Slow growth of female HE enrolment puts SDG target at risk

Higher education enrolment of women in Bangladesh has been increasing at a snail’s pace, falling behind growth in enrolment for men, with officials saying that without proper planning and financing of higher education, Bangladesh is set to significantly miss the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of equal access for all women and men to tertiary education by 2030.

According to just-released figures from the Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics (BANBEIS), the country’s gross enrolment ratio (GER) for higher education stood at 20.18% in 2023. But the GER for females was much lower — at 16.51% that year, even though girls have continued to outnumber boys at primary and secondary school levels.

The GER measures those enrolled in higher education as a percentage of the total population aged 18-23.

SDG targets

Current acting chair of the University Grants Commission (UGC) of Bangladesh, Professor Muhammed Alamgir, said many girls drop out of education before reaching university, leading to lower enrolment of girls in higher education.

Alamgir told University World News COVID-19-induced financial constraints caused a reduction in overall student enrolment in the last few years, although the country had witnessed a small but steady increase in enrolment in the years before the pandemic.

However, he noted: “If we progress at this speed, it will be very challenging for us to meet the SDG goal to ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality tertiary education.”

In 2015, when the SDG goals were adopted, overall GER was 15%, and for females 12.11%. The GER increased overall by only 5.15 percentage points in the last seven years. The pace of increase in female enrolment was even slower — only a 4.4 percentage point rise in the same period. This compares to a 32% increase in the GER for women over the same (nearly) 10-year period in neighbouring India, and an 18% increase in women in higher education in India in just the past five years.

Challenges facing girls

Education experts blamed several factors including the limited employment opportunities for women in Bangladesh, the absence of academic and industry linkages, and the lack of quality in higher education. They also pointed to a lack of facilities like hostels for women, sexual harassment on the way to college and university, as well as poverty and child marriage, which play a vital role in girls not attending universities.

Most higher education institutions in Bangladesh lack facilities like halls for female students. “It is a social problem. We need to work together to break the barrier if we want to leave no one behind,” Abdul Mannan, a past UGC chairperson told University World News.

Rasheda K Choudhury, a core group member of Citizen’s Platform for SDGs, Bangladesh, a citizen’s forum to track the state’s implementation of the SDGs, told University World News: “The enrolment rate at the university level is not at a satisfactory level. We are way behind [being on] the right track to achieve the SDG goal regarding tertiary enrolment.”

Choudhury, who is also executive director of the Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE), said: “In Bangladesh, the budgetary allocation for university education is not adequate and tertiary education is costly, so many cannot go for it.”

During the last 10 years, the government allocated less than 1% of the national budget for the entire higher education sector. In its 2020 Annual Report, the UGC recommended increasing the budgetary allocation for higher education to at least 2% of the national budget. This should increase to 6% by 2030, according to the UGC.

According to the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report 2022, households cover about 71% of the total cost of education in Bangladesh. “When it is a question of choosing who will get higher education, males get preference over girls in a family,” Rasheda Choudhury explained.

Employability and low educational quality

Another former UGC chairperson, Professor AK Azad Choudhury, told University World News universities were not enhancing the employability of their graduates. If students “see no light at the end of the tunnel, why will they go to enrol at universities?” he asked.

The Labour Force Survey 2022 released by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) last October said the number of unemployed graduates had doubled in five years.

The 2016-17 labour force survey showed that 390,000 people who completed higher education were unemployed. It rose to 799,000 in the latest survey.

For example, as many as 28% of students remain unemployed even three years after graduating from some 2,550 colleges that fall under the National University of Bangladesh, a study by the Bangladesh Institute of Development Research (BIDS) found in 2023, according to BIDS research fellow Badrun Nessa Ahmed, who presented the findings in Dhaka on 24 March 2024.

The National University of Bangladesh has around 2.9 million students. According to the UGC’s 2022 report there are another 163 universities in Bangladesh – 53 public and 110 private – with 4.7 million students enrolled.

“Higher education in the country at many private universities and the National University of Bangladesh and its affiliated colleges seriously lacks quality,” said Azad Choudhury.

Current UGC chair Alamgir said the UGC is planning to set up a university-level training academy aimed at improving the quality of lectures in the classroom.

Data from the Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics (BANBEIS) shows that enrolment was 15.03% in 2015. In subsequent years it was 15.67%, 15.84%, 16.88% and 19.01%, reaching 20.07% in 2020. In 2021 GER was 20.19% but fell to 18.66% in 2022, due to the pandemic.

Enrolment of females was 12.37% in 2016. In subsequent years it was 12.87%, 14.06%, 16.18%, and 17.84% in 2020, reflecting only small rises each year. In 2021 it was 18.2% before falling to 17.19% in 2022.