Education: Girls are catching up with boys in sub-Saharan Africa

Jul 11, 2022

With the collaboration of Statista.

The gender gap in the system of education in Africa is reducing. Image: Unsplash/Doug Linstedt

Martin Armstrong

Data Journalist, Statista

Our Impact

What's the World Economic Forum doing to accelerate action on Education and Skills?

The Big Picture

Explore and monitor how Education, Gender and Work is affecting economies, industries and global issues

A hand holding a looking glass by a lake

Crowdsource Innovation

Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:

Education, Gender and Work

In sub-Saharan Africa there is still room for improvement in levels of participation in education, regardless of gender.
However, the gender educational gap is reducing: in 2020, 66% of girls completed their primary education compared to 61% for boys.
Despite being ahead in primary education, girls still remain behind boys at lower and upper secondary levels, but these gaps are closing.

In Africa, progress has been made in a lot of areas over the last few decades. This is something we have regularly covered in our infographics, and this, using figures from UNESCO as quoted by the BBC, reveals another aspect which has seen positive developments of late.

Participation in education is still an issue with room for improvement in sub-Saharan Africa, regardless of gender, but for girls as recently as 2000, the problem was even more acute. At primary level, just 44 percent of girls were completing their education 22 years ago. In 2020, that figure had risen to 66 percent, and had even overtaken the rate for boys (despite healthy gains, too).

Education in Africa and gender gap

Girls remain behind boys at lower and upper secondary levels, but the gaps have been reduced in the past two decades - going from 5 percentage points at lower secondary level to just two points, and from 6 points at upper secondary level to 3 in 2020.

Education in Africa: Participation in education is still an issue with room for improvement in sub-Saharan Africa. Image: Statista

Discover

What's the World Economic Forum doing about the gender gap?

The World Economic Forum has been measuring gender gaps since 2006 in the annual Global Gender Gap Report.

The Global Gender Gap Report tracks progress towards closing gender gaps on a national level. To turn these insights into concrete action and national progress, we have developed the Gender Parity Accelerator model for public private collaboration.

These accelerators have been convened in twelve countries across three regions. Accelerators are established in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico and Panama in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank in Latin America and the Caribbean, Egypt and Jordan in the Middle East and North Africa, and Japan and Kazakhstan in Asia.

All Country Accelerators, along with Knowledge Partner countries demonstrating global leadership in closing gender gaps, are part of a wider ecosystem, the Global Learning Network, that facilitates exchange of insights and experiences through the Forum’s platform.

Have you read?

In these countries CEOs and ministers are working together in a three-year time frame on policies that help to further close the economic gender gaps in their countries. This includes extended parental leave, subsidized childcare and making recruitment, retention and promotion practices more gender inclusive.

If you are a business in one of the Gender Parity Accelerator countries you can join the local membership base.

If you are a business or government in a country where we currently do not have a Gender Parity Accelerator you can reach out to us to explore opportunities for setting one up.

Have you read?

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.