developing countries. They found that female education was by far the most important reason why child malnutrition decreased by 15.5 percent between 1970 and 1995—much more important than, for instance, improved health environments or food availability.

“The fundamental importance of female education for raising children’s nutrition levels is beyond question,” says Haddad. “Partly because a mother uses her new knowledge and the additional income she earns from it to improve diets, care, and sanitation for her children, female education is probably the strongest instrument we have for reducing infant mortality and child malnutrition.” Indeed, the 1993 World Development Report notes that a 10 percent increase in female literacy reduced child mortality by the same amount in 13 African countries between 1975 and 1985. An increase in male literacy had little effect. The report also notes that infant mortality drops with more maternal schooling. In the late 1980s in Peru, for example, 4–6 years of maternal schooling reduced the risk of infant mortality by almost 40 percent; 7 or more years reduced it by 75 percent.

Growing evidence shows that girls’ education also leads to better education for their future children. “Children of educated mothers,” says John Hoddinott, an IFPRI research fellow, “do better in school because children are healthier, mothers can help them with their homework, educated mothers can be role models, especially for girls, and mothers may be less intimidated by their children’s teachers, so if a teacher says, ‘Your child won’t amount to anything,’ the mother is more likely to argue back.”

A recent study by Jere Behrman, professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and his colleagues shows that children of literate mothers in rural India spent 1.8 hours more a day on their studies than similar children of illiterate mothers. “The data also show,” says Behrman, “that in rural India a woman’s dowry is almost three-fourths lower if she has a few years of education, probably because her prospective husband thinks she will participate more in the education of their children.”

What Keeps Girls out of School?
Evidence on the benefits of girls’ education is overwhelming. So why are so many girls still not being educated? The obstacles are many and complex. Some are common to many different geographic areas, while others are specific to a particular country or village.

Parents often perceive that education is not as necessary for their daughters as for their sons. According to Sudhanshu Handa, an IFPRI research fellow who has studied education issues in Mozambique and Mexico, “Parents may say, ‘Girls are going to stay home, so there’s no point in educating them.”

The positive link between mothers’ education and children’s health and well-being may not be obvious to parents. May Rihani of the Academy for Educational Development, who is now in charge of AED’s girls’ education programs in Pakistan, India, Guinea, and Mali, recalls a community meeting in Mali where she was explaining that educated mothers tend to have healthier children. She was soon challenged by a man from the village. “He said, outraged, ‘Do you mean to say that uneducated women love their children less than educated women?’ ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘it has nothing to do with love. It has to do with mothers’ ability to read and write. Educated mothers can, for example, read instructions on medications.’ He said, ‘If what you are saying is right, we may have to think about that.”‘

A perceived lack of job opportunities for women may also keep parents from sending their daughters to school. But the logic about keeping girls out of school can become a vicious circle: girls do not get educated because there is a lack of wage-earning opportunities for women, and women who are uneducated cannot get wage-earning employment. Parents may also perceive that their sons will be the ones to support them in their old age and that any economic gain that results from educating a girl will go to her future husband and his family.

Handa’s work shows that in rural areas in particular, lack of education among parents is a sizable obstacle, for parents’ decisions about whether to educate girls often depends on their own education levels. “In Mozambique, the difference in boys’ and girls’ enrollment rates is much less in urban areas—something that is true for most countries. That’s because in urban areas parental education is higher, and there are more job opportunities for women and girls.”

Security is another big concern of parents. In rural areas, schools can be far from home. “If a girl has to walk a long way to school, parents don’t want that for security reasons,” says Rihani. “Parents don’t want girls walking home in seasons when school continues until dark. If these conditions are not dealt with, girls’ education won’t happen.”

Inadequate school facilities can also keep girls away. “Some school facilities can actually make it difficult for girls to go to school,” says Levinger. “For example, when a girl reaches puberty and there are no sanitary facilities, that becomes a problem. Also, the presence or absence of facilities to care for siblings can affect girls’ attendance, because they often take care of their siblings.”

In Pakistan, says Rihani, it is taboo for male teachers to instruct girls, but female teachers are hard to find. “For girls, mingling with men and boys is unacceptable,” she explains. “There are government schools for girls and these have women teachers, but they are too few to serve everyone. And if a school is in a remote area, it is hard to get female teachers because there isn’t a big pool of educated women.” To overcome this situation, leaders of a project in Pakistan decided to recruit less-educated women to teach in remote rural schools. “One of our biggest successes,” says Rihani, “was convincing the government that the criteria for teachers in this project could be different and that attendance and quality wouldn’t suffer.”

The cost of educating girls is a deterrent to many families. Even when schooling itself is free, other costs may arise. In Pakistan, government books are free, but families may have to travel some distance to pick them up, thereby incurring transportation costs, explains Rihani. In other areas, the loss of the girl’s time is counted as a significant cost. Families often rely on girls to help care for younger siblings and perform other household chores and even, in some cases, to earn income. They simply cannot afford to lose the household labor that girls represent.

Chipping Away at the Barriers
Although the barriers to girls’ education may be many and complex, they are not insurmountable. The cultural and economic barriers will probably continue to weaken as economies grow, priorities get reordered, and cultures come under pressure to adapt to new realities. Knowledge about the benefits of educating girls may also help transform attitudes and priorities.

Countries worldwide are overcoming education barriers for girls by developing innovative programs that lower costs, offer stipends, involve communities in identifying problems, and building infrastructure. Mexico’s PROGRESA program, for instance, gives families higher cash payments for girls in secondary school than for boys.

To get girls into school, Malawi has eliminated school tuition fees for girls (and later for boys as well), and relaxed the requirement that girls wear uniforms to school. And to spread the message about the importance of girls’ education, they borrowed a technique first used in Latin America: “social mobilization” through theater performances designed to initiate dialog at the village level. University drama and music students travel to Malawian communities, where they listen to villagers and then perform skits on the role of girls in the community. The skits address fears and expectations regarding girls’ schooling and stimulate discussion on how to help girls become educated.

Surveys show that pregnancy is the most common reason girls drop out of school in Malawi. So in 1993 the country changed its policies to allow girls to resume their education after giving birth. According to John Hatch of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Girls’ and Women’s Education Project, “Girls return to school after one year. The girls do go to a different school from the one they attended before, and they must show that the child is being well cared for.” Ironically, successful campaigns to increase enrollment can exacerbate another problem faced by many developing countries: overcrowded schools. Colombia is confronting the problem by offering poor children vouchers they can use to enroll in private schools. “The government could build more public schools,” says Elizabeth King, principal economist at the World Bank, “but there’s already excess capacity in the private schools, so they’re using that capacity.” The vouchers have had a greater effect on girls’ enrollment than on boys’, she points out, because “girls’ enrollment is more sensitive to price.”

In Guinea, a national effort to raise girls’ enrollment helps local communities identify constraints and seek solutions. In one remote northern village, for example, girls who completed primary school had to go to a school in Mali to continue their studies, according to Aly Badara Doukoure, the girls’ education administrator of Guinea. “This was very difficult for them. In 1998 the community identified having a school nearby as a solution, and now, in 1999, they have already built a three-classroom school for their girls,” says Doukoure. Similarly, another village identified the expense and inconvenience of procuring school materials as a barrier to girls’ education. “So they set up a community store where all families can buy school materials at a reduced price,” Doukoure says.

Bangladesh has also made a massive push to educate more girls. Part of the government’s strategy is to offer girls a stipend for secondary schooling, in the hope that this will lead to increased enrollment in primary school. Bangladesh also benefits from a well-known partnership with the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. BRAC, a nongovernmental organization (NGO), runs some 30,000 primary schools serving about 900,000 students. The BRAC schools aim to have each school made up of at least 75 percent girls. These schools, which have longer school years and lower student-teacher ratios than public schools, attract many girls who have either dropped out of public school or never attended.

Government Cannot Go It Alone
In most developing countries, the task of getting girls into school, especially poor girls in rural areas, is simply too large for government to accomplish alone. Partnerships between governments, communities, donors, businesses, and NGOs appear to be the solution. Support from these partners for girls’ education may be financial, in-kind services, or just leadership, expertise, and time. “In Morocco, NGOs successfully petitioned for funds to make improvements to schools that communities had identified as necessary to attract and keep girls, and local businesspeople have helped with the improvements,” says Hatch. “Peru and Guatemala have had good interest and support from business groups. In some communities, religious organizations have set up babysitting co-ops for younger siblings of students so that girls can attend school. In Guinea parent groups monitor attendance of both students and teachers.”

“We’re trying to make a revolutionary change in how people think about education,” says Rihani. “We want to change the idea that education can be offered as a service only if the government offers it. The private sector can also do it. The community can do it. They can build a school and pay a teacher.”

Obviously, the moral imperative that sees education as a critical individual and public good extends to everyone, including girls. Besides this moral rationale, the economic and social benefits offer convincing arguments in favor of stepping up efforts to educate all girls. Few development investments can match the overwhelming evidence on the returns to girls’ education, yet too few resources are still being devoted to this effort. In a recent report called Education Now, Oxfam calculates the additional cost of universal primary education worldwide as $8 billion per year for 10 years—the equivalent of four days’ worth of global military spending. By paying this relatively small price now, governments, communities, and their partners can lay the groundwork for rewards that will extend into the future for many generations.

Reported by Heidi Fritschel and Uday Mohan

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