The Importance of Educating Girls

These days, everyone is saying it—Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn say it, The Nike Foundation’s “Girl Effect” campaign says it, Goldman Sachs’ “10,000 Women” initiative says it: Educational initiatives for girls in the third world are the key to a successful international development strategy. As Harvard University President Emeritus Lawrence H. Summers observed years ago in a speech to a Development Economics Seminar at the World Bank, “When one takes into account all its benefits, educating girls yields a higher rate of return than any other investment available in the developing world.” A 2010 World Bank “News and Broadcast” article in honor of International Women’s Day corroborates Summers’ declaration, noting that a “one-year increase in the schooling of all adult females in a country is associated with an increase in GDP per capita of around $700.” Today, 18 years after Summers’ speech, the question is no longer whether girls’ education in the developing world is an economically valuable cause, but rather how to best affect change within this sector.

In the past year, celebrities like Oprah G. Winfrey and Madonna have come under fire for the elaborate girls’ secondary schools they have built in South Africa and Malawi respectively; grassroots activists assert that, in building such western-style schools, both women fall short of maximizing their potential for change. Unsurprisingly, celebrities and corporations capable of undertaking large-scale projects such as these “leadership academies” turn up their noses at the more localized efforts of these same grass-roots critics. Such antagonism is at once unnecessary and counter-productive. Each type of school affects a very different, though equally necessary, kind of change.

Schools like Oprah’s Leadership Academy of South Africa operate on a top-down theory of change. They equip their graduates to act on the national and even international stage by guaranteeing tertiary education. In short, they prepare their students to be extraordinary. Oprah communicates such a mission to every viewer of her website before they can even click on the “mission” tab. The following series of questions greets every viewer of the school’s website: “How many Rosa Parks or Marie Curies have we lost to poverty? How many Maya Angelous or Sandra Day O’Connors never had a chance to learn? How many Toni Morrisons or Mother Theresas lost hope because of abuse or neglect?” Such overtures underscore the school’s mission to serve as a training ground for national and global female leaders.

Schools built by small, grass-roots NGOs operate on the inverse theory of change, striving to revolutionize the local status quo rather than affect national or global change. Usually rural instead of urban and almost always consistent with government standards, schools built by organizations like Achieve-in-Africa, BuildAfrica, Ripple Africa, and Schools-for-Africa are intensely local, both in terms of curriculum and culture. Such schools do not guarantee a college education; they simply equip girls to maximize their impact in their hometowns by holding jobs outside the home and ensuring the education of the next generation of girls. In doing so, these schools afford women new economic value in their local communities and animate a bottom-up theory of change.

Ultimately, thinking of girls’ education as the most effective investment option in the developing world helps justify the need for both types of change using basic economic theory. Just as any good stockbroker takes care to diversify each of her portfolios, American philanthropists as a group are wise to pursue both the “Leadership Academy” and the “Local Village School” models. Within this philanthropic portfolio, the leadership academy functions as a venture investment—expensive, risky, but with the potential to pay unprecedented dividends. Such potential is attached to a small number of graduates and hinges on the expectation that each graduate will affect real change in her native country. On the other hand, the smaller, more localized school is akin to a safe stock: By partnering with local people and government, these schools guarantee that their graduates will be accepted into, and strengthen, the local economic community over their lifetimes. Although the individual-based “return” on this type of investment may be small, it is constant and easily replicable.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, these two methods of educating girls in the developing world are complementary rather than contrary. Both the risky and the safe, the top-down and the bottom-up, the leadership academy and the village school are necessary to affect meaningful change in the developing world, be it economic or otherwise.

Elizabeth C. Cowan ’12 is a history and literature concentrator in Quincy House. She is co-director of Circle of Women, a student-run nonprofit that builds self-sustainable secondary schools for girls in the developing world.