Putting Girls’ Education First
Girls’ education is one of the most powerful things that any nation can invest in, because it creates large and lasting social and economic benefits. Girls who are well-educated go on to lead more empowered, prosperous lives. They delay pregnancy until they are older, affecting maternal and infant mortality rates. And they raise healthier children, creating a virtuous cycle with inter-generational benefits.
Globally, if all girls completed primary school, the number of maternal deaths would be cut by two-thirds, the number of child marriages would drop by 14 percent, infant mortality would fall by 15 percent, and 1.7 million children would avoid the stunting of malnutrition.
The Haitian education system is characterized by high costs and unequal access to schools. Across the country, girls and poorer children have higher drop-out rates.
Writing for Copenhagen Consensus, Economist-Planner and Project Analyst in the Haitian Public Investment Department, Ministry of Planning and External Cooperation Mélissa Torchenaud has written a new research paper that investigates the costs and benefits of improving girls’ education access.
The paper is part of the research project, Haiti Priorise. In April, an Eminent Panel of world-class economists and development experts from Haiti and abroad will meet in Port-au-Prince, review all of the new research, and identify priorities.
Torchenaud turns to international examples of how to invest in girls’ schooling to target those most in need. Some countries have set up scholarships for underprivileged girls. In Bangladesh, rural girls can receive a scholarship if they go to school regularly, get good marks and do not get married. This has led to enrolment rates for girls and boys becoming equivalent. Brazil, Kenya and Nicaragua have also achieved promising results with scholarship programs.
She proposes a Haiti Girls’ Scholarship program that would take place over a period of 10 years. During this period, the ministry of education would pay for tuition and the supply of teaching materials to a group of rural girls admitted in secondary 1 until the end of their traditional studies – a period of 4 years for each girl.
To stay in the scholarship, recipients must keep good marks and attendance.
Like all of the research papers in Haiti Priorise, Torchenaud examines the proposal using cost-benefit analysis – a method that allows for the comparison of social, environmental, and health costs and benefits of contrasting policy options.
The average cost for each scholarship, per year, would be around 30,000 gourdes (around $430) for things like tuition, uniforms, and teaching materials.
Torchenaud considers the fact that the girls who stay in school could otherwise have tried to get a job, with about one-third succeeding. On average this means they forgo about 28,000 gourdes ($400) in income. Including this ‘lost’ income and some program costs, the total cost per year runs to 67,000 gourdes per student ($970). The total cost to reach 6,583 girls over 4 years would be 7.7 billion gourdes (around $110 million).
The benefits are numerous. For each girl, the wage increase from each additional year of schooling will add up to 262,000 gourdes ($3,800) across her lifetime. As the girl gets one year more education, the risk of her children dying early declines by almost 10 percent. More benefits will accrue because more education will decrease the risk of HIV infection, teen pregnancy and maternal mortality rates. It will also improve the nutrition in the next generation of children.
Adding up all such health and economic benefits, the total benefit Haitian society from giving one girl an extra year of schooling is 347,000 gourdes ($5000).
About 15 percent of recipients would have stayed in school anyway, and around one in ten will drop out. Accounting for these factors, every gourde spent on improving girls’ school retention through a scholarship for rural girls would have benefits to society worth 4.4 gourdes.
While it has high returns to Haiti, this scholarship program would only respond to one aspect of the challenges facing Haitian education. Other research papers in the Haiti Priorise project will look at how to improve primary schooling more generally, as well as pre-school education.
And of course, there are many other challenges – from energy to health to infrastructure – competing for the same resources. With research papers across all of these areas, Haiti Priorise aims to prompt debate and discussion about where to spend scarce resources to do the most good first.
But this research definitely makes a strong argument for prioritizing keeping girls in school.
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7 年Many factors affect the outcome of education. The cost benefit analysis results are only valid if you control for so many factors with potential effect on the results. The basic economics of education showed us this decades ago including the age - earnings profiles by gender (read sex). There is no miracle benefit from educating anyone. I get disappointed that girls' education benefits always relate to women's production of healthy labour and hence only indirectly contributing to the economy when fewer children die or get stunted. The only reason for focusing on girls' education is that they are marginalised, not because educating them has more benefits than educating boys. It is the logic the World Bank took when some thirty years ago it saw the need to support primary education because the social returns are higher at this level than they are for other levels where individuals' returns are the highest. Why? There are hardly any foregone earnings at primary school level except for certain types of manual labour (children making carpets in India, making bricks in Afghanistan, herding cattle in Lesotho,for example). Analysis need not be a market strategy but a real tool providing evidence for where and when to invest in whose education. These days we need both the cost benefit analysis and the guiding Theory of Change. And Haiti may be the poorest country in that hemisphere because it is near the US but it is not the poorest in the world as this term is always applied to any country outside of North America and Europe.
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7 年That's a great article Anne A focus on Educating girls in these more medieval nations is what all advanced countries need to support more I recall woman entrepreneur who created an organization that taught girls about computer coding in India that has done wonders for young girls in many parts of the world
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7 年I think this is good but I have got doubt the numbers. In that, people say that with more education comes more money over a lifetime. Or as if education alone generates the kinds of increases you cite. I am sorry but the jobs are not there. Education does not generate its own jobs. If someone gets a degree in computer science it does not mean that they get a good paying software job. In fact, I have read where 1/3 of all computer science graduates will never get a software job, in the United States. If this is true for the richest economy on Earth how much more does it apply to the poorest country in our hemisphere, Haiti? Please do not misundertand me. I still want girls to get an education. But people tend to overestimate the relationship between education of the masses and the economy. There is very little (if any) cause-effect. What early and long education does do is to indoctrinate our young into becoming consumers of the so-called latest and greatest gadgets, etc. So, to that extent, education does help out the economy, by the adults buying and buying and buying things they really do not need at a price they cannot afford. For example, the US became the largest economy on Earth, circa 1880. This was long before we had much mass education. We had about 10% high school graduation rate in 1910, to give you some idea of how little we, as a country, were educated. Education was supposed to make us more knowledgeable and better able to govern ourselves and maintain our rights. We are losing our rights quicker now than at any other time in our history, so education has failed to do this. One final nail in the coffin, as it were, in a recent PISA test had a nation that is in poverty (for most them) actually outscored the US. So, that might tend to make one think that educating your young would not necessarily lead to a booming economy. It is not absolute proof but it is a start. Also, as a side note: poverty does not cause an inability to learn. Economies are strong when they have an abundance of natural resources that everyone wants. I hope that education will be beneficial to all.