Chapter 2 cover photo credits: Mark Henley / Panos Picture

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Stemming girls’ chronic poverty: Catalysing development change by building just social institutions

on health, education and nutrition, often with particularly 

valuable impacts for girls. In South Africa, for instance, girls 

in pension-recipient households are on average 3 to 4 cm taller 

than girls in non-recipient households (Duflo, 2000, in Palacios 

and Sluchynsky, 2006). 

Improving girls’ human capital development 

opportunities 

In order to minimise the negative effects of son bias on girls’ 

experiences of poverty and vulnerability, policy approaches 

which improve their human capital development opportunities 

are also essential. We consider three broad categories: reducing 

opportunity costs of girls’ schooling; enhancing capacity 

building and training opportunities for adolescent girls; and 

social health protection. First, there is a growing range of 

promising policy initiatives that aim to reduce the opportunity 

costs poor families face in investing in girls’ education. Glick 

(2008) argues that two types of policies could improve girls’ 

educational access: ‘those that are “gender neutral,” that 

is,  that  do  not  specifically  target  female  (or  male)  schooling 

returns or costs; and those that are gender-targeted, that is, 

that  attempt  to  alter  the  costs  or  benefits  of  girls’  schooling 

relative to boys.’ In the first case, demand for girls’ schooling 

is often more responsive than boys’ to gender-neutral changes 

in school distance, price and quality, which can be explained 

by perceptions about differential costs and returns of girls’ and 

boys’ schooling. Increasing the availability of local schooling to 

reduce distances travelled and demand-side interventions that 

subsidise households’ schooling costs, such as cash transfer 

programmes and school feeding programmes, are other good 

examples (see Box 21). 

In some contexts, however, where gender imbalances are 

significant  and/or  cultural  barriers  are  strong,  approaches 

which directly target girls’ schooling can be more expedient. 

Glick (2008) notes robust evaluation evidence that households 

respond to incentives in the form of subsidies for enrolling 

girls (see also Chapter 1 on Discriminatory Family Codes). 

India’s Balika Samridhi Yojana programme, which is designed 

to  change  attitudes  towards  the  girl  child  at  birth,  improve 

enrolment and retention at school, raise the age of marriage 

and assist girls to undertake income-generating activities, is 

one such case. The government makes ‘periodical deposits’ 

of  money  for  the  first  two  girls  in  a  family  from  birth  until 

the age of 18, with payments conditional on school attendance 

and remaining unmarried. The scheme was redesigned in 

1999 to 2000 to ensure that the dividend went directly to the 

girl child (Ramesh, 2008). Other promising initiatives on the 

supply side which are supported by randomised programme 

evaluation  evidence  include  financial  incentives  to  teachers 

and school managers to attract or retain female students (Glick, 

2008). Informal assessments also suggest that the provision 

Box 21: Strengthening demand for education 

 

Cash for education approaches reduce the cost of sending children to school by providing additional income to the family and 

offsetting losses if school replaces paid work for a child. In the case of conditional cash transfers – those programmes that make 

participation dependent on compliance with the use of basic services for children – they may also increase the benefits of attending 

school and reduce health and nutrition constraints. The earliest and most famous cash transfer programme is Mexico’s Oportunidades 

(‘Opportunities’), initiated in 1995, which now reaches 25 million low-income Mexicans (World Bank, 2008). Oportunidades offers a 

higher monthly cash transfer to support girls’ secondary education and has been shown to increase secondary school enrolments by 20 

percent for girls and 10 percent for boys (Adelman et al., 2008). In the case of Brazil’s Bolsa Família (‘Family Grant’), a similar initiative 

reaching 12.4 million households, aggregate school attendance by boys and girls has risen by 4.4 percentage points (ibid). The largest 

gains have occurred in the historically disadvantaged northeast, where enrolments have risen by 11.7 percentage points. Importantly, 

children and especially girls aged 15 to 17 who are at greatest risk of dropping out are more likely to progress from one grade to the 

next. Bolsa Família increases the likelihood that a 15-year-old girl will remain in school by 19 percentage points.

School feeding programmes are another important demand-side approach: although there is insufficient evidence that they address 

malnutrition, they have the potential to improve school participation and learning outcomes through the consumption of nutritious 

food (Adelman et al., 2008). In World Food Programme (WFP)-assisted schools, there is on average only a very small gender gap (78 

percent boys’ to 76 percent girls’ net enrolment rate). In cases where there are significant gaps in access to and completion of basic 

education, WFP programmes include take home rations for girls which are conditional on their attendance rate. These can contribute 

to increasing enrolment rates: for example, in Pakistan the provision of take home rations to girls attending school for at least 20 days 

a month resulted in a 135 percent increase in enrolment between 1998 to 1999 and 2003 to 2004 (WFP, 2010). In Afghanistan, WFP 

helped to increase girls’ enrolment and attendance rates by distributing a monthly ration of 3.7 litres of vegetable oil (an important 

component of the local diet) to girls, conditional on a minimum attendance of 22 days per month (ibid). In India, which has a long 

history of school feeding programmes (since 1925), a 2001 Supreme Court ruling declared a constitutional right to food, and school 

feeding programmes now feed approximately 120 million girls each day (Winch, 2009). This has been found to be especially effective in 

improving school enrolment, especially among girls (WFP, 2010). 

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