Who Reaches the End of Lower Secondary School?

According to the World Bank, humanity has made major gains in education over the past five decades with girls now educated at far higher levels than ever before. While this is something to be celebrated, there is still room for improvement as regional differences remain.

The following map shows one metric used for identifying disparities in access to education, looking at how the rates of students completing lower secondary school varies between boys and girls. Lower secondary school is here considered as the end of eighth grade, when children are usually around 13 to 14 years old.

Of the 169 countries and territories for which the World Bank provided recent data (between 2018 and 2023), Afghanistan had the widest gender gap for lower secondary school completion in terms of female underrepresentation. In 2019 (latest data available for Afghanistan), the gap stood at -30.4 percentage points. Among the other countries where a lower share of girls completed grade eighth than boys are Iceland (-5.2 p.p. gender gap in 2021), Albania, (-8.4 p.p. gap in 2023), Mauritius (-9.8 p.p. in 2023) and the DRC (-12.1 p.p. in 2020).

This data highlights how the gender gap exists in the opposite direction too, with far fewer boys finishing eighth grade than their female peers. This was the case in the Cayman Islands in 2023, where there was a 34.5 percentage point difference, with boys here underrepresented. Four other places had +20 percentage point gaps indicating an underrepresentation of boys. These were Tuvalu (29.3 p.p. in 2023), Sierra Leone (21.5 p.p. in 2021), Palau (21.1 p.p. in 2023) and Suriname (20.9 p.p. in 2021). Meanwhile, 22 economies reported parity within a +1/-1 buffer zone, including four places which reported total parity: Turkey, Peru, Azerbaijan, Hong Kong.

It is worth noting that, as is often the case, data lags mean it is difficult to fully represent the degree to which a country’s gender gap in education completion has improved or worsened today. For example, this will be the case with Afghanistan, where access to female education has declined drastically since the Taliban came into power in 2021.