What Gender Gaps In Education Spending Look Like For Rural Lao Families: A Teacher’s Observations
The mango tree at the gate of our small rural primary school in northern Laos drops so much fruit this time of year that you have to step around squished yellow orbs to get to the bench where I collected end-of-term fees. In 2022, I was sitting there wiping sticky juice off my notebook when 10-year-old Sengdee showed up with her dad, twisting the frayed hem of her sixth-grade uniform between her fingers. He pulled a crumpled envelope of Lao kip out of his shirt pocket, counted out 150,000 kip (about $7) for her older brother’s new seventh-grade uniform and textbooks, then pushed 70,000 kip across the wooden bench toward me. “Her old uniform still fits if we take in the waist,” he said. “She can share a math book with her cousin who lives down the road.” I didn’t argue right then. I’d seen this same math played out too many times in my 18 months as a volunteer teacher here to be surprised.
When people ask about gender gaps in education spending in Laos, most expect a big, abstract answer about national statistics or broad cultural norms. But I saw it play out in these small, quiet choices every term. The year before, 12-year-old Mai dropped out right before starting ninth grade because her family spent the $150 they’d saved for her school fees and bus fare on a motorcycle for her older brother, so he could get to his technical college classes an hour away in the district town. When I walked to their village to talk to her mom, she stirred a pot of jungle curry and didn’t apologize. “We don’t have enough for both,” she said. “He’ll take care of us when we’re old. She’ll move to her husband’s village next year anyway.”
That’s the core of the spending gap, I learned. It’s not that parents in rural Laos don’t care about their daughters’ education. It’s that every extra dollar, every extra kip, is a choice when most households live on less than $2 a day from farming corn and rice. For generations, the unwritten rule has been that investing in boys gives the family a better long-term return. Sons stay in the village, inherit the land, and support their parents in old age. Daughters move to their husband’s community, so any money spent on her school is seen as money lost to another family. That’s not cruelty. That’s survival, based on what generations have experienced.
After a year of watching girls drop out or make do with tattered books and too-small uniforms, a few of us local teachers started making small, low-effort changes that have helped more than I expected. The first thing we did was set up a bin for gently used uniforms and textbooks at the school. We collect them from older students when they outgrow them or finish the school year, wash and mend them, and keep them on hand for families that can’t afford new ones. It doesn’t cost much—we get small donations from passing trekking groups to cover thread and soap—and it means Sengdee got a nearly new uniform that year instead of having to wear her old too-big one for another year. She didn’t have to share a textbook with her cousin, who lives an hour’s walk away and only brought the book to school once a week, so she could do her homework every night like the rest of the class.
The second change we made was how we talk to parents about their daughters. We don’t lead with lectures about equal rights. We lead with specific numbers that they can actually use. When I met with Sengdee’s dad a week after he paid her fees, I brought her test scores—she’d gotten the second highest mark in math in the entire sixth grade. I told him that if she finished high school, the new district hospital just 45 minutes away was hiring new clerks and nurses’ aides that make 2 million kip a month, about $85. That’s more than most day laborers make in a full year here. Most parents in these villages haven’t met anyone who finished high school and got a steady, paid job, so they don’t have that context to work with when they’re making their budget choices. I also introduced him to Sengdee’s uncle, who lives in Vientiane and drives a tuk tuk for a living, and asked if he could chip in 50,000 kip a term for her fees. He agreed, because he’d never known how well Sengdee was doing in school before that conversation.
We also started keeping a simple list of small local donors, mostly expats and regular repeat tourists who visit the area, that can sponsor a girl’s fees for $50 a year. We don’t ask for big lump sums, just enough to cover the gap when a family has to choose between two kids’ school costs.
I went back to visit the school last month. Sengdee was sitting under that same mango tree, selling bags of ripe mangoes to passing tourists to earn extra pocket money. She just finished seventh grade, and she got the highest score in her science class. But this year, her younger brother is starting secondary school, and last year’s drought killed almost half the family’s corn crop. They don’t have enough extra money to cover both kids’ full fees this coming term. We’ve got a donor lined up to cover half, but we’re still looking for the other half.
Things are changing slowly. More girls are finishing primary school than when I started, and more parents are starting to see that an educated daughter can bring just as much stability to the family as an educated son. But every year is still a new choice. Every kip still gets counted twice, and the gap doesn’t disappear all at once. Right now, Sengdee’s still in school, and that’s enough to keep going.
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