By Randa Grob-Zakhary
Ten years ago, in a remote village in Nigeria’s Borno state, Aisha’s* education was brutally interrupted when she and her classmates were abducted by armed fighters.
What she remembers most clearly from the eight months she calls “the hard times” is how much she missed school.
After being rescued, Aisha enrolled in an accelerated learning programme run by a local NGO. Through this flexible, informal schooling, she not only caught up on lost learning but also received trauma counselling from trusted female teachers. In two years, she transitioned back to formal school, passed her exams with flying colours, and went on to college. Today, she works as a community health worker but dreams of becoming a doctor.
Aisha’s story holds lessons for education systems in Nigeria, across Africa, and beyond. For it is girls living with intersecting challenges – conflict, extreme poverty, remote rural locations, restrictive gender norms, or disability – who are being shut out of global education progress.
Latest data from UNESCO show the gap in boys’ and girls’ enrolment has almost closed. But when it comes to completing secondary school, a gender chasm opens up. For every 10 girls who complete primary school, fewer than four will finish upper secondary.
Nigeria, with over 18 million children out of school, provides a stark insight into this crisis of inequity. While 90 per cent of children from the wealthiest urban families complete secondary school, that figure plummets to less than 13 per cent for girls in the poorest rural households.
Recent reforms announced by Nigeria’s Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, are a welcome step. But they will only succeed if they address a critical blind spot: the vulnerable moments when girls transition between non-formal and formal schooling.
Too often, we blame poverty or social norms when girls drop out. Our research shows it is education systems that are failing them.
We analysed over 11,000 sources of evidence from 68 countries to understand this challenge. The findings are alarming: of 60 national education plans we reviewed, none had clear measures to support girls transitioning from accelerated or alternative programmes back into formal school.
The good news is that these are solvable problems. The research also identified proven, well-designed responses from across the continent and other regions.
Working with the educators, NGOs and ministries behind these successes, we developed STEP, an open-source decision-making tool. It helps education leaders do three things: make visible the points at which girls’ education is most at risk, clarify responsibility for girls’ transitions, and plan around the realities of the girls who are currently being failed.
The returns on this kind of investment in girls can be transformative. In northern Nigeria, one programme increased girls’ school attendance by 680 per cent and reduced child marriage by 76 per cent. Economic modelling shows that scaling similar initiatives could generate up to $2.5 billion in societal benefits.
In Ethiopia, 2.5 million out-of-school children have caught up on lost learning via speed schools, with 90 per cent successfully transitioning into formal school. Uniquely, this model has been adopted into the country’s national education strategy.
Sierra Leone, too, has recorded strong results in getting girls from catch-up learning back into formal education and keeping them there. Its government has confronted the challenges many girls face via its Radical Inclusion policy and national guidelines on accelerated education.
Aisha’s return to school was hard-won, but it was not an accident. It also took a deliberately designed pathway, with people at each transition accountable for her next step. When she moved back into school, her NGO mentors and the school leadership coordinated her transition together.
Her catch-up programme succeeded because it worked closely with local communities, including activities to strengthen household incomes. It also brought boys and men into active conversations about supporting equal opportunities for girls.
Aisha’s path is a glimpse of what is possible. The message from the evidence is clear: when education systems plan and deliver with all girls’ realities in mind, their life chances can shift dramatically. Ministries of Education now have the evidence and the tools. The next step is to use them.
- Aisha’s identity has been changed for security reasons
Dr Randa Grob-Zakhary is founder and CEO of Education.org, a not-for-profit organisation that synthesises education evidence to provide actionable insights for policymakers
