Education Spending Across Genders in Laos: What I Learned Volunteering At A Rural Primary School
Mid-morning last April, I was sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor of Mr. Souk’s office at Ban Nong Khu Primary, counting out crumpled 5000 kip notes for the new school roof fund. The plastic jar under his desk smelled of damp paper and dried tamarind, and there were crumbs of morning sticky rice stuck to the edge of his paper ledger. That’s when Mai knocked, her frayed indigo skirt twisted tight in her fists. She was 10, in grade 5, top of her class in math. She’d come to ask for another two weeks to pay her 20,000 kip uniform fee. Her dad had taken the money he’d set aside to buy her older brother a new set of textbooks for his first year of high school in the district town. Mr. Souk didn’t even argue. He just nodded, told her to go back to class, and crossed the fee off the ledger with a blunt pencil. “Eighth time this semester,” he said to me after she left. “Same story, every time.”
I’d been at the school for three months already, but that day I started counting, really counting. Out of 122 students, only 48 were girls. In grade 1, there were 12 girls and 11 boys. By grade 5, that was down to 7 girls and 14 boys. I started asking parents at the weekly Saturday market why that was, and most didn’t beat around the bush. A mom selling hand-woven bamboo baskets told me flat out: “We have enough money for one kid to go to secondary. We choose the boy. Girls leave to have babies in another village. Our money doesn’t stay with us.” Another dad told me his 12-year-old daughter was better at reading and English than his son, but she’d dropped out to look after her younger siblings so his wife could work the rice fields full time. The money he would have spent on her monthly bus fare went straight to his son’s boarding costs.
After I got back to the U.S. to finish my teaching degree, I looked up the numbers to put what I’d seen in context. What I witnessed in Ban Nong Khu isn’t an anomaly. National household surveys from Laos and UNESCO data confirm the average rural Lao family spends around 35% more on a son’s education than a daughter’s. The gap gets wider the older kids get. After primary, when school fees, bus fare and boarding costs kick in, two-thirds of families who can only afford to send one child to secondary school choose a son. This isn’t because parents don’t love their girls, or they don’t value education. For a family living on less than $2 a day, it’s a math problem, not a moral failure. They can’t afford to gamble on an investment that doesn’t guarantee them security down the line.
What stuck with me most, though, isn’t the gap itself. It’s the small, concrete changes local teachers are already making to chip away at it, changes that don’t require millions in funding to work. Mr. Souk started working with a small community NGO out of Vientiane four years ago to bring targeted, restricted scholarships to girls at his school. Each scholarship is 150,000 kip a year—about $7— that covers uniforms, textbooks, exam fees and annual bus fare. The key detail is the money goes straight to the school, not to the family. It can’t be redirected to cover a boy’s costs or an emergency farm repair, because it never hits the household budget. That one small rule change has kept 32 girls in school across three nearby villages in four years.
Another simple change the school made is requiring a home visit for any girl who misses more than two days of school in a row. Instead of waiting for the girl to drop out before reaching out, a teacher shows up at the family’s farm with the girl’s latest test paper or class project, points out specific strengths, and talks about actual, local jobs girls can get if they finish school. It’s never vague “education is important” talk. It’s “Your daughter got full marks in English, the new eco-guest house in Luang Namtha pays 1.5 million kip a month for receptionists that speak English— that’s three times what a farm worker makes.” For a lot of parents who’ve never met a woman with a formal job, that concrete example changes the calculation more than any lecture. Even for families that want to save for their daughter’s education themselves, the school hands out plain labeled envelopes to keep school money separate from other household cash. It sounds too simple to work, but Mr. Souk told me 18 of the 22 girls in upper primary use them, and it keeps the money from getting pulled for emergency costs before the school term even starts.
I got a text from Mr. Souk two weeks ago. Mai passed her grade 6 exam, and she’s got a scholarship for secondary school next year. She’ll board in the district town, and all her costs are covered. That’s a win. But he also told me three girls from grade 4 dropped out last month, when their dad hurt his back farming, and the family needed them to sell vegetables at the market full time. The scholarship program only has 10 spots a year, and there’s not enough donor funding to add more. Attitudes don’t change overnight. Last year, one father told me after a home visit, “I know she’s smart. I want her to go to school. But if I don’t spend the money on my son, he won’t get into university, and we won’t have anyone to take care of us when we can’t farm anymore.”
The spending gap between girls and boys in Laos isn’t going away next year, or even next decade. But small, intentional changes, one girl and one family at a time, are adding up. Some girls get to stay in school, when they would have had to leave before. That’s enough for now.
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