In 2023, more than half of the world’s out-of-school children were boys — an estimated 139 million.

Education is a fundamental human right and a powerful driver of economic development. To ensure no one is left behind, countries have rightly made efforts to improve educational opportunities for girls.

Despite notable progress, supporting girls remains essential to achieving gender equality. Yet UNESCO’s 2022 global report on boys’ disengagement from education highlighted that in some geographic locations and stages of education, boys face significant educational challenges.

Even in some countries where girls have historically struggled to achieve equal access to education, boys may now lag behind: they are more likely to repeat grades or drop out, and to achieve lower learning outcomes.

To build inclusive and equitable societies, it is essential to address the educational barriers affecting both boys and girls.

How can we tackle boys’ disengagement from education while advancing gender equality? Some initial insights are provided by the research project Lifting barriers: Educating Boys for Gender Equality of GPE KIX, supported by UNESCO, Equimundo and the University of East Anglia. Our approach is to promote gender-transformative education with specific support for boys, where needed.

Harmful gender norms are the core of the issue

Harmful gender norms contribute to boys’ disengagement from education. Social and gender norms that view doing well in school is “unmanly”, expectations for boys to be breadwinners or boys’ greater exposure to corporal punishment can lead to boys withdrawing from school.

Effective design and framing of education interventions are essential to ensure that no one is left behind. Supporting boys’ engagement in education must not undermine girls’ advancement or overlook the specific barriers they face. Instead, it should be part of a transformative approach where everyone benefits.

Advocacy has played a central role in gaining support for including boys: addressing boys’ disengagement is a critical step in the broader fight for gender equality.

The impact is powerful. Educated boys and men are more likely to champion equality and respect all individuals.

Boys are not problems to be fixed, nor should they be pathologized. Education strategies must focus on the positive qualities and potential of boys, which harness their strengths, aspirations and values to promote academic success and help them flourish.

This is called an asset-based approach: shifting the focus from treating boys as problems to be fixed to recognizing their strengths and capacity to reach their academic potential.

Turning research into practical solutions

Interventions addressing boys’ disengagement in education are rare.

Our research highlights that effective interventions should include a whole-school approach, offering boys safe spaces for interaction and reflection, providing ongoing teacher and facilitator support, encouraging positive expressions of masculinity, and involving caregivers and community members to ensure long-term success and sustainability.

Especially, it emphasizes that all boys and men should be free to express diverse expressions of positive masculinities without fear of exclusion, ridicule or violence.

It fosters expressions of masculinities that align with egalitarian values and promote health and well-being. Examples include committed fatherhood and partnership, caring and intimacy, and help-seeking behavior.

Based on this, we are testing a gender-transformative school-level intervention that will benefit both boys and girls, including teacher training, teaching resources, and boys’ clubs, supplemented by training developers and reviewers of teaching and learning materials.

Creating national ownership and socializing results

We have conducted in depth-research on boys’ disengagement in three purposefully selected target countries, Cambodia, Lesotho and Malawi, to tailor interventions, materials and training to the countries’ needs and contexts.

Countries were selected considering education data and priorities and the delivery capacity of consortium members and national-level partners.

Also, all three countries have higher numbers of boys than girls of primary and secondary age out of school, low levels of learning and high levels of physical violence and bullying at school (see box).

We have actively seized opportunities to consult national stakeholders and integrated capacity-building efforts to create impact. These are some engagement strategies we have put in place to create national ownership and socialize the results:

1. National launch events: The project has been launched in all participating countries to build national ownership, encourage collaboration and strengthen commitment among key stakeholders:

2. Building country coalitions: In Malawi, where we are piloting a school-level intervention, we have set up an advisory committee with key education and gender stakeholders to mitigate risk, ensure national relevance and buy-in. Its members can be pivotal advocates and early users of the project’s outputs. Some of the key stakeholders included key directorates within the Ministry of Education, Malawi Institute of Education, Ministry of Gender, Community Development and Social Welfare, Ministry of Youth, and Civil Society Education Coalitions, among others.
3. Seize collaboration opportunities: We have engaged the Malawi Institute of Education (MIE)—the country’s national curriculum center—to collaborate on adapting the school-based intervention in that country. Encouragingly, the MIE has shown a strong commitment to shifting from a gender-responsive to a gender-transformative curriculum approach.
4. Building capacity: We have organized training on masculinities and education for national stakeholders and researchers from Malawi and Cambodia. We also organized participatory methods training with the Centre for Alternatives for Victimized Women and Children (CAVWOC) and the Centre for Social Research (CSR) to enhance data collection on boys’ disengagement in Malawi. The workshop’s benefits have extended beyond the project. As one participant from CAVWOC shared: “We oriented the team for another project on how to gather community insights on gender-based violence and sensitive issues, including discussions with learners at schools.” National consultations on making teaching and learning materials gender-transformative with a focus on masculinities have been completed in Cambodia, Lesotho and Malawi, including capacity building.