Gender Gaps in Education Spending in Laos: What I Learned As a Rural Volunteer Teacher
Last October, I sat across from Mr. Bounteum and his wife at our village school’s parent-teacher conference, my plastic folding chair sinking a little into the muddy yard. A half-eaten bag of grilled pork sat between us, and mosquitos bit at my ankles as we talked about their 14-year-old daughter Seng, who’d gotten the second highest test score in my 9th grade class. They’d come to tell me she wouldn’t be coming back for 10th grade. The school fees, new uniform, and bus fare to the district secondary school added up to almost 400,000 kip, around $18, that year. They had a 12-year-old son starting secondary too. “We can only pay for one,” Mr. Bounteum said, wiping sticky rice from his hands. “Kham will need an education to get a job and take care of us when we’re old. Seng will marry and join her husband’s family anyway.”
That conversation wasn’t unusual in the two years I’ve been teaching at this small rural school outside Luang Prabang. I’ve seen it over and over: when money is tight, education spending goes to boys first. Last year, I helped a local education NGO run a household survey across four nearby villages, and we saw the gap laid out in numbers too. Out of 122 families we interviewed, average annual spending on boys’ education was 320,000 kip higher than for girls. That’s enough to cover a full year of uniforms, school supplies, and canteen meals for one student. That gap adds up: today, less than 40% of girls in our area finish lower secondary, while almost 70% of boys make it to 10th grade.
It’s not just big tuition fees that create the gap, either. I keep a cupboard of donated textbooks and supplies for students who can’t afford their own. For the first year I ran it as a free-for-all, any student could take what they needed. I quickly noticed that 8 out of 10 times, a father would come in asking for a book or uniform for his son, even if his daughter was the same grade and needed it more. Last year I changed the system: I lock half the supplies away, reserved only for girls who need them. The first month, three girls got new waterproof school bags they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
A lot of people outside Laos hear about this gap and assume it’s just because parents don’t care about their daughters. That’s not true, from what I’ve seen. Most parents here want all their kids to do well, no matter their gender. But the economic reality is that for rural families, there’s still a widespread expectation that boys will stay in the village, work the family land or get a stable government job, and support their parents as they age. Girls are expected to move to their husband’s village after marriage, so any money spent on her education is seen as a loss for the family unit. That’s not cruelty, that’s a hard calculation families make when they only have enough extra money for one kid.
The small changes we’ve made over the past two years have taught me you don’t need big, expensive programs to move the needle a little, if you target the gap directly. The first thing any local teacher or volunteer can do is set up that dedicated, reserved supply bank for girls. It doesn’t cost anything, just a little extra space in a cupboard and a clear rule that half of all donated uniforms, textbooks, and school supplies go only to girls. That alone got 11 more girls into secondary last year in our district.
The second thing we did was work with the village development committee to secure small conditional micro-grants, around $2.50 a month, for families that keep their daughters in school. A key rule here is that we pay the money directly to the girl or her mother, not the head of household (usually the father). We tried it both ways the first year, and found that 70% of the time when money went to fathers, it got redirected to other needs, often the son’s education. When it goes to mothers or the girls themselves, 90% of it goes to school costs. In two years, our rate of girls finishing lower secondary went from 38% to 52%. For people who donate to education projects in Laos from overseas, the biggest concrete step you can take is earmark your donation specifically for girls’ extra costs, not just general school funding. General funding like new classrooms benefits all kids, but the spending gap happens at the family level, so targeting that directly makes a far bigger difference for girls.
Seng got one of those micro-grants last year, so she’s still in school. Last month she brought me a bag of ripe mangoes from her family’s tree, after she aced her midterm exams. She wants to train to be a pediatric nurse after she graduates. But the gap is still there for her, and for most girls here. Her parents still don’t pay for the after-school tutoring that Kham gets from his uncle, so Seng stays after my class 20 minutes every day to get extra help. They still pull her out for two or three days every harvest season to help in the rice fields, while Kham stays in class. That’s the reality: even when we get girls through the school door, they don’t get the same level of spending on their education as boys.
This year we’re trying something new, pairing girls who’ve already finished secondary school and gotten full-time jobs with girls still in school to come talk to their families about what an education can do for them. We don’t know if it will work. Some families still won’t have the money to keep their daughters in school this year, especially after last year’s flooding ruined half the rice crop in the area. The gender gap in education spending isn’t going to disappear overnight. But for girls like Seng, those small, targeted changes are enough to give them a shot I didn’t think they’d have just a few years ago.
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