Empowering Girls Through Education: World Bank’s Global Push for Gender Equity

The World Bank’s 2025 flagship report, created by its Education Global Department in collaboration with research leaders like UNESCO, UNICEF, UNGEI, and the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), boldly asserts that empowering girls and young women through education is not just a moral imperative; it’s an economic necessity. The numbers are staggering: nations stand to lose up to US$30 trillion in lifetime productivity due to gender disparities in education. The World Bank’s Pathways to Prosperity for Adolescent Girls in Africa study estimates that effective education interventions could generate US$2.4 trillion in income across Africa by 2040. This underscores the idea that education is not only a rights-based issue, but a transformative economic lever, especially when investments are targeted at girls and young women.

Progress and Disparity: A Tale of Two Realities

Global progress since 2015 is evident; over 50 million additional girls are now in school, and completion rates for girls have increased across all education levels. But despite this, deep inequalities persist. Around 122 million girls are still out of school. In FCV (fragile and conflict-affected) zones, girls are 90% more likely to be out of secondary school than their peers elsewhere and twice as likely to be out of school compared to boys in the same contexts. In Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, child marriage remains a barrier to girls' education: 40% of girls in Sub-Saharan Africa and 30% in South Asia marry before turning 18. Two-thirds of the world’s illiterate adults are women. Learning Poverty, children unable to read a basic text by age 10, affects over 50% of girls in low- and middle-income countries. These challenges, though immense, have not stopped global education efforts from inching forward. The World Bank’s active education projects reached over 146 million girls across 78 countries by the end of fiscal year 2024.

Spotlight on Solutions: Projects that Transform Lives

The report offers a powerful tour of success stories driven by World Bank-financed projects worldwide. In Serbia, the Inclusive Early Childhood Education and Care Project trained over 14,000 teachers and raised preschool enrollment from 52% to 74%, with poor municipalities seeing rates jump from 19% to 52%. In Kenya, the PEELP and SEQIP programs used scholarships and mentorships to benefit 34,000 students, 51% of them girls, and sanitary pad distribution reduced absenteeism by 30%. In Mozambique, the Moz-Learning Project equipped 150 schools with gender-sensitive WASH facilities and 98 multimedia learning centers, raising lower secondary enrollment by 30%. Pakistan’s ASPIRE initiative, targeting lagging districts, benefited 17.7 million people, 6.7 million of them girls, through education and mental health campaigns, and enrolled 43,000 girls in interactive learning tracks. In India’s Nagaland, the NECTAR Project reached 52,000 girls and trained nearly 200 education officers in gender-based violence prevention.

Building Digital Futures and Narrowing the STEM Divide

The World Bank’s initiatives also reflect a shift toward equipping girls with digital and job-relevant skills. The SWEDD project in the Sahel region trained over 250,000 girls and women through vocational training, grants, and credits. Its successor project, SWEDD+, aims to reach 766,000 more by 2030. Nigeria’s AGILE Project is on track to train 685,000 girls in digital literacy, with 262,225 already trained and nearly 85,000 completing life skills programs. Meanwhile, the gender gap in STEM remains a persistent issue: only 34% of tertiary STEM students are women, a figure unchanged for a decade. Women hold less than 10% of STEM leadership roles, and only 28% of the STEM workforce comprises women compared to 47% in non-STEM fields. Projects like Georgia’s I2Q are working to flip this trend. Through mentorship and teacher training to eliminate bias, the project has reached 798 girls so far and launched 12 STEAM Hub schools to generate up to 300 girl-led projects. Colombia’s PACES Project has also made strides, supporting 500,000 women in accessing higher education and awarding scholarships to 70 outstanding female scientists.

A New Crisis: Boys Falling Behind

While the world races to close the education gender gap for girls, a new challenge is emerging: boys are increasingly disengaging from school. Today, 129 million boys are out of school, more than girls. A 2023 World Bank study revealed that boys underperform girls in secondary school completion in 21 out of 25 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean. Learning outcomes for boys are, on average, 3.7 percentage points lower than those of girls. Social norms, rigid labor markets, and uninspiring teaching practices are driving this downward trend. The World Bank is stepping in with country-level solutions. In Paraguay and Brazil, projects provide cash transfers and incentives to keep boys in school. In Guyana, a gender strategy has been deployed to combat dropouts and reverse gender gaps in subjects like mathematics. Colombia is using updated pedagogical methods to close performance gaps. Tanzania’s SEQUIP Project, although focused on girls, also offers inclusive, safe school environments that can benefit all students, including at-risk boys.

The report concludes with a clear message: transformative, inclusive education systems require collaborative, multisectoral efforts. The World Bank’s Education Department works internally with its Gender, Social Protection, Energy, and Water divisions, and externally with global agencies like FCDO and UNESCO to tackle the barriers that keep girls, and increasingly, boys, out of the classroom. Initiatives like Learning to Empower Adolescent Girls at Scale (LEAS) are proof of what is possible when knowledge, policy, and grassroots implementation come together. As the report powerfully argues, when every girl and boy is truly counted in, the ripple effects extend far beyond the classroom, reaching families, economies, and entire generations.