International Women's Day: More and more economists have been providing persuasive new evidence on the benefits of educating girls, writes Eileen KaneInternational Women's Day
On International Women's Day, it's worth reflecting on females who have enormous potential for changing the world for the better - girls in developing countries.
"Educating girls yields a higher rate of return than any other investment in the developing world," said Larry Summers in 1992, when, as chief economist of the World Bank, he jolted other economists into a flurry of new research.
Summers, now president of Harvard, is no feminist poster boy, so his words and their implications for girls, for development policy, and for all of us are intriguing.
Of course, educators and gender experts had been making the development case for getting girls into school on other, largely non-economic grounds since the early 1990s. But in the last few years more and more economists, a group not usually given to giddiness or hyperbole, have been providing persuasive new evidence on the benefits.
Partly as a result of this evidence, when the UN adopted eight millennium development goals in September 2000, two of those goals were about achieving gender parity in education:
Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education. Ensure that by 2015 children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of ordinary schooling.
Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women. Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005 and in all levels of education no later than 2015
All eight goals are interdependent: reducing disease, for example, without eradicating hunger won't work. And no single goal is an automatic key to triggering the others. Still, economists have been highlighting the centrality and knock-on effects of these two particular goals.
Along with educators, they continue to show, in study after study, that getting and keeping girls in school reduces child mortality and malnutrition; improves family health; delays the age of first marriage; lowers fertility rates; enhances women's domestic role and their political participation in society; improves their functioning in the wage labour force; strengthens a family's survival strategies; and probably most intriguing to governments, increases economic growth.
Even when various studies define these effects differently, the findings still hold. Causation is clear: improvement in girls' education is the cause of increase in economic growth, not the effect.
The effects are measurable, and large. For example, if the goals for education were met, the number of births per woman would be reduced by 0.6. Child mortality would also be reduced: one more year of female education reduces it by 18 per thousand.
On the other hand, whether a country's education rates are high or low, simply having a gender gap in the rates has serious negative consequences, regardless of whether the imbalance is 90-70 in favour of boys, or 50-30.
If the goals were met and gaps reduced, 435,000 children would be saved each year in India; in Mali, it would be 35,000.
The Population Council, an international research organisation, has pointed out that while each of these benefits could be achieved by other interventions, only girls' education achieves them all.
Recently, researchers have been looking at the effects of girls' education from another angle: what happens if countries don't improve girls' participation?
Studies show that the national economic and social costs of not educating girls and of not achieving gender parity in education are high; and higher for sub-Saharan Africa than for any other region.
Researchers Gita Abu Ghaida and Stephan Klasen have shown that some serious negative economic consequences are already evident, and will increase from now on.
As well, four of the other millennium development goals - improvements in child mortality, maternal health, reduction of disease including HIV/Aids, and environmental stability - will not be met or will be severely hindered without progress in girls' education.
Despite this evidence, almost 60 per cent of the children out of school are girls, 40 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa, where the numbers are worsening and the gender gap is rising. In south and west Asia, two-thirds of out-of-school children are girls. Why is it so difficult to get girls into school, to say nothing of keeping them there?
Girls in developing countries work more hours than boys (in Zambia, research shows they even work more hours than adult men), so the loss of their labour to a family is more serious, and if they are in school, their performance is affected.
When funds are scarce, some parents think boys are a better educational investment. Parents also fear for girls' physical security: over 80 per cent of 200 school sexual abuse cases in Zimbabwe involved trained male teachers. Some girls have a short "window" for education. In lowland Eritrea, for example, children start school at a later age because distances are great. Girls who then marry at 10 or 11 get only a year or two of schooling.
Finally, a new reason: in parts of Africa and the Caribbean, the rate of HIV/Aids among teenage girls is four to seven times higher than that of boys.
But what about boys? Most schools in developing countries have been designed with a student in mind; that student is a boy. This means that those boys still out of school are among the very hardest to reach. The strategies that have been working best for girls also have the best chance of bringing in these last remaining boys: addressing family costs, reducing distance, making school schedules flexible, improving quality, lowering enrolment age, improving employment policies, developing labour-saving technologies, and creating HIV/ Aids support. They are "gender-neutral".
On International Women's Day it would be good to be able to forget for a little while the benefits of girls' education to countries, to economies, to families, to future generations, etc and simply honour a girl's basic human right to an education.
But until we can do that, it seems that economists are a girl's best friend.
Eileen Kane is an anthropologist and a former chair of the Government's development co-operation advisory body. Her latest book is Girls' Education in Africa (World Bank 2004). ekane@groundworkers.org