E. King & B. Lomborg
4 June 2008
opinion
Nairobi — A GIRL BORN IN SOUTH ASIA or sub-Saharan Africa faces a cruel double burden. She will grow up in a region beset by poverty, disease, war or famine. She will also confront these challenges with the added disadvantage of being female.
Although more attention is being given to gender issues, inequality persists in every culture, country and continent. A new study shows that eliminating this disparity is an investment with high payoffs.
Despite global interest in education for all, many girls in poor countries continue to be denied basic education; right from the start, they are disadvantaged.
Three in five illiterate children in the world are girls. Particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, cultural norms and economic hardships stop parents from sending their daughters to school or from keeping them in school for as long as they enrol their sons. This is neither equitable nor efficient.
An obvious solution is to build more schools in places where girls and boys must be educated separately.
In poor Muslim countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Morocco, single-sex schooling is the norm, but many rural areas can afford only one public school, which is usually set aside for boys. In theory, about half of the education gap in these areas could be closed by building girls' schools.
Elsewhere, supply constraints are not the problem. Instead, policymakers must find ways to strengthen the incentives for parents to send their daughters to school.
In countries where the cost of schooling girls is lowered either by a no-fee policy or by a stipend for girls who enrol in school, girls' enrolment rate increases.
The experiences of these few countries lead us to propose a system whereby mothers are paid if their school-age daughters attend school regularly from the 3rd to the 9th grade.
This would increase girls' enrolment and also put money into women's hands - important because studies show that money given to women is more likely to provide positive nutritional and health benefits for their children than money given to men.
It also provides the women with greater bargaining power in their own households. The annual cost per pupil would be $32. Covering every eligible girl in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia for a year would cost $6 billion. Benefits from increased future wages and the reduction in healthcare use would be between three and 26 times higher.
Pregnancy is one of the most vulnerable times for poor women; 99 per cent of the 529,000 women who die annually from pregnancy-related complications live in developing countries.
Severe malnutrition and the absence of prenatal care during pregnancy put both mother and child at serious risk. Spending $3.9 billion on family planning and maternal health initiatives, such as provision of emergency contraception in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, could avert 1.4 million infant deaths and 142,000 pregnancy-related deaths.
Elizabeth King is the research manager for Public Services of the World Bank's Development Research Group; Mr Bjorn Lomborg is the organiser of Copenhagen Consensus, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School.
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