Policies and Interventions to Remove Gender-Related Barriers to Girls' School Participation and Learning in Low‐ and Middle‐Income Countries: A Systematic Review of the Evidence

"A clear understanding of the most effective approaches to improving education outcomes for girls, and to narrowing gender gaps, is largely missing from literature and practice."

Gender disparities in education persist in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), with girls in many settings less likely to complete primary school, less likely to complete secondary, and often less likely to be literate than boys. This systematic review looks at whether interventions that address gender-related barriers to girls' education help improve education outcomes for girls - specifically, attainment, enrolment, absenteeism, and academic performance.

This review includes 82 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-experimental studies (that used quantitative models that attempted to control for endogeneity) of interventions that address at least one gender-related barrier to schooling and measure impact on girls' education outcomes. Study locations spanned all regions of the developing world. Both peer-reviewed journal articles and grey literature were included, with publication dates from 2004 to 2020.

The literature indicates that gender-related barriers to schooling include: (i) factors that only or overwhelmingly affect girls, such as child marriage and gender norms which hold that girls' education is less valuable than boys'; (ii) barriers that affect both girls and boys but because of intersections with inequitable gender norms and inequality often affect girls more, such as lack of access to school and inability to pay tuition; and (iii) barriers that are shared by both girls and boys but may differ in terms of import and the pathways through which they undermine education outcomes, such as pedaegogy and lack of teaching materials and supplies. Underlying issues such as gender norms and policy and legal environments cut across these barriers.

Specifically, the paper identifies 18 specific barriers and describes possible interventions targeting each of the barriers. Here are some examples of interventions that...:

1. Challenge the lack of support for girls' education - e.g., by changing community knowledge and norms about the value of girls' education through community-wide information campaigns on the benefits of girls' schooling;
2. Address child marriage and adolescent pregnancy - e.g., by providing information about employment opportunities as an alternative to early marriage and childbearing;
3. Target the lack of information on returns to education/alternative roles for women - e.g., by challenging traditional gender role norms through examples of women's professional, scientific, leadership success and achievements;
4. Have a goal to reduce school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) - e.g., by changing students' knowledge and attitudes about violence through antiviolence curricula/activities;
5. Address a gender-insensitive school environment - e.g., by training teachers in gender-responsive pedaegogy;
6. Address the lack of safe spaces and social connections may, for example, create female mentored girls' groups after school.
7. Interventions that address the lack of teaching materials and supplies at school - e.g., by modifying textbooks to ensure that gender stereotyping is eliminated;
8. Address insufficient academic support - e.g., by providing individual tutoring.
9. Deal with inadequate sports programmes for girls - e.g., by instituting school policies to ensure that girls get equal access to sports facilities;
10. Address inadequate health and childcare services at school - e.g., by providing onsite childcare;
11. Address inadequate life skills at school - e.g., by building empowerment and psycho-social skills (social and emotional skills such as resilience, or communication);
12. Address inadequate menstrual hygiene management (MHM) - e.g., by educating girls and others about MHM;
13. Address the lack of water and sanitation - e.g., by constructing hand-washing stations at schools;
14. Address inadequate school access - e.g., by increasing the number of schools available to girls through building community schools;
15. Address a poor policy/legal environment - e.g., by raising awareness about existing laws/policies, such as those allowing pregnant girls to remain in school and return to school after childbirth;
16. Address an inability to afford tuition and fees - e.g., by providing stipends directly to the school to reduce or eliminate tuition and/or other school fees;
17. Address an inability to afford school materials - e.g., by providing textbooks and uniforms to the household or to the school, which are then distributed to households or students; and/or
18. Address the lack of adequate food - e.g., by providing food to students or households on the condition that students attend school or achieve some minimum school-related performance goal.

While the gender-related barriers to schooling vary between settings, as do the appropriate interventions to address those barriers, many of them share a similar underlying logic. For example, interventions may target parents' attitudes about the value of girls' education using different approaches, including sharing information about employment opportunities for women or shifting norms by making a rights-based argument through community meetings. More indirectly, teacher training programs that equip teachers with the skills to understand and address the learning needs of both girls and boys may foster more active participation of girls in the classroom, leading to stronger communication skills and more ambitious educational aspirations for girls, and subsequently leading to improved grade attainment and literacy for girls.

Based on the study descriptions, of the 82 studies in the review, the researchers determined that 44 (54%) appeared to address more than one barrier. The paper first provides an overview of results for all barriers and then presents details for each barrier individually.

Per the review, interventions rated as "effective" exist for 3 gender-related barriers: inability to afford tuition and fees, lack of adequate food, and insufficient academic support. "Promising" interventions exist for 3 gender-related barriers: inadequate school access, inability to afford school materials, and lack of water and sanitation. More research is needed for the remaining 12 gender-related barriers.

Generally, the results echo the findings of other reviews, though with some caveats. Consistent with others' findings, the present review found evidence that interventions addressing financial barriers (tuition and fees, inadequate food, lack of school materials), inadequate school access, and lack of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) facilities may be promising or effective approaches to improving school enrolment and attainment for girls. However, many previous reviews indicate that programmes that address pedaegogy and skills-based learning, such as teacher training and materials, academic support, and life skills or empowerment curricula, may help improve education outcomes. The present review found that more research is needed to understand the circumstances in which life skills education and safe space programmes might improve education outcomes for girls.

In concluding, the researchers outline 4 implications of this research, such as the fact that many interventions that appear to be targeting a similar barrier (e.g., inadequate life skills education), even with a small number of programme components, do so in vastly different ways, ranging from different duration of interventions, frequency of meetings, curricular content, role of mentors/facilitators, etc. Without shared definitions of core components of these approaches, even high-quality studies will be difficult to compare, and results would be difficult to apply across settings. Similarly, it may be beneficial for future studies to explore the explicit pathways between interventions and their effects on education outcomes.