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Evaluation of USAID Efforts in Girls' Education

Increased educational participation among girls contributes strongly to development. Completion of a decent basic education gives girls access to improved earning opportunities in later life. Just as important, more educated girls become better mothers, reducing child mortality. Lower child mortality in turn tends to lower high rates of fertility.

USAID has long been a leader among donors in promoting girls’ education. Improving educational opportunities for girls is at the core of USAID’s overall objective in basic education.

Although there is universal agreement within USAID on the importance of girls’ education as a goal, there is active debate about the most effective strategies and tactics. Perspectives range from a focus on improving basic educational systems as a means to expand educational opportunities for all children, including girls, to an equally strong focus on the need to remove specific barriers to the educational participation of girls. To help resolve these issues, USAID’s Center for Development Information and Evaluation (CDIE) completed a major evaluation entitled Focus on Girls: An Evaluation of USAID Programs and Policies in Education. The evaluation included field studies of USAID programs in Guatemala, Guinea, Malawi, Nepal, and Pakistan.

The evaluation synthesis confirms the importance of efforts to remove specific barriers to girls’ participation, but emphasizes that these efforts will tend to be ineffective if pursued in isolation. Rather, these efforts should be integrated into the broader context of developing systems of basic education.

In most low-enrollment countries, the key to raising girls’ enrollment is to establish more and better primary schools available to girls. This is because:

• Where schools are crowded, girls tend to be the first ones crowded out (or never admitted).
• Where children must walk long distances to school, parents tend to keep girls home out of concern about sexual harassment.
• Girls’ enrollments tend to be especially sensitive to parents’ perceptions of poor quality.
• In low-enrollment countries, improving conditions at the primary level helps girls most.

Achieving large-scale and lasting progress in these areas depends on the host country government’s commitment to fundamental change in basic education, including additional resources for primary schools and changes in the way the educational system is managed. USAID Missions contemplating support for girls’ education initiatives must ensure that host country governments are fully committed to making these systemic changes and to doing their part to sustain them.

Sexual harassment was the clearest example of a specific barrier to girls, more-or-less separable from broader educational improvement. Parents’ concerns about harassment become more pressing as girls approach puberty, leading them to pull daughters out of school before completion.