The scale of the gap
Across the Federal Member States, girls remain under-represented in primary enrolment — but the size of the gap varies dramatically by district, and the averages hide as much as they reveal. Our analysis of five years of enrolment data shows that the national gender parity index, while improving, still masks pockets where fewer than four girls enrol for every ten boys.
The trend line is encouraging: parity has moved steadily toward balance year on year. But progress is uneven, and the districts furthest behind are not always the ones with the fewest resources — governance, distance to school, and community attitudes explain more of the variation than budget alone.
What the evidence points to
Three interventions stand out in the data as consistently associated with narrowing the gap. First, the presence of female teachers correlates strongly with higher girls' enrolment and, crucially, retention into later grades. Second, school-level water and sanitation facilities — particularly separate, safe latrines — remove a barrier that disproportionately affects girls. Third, targeted community engagement that involves mothers and local leaders shifts enrolment decisions at the household level.
The districts that closed the gap fastest did not spend the most — they combined female teachers, safe facilities, and community trust.
What this means for programme design
For programme designers, the implication is clear: gender-responsive education programming should not treat girls' enrolment as a single lever but as the product of several reinforcing conditions. Investments that address only one — building schools without recruiting female teachers, or training teachers without engaging communities — tend to underperform against their targets.
PRIME's recommendation is to sequence interventions so that the enabling conditions arrive together, and to build monitoring systems that disaggregate enrolment and retention by sex from the very first data-collection round — so the gap is visible, and closing it is measurable.