You shall go to the school ... tackling the Cinderella syndrome

Girls are the most marginalised and disadvantaged group in poor communities.

They suffer lower rates of education, higher rates of exploitation, sexual violence and abuse and are more likely to be subject to harmful traditional practices.

Across the globe, they are the last to have their basic needs met and the first to have their basic rights denied.

It is estimated that between 60 million and 100 million girls are "missing" due to neglect and practices such as infanticide. Increasingly, girls are also now the victims in the HIV/Aids pandemic.

The plight of girls provides an important benchmark for the effectiveness of strategies to fight poverty. You can provide more schools in a poor community but the fact that you do not automatically get more girls enrolling shows how entrenched their disadvantage is.

It is the Cinderella syndrome: girls can attend school only after all the chores are completed. And even if girls do attend schools, our research shows the "lower expectations" for girls restricts their path to secondary school.

This is the conundrum facing organisations which fight poverty. It is a problem that also confronts the World Bank, now "celebrating" its 60th birthday, as it holds its annual meeting in Washington in a month.

The Bank is now one of the largest investors in human and social development, with 20% of its $11.2bn budget (2003) devoted to it.

The Bank's 2004 World Development Report tackled the issue of making services work for the poor and set out how it would tackle impoverished nations that fail to provide access to basic services such as education, health and amenities like water and electricity.

The Bank's solution is privatisation, which it argues will put the poor in the driver's seat as a client dealing with companies that will provide basic services.

But World Vision's research into the plight of girls in three impoverished countries - Tanzania, Costa Rica and Cambodia - and its analysis of the Bank's approach to human development highlight serious flaws in that approach.

The major problem is the Bank's failure to acknowledge the scant resources and huge logistical hurdles that stop the poor becoming informed, empowered consumers.

By focusing only on structural institutional reforms, the Bank fails to address the role that governments have in empowering people by acknowledging their human rights.

The Bank should work with governments to implement commitments to rights, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This would create a mechanism to oversee government engagement with the private sector.

The Bank's strategy for empowering the poor recognises freedom from illness and illiteracy but fails to identify freedom from oppression and abuse.

One can be healthy and educated but still be poor if governments, institutions and rules are not there to protect and offer economic, social and political opportunities.

The Bank itself admits that decentralisation usually produces mixed results, especially if there is no protection from national governments. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, where foreign companies gained a 40-year concession to run the water company, prices increased more than 200%.

But even if the Bank's approach does increase school enrolments and improves health and nutrition services, history shows this alone will not improve the plight of girls.

World Vision case studies in Tanzania, Costa Rica and Cambodia show that even where there are more enrolments, girls are more likely to drop out than boys.

A girl's ability to go to school does not rely on school places but on family economics. If they go to school it means their families suffer economic loss through the absence of their labour.
The research shows that the needs of girls are the first to be sacrificed. If they are needed at home, their education is sacrificed; if there is economic hardship, they miss out on medical care. They are pulled out of school to care for sick siblings, they are kept back to do household chores or to work in factories, rock quarries or to be domestic help.

Overcoming this entrenched disadvantage must involve national governments and local communities in coordination with donors such as the World Bank. It cannot just be left to the private sector.

· Haidy Ear-Dupuy is the senior policy adviser of international aid and development agency World Vision