Missed Opportunities: The High Cost of Not Educating Girls

Globally, according to data for 2016 from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, nine in ten girls (89.3 percent) complete their primary education, but only three in four (77.1 percent) complete their lower secondary education. In low income countries, the situation is much worse. Less than two thirds of girls (65.0 percent) complete their primary education, and only one in three (34.4 percent) completes lower secondary school. The fourth Sustainable Development Goal is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. The first target under this goal is to ensure that by 2030 all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes. At current rates of progress, many countries are unlikely to achieve this target. More needs to be done to improve educational attainment and learning for all children, boys and girls alike. At the same time, a special focus needs to be placed on girls who remain at a disadvantage versus boys in many countries, especially at the secondary level. The lack of educational attainment and learning for girls has multiple negative potential effects throughout their lifetime not only for themselves, but also for their children and households, their communities, and societies or countries. This note summarizes findings from a research program at the World Bank to document the potential negative impacts of low educational attainment for girls, and some of the economic costs associated with those potential impacts. The fact that investing in girls is smart economics is not news. The point was made in the World Development Report on gender (World Bank, 2012) and in many other studies before that (see for example World Bank, 2001). The contribution of this study is to document the potential negative effects of not investing in girls in perhaps a slightly more comprehensive way and with more recent survey data than has been done so far. The hope is that by illustrating the wide-ranging potential impacts and costs of not educating girls, the analysis will foster even greater policy mobilization towards improving education opportunities for girls