Gender Gaps In Education Spending In Laos: A Teacher’s On-Ground Perspective
The rain was dripping through the cracked edge of our classroom roof last August when Seng and Mai pushed the door open, holding crumpled enrollment forms between them. Both had finished primary school at our village school outside Luang Prabang, and they’d come to ask if I knew of any way to cover their 7th grade uniform and textbook fees. Seng twisted the broken strap of her rubber sandal around her ankle while she talked: her dad had said the family could only afford to send one older child to lower secondary that year, and it would be her 16-year-old brother, who wanted to study auto mechanics. “If I go, he can’t,” she said, staring at the mud caked on the floorboards. “He’s the boy.”
I’d been volunteering at the school for 18 months by then, and that conversation wasn’t a surprise. I’d already started noticing unspoken gaps when I asked kids to bring their own math textbooks the year before. Three quarters of the boys had new copies printed that year, while half the girls were using hand-me-downs from older cousins, with whole chapters torn out and covers held together with packing tape. When I went door to door to check on repeated absences, I started asking families how much they set aside each year for all school-related costs. Out of the 28 families I talked to that first year, 21 spent more than two thirds of their total education budget on boys, even when there were more girls than boys in the family.
I walked to Seng’s family’s stilt house a few days after that meeting, sat on their bamboo porch sipping sweet iced tea, and her mom explained the choice plain. They make about $1200 a year from their small rice farm and selling woven scarves to passing tourists. Paying for two kids to attend secondary school—covering fees for uniforms, books, exam registration, and the weekly bus fare into the nearest town—would eat up almost half their yearly income. “We know Seng is smart,” she said, wiping rain off her woven skirt. “But when we get old, our son will stay here and take care of us. Seng will marry and go to live with his family. We can’t afford to spend money on an education that won’t help us later.”
What most people outside rural Laos don’t understand about the gender gap in education spending here is that it’s rarely about tuition. Primary and lower secondary tuition has been free for public schools for more than a decade. It’s all the hidden costs that add up, and when you have a limited pot of money, you cut costs for the child you’ve been told will get less long-term benefit from that investment. The gap also isn’t limited to poor rural villages. A teacher friend of mine who works at a private secondary school in Vientiane told me she sees the same pattern among middle-class families. Parents will pay $100 a month for advanced math tutoring for their son to prep for engineering school entrance exams, but only pay for a 6-month cosmetology course for their daughter, which is shorter, cheaper, and seen as “enough” for a woman who will eventually raise a family. The gap just looks different when you have more money.
Over the last three years, a small local education group I work with has tested a few simple, low-cost changes that have helped keep more girls in school, without forcing families to choose between their kids. The first change is something any local teacher can do starting tomorrow: at the start of each term, every teacher does a 2-minute one-on-one check-in with every girl, where she lays out all her school supplies on the desk. We mark down who’s missing a book, a uniform, or the exam fee, instead of waiting for her to ask for help. Most girls here grow up being taught that their needs come second, so they won’t speak up even if they have nothing to write with. That one small step has helped us catch 12 girls who would have dropped out in the last three years, just because we noticed the gap instead of waiting for them to admit they needed help.
The second change we made is adjusting how we offer financial support. Instead of giving full scholarships only to girls, which can just shift the burden to brothers and end up pulling boys out of school instead, we give a $50 per term stipend to any family that keeps all their school-aged kids enrolled. We also require that either the girl herself or her mother picks up the stipend and signs for it, which gives the women in the family a little more say in how that money is spent. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s enough to cover the extra hidden costs that would otherwise force a choice.
Seng got the stipend last year. She stayed in 7th grade, got a new uniform, and earned Bs on all her end-of-year exams. But this year, the monsoons flooded half the village’s rice fields, and Seng’s dad told her last week she needs to move to Luang Prabang to work in a relative’s clothing shop to bring in extra income. We’re working with the village chief to talk him into letting her stay, and offering her a few hours of work weaving scarves for our small tourist craft project on weekends to add to the family income instead. We don’t know if it will work.
That’s the reality of closing the spending gap here. It doesn’t get fixed all at once, and there’s no neat ending for every girl. Big international programs often come in, build a new school building, and leave, celebrating how many kids they’ve enrolled, but the gaps in how families spend their own money don’t change just because there’s a new classroom. For teachers working here, and for people looking to support education in Laos, the most useful work is usually the small, consistent stuff: paying attention, not blaming parents for making the hard choices they’ve been taught to make, and showing up even when you can’t fix every problem. I’m still hoping Seng can stay for 8th grade. We’ll see how it goes.
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