Factors that have led to girls' education becoming a prominent development policy agenda

“There is no greater pillar of stability than a strong, free, and educated woman.” (Angelina Jolie)

“If we are going to see real development in the world then our best investment is WOMEN!” (Desmond Tutu)

In most parts of the Western world and beyond, almost no other topic of the development policy agenda can be considered as uncontested as the promotion of girls’ education (GE). Going hand in hand with liberal human values and as a means of justification for other developmental interventions, promoting GE is frequently perceived as one of only a few ‘truly global’ notions and indicators of progress. Chosen by the anti-extreme poverty ONE Campaign as the first two of their “10 quotes that tell us the importance of investing in girls’ education” (ONE 2017), the quotes above highlight common themes associated with the empowerment of girls and women via the means of education: reasonable investment, societal progress and security.

Hardly contestable if not deconstructed, these quotes simultaneously represent entry points for more critical discussions of the anything but uniform notion of GE by raising, among others, the questions of: Which forms of stability? Strong, free and educated in which regards? Can there be a single ‘real development’? Can human beings be ‘(best) investments’ at all? Keeping in mind these questions, this essay sets out to trace the factors of why and how GE became such a prominent development policy agenda. It is centrally argued that this circumstance is due to two central characteristics of GE: (1) Its extraordinary definitional and methodological blurredness, rendering it almost common-sensical; (2) its frequent facilitation as a panacea within a wider neoliberal policy framework. For this purpose, several development organisations and the methodologies of well-known reports will be scrutinised from both quantitative and qualitative angles, including diverse understandings and common themes. Ultimately, a brief outlook will be given.

Definitional and methodological blurredness of GE

In contrast to many other development-related issues such as poverty or inequality, no meaningful and (almost) exhaustive sets of indicators for the genuinely multidimensional concept of GE have been agreed on by the international development community yet. Even though some primarily quantitative indicators such as literacy rate and school enrolment can be frequently found - which allow for (limited) comparisons of countries and over time - they are still far from accurately reflecting GE’s ascribed potential to improve the lived experiences of half of the world’s population. Whilst the exact reasons for this sub-operationalisation remain unknown, a reciprocally beneficial relationship between blurry indicators and ideological purpose cannot be excluded. More precisely, the collection/interpretation of GE­relevant data seemingly depends on the respective institution and its embedment in wider political and ideological structures. What evolves from this incoherence is a plethora of non­rivalling understandings - rendering GE a common-sensical pursuit for development organisations.

In order to exemplify the varied definitions which exist of GE among internationally well-known developmental organisations, a Google search of the supposedly easily understandable question “What is girls’ education?” has been conducted. Among the first ten search results, the World Bank ([WB] 2017), the United Nations (UN) International Children’s Emergency Fund ([UNICEF] 2020) and the Malala Fund (2020) are the presumably best- known. Among others, they were scrutinised for their explicit understandings of and barriers to, threats by as well as benefits of GE (Table 1 of the annex). Understandable as only indicative in nature,¹ the analysis reveals some interesting insights.

Firstly, their explicit understanding of GE varies significantly. The Malala Fund focuses narrowly on access to education (particularly secondary schooling), whereas the WB and UNICEF define GE more broadly. Contrary to initial expectation, however, UNICEF does not reveal the most ambitious understanding, going so far as to only highlight the importance of safe learning environments and support in educational trajectories, besides access to schools themselves. The WB additionally stresses the importance of learning skills to navigate in a changing world, to make decisions about one’s own life, the importance of qualifications to compete in labour markets as well as contributing to communities and the world more generally.

Secondly, there is little disagreement surrounding the identified barriers to GE on the micro-, meso- and macro-level (Table 2 in the annex). Aspects as diverse as child labour and marriages, poor school quality and standards, gender biases and -based violence, costs and poverty, health and hygiene are almost uniformly mentioned. All three organisations, however, stress diverse economic advantages, especially for women in the formal labour market, as well as GE’s potential to improve aspects of health.

Thirdly, UNICEF and the WB argue - from the perspective of individuals - that educated girls are less likely to marry young and have less children. The Malala Fund, in contrast, argues only in terms of extra-household benefits. Even though this includes important aspects such as strengthened community resilience and ability to recover faster from conflicts as well as natural disasters, not one aspect of intra-household changes is highlighted. This diverging starting point becomes clearest in comparison to UNICEF. The children’s fund manages to simultaneously make the same point and stress the benefits on different levels, arguing that GE contributes to more resilient societies giving all individuals opportunities to fulfil their potential. At the same time, exceeding the wider educational benefits mentioned by the WB, UNICEF is the only organisation of the three differentiating between the respective benefits of primary and secondary education and wider societal impacts of gender-equitable education systems.

Certainly, whilst their working definitions appear to be informed by various factors such as accountability to different donors and stakeholders as well as amount of (financial) resources and audience, the reasons underpinning their respective construction of GE remain unknown. Most revealingly, however, is the kind of discourse they aim to contribute to. Before more light will be shed on this, GE’s frequently insufficient and varying operationalisation shall be exemplified in order to illustrate its common-sensical nature in a neoliberal policy framework.²

For this purpose, an indicative comparison of two report series have been conducted, chosen for their wide perception, focus on gender inequalities and equal reliance on data stemming predominantly from UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics. These are the Global Gender Gap Reports by the World Economic Forum ([WEF] 2019, WEF 2018, WEF 2017) and the Results Reports of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE 2019, GPE 2018, GPE 2017), known as the only global fund solely dedicated to education in developing countries (GPE 2020a).

Firstly, regarding study design, WEF’s report series discusses GE implicitly as one of four sub-indexes of its composite Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), whereas GPE discusses GE explicitly via comparing girls’ and boys’ educational data specifically. Despite the implication of their titles to contain data on countries worldwide, GPE’s most recent report covers data only on 72 of its 100 developing country partners (GPE 2020b, GPE 2019). WEF (2019), in turn, covers countries from all continents and most different levels of average income, amounting to 160 country overviews. In former reports of both series not all these countries were included, limiting comparisons across time to some extent.

Secondly, regarding indicators and sources, the WEF’s GE-relevant sub-index ‘educational attainment’ consists of four exclusively quantitative indicators: enrolment in primary, secondary and tertiary education and literacy rate of over-15-year olds (all in percent). GPE’s report, in contrast, relies on 15 more illuminating indicators of both quantitative and qualitative nature. Of the two, only GPE provides a working definition of GE as the education of those girls in their respective countries’ mandatory primary and secondary school age (GPE 2019). WEF (2019), in turn, reveals internal ambiguities regarding the age range of the categories ‘boys’ and ‘girls’. Additionally, in the WEF-report only the ratios of primary and secondary school enrolment allow for derivations about GE in the first place. These two indicators, however, hardly shed any light on persistent dimensions of gender discrimination within schools and beyond.

Abstracting from this indicative comparison, methodological shortcomings regarding GE even appear in overviews given by the UN such as in its Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI). This includes the importance of transparent reporting, as the references for its section ‘Information by Country’ are either incomplete or not provided at all. The more difficult it is to find out, for example, which years the indicator of female literacy rate and the listed non­key indicators refer to. Moreover, meaningful insights are equally hampered by outdated data, lacking data (e.g. for girls under the age of 15 and qualitative measures more generally) or if the given data is not further stratified (e.g. primary enrolment only for both sexes) (UNGEI 2020a, UNGEI 2020b, UNGEI 2020c).

This illustrates that so-called ‘global’ reports/comparisons of GE such as UNGEI, WEF and GPE’s frequently fall short of shedding light on intra-country disparities. Certainly, limited resources often render macro-level comparisons of aggregated quantitative data more attractive and may already allow for deriving adequate hypotheses about the cause(s) of differences; without considering their constituting regional or state-level data, however, they may be insufficient or even misleading.

GE as a panacea within a neoliberal policy framework

Coming back to the first comparison presented in this essay, we have seen that the WB, UNICEF and the Malala Fund’s understanding of GE seemingly fit into neoliberal understandings of development: they do not clearly distance themselves from trends of increasing privatisation of education and frequently facilitate loaded buzzwords such as ‘return on investments’ or ‘best investments’ (see Table 1 and 2 in the annex). It would show more critical engagement if they highlighted, for example, aspects of educational justice and human rights, as it is most clearly stressed in Art. 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The comparison of the three development organisations equally illustrates that in the last few decades GE has been frequently facilitated as a panacea for other development concerns such as poverty or inequality. Nowhere is this ascribed potential (in the context of a neoliberal policy framework) as clearly stated as in the report by Wodon et al. (2018) with the telling title “Missed Opportunities: The High Cost of Not Educating Girls”. As part of a WB- series of notes on the eponymous topic, it focusses on potential gains of secondary education classified in six domains as well as economic benefits. Revealingly, this study has been supported by GPE and the Malala Fund whose entrenchment with neoliberal policies we have just illustrated.

The uncritical usage of de-theorised concepts such as human/social capital or agency, together with a framework that primarily points towards economic benefits, clearly suggests that GE is politically prioritised for other reasons than its intrinsic value as a social good. More precisely, aspects of rights and justice are overshadowed by economic gains, both for public and private actors. This epitomises itself in the following statement in the report’s summary which uses economical terms as many as five times, but allows space for a moral (NB: not legal) aspect only in a marginalised side note (Ibid., p. 6; italics by the author):

“While the public and private cost of providing universal quality primary and secondary education for all girls could be far from negligible, the potential returns to this investment could be much larger. Increasing investments in girls’ education makes economic sense. It is also the right thing to do.”

Revealingly, this report lacks a working definition of GE, but other discussed aspects and domains such as child marriage are indeed elaborated in greater detail. What becomes clear is that, again, quantitative indicators perceived as sufficient side-line qualitative data on GE which are mentioned only as “another way to illustrate interdependence between domains” (Ibid., p. 9) in the form of few anecdotal stories. Abstracting from this report, it is puzzling where the often insufficiently proven conviction stems from that GE constitutes a panacea within wider neoliberal policy contexts.

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¹ It is acknowledged that only a rigid and methodologically grounded discourse analysis would provide for potentially generalisable insights by exceeding the comparison of mostly buzzwords on a few websites.

² See Harvey (2007) for a comprehensive treatise of the term.