It seems less specifically about the school and more about the support system and the safe place that this program gave to the girls.
It sounds like this was a program specifically built to target the reasons they were not staying in school in the first place. Which obviously is a good thing but just simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here.
That is an important distinction since the question to me remains if the numbers would continue without the program specifically in place.
Am I misunderstanding something here?
This is pretty easy to reason through: if a girl knows nothing about the world, a safe place for her to be is with someone who knows more. If a girl knows how to function in the world on par with a boy/man, or at least has visibility into a future where she can, there is no longer that fear/dependence cycle locked in.
eg How Much Education Is Needed to Delay Women's Age at Marriage and First Pregnancy? https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/...
The power of education to end child marriage - UNICEF DATA https://data.unicef.org/resources/child-marriage-and-educati...
https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_ine...
Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
But it does mention accelerated catch up programs just for them, assisting financially, and vocational training.
Which is clearly more than just "stayed in school". Meaning it is something that can't just be replicated by encouraging being in school but actively needing a program like this. Which is not a bad thing obviously, but it is important that the right lesson is taken out of this.
Every problem solved involves fixing dependencies.
The way this is phrased makes it seem like the children are making the choice to marry.
That doesn’t sit well for a western individualist mindset but… it happens there too. Parental pressure in particular is the conduit for broader social norms.
> Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
“Basically if you are a kid your friends/family will want you to get married if your friends/family notice you are unemployed/not in school/etc.”
(The desires of the kid were not referenced.)
the social pressure is traditional society on families, and then elders in families exert significant pressure on younger dependents, not to mention the strong economic pressure of nonproductive mouths to feed in circumstances without significant surpluses. It's exactly how westerners lived a century ago so it should not appear mysterious.
> Am I misunderstanding something here?
"Stayed in school" is a clear, binary condition that's easily measured and has obvious benefits to everyone because everyone is at least a little educated.
If I ask you "is your house temperature livable?" and you say "the thermometer says 20", answered. You didn't say "well, I purchased and installed a heat pump and duct distribution system capable of forcing warmed air to be distributed to the remainder of the house, which keeps the temperature in a habitable range, then ensured power supply remains connected and kept it on" and say I didn't really explain the important part.
For example, I could read the actual details on this and possibly determine that they replace school with some other (cheaper) program that just keeps the girls busy.
Or I could determine that all we really need to do is launch an outreach marketing program encouraging that girls stay in school and ignore all of the other support that was given.
One of those is supported by the headline and one is supported by the lack of information about what actually helped.
If by your example there was a study on how we made a previously unlivable area, suitable for humans in their homes but all it said was "well the temperature is X" than you would have questions on how exactly that was achieved.
Same with living in space, if NASA told us that the way astronauts are living on the space station with "well there is oxygen" we wouldn't accept that because there is obviously more going on.
Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it.
That's why there's an article, with text beyond the headline.
You might think “why does it matter?”, but if you’ve drawn the wrong lesson, you’re setting up millions of dollars in failed investments in just building schools and sending teachers into them, which won’t have the affect you expect, and that will fail to improve the lives you thought you would improve.
other then that often its financial reasons. they will put boys to school because those are classically expected to take care of the family while girl will be married off to some guy. (ofc this is changing in a lot of places bits its the historical reasons afaik)
Both happen at the same time, it's not one causes the other or smth like that. When families struggle with money, marrying girls off reduces their costs. Married boys remain with the family and actually bring someone new into the household, increasing costs or keeping stable if the boy works. Even in cultures where women pay dowries to marry, the ROI could be worth it if you reduce household costs every year going forward and your manual labor work has little chance of growing your income significantly.
Putting a kid through, even free school, costs money and at rural poverty levels in the Global South it's similar to a huge car payment one can't afford. Marrying the kids off is like ending that payment (if they go to live with another family which only girls do)
No, you are right - especially in Northern Nigeria.
Northern Nigeria is in the midst of a protracted Islamist insurgency by Al Qaeda and ISIS where jihadis have often targeted government institutions like schools and kidnapped and subsequently assaulted and trafficked female students, such as in Chibok [0], Papiri [1], and Kebbi [2].
Marriage is viewed from an economic and safety lens in these kinds of communities - if education can provide both then a girl can continue to be educated. If not, marriage is the easiest solution.
This Pathways program had added security monitoring that reduced the risk of girls potentially being made a "war bride" (ie. sex slave) by a jihadist, and never to see their family again, which incentivized families to continue to support their daughters education instead of deciding to marry them off early.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibok_schoolgirls_kidnapping
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w7621xypyo
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/world/africa/nigeria-scho...
Using official Kenyan government statistics (back when Open Data was en vogue) for school attendance and access to sanitation, we tried to find out whether there's a correlation between school attendance of kids and their access to different types of sanitation (ranging from "flush toilet connected to main sewer" to "out in the bush"). We titled the project "Happy Butts, Happy Pupils". [0]
Learning 1: Districts with better sanitation have higher school attendance.
Learning 2: "VIP latrine" is a very funny and (unintentionally?) fitting name.
[0] TL;DR for anyone interested: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y5szIPCOnL4pyu67wu1MTRw8KSA...
NO. I've seen quite a few things, across many cultures, pointing out that girls being any combination of low-value, low-status, and unsupported leads to them ending up as "cheap bodies".
That includes several American women friends, whose life stories include getting married at age 17-ish - because, with the situations in their own families, that really looked like their least-bad option.
In Nigeria, nearly 40% of all girls are wed by 18 between 2000 and 2019 (https://childmarriagedata.org/country-profiles/nigeria/#comp...), whereas there were a total of less than 300K American girls in child marriages between 2000 and 2018.
Yes, in many US states, someone under 18 can legally marry with the permission of a judge. And if the applicant is a pregnant 17 year old who wishes to marry her 17 year old boyfriend so their child isn’t “born out of wedlock”, a lot of judges will say “yes”. But if the applicant is a father who says “I think my 12 year old daughter is old enough to get married, and I found her a husband I like”, no way in hell is any American judge approving that, even if the letter of the law says they could.
But in some other countries, there are judges who would be happy to give that marriage official permission.
I'd guess your pot/kettle comment is something nationalist/political? My prior comment was trying to say it's universal, not some "country X is good/bad" dig.
