Assessing the Relationship Between the Implementation of Compulsory Education Laws and Girls’ School Attendance in Twenty-Seven Countries

Achieving education for all and gender parity in education is central to Sustainable Development Goal 4. However, there are still an estimated 78 million primary-school-age children and 64 million lower-secondary-school-age children. Half of these out-of-school children live in sub-Saharan Africa. Disproportionately, girls are out of school, particularly rural and low-income girls. Building longitudinal policy data from 51 African countries and using data on school attendance from 35 African countries, we assess school attendance in the 27 countries that had made at least primary education compulsory and tuition-free. We find that once education becomes compulsory, it is possible to achieve gender parity in education. In 20 of the 27 countries studied with compulsory tuition-free education, primary-school-aged girls were as likely or slightly more likely than boys to be reported as attending school. Rural girls were more likely to be out of school than urban girls and girls from the poorest households were more likely to be out of school than girls from the richest households. Importantly, in countries where overall implementation was high, the gaps for girls across location and social class were small, indicating strong implementation is feasible in rural areas and in poorer neighborhoods.