Open now. First call for proposals, apply by 5 June 2026.
Learning and gender already exist together in the real world. What has been missing is not the phenomenon. It is the implementation that recognises it. First call is now open.
The thesis
We've spent time building 'The Big Picture' of the evidence on gender, learning, and later outcomes, building on the work of many. What we found is this: learning drives life outcomes and gender shapes who gets to benefit from it.
Girls often match or outpace boys in early primary. Then, somewhere in the transition to upper primary or secondary school, the picture changes. By adulthood, the gaps in labour market outcomes, health, and decision-making are stark and gendered.
The people behind this fund are interested in these findings. Address learning without gender, and you leave the gap intact. Address gender without learning, and you change attitudes without changing lives.
Our findings show that learning and gender are already inseparable. Every classroom, every dropout, every transition through primary and into secondary school involves both at once. What has been missing is the implementation that recognises this and measurement that helps us understand it.
This fund responds to that gap directly. We are looking for researchers and implementers to innovate with us, by addressing gender and learning together, measuring both sets of outcomes, at the grades where divergence begins.
What the evidence shows
Learning is the missing variable: Standard estimates of the returns to education are based on years of schooling, and estimated returns for girls are routinely larger than those for boys. When you add what was actually learned in school, the benefits are substantially larger. The field rarely measures it.
Adolescence is when it gets complicated: Girls and boys show near-equal outcomes in early primary. The divergence in school completion, earnings, and health begins at the transition to upper primary and then secondary. That is the window we care about.
The evidence gap is not an accident: Gender programs and learning programs have developed in parallel, with separate funders, separate metrics, and separate literatures. We will fund work that sits across them both and build a bridge between them.
Key facts about call for proposals
Award Value Up to $250,000
Number of Awards Up to 6
Application Open Date 27th April 2026
Application Close Date 5th June 2026
Countries Cote D’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania
The “Big Picture” orients the Gender and Learning Evidence Fund by grounding it in the latest evidence. We have developed it with funding from the Gates Foundation, to make sure our overall investment builds from the evidence that exists.
Our conceptual framework visualizes how gender and foundational learning interact during primary school to shape children's trajectories into post-primary education and early adulthood. It suggests two main populations: those whose trajectory proceeds through schooling along the top of the image and those who do not along the bottom. This report focuses on the first population.
As this is the first edition of The Big Picture, and something we’ll continuously update over the lifetime of the fund. We’ll be actively exploring mechanisms for funding out of school interventions in future interventions, too.
We reviewed two bodies of literature: first, Pathways Literature, which explores what we know about the trends and causal evidence around gender, learning and later outcomes such as pathways to later education, livelihoods, health and empowerment. Second, Interventions Literature which covers what we know about the programs designed to improve gender and learning outcomes, how to influence their success, and the gaps in knowledge we have to date. Here’s what we found.
The headlines
Overall, the evidence shows us that learning drives later outcomes in education, health, livelihoods and empowerment. We see this in estimates using years of schooling as a proxy for learning and even more powerfully when learning itself is measured. The evidence also shows that addressing learning without gender and addressing gender without learning enables a status quo in which learners' later life outcomes are limited by gendered barriers. Currently, however, gender-focused programs most often do not measure or address learning and learning-enhancing programs most often do not measure or address gender. In the instances where programs do address both gender and learning, they have not yet been rigorously evaluated.
Therefore, moving this evidence base forward requires better measurement, longitudinal data and causal design to enable greater understanding of gender, learning and life trajectories. The need for better measurement has two forms. The first is to explore more specifically how later life outcomes in education, health, livelihoods and empowerment are affected by learning itself. The second is to add measurement of learning to gender-focused programming and measurement of gender outcomes to learning-enhancing programs. Both of these additions support a more holistic understanding of gender and learning. Longitudinal data utilizing such combined measurement would offer insight into these dynamics long term, and causal designs could work to untangle multicomponent interventions to offer insight into both intervention adaptations and efficiencies.
Summary of the Pathway Literature
Evidence shows that education enables more education and improves outcomes in health, empowerment and livelihoods. Girls’ education has additional social and intergenerational benefits. Girls in most low and middle income countries are equal to or ahead of boys in early childhood and primary school outcomes but by adolescence, they fall behind in secondary school completion as well as health, household decision-making, and labor market outcomes.
Adolescence–especially the transition to upper primary and to secondary–is the critical window. Many of the estimated pathways relationships are elevated by schooling once six or more years of schooling are attained. Schooling and learning, however, are weakly associated across LMICs and many girls and boys complete six years of school without becoming literate. Re-estimating associations between women's education and later outcomes — health, livelihoods, empowerment — and adding learning into the equation, the benefits are substantially larger. We may be systematically understating the returns to girls’ education that actually produces skills and we don’t have detailed knowledge about these relationships and learning for boys. We need greater evidence about girls' and boys’ learning during the later years of primary school and into secondary school, and how that learning, alongside gender norms in context, shapes boys' and girls’ life trajectories.
A second cross-cutting finding is that schooling and learning are weakly associated across LMICs (Kaffenberger & Pritchett 2021). Many girls and boys complete six years of school without becoming literate. When these authors re-estimate associations between women's education and later outcomes — health, livelihoods, empowerment — adding learning into the equation, the benefits are substantially larger. Standard estimates based on schooling alone systematically understate the returns to girls’ education that actually produces skills, a finding not yet replicated for boys’ education across settings and life outcomes.
Taken together, these cross-cutting findings provide impetus for pursuit of more learning data and its use in pursuing greater understanding of how gender norms shape learning trajectories to influence later life outcomes.
You can click on a category below to find ihe findings associated with that category type:
LATER EDUCATION
Girls often match or outperform boys on learning in primary school yet fall behind on secondary school completion in much of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Higher cognitive ability is related to enrollment, achievement, and years of schooling, but studies rarely disaggregate by gender. Studies from Kenya and South Africa offer strong causal evidence that better instruction and early learning reduce dropout and improve on-time progression, yet neither study addresses whether these gains are equal for girls and boys.
LIVELIHOODS
Each additional year of schooling yields a 9–10% private earnings return, and women see higher returns, but when estimates are based on learning, a one standard deviation increase in test scores is associated with ~4.5% to 15% higher earnings. More schooling and even more learning, however, are unlikely to shift gender gaps in livelihood outcomes due to norms that limit opportunity and define “appropriate” livelihoods pathways.
HEALTH
The literature consistently shows that education improves a wide range of health outcomes — especially for girls and their children. Effects show up across child mortality, fertility, contraceptive use, HIV risk, and gender-based violence. The evidence base is large, yet it has three limitations. First, most studies focus only on girls. Second, most studies measure education as years of schooling, not whether girls actually learned. Third, most studies pool women aged 15–49 years, masking what happens specifically during adolescence and young adulthood. The emerging work that does isolate learning suggests that schooling without learning delivers far weaker benefits and that the learning dimension has been systematically underestimated.
EMPOWERMENT
Literature suggests that girls' secondary education is consistently linked to greater agency and better decision-making for women — but most of this is measured through educational attainment, not learning. The emerging evidence suggests learning is doing much of the heavy lifting, and that standard estimates based on years of schooling substantially understate the empowerment returns to genuinely learning-focused education.
Summary of the Intervention Literature
The intervention literature shows us that gender-focused interventions like life skills, safe schools, and girls clubs reliably shift their intended outcomes - constructs like attitudes, norms, and confidence - as well as positively affecting school participation. However, they most often either do not measure learning, or they produce learning gains only when they have a component that directly addresses learning. Further, many of these types of gender-focused programs have been implemented and tested only with girls.
Proven learning-focused interventions like structured pedagogy and teaching at the right level don’t often have gender content or measures; nor do they consistently disaggregate learning impact by gender.
There are interventions that do combine addressing gender-focused programming and learning enhancing efforts, but they have to date been plagued by weak research design. Both gender and learning interventions are multicomponent, and evaluation designs to date have been unable to isolate effects of specific components.
You can click on a category below to find ithe findings associated with that category type:
SAFE SCHOOLS
Safe school and violence-prevention interventions aim to reduce physical, emotional, and sexual violence in school environments and improve school climate for all students, with particular attention to girls' safety and wellbeing. They include a range of approaches — whole-school models, GBV-prevention programs, and girl- and child-friendly school reforms — that work through changes in school norms, teacher-student relationships, leadership practices, and community engagement. The underlying theory of change is that safer, more equitable school environments create conditions for greater attendance, participation, and ultimately learning, particularly for girls. Evidence on these interventions is strongest for violence reduction and school climate outcomes; effects on foundational learning are less consistently measured and more mixed.
SAFE SPACES & GIRLS’ CLUBS
Girls' clubs and safe space interventions consistently improve psychosocial outcomes, protection, and schooling participation. They are best understood as delivery platforms through which adolescent girls can build trusted relationships, life skills, and agency, while sometimes receiving information on or linkages to health, education, and economic opportunities in a structured, supportive setting. Evidence on direct academic learning impacts is limited: where learning is measured, effects are modest, often concentrated among the most marginalized girls, and difficult to attribute to the safe space modality alone, since these programs almost always operate as part of multi-component packages. Clubs and safe spaces should not be treated as learning interventions in themselves; measurable gains in academic skills require explicit instructional content layered alongside gender-transformative programming.
Gender transformative education (GTE) has demonstrated long-term impact on learning, empowerment, and health outcomes in Honduras, but evidence from Ethiopia and Uganda is mixed, with inconsistent effects across primary and secondary levels. Gender responsive pedagogy (GRP) interventions show consistent impact on teachers’ attitudes and instruction, but more mixed results for impact on student learning. Secondary school level evidence is more plentiful and clear than in primary school settings.
STRUCTURED PEDAGOGY or TaRL + GENDER
Some SP and TaRL interventions that focus on improving the teaching of foundational literacy and numeracy skills have added additional elements to become gender responsive in pedagogy and/or content. To date, none has been evaluated to show impact on gender and learning.
LIFE SKILLS
Evaluations of life skills show effective promotion of agency, psychosocial wellbeing, gender norms change, self-efficacy, as well as educational attainment. Well-evaluated life skills programs are almost exclusively from programming for adolescent girls. When life skills interventions address academic learning outcomes directly, they can show learning impact.
To read more about this work, including our methods, detailed findings, and the implications for funding, download our Big Picture Report.
To access the RFP documents for our first call for proposals, go here.
Kaffenberger, M., & Pritchett, L. (2021). Effective investment in women's futures: Schooling with learning. International Journal of Educational Development, 86, 102464. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2021.102464
Key facts about call for proposals
Award Value Up to $250,000
Number of Awards Up to 6
Application Open Date 27th April 2026
Application Close Date 5th June 2026
Countries Cote D’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania
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