Gender Gaps in Education Spending in Laos: What I Learned Volunteering in Rural Village Schools
Last March, I sat cross-legged under a 50-year-old mango tree outside the one-room lower secondary school I was volunteering at in northern Luang Prabang province, sorting crumpled 5000 and 10000 kip notes for term fees. The leftover sticky rice from my lunch sat wrapped in a banana leaf next to me, and a fly buzzed repeatedly around the open plastic envelope holding the money. Mr. Boun, the 62-year-old village headman, leaned against the tree trunk smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, flipping through the tattered registration book. “Twelve boys paid, seven girls,” he said, tapping the page with his calloused thumb. I brushed the fly away and frowned. Most of the girls lived closer to the school than the boys—why hadn’t their families come through with the fees?
It wasn’t that families didn’t want girls in school, he explained. It was just that when money was tight, boys got picked first. Thirteen-year-old Seng, for example, was supposed to be in my 8th grade class, same as her older brother Thit. But the family’s buffalo had gotten sick the winter before, eating through half their annual savings, and they couldn’t swing the fees for both kids. Seng was selling mangoes at the district market that day instead of sitting in class, and that’s where she’d stay unless someone could cover her costs.
I walked up the dirt path to Seng’s house with Mr. Boun a week later to talk to her mother, Nok. She was husking rice on the bamboo porch, three small kids chasing a chicken around her feet, and she didn’t get defensive or apologize when we explained why we’d come. She poured us warm sugary tea and leaned back against the porch post. “We have three little ones still to feed, too,” she said. “Fees, uniform, bus fare for exams, that’s $150 a year per kid. We don’t have that for two. Thit will get a government job someday, build roads or be a policeman, and he’ll take care of us when we’re old. Seng will marry and move to her husband’s village. What use is a lot of school for her here?”
I’d read about the gender gap in education spending in Laos before I arrived, but sitting on that bamboo porch, it stopped being a line in a report. The World Bank puts average household education spending per boy at 28% higher than per girl nationwide, and that gap jumps to 45% once kids hit secondary school. Most of the divide isn’t from government spending—Laos has made huge progress making primary school free and accessible for almost all kids. The gap comes down to small, impossible choices that families make when they don’t have enough extra money to go around.
Over the year I spent there, I learned that small, concrete changes can chip away at that gap, even without huge budgets or national policy overhauls. The small NGO I worked with runs a conditional cash program for rural girls: if a girl maintains 90% attendance, we cover her term fees and the cost of a new uniform. It’s only $15 a term, less than most people spend on a single dinner out, but that was enough to cover Seng’s costs that term. She came back to class a week later, and she wore that new blue uniform even on weekends when she helped her mom sell produce at the market.
There are changes that local teachers and village leaders can make even without outside NGO funding, too. At our school, we started doing a simple, confidential check-in at the start of every term: each student pulls me aside for a minute after class, and I ask if they have all their books and a uniform that fits. No public announcements, no shaming families for not having money. We keep a wooden box at the back of the teacher’s hut full of gently used uniforms and donated textbooks, so any kid that needs one can take it for free. Before we started this, we sent an average of three girls home every term for lack of supplies. Last term, we sent zero.
Mr. Boun started another small change that’s made a big difference: at every monthly village meeting, he invites a woman from the area who finished secondary school and has a steady job to talk to parents. Last month, it was a nurse from the next district who grew up in our village. She told the group she sends $100 a month back to her parents, more than her brother who farms the family land sends them. A lot of the older parents had never thought about education for girls as a investment that pays off for the whole family, not just the girl. It’s slow, but it’s changing how people think when they divide up their education budget.
Seng passed her end-of-term exams last month, and she’s moving up to 9th grade next year. Upper secondary is an hour bus ride away, and fees are twice what they are for lower secondary. We’ve lined up a local sponsor for next year, but if that sponsor can’t renew the year after that, her family still can’t afford to keep her in school on their own. There are still nine girls in our district who aren’t in school because their families chose to spend that money on their brothers. The spending gap doesn’t close overnight, and there are no easy fixes. But the small, consistent changes—checking in privately with kids, keeping a box of extra supplies, sharing stories of what girls can do with an education—are adding up. It’s not perfect, and there’s a long way to go, but it’s a start.
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