Harnessing innovations in gender and learning to accelerate life outcomes

The Gates Foundation is built on a simple belief: every life has equal value. As the foundation looks toward its closure in 2045, that belief is reflected in three goals: ensuring no woman or child dies of a preventable cause, helping the next generation grow up free from deadly infectious diseases, and enabling hundreds of millions of people to break free from poverty.

Quality education and gender equality are central to that vision. Foundational learning helps young people build the skills they need to shape their futures. Gender equality means young people can exercise agency over their own lives, free from discrimination, supported by systems that value them equally. Working together, these two priorities have the power to shape the future and prosperity of nations.

However, programmes focused on improving learning outcomes do not always address the gender norms and structural inequalities that shape whether children stay in school, transition successfully to the next level, or complete their education. Programmes focused on gender equality increasingly tackle girls’ access to education, but few measure whether girls are developing the foundational skills, such as literacy and numeracy, needed to unlock later opportunities.

That separation between gender and learning outcomes matters. Learning and gender interact constantly – shaping whether an adolescent girl leaves school to marry or care for younger siblings, whether a boy drops out to take on dangerous work, and whether adolescents, especially those marginalised by poverty, location, disability, religion, race or ethnicity alongside gender, are able to transition though education and access better health, livelihoods and life outcomes.

That is why we are excited about building stronger bridges across sectors. While it is commonly held mantra is that ‘the path to gender equality is through education’, this only becomes a reality when learning outcomes, gender and norms are addressed in a unified way.

Why stronger bridges matter

Strong literacy and numeracy unlock a range of later education, skills, health and livelihoods outcomes.

At the same time, foundational learning is the start of a longer trajectory. We have clear evidence in support of this connection: in coastal Kenya, improved literacy instruction increased reading outcomes and reduced school dropout and new longitudinal findings from the Learning and Educational Achievement in Pakistan Schools (LEAPS) study show that the quality of primary schooling and foundational learning has persistent gains and durable effects on educational attainment, skill retention earnings and labour market outcomes.

As children move through education systems, gender norms – reinforced through schools, families and communities – increasingly shape who stays in school and on what terms. Depending on context, these norms drive specific forms of exclusion: child marriage, early pregnancy, gender-based violence and disproportionate unpaid care burdens for girls; pressure toward premature or dangerous labour, emotional disengagement and expectations about earning and masculinity for boys.

The gender equality sector brings deep expertise on these barriers: how they show up in adolescents’ lives, how they affect health and economic opportunity, and what it takes to shift the norms, systems and policies that sustain them. That expertise has been built over decades, often by feminist and women-led organisations working at the frontlines of norm change, legal reform and community mobilisation. The education sector brings deep experience on improving learning at scale, including how to work with governments and partners to strengthen education systems.

Across both sectors, the partners we work with bring practical experience, local relationships and implementation know-how that can help turn shared priorities into solutions that work in real systems. This is where we see the opportunity: to harness expertise, build from what each field already knows and work with partners in more joined-up ways around the outcomes that matter most for young people.

What collaboration can look like in practice

Early efforts are already proving that breaking down sector silos can deliver tangible results.

The is one example. It is a co-investment between the Gates Foundation’s Gender Equality and Global Education divisions designed to test what works when gender and learning are addressed together. Starting with investments in Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Kenya , the fund will generate implementation evidence on practical, low-cost approaches to bring learning and gender together to improve later outcomes.

In Ethiopia, the Gates Foundation is working with the government and partners to develop a multi-sectoral initiative that strengthens adolescent girls’ agency, expands access to schooling and quality learning, and engages communities in creating the conditions for girls to access health and economic opportunities. We expect to see increased educational outcomes like learning and completion, as well as reductions in child marriage and adolescent pregnancy.

Taken together, these efforts are still early. But they reflect a broader direction we are excited about: bringing learning and gender equality partners together to design solutions that will improve a wide range of outcomes.

Where important gaps remain

There is important work to build from, but several gaps remain if we want to understand whether solutions they are affordable, scalable and practical for governments to adopt.

One major gap is targeted solutions integrating learning and gender for out-of-school adolescents, many of whom face policy barriers to re-entry in addition to social and economic ones. While promising models like the Pathways to Choice programme – a bundled intervention combining accelerated literacy and numeracy, life skills, support for school return and vocational training for out-of-school adolescents, pioneered by the Centre for Girls Education in Nigeria – are already showing impact, we need to know more about how learning, skills, health and livelihoods interventions can be combined in ways that are practical and affordable for governments to scale.

Another gap is rigorous long-term impact data. Many adolescent interventions measure short-term changes in knowledge, attitudes, or participation. Fewer track whether those interventions lead to sustained improvements in education, health or livelihoods. Fewer still collect gender-disaggregated data that is also broken down by location, wealth, disability, race, religion, language or marital and parental status – the kind of intersectional data needed to understand who is being reached and who is still being left behind.

We also need better evidence on boys and young men. Rigid gender norms constrain all young people. We need to understand how masculinity norms specifically shape boys’ learning trajectories, what role schools play in reinforcing or challenging those norms, and how engaging boys as allies in gender equality can improve outcomes for everyone.

Areas for action

Our hope is that working more deliberately across sectors helps move the field from parallel efforts to shared solutions.

That means asking sharper questions: how does quality learning affect later outcomes that are often deeply gendered, and how can gender-focused efforts strengthen – rather than sit apart from – education quality?

It also means generating evidence that is useful for action: rigorous enough to guide decisions, practical enough for governments to adopt, and grounded enough for local partners to adapt to their contexts. This aligns with the What Works Hub for Global Education’s implementation science agenda, which emphasises understanding how effective approaches can be implemented and sustained at scale. For gender and learning, this means examining how integrated approaches are delivered through government systems, how they are adapted to local contexts, and whether they reach those facing the greatest barriers.

The promise is bigger than any one fund or initiative. It is a way of working that better reflects young people’s lives – and gives partners across education, gender equality, health, livelihoods and adolescent wellbeing a stronger basis for building solutions together.