Somewhere along the way, a quiet idea gets handed to almost all of us: that a girl’s schooling matters a little less. Nobody announces it. It shows up in who gets pulled out of class first when money runs short, in whose questions get answered at the dinner table, in a raised eyebrow when a bright girl talks about becoming an engineer. If part of you always sensed that idea was wrong and wished you had the numbers to say so, you were right, and the numbers turned out to be staggering. A 2018 World Bank study put the cost of not educating girls to the same level as boys at 15 to 30 trillion dollars in lost lifetime earnings and productivity.
Common questions from parents
Is educating girls worth the cost?
What is the “10 percent to 3 percent” statistic about girls’ education?
Does girls’ education help anyone besides the girls themselves?
Where does the idea that girls’ education is a “waste of resources” come from?
What actually helps girls’ education succeed?
They called girls' education a 'waste of resources.' The World Bank found the opposite: the world loses up to 30 trillion dollars by not educating girls to the level of boys.
What this infographic lays out, in plain terms
The graphic answers one blunt question: when a society educates its girls, does anything actually change? It opens with the misconception it exists to retire, the belief that girls’ schooling is a “waste of resources,” and names where that belief comes from. Not evidence, but a lack of awareness of how far the benefits reach. Then it stacks up what those benefits are.
- The economic case: educated girls are far more likely to find higher-paying work and step out of the cycle of poverty.
- The headline figure: development groups have long cited that a 10 percent rise in girls’ schooling tracks with roughly a 3 percent lift in a country’s economic output.
- Beyond money: educating girls improves health outcomes for their families and whole communities, not the girls alone.
- The path forward: fund access to schooling, wrap real support around it, encourage ambition, and treat it as a legacy that reaches the next generation.
A girl’s education is not a cost her family absorbs and hopes to recover. It is the single most reliable way to change what her whole life, and her children’s lives, look like.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
Why educating a girl pays a country back
The clearest way to see the value of girls’ education is to measure what a country loses without it. The World Bank did exactly that in its 2018 report, “Missed Opportunities: The High Cost of Not Educating Girls,” and the figure is hard to shrug off: between 15 and 30 trillion dollars in lost lifetime productivity and earnings worldwide. The same research found that women who complete secondary school earn nearly twice as much as women with no education, which is how a single classroom seat turns into a household that is no longer trapped in poverty.
The return travels upward, from the family to the whole economy. Development organizations such as Concern Worldwide point to a widely cited pattern in which a 10 percent increase in girls attending school tracks with about a 3 percent rise in national output, and a 2020 analysis by Plan International and Citi estimated that every dollar invested in girls’ education and rights returns close to 2.80 dollars. Those figures describe direction and scale rather than a precise formula, but they all point the same way: this is one of the highest-return investments a country makes.
Key takeaways
- The myth, retired: Calling girls' education a “waste of resources” reflects a lack of awareness of how widely the benefits spread, not any honest weighing of the evidence.
- The economic return: Women with a secondary education earn nearly twice as much as women with none, and the World Bank puts the global cost of not educating girls at 15 to 30 trillion dollars.
- The human return: Educated girls marry later, raise healthier children, and become the most durable health advocates their own families have.
The part that reaches past the balance sheet
Money is the argument that opens doors, but it is not the reason most parents care. The World Bank measured the effects of a girl’s education across six areas of life, and the pattern outside the economy is every bit as strong. Girls who finish secondary school marry later, have their first child later and by choice, and go on to raise healthier children, with measurably lower rates of child mortality and malnutrition. An educated mother becomes her child’s first and most durable health advocate, a link documented across decades of global data (see what forty years of child-mortality research found about education).
This is where the misconception collapses. A girl’s education is not a cost a family absorbs and hopes to recover. It is the single change most likely to lift her earnings, protect her children’s health, and steady the community she grows up to lead. As Malala Yousafzai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for this fight, puts it, the education of girls is a critical component of global development. When people call girls’ schooling a fundamental pillar of a society’s progress rather than an individual perk, that is what they mean.
“Countries lose between 15 and 30 trillion dollars in lifetime productivity by not educating girls to the same level as boys.” (World Bank, Missed Opportunities, 2018)
Every seat in a classroom that goes to a girl pays a family, a community, and a country back for decades.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
The lie underneath “waste of resources” is the oldest one in education: that some children’s potential is worth less than others’, and not worth the trouble of unlocking. It is wrong about girls in the developing world, and it is wrong about the child sitting at your own kitchen table. You are the one who decides that your child’s potential gets invested in, and that decision is the whole game.
The same truth scales all the way down. What looks like a fixed limit is usually a skill that has not been built yet, and the struggles that look separate often share the same roots. That is why Learning Success is one membership covering the whole child rather than a shelf of single fixes. See what All Access includes.
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Your school district must evaluate your child free of charge if you ask in writing, whatever your income and whatever the outcome (US, 34 CFR 300.111 and 300.301(b)). That route takes time and answers a different question than you do. This one starts today, from what you already know.
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References
- Wodon, Q., Montenegro, C., Nguyen, H., & Onagoruwa, A. (2018). Missed Opportunities: The High Cost of Not Educating Girls. World Bank.
- Plan International & Citi Global Insights (2020). Analysis of the economic returns of girls' education.
- Concern Worldwide. Girls' education and economic growth.
- Malala Yousafzai, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, on girls' education and global development.
