For the past two decades, investing in girls’ schooling has been hailed as a cornerstone of promoting gender equality in sub-Saharan Africa. Between 2016 and 2018 the World Bank Group invested US$3.2 billion in education projects benefiting adolescent girls.
The logic is straightforward. Girls face significant barriers to education, among them poverty, insufficient academic support, adolescent pregnancy, child marriage, and school related gender-based violence. Reducing these barriers can substantially improve their educational outcomes.
But is this approach – investing in girls’ education – fair to boys, and enough to make a meaningful impact on girls’ lives in the long term? Having studied the relationship between interventions and the way people’s lives develop in adverse contexts, we argue that the answer is no on both counts.
