When girls fill the care gaps, equity slips away

Co-Authored By: Dennis Nyakundi and Lydia Wilbard

Two girls from recent field visits come to mind. One in India and one in Kenya. We will not name them, and we cannot show you their faces. But we can tell you what we saw.

The first is in an Anganwadi preschool in Maharashtra, India, a bright room of painted clouds and paper butterflies, full of four- and five-year-olds sitting cross-legged on woven mats. She stands at the edge, too old to be enrolled. She is not a student but a caregiver, minding her younger brother while their mother attends to the family’s other needs. At her own school, a few kilometers away, a teacher is marking the register. Next to her name: absent.

The second is in Turkana County, in northern Kenya, where her class is holding an outdoor session, benches under the wide sky. Her classmates are on their feet for the lesson. She is the only one seated, low behind a desk, her infant sister asleep against her shoulder. She is following the lesson and minding the child at the same time.

What makes these scenes unusual is not that girls are caring for siblings, but that it is visible. Far more often, they simply stay home, minding the little ones, cooking, fetching water. UNESCO estimates that roughly 133 million girls are out of school worldwide today.

The care handoff

Two forces tend to combine here. The first is gender norms about who is responsible for care. Where caregiving is understood as women’s work, a mother with her hands full passes the responsibility not to a father, an uncle, or an older brother, but to a daughter. The second is limited access to quality, affordable childcare. Where a family cannot reach it, the care of the youngest transfers, silently and automatically, to a school-age daughter.

Kenya’s Usawa Agenda 2026 Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Assessment Report offers a partial picture of where the need for childcare may be greatest. Nationally, 14 percent of four- and five-year-olds are out of school, compared with 3 percent of those aged six to twelve. The report does not tell us why they are out or who is looking after them. The research makes clear just how many children, on any weekday morning, are somewhere other than a classroom.

The counties where those numbers run highest are arid lands like Turkana. In those same counties, against the national trend, more girls than boys are missing from class. It is not unreasonable to suppose that their absence is due in part to the caregiving responsibilities they have been given.

What it costs

The costs compound. A morning missed becomes a term repeated; falling behind becomes dropping out. Once a girl is out of school, the risks stack. UNFPA finds that girls with no education are over three times more likely to marry before 18 than those with secondary or higher education, with pregnancy often preceding or following. Options narrow at the age when they should be widening.

The losses do not stop with her. A study from Pakistan found that when the oldest sister receives more schooling, her younger brothers’ literacy and numeracy improve significantly. What she learns can travel home with her, through the time she spends with younger siblings. Boys and men gain when a girl is educated, and may be among the first to do so.

The effect carries across generations. An earlier Usawa Agenda assessment found that children whose mothers had a tertiary education were 80 percent more likely to meet reading expectations and 62 percent more likely to meet numeracy expectations than those whose mothers had at most primary education. A gap in care at one stage narrows opportunities at every stage that follows, hers, her siblings’, and eventually her own children’s.

Closing the care gap

At Echidna Giving, this is part of why we think about early childhood care and girls’ education together, across three interconnected stages: of early childhood, foundational learning at primary school ages, and adolescence. No single organization has solved this challenge. Yet, across different countries and contexts, the same patterns keep emerging. Working alongside partners has helped us see them more clearly.

1. Early learning works better when it is designed around families as well as children. What we keep hearing is that hours matter as much as quality. Where a center’s opening times fall within the school day rather than around a family’s working hours, families cover the difference themselves, often through an older daughter. Kidogo, SEWA, and Mobile Creches each approach this challenge by designing childcare around the realities of working families.
2. Education can shape norms, not only teach the three Rs. Childcare eases the pressure of care responsibilities; norms shape who absorbs the care responsibilities that remain. Schools are among the few settings where expectations about who provides care can be examined early and at scale. That thinking is finding its way into education systems. In India, Breakthrough embeds a gender equity curriculum and teacher training with the governments of Punjab and Odisha, and the Accelerator for Shifting Gender Norms Through Education brings together twelve organizations worldwide working in education systems to do the same.
3. Girls who have already left school need a route back that fits their lives. Girls who have been out of school for some years rarely return on the same terms they left. What appears to work are pathways built around their age, hours, and responsibilities. That need-based approach can be seen in Tanzania’s Institute of Adult Education, which strengthens life skills and learning for girls returning to education, and, across Africa, in CAMFED, which provides support that helps marginalized girls enter, stay in, and return to school.
4. Making care visible changes how we respond to it. Care work is still too often invisible. Increasingly, though, it is being measured, studied, and brought into view. Kenya’s statistics bureau recently published its first measurement of the value of unpaid care and domestic work, finding that women and girls spend about five times as much time on it as men and boys. Through a coalition it convenes, Echidna also commissioned a political economy analysis of Kenya’s childcare sector, shedding light on the institutions, incentives, and relationships that shape childcare.

Discussions of unpaid care usually evoke a picture of an adult woman. But sometimes the one doing unpaid care is a child in a school uniform. The aim is not to count her as part of the care workforce, but to build care systems strong enough that she never needs to be.

Equity can return the way it left

Equity rarely disappears with an announcement. It slips away quietly, one missed opportunity at a time.

It can return the same way. No ribbon is cut the morning a girl walks to school with both arms free because her little sister is safe, fed, and learning at a childcare center. No headline announces the young woman who left school at eleven, taking her seat in a catch-up class at seventeen. But when we invest in early childhood care, we give a two-year-old the start she deserves and give a twelve-year-old back the education that was quietly being taken from her.

We are still learning our way through this, and we would value other perspectives. If you work at the intersection of childcare and girls’ education, what are you seeing that we may be missing?