Statisticians Make the Poorest Girls Disappear
All over the world, the children most likely to be out of school are girls in poor, rural areas. Their families and traditions may not value girls’ education, there may be no high schools nearby or they may face pressure to marry young and have children or work to support their families.
I think of those girls every day at Malala Fund, where we are committed to ensuring every girl has access to 12 years of free, safe, quality education.
Last year at the United Nations, the world committed to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including a promise to “ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education.”
But statisticians are now making girls in poor, rural areas invisible through the power of numbers — vanishing them into thin air like a magician’s assistant.
Countries are soon going to sign off measurements — called indicators — to track progress on the SDGs. The statisticians in charge of defining these indicators are treating millions of girls as if they don’t exist.
They are proposing to measure the following:
Percentage of children/young people in grades two and three at the end of primary school (elementary) and at the end of lower secondary (junior high) achieving at least a minimum proficiency level in reading and mathematics.
Notice anything wrong with this measurement? We certainly do!
- It does not measure children out of school.
- It completely ignores children in upper secondary school (high school).
However, the SDG goal says we will ensure that ALL children complete primary AND secondary school — but the statisticians are only measuring children in school and not even counting those in upper secondary school.
So how will we know if we’re meeting the goal if we don’t have this data? Even non-number crunchers know the answer: we won’t.
If the statisticians succeed in their magic trick, it means millions of out of school children, mostly girls, are gone — off the global education agenda. At Malala Fund, we are urging politicians not to accept this minimalist measurement of education progress.
We want the statisticians to count all the way through high school, so we know if girls are falling off the radar after they complete primary school. And we must count not just how many children complete school but the children still out of school as well.
If we continue at our current rate of progress, it will be 100 years — a full century — before the poorest girls in remote and rural locations around the world have the chance to go to school for 12 years.
As Malala said in her Nobel acceptance speech, “The world can no longer accept that basic education is enough. Why do leaders accept that for children in developing countries, only basic literacy is sufficient, when their own children do homework in algebra and physics?”
The most disadvantaged girls and boys must remain visible to politicians, education ministers and anyone who cares about human development. We need to be reminded, on a regular basis, of the progress being made — or not — to educate these young people.
We’re working to make sure statisticians don’t disappear millions of girls — or their potential to build a brighter future for their families, communities and our world.
