Anti-Poverty Group’s Data Misleads on Women’s Education in Africa

Tshimanga said that according to their methodology, “on average, women go to school for less than two years”, at 1.99 years in the nine countries. (Note: The unrounded figures in ONE’s spreadsheet averages to 2.06 years.)

Because of this, some countries “will have more than the average” – Liberia, Chad and the Central African Republic.

“The other seven countries are below the average, such as in Guinea where the mean years of schooling for women is 0.73 years,” he added.

Estimates do not change rapidly from year to year

The UNESCO institute does not have estimates for three of the countries on the list, Anuja Singh, a programme specialist with the UN data agency, told Africa Check.

Some of the data is more than a decade old – for example, Chad’s was last updated in 2004. But these figures are still useful, Huebler said. This is because the mean years of schooling indicator considers such a large cohort (anyone in the country older than 25) that the estimates in the database change only minimally over a small number of years.

“It would be preferable to compare data from the same year, but this is more important for indicators that can change quickly from year to year because they are calculated for small cohorts, such as primary school enrollment rates,” Huebler noted.

‘Direct comparison’ not advisable

Is it sound to plug in WIDE data where UIS data is missing? Institute for Statistics data considers women older than 25 while that from WIDE looks at women between 20 and 24, Nicole Bella, a senior statistician with UNESCO’S Global Education Monitoring Report, told Africa Check.

“The use of different age-groups explains why WIDE mean years of schooling are higher than UIS data since youth are more likely to be educated than older generations,” she said.

Rosa Vidarte, who is a researcher for WIDE, supported this. “Since younger people have more years of schooling nowadays than in the past, it makes sense that [WIDE has] higher numbers given the age range that we are calculating schooling for,” she told Africa Check.

Further, WIDE uses household surveys, Vidarte said, alluding to the UIS’ use of annual survey data. “Also, the years that we are calculating for and what UIS is calculating for are different.”

The institute’s Singh told Africa Check that while the datasets could be broadly complementary, “we do not support direct comparison”.

Conclusion: The claim is misleading

Saying educating girls can change the world, global anti-poverty group ONE zeroed in on 10 countries – nine in Africa –  as the “toughest” for girls to learn in. On average, women in these countries spent less than two years in school, the group said.

The organisation used data from UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics and plugged gaps by using the World Inequality Database on Education.

Experts told Africa Check that since the two datasets measure different age-groups and use different approaches to collating information, it is not advisable to directly compare them.

The UNESCO institute does not have estimates for three of the countries on the list, while the average years of schooling based on WIDE data is about three years.

Elements of the claim are accurate, but it is presented in a way that is misleading. However, this does not take away from the fact that both databases consistently show low years of schooling for women in the highlighted countries.

Source: Africa Check

*This fact-check was written by Ina Skosana, health researcher of Africa Check, a non-partisan fact-checking organisation. View the original piece on their website here.