Introduction: Girls' Education in Bangladesh
Before Investigating the effects of COVID-19 on girls' education in Bangladesh, it is helpful to understand the position of girls' education before the pandemic.
Pre-COVID-19 Education in Bangladesh
In the late 1980s gender disparity in literacy and school enrollment was widespread throughout Bangladesh, with educational attainment for women among the lowest in the world. (Schumann, 2009). To increase rural female enrollment at the secondary level (where gender disparity was highest), the government introduced the Female Secondary Stipend and Assistance Program (FSSAP) in the early 1990s; a conditional cash transfer program that provided uniform stipends and a tuition subsidy program to girls that met attendance, academic, and marital status criteria (Rahman Khandker et al., 2021).The FSSAP was remarkably successful, and in the years before COVID-19 Bangladesh achieved gender parity with girls surpassing boys in secondary enrollment. Impact evaluation performed by the Asian Development Bank in 2021 reports that the FSSAP was successful in delaying marriage, enhancing contraceptive use, reducing fertility, improving both girls’ and boys’ education outcomes, and increasing the probability of self/non-farm employment among women, and estimates that the stipend program’s development benefits “outweigh its cost by more than 200%” (Rahman Khandker et al., 2021).
Despite success in increasing enrollment rates, however, the dropout rate of female students at the secondary school level before COVID-19 remained alarmingly high at 42%. Factors that contributed to Bangladesh’s low female completion rates include gendered household responsibilities and social norms, high rates of child marriage and pregnancies, and a lack of access to sufficient sexual education (Sosale et al., 2019).
In 2017, the World Bank funded the Bangladesh government’s Secondary Education Development Program (SEDP), a five-year plan focused on increasing school completion rates and specifically targeting girls with an Adolescent Girls’ Program. This program provided grants and stipends to motivate girls to stay in school, as well as improvements in health curriculums and the construction of separate girls toilets. Unfortunately, the implementation of the SEDP was disrupted by COVID-19 (World Bank, 2017).
