COVID-19 threatens recent historic gains in girls’ education – potentially undermining stunting progress
When girls leave school, they often don’t come back. Now, there are concerns the growing number of girls out of school due to the pandemic poses dangers to their own health and well-being – and progress on reducing stunting
As schools around the world reopen, as many as 11 million girls may not return to the classroom due to the COVID pandemic. Their departures leave them not only at risk of child marriage, early pregnancy, lower lifetime earnings, and child labor, but also poses an underappreciated risk to recent historic reductions in stunting.
One of the strongest drivers of stunting reduction in countries researched by Exemplars in Global Health, including Ethiopia, Nepal, Peru, and Senegal, was an increase in maternal education.
Improved women’s education reduces stunting through several pathways. Better educated mothers tend to earn more and know more about health and nutrition, which enables them to devote more resources to their children and better understand how to use those resources most effectively to support the health of their children. Educated mothers are also more likely to participate in decisions about how their families will spend money and rear children. In general, the more empowered mothers are in household decisions, the more their children benefit. Additionally, girls who stay in school longer tend to have fewer children – and that increases the resources available to each child. Finally, girls who stay in school tend to have children later in life. Biologically, post-secondary school-age mothers are healthier, stronger, and more prepared for the rigors of pregnancy and childbirth. That means their children tend to be healthier, stronger, and taller. All of this contributes to reductions in stunting.
We know from other pandemics that when girls leave school, they often don’t come back,” said Dr. Anushka Ataullahjan, a researcher at The Hospital for Sick Children, Centre for Global Child Health. “And the longer girls remain out of school, the harder it will be to get them back into the classroom. And we know that poor girls and rural girls are most at risk.”
As countries continue to struggle to limit the impact of the pandemic, a review of Exemplar’s findings provides some urgency to the need to nudge girls back into the classroom, not only to improve their own long-term health and potential, but that of the next generation.
Peru demonstrates the potential power of boosting maternal education. The median number of years of education among women roughly doubled from 5.6 in 2000 to 10.5 in 2016. Peru’s better-educated mothers understand the importance of nutrition and growth monitoring services, are better able to follow best practices for child nutrition, and are more likely to be empowered within their household and community to access such services.
An analysis found that the increase in maternal education in Peru accounted for 16 percent of the reduction in stunting the country achieved from 1991 to 2018. What’s more, as Peru’s girls stayed in school longer, they were less likely to get married and become teen mothers. That allowed the girls to grow to their full height potential before having their own children. Indeed, the average height of Peruvian mothers increased by nearly two centimeters between 2000 and 2016 – as the rate of adolescent fertility, a key driver of stunting, dropped 26 percent.
“Women's education has been, along with other environment indicators, instrumental in improving family's health and wealth, including, of course, the nutritional status of kids,” said Luis Huicho, Professor of Pediatrics, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia.
And by making school enrollment one condition of its conditional cash transfer program Juntos, Peru ensured that educational gains for girls would continue to grow even in remote communities for years to come, said Huicho.
Similarly, girls’ education was a powerful lever for improving health outcomes in Nepal, Ethiopia, Senegal, and in both Uganda and a few provinces of Pakistan (new Exemplars in Global Health research on these geographies will be published later this year).
“Beyond its importance as a human right, we’ve known that women’s education is important for child health and nutrition for some time,” said Dr. Ataullahjan. “The concrete and definitive evidence from these countries adds strength and weight to the case for investing in women’s education.”
Around the world, over the past two decades, the number of out-of-school girls has dropped by an estimated 79 million. Experts fear that COVID may threaten these historic gains and the robust improvements to health they have helped support.
“COVID-19-induced school closures may slow or reverse these gains and may further prevent girls and women from realizing the potential returns – representing a 'hidden' future cost,” writes H.E. Aïcha Bah Diallo, Founding Member, Forum of African Women Educationalists, and her co-authors in a recent blog published by the World Bank. “The World Bank is forecasting lower levels of schooling, learning, and future earnings because of school closures due to COVID-19… Recent evidence from several countries shows that the COVID-19 slide is real.”