Girls outshine boys in literacy, numeracy: Surprising twist in the education landscape
Pupils continue with lessons at Makere Primary School in Tana River County, which was hit by floods, on May 16, 2024.
What you need to know:
- A 2024 report on literacy and numeracy in Kenya reveals surprising gender disparities in education, with girls outperforming boys despite facing more obstacles to school attendance.
- The study highlights significant gender imbalances in school management, with women comprising 60 per cent of teachers but only 10 per cent of board chairpersons and 30 per cent of school heads.
- It also uncovers paradoxical findings, such as higher rates of out-of-school girls in university graduate households and the role of mothers' education in improving children's learning outcomes.
The 2024 report Are all our children learning? by Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Assessment and Usawa Agenda comes up with gender differentials worth noting. Although the study covered all the 47 counties, data from Garissa were excluded from the analysis because of quality concerns on some variables.
On access to school, the report notes that of the 8.5 per cent of school age children out of school, there are more boys (9.5 per cent) than girls (8.4 per cent). However, in the following 11 counties, there were more girls out of school than boys: Baringo, Elgeyo Marakwet, Kajiado, Kisii, Nyamira, Kericho, Samburu, Mandera, Meru, Taita Taveta and Vihiga.
A striking finding is that the proportion of girls out of school in households headed by university graduates is more than double that of boys, at 9.6 per cent compared to 4.1 per cent respectively. Another is that “children …in female-headed households are 0.7 per cent more likely to be out of school than their counterparts in male headed households.” The report also notes that girls with mental health challenges and boys with albinism are most likely to drop out of school.
In assessing school level factors, the study established that primary schools are dominantly managed by men even though women are the majority teachers. Specifically, women feature as 60 per cent of teachers, but only 10 per cent of chairpersons of boards of management (BOMs) and 30 per cent of school heads.
In urban areas, women constitute 20 per cent of BOM chairpersons and 40 per cent of school heads. Of the latter, slightly more (50 per cent) males than females (40 per cent) hold bachelor’s degrees.
On menstrual management, which is critical for girls due to biological factors, the study established that 80 per cent of public primary schools provide sanitary towels, much better than private ones at only 50 per cent. This suggests that the government sanitary towels programme is not doing so badly.
But it also indicates that exclusion of girls in private schools from the programme is inadvertently disadvantageous to them, notwithstanding that they are also Kenyan children whose parents pay taxes that fund the initiative. Could the poor performance by private schools be related to the fact that they expect parents to provide the towels?
Toilets
In terms of providing girls with bath/changing rooms (hence privacy), both private and public schools fare badly with only 20 per cent and 50 per cent doing so respectively. The report shows that there is congestion for both boys and girls with regard to toilets.
In this regard, one toilet serves 66 boys and a similar number serves 62 girls. The situation is better for girls in rural schools where 47 are served by one toilet compared to 84 of their urban counterparts.
Turning to meeting expectations in reading a Grade 3 English text, girls in school outperformed boys at 47 per cent compared to 43 per cent. The pattern recurred among children who had dropped out of school where 31 per cent of girls met expectations compared to 26 per cent of boys.
In numeracy, more girls (61 per cent) than boys (59 per cent) also met expectations in solving a Grade 3 problem. The pattern was again similar for children out of school where more girls (46 per cent) than boys (42 per cent) met expectations in solving a Grade 3 numeracy problem.
Inequalities
The better performance by girls was registered across the board for virtually all ages. In very few circumstances did boys perform better.
Summarising the inequalities, the report observes that “the odds of having better learning outcomes in English for girls are 16 per cent higher than for boys.” It also notes that “a mother’s education plays a significant role in improving the learning outcomes of a child.”
Specifically, it reports that “the odds for a learner whose mother has tertiary education to have better learning outcomes in English and numeracy are 68 per cent and 47 per cent respectively higher than those of a learner whose mother has at most primary level of education.”
This confirms previous studies and underscores the value of women’s education. The study further notes that “the odds for children living in female-headed households to have better learning outcomes in English and numeracy are 5.0 per cent and 6.0 per cent respectively lower than those of their counterparts in male-headed households.”
The revelations are important for the government and other stakeholders in education to consider with a view to addressing the disparities. In addition, researchers need to go beyond the quantitative data to unravel the factors behind the gender differentials.
For instance, what explains girls’ better and boys’ poorer performance in both numeracy and literacy?
Why are households of university graduates leading in the number of girls out of school? What is common about the 11 counties with more girls than boys out of school?
How do the factors that keep boys out of school differ from those applicable to girls? Why are women marginalised from school management?
The writer is a lecturer in Gender and Development Studies at South Eastern Kenya University ([email protected]).
