Council researcher Nicole Haberland co-authored a recent piece in CGD Notes, a publication by the Center for Global Development (CGD), together with fellow researchers from APHRC, CGD, IDEAS, J-PAL, and REAL Centre*, proposing five ways to advance the research agenda on girls’ education.
They suggest the following priorities:
- Advance knowledge of understudied gender-related barriers to education
- Increase evidence from understudied countries and regions
- Build knowledge on how interventions can be implemented effectively at scale
- Get better, complementary data on girls’ education through rigorous studies, administrative data, and household surveys
- Develop stronger partnership between policy makers and researchers, particularly those in the global South
The note features research from the contributing organizations and others, including a range of rigorous Council studies on gender-related barriers to education, gender and power inequalities, and scaling effective interventions in partnership with local governments.
Authors refer to the Evidence for Gender and Education Resource (EGER)’s Girls’ Education Roadmap on approaches proven to be effective in improving education outcomes, as well as the recent systematic review on policies and interventions that address eighteen gender-related barriers to girls’ education. Council research on programs that foster critical thinking about gender and power to improve sexual and reproductive health and adolescent girls’ empowerment is also shared to note expansive opportunities for education research. The note highlights how much of the evidence on what works comes from a small number of countries, drawing on both the Council’s review and a CGD review (shown in the figure below). In a call to build knowledge on how to effectively implement interventions at scale, the authors highlight the Adolescent Girls Initiative–Kenya as a successful example, sharing the program’s partnership with the Wajir County government to test and learn as the program is implemented at scale by and through the county infrastructure.
Read the full publication on the CGD website to learn more about how the research community and other stakeholders can work together to advance knowledge and action for girls’ education and women’s empowerment.
* Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), Center for Global Development (CGD), Institute of Development and Economics Alternatives (IDEAS), and the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the University of Cambridge