World Bank sets aside $2.5bn for female education

The World Bank will set aside $2.5bn over the next five years for projects aimed at helping adolescent girls in the developing world go to school, in an attempt to reduce the ranks of the 62m girls around the world without access to education.

The announcement, to be made by US first lady Michelle Obama on Wednesday, is aimed at what development experts argue is one of the most effective ways of boosting longterm economic development.

One World Bank study found that for every year of education a girl in the developing world received, her life­long income rose 18 per cent ­ with a vast impact on economic growth.

“The evidence is very clear: when we invest in girls’ education and we embrace women in our workforce that doesn’t just benefit them, it benefits all of us,” said Mrs Obama in a statement.

Last year she launched an initiative called Let Girls Learn aimed at helping adolescent girls secure an education. The World Bank money is mainly earmarked for projects in Africa and South Asia and includes everything from scholarships to building separate toilets for girls at schools.

Tina Tchen, Mrs Obama’s chief of staff and the executive director of the administration’s Council on Women and Girls, said the goal was also to highlight the issue for other governments and to draw new financing commitments from the public and private sector.

“What the $2.5bn represents is part of a call to action for many more people to get involved, because to really address this issue it isn’t just the World Bank that is going to solve it. It isn’t just the US government who is going to solve it,” she said.

The new funding is far from the World Bank’s first foray into girls’ education. Between 1994 and 2008 it operated a programme in Bangladesh that resulted in girls overtaking boys as the majority population in the country’s schools.

In India, a $500m national project has helped enrol 4.3m more girls in secondary schools since 2012 and also helped reach gender parity. The bank has also had similar results with programmes in Nigeria and Yemen.

Mrs Obama has made the Let Girls Learn initiative a priority for her remaining time in the White House and vowed to continue the work after her husband leaves office. In an email interview with the FT last year she called girls’ education a “moral issue” and said she would focus on it “for the rest of my life”.

“Each of these girls has the spark of something extraordinary in them. And I see myself in these girls ­ I see my daughters in these girls ­ and I just cannot walk away from them. So for me, this is personal,” she told the FT.