HOW UNEQUAL ARE THE WORLD'S STUDENTS?
To understand global student inequality, a natural place to start is with graduation rates between the different regions.
This graph shows the percentage of women in each region that graduate university with an undergraduate degree
The female graduation rate in the 48 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (3.4%) is extremely low.
Even the regions with significant rates of gender inequality such as ‘Central and South Asia’ and ‘North Africa and West Asia’ have far more women graduating university.
The difference to the richest region of Europe and North America is huge.
Only one girl in thirty gets to graduate from University in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The next worst region is more than seven times higher than sub-Saharan Africa. [1]
That is the scale of inequality between female students in our world.
Comparing Life Chances for Young Women
If we compare life-chances more broadly the inequality becomes even more extreme.
In Europe, 7,390 women graduate for every woman that dies in childbirth or other maternal related causes [2], but the odds for a African woman are very different.
In sub-Saharan Africa, less than 2 women graduate for every women that die of maternal causes. [3]
This is the average, for young women in countries like Mauritania and Niger graduation is only slightly more likely than maternal death [4].
The difference is actually difficult to judge on this graph because the sub-Saharan bar is so much lower.
To put it in real terms, if the 7,390 European women who graduate per maternal death all stood on top of each other they would be nearly two miles taller than Mount Everest, whilst the height of the African women would be 3 metres, slightly lower than a basket ball hoop. [5]
That is how unequal young women’s life chances are in our world
How much of this inequality is because of gender discrimination within Africa?
There is a gender gap in African Universities but whilst it needs to be reduced (particular in some francophone countries like Niger), it is not the main factor.
98.8% of the difference in graduation rates between Western Europe & North America and Africa is regional inequality and 1.2% is down to gender inequality in Africa. [6] This is because, when you add African male graduation rates to the female graduation rate graph, you can see they are also incredibly low.
The impact of gender inequality within Africa on a girl’s chance of graduating university is dwarfed by the impact of continental inequality.
Is university student inequality growing?
Unfortunately, the gap in graduation rates between the world’s regions is also growing.
Since the year 2000 the North America & Europe first degree graduation rates have increased, with an additional 16% of all young people going to University, and the world average has also increased by 10%,
In Sub-Saharan Africa rates have changed only 1% since the year 2000, and may even have fallen when the latest data is released (the African data is less frequently collected and still pre-pandemic)[7].
What about school students?
Global school student inequality, or rather the inequality between school aged children, is even worse. In Africa 119 million school aged children are now out of school, the highest this century [6]
At the start of the 21st century, around a quarter of the world’s children out of school lived in Africa [7] and the number was declining. However, since 2010, the number of African children out of school has actually gone up.
The increase alone in African children out of school since 2010 is 22 million [8] a lot more than all the high school students in the United States [9].
What happens is no mystery, in most cases the child has been forced by extreme poverty into child labour which has seen a similar increase.
Over 16 million more African children have become child labourers since the UN Sustainable Development Goals began [10] which has devastating consequences for the child’s health, safety and future.
In fact, since 2016 the world has created an average of two billionaires and 90,000 more African child labourers every week [11]. The two numbers are not unconnected.
Hasn’t it always been this way?
Schoolchildren in Africa have always been less likely to finish school than children in richer regions, but the student inequality between Africa and the rest of the world has never been this large.
If you look at the graph of the change in the number of African children out of school by year this century, you can see the clear and sharp increase of 22 million since 2010 which has wiped out the previous progress in Africa.
Yet in contrast, outside of Africa the number of out of school has fallen by over 130 million this century. [12]
In 2010 the number of out of school children in Africa was 27% of the global total, now it is 43% and rising fast, an incredible shift in just 15 years. [13]
Our generation has made school student inequality worse. In fact, Generation Z students are the most unequal on record.
In 20 sub-Saharan African countries, a child has a higher chance of being forced into child labour than they do of completing school. [14] A girl in Chad is twice as likely to die of preventable causes before the age of five than to complete secondary school. [15]
The school completion rates for Gen Z children in Africa are so low that a young person in Portugal has more chance of graduating university than a young person from Madagascar has of finishing primary school. [16]
This has a major impact on education outcomes.
Sources
1. UNESCO UIS ‘Indicator GGR_6t7_F.. (Gross Graduation ratio from first degree programmes ISCED 6 and 7 in tertiary education, female %)’ – Get data here – gives the SDG Sub-Saharan Africa Region as (3.40798%) which is extremely low even when compared with regions with high rates of gender inequality such as Central and Southern Asia (24.1%) and Northern Africa and Western Asia (33.3%), let alone the richest region Europe and Northern America (52.0%). This means only one women in 30 graduates university in sub-Saharan Africa. Comparing Africa with the next lowest region Central and Southern Asia gives a multiple of 7.07
2. UNESCO UIS, ‘Indicator GGR_6t7_F.. (Gross Graduation ratio from first degree programmes ISCED 6 and 7 in tertiary education, female %)’ – Get data here – gives a female graduation rate of 55.56497% for the European Union (World Bank) in 2024 & World Bank ‘(Lifetime risk of maternal death (1 in: rate varies by country) Indicator SH.MMR.RISK)’ – Get data here – gives 0.007519% risk for a woman in the European Union for 2023 (currently the latest year), so the chances of a young European woman graduating university are over 7,390 times higher (739,014%) than her lifetime risk of maternal death.
3. UNESCO UIS, ‘Indicator GGR_6t7_F.. (Gross Graduation ratio from first degree programmes ISCED 6 and 7 in tertiary education, female %)’ Get data here – gives a female graduation rate of 3.40798% for sub-Saharan Africa for the latest year & World Bank ‘(Lifetime risk of maternal death (1 in: rate varies by country) Indicator SH.MMR.RISK)’ – Get data here -gives 1.8182% risk for a woman in sub-Saharan Africa for 2023 (currently the latest year), so the chances of a young woman in sub-Saharan Africa graduating university are 1.87 times higher than her lifetime risk of maternal death.
4. UNESCO UIS, ‘Indicator GGR_6t7_F.. (Gross Graduation ratio from first degree programmes ISCED 6 and 7 in tertiary education, female %)’ Get data here – gives a female graduation rate of 3.40798% for sub-Saharan Africa for the latest year & World Bank ‘(Lifetime risk of maternal death (1 in: rate varies by country) Indicator SH.MMR.RISK)’ – Get data here – shows 1.32 Mauritanian and 1.23 Nigerien girls will graduate University for every girl that will graduate University.
5. Taking 1.61cm as the height of the average women means 7,390 women would stand 11,898 metres tall, nearly two miles higher than Mount Everest (8,849 metres tall) whilst 1.87 women would be 3.01 metres tall, less than the height of a basketball hoop (3.048 metres or 10 feet)
6. UNESCO UIS ‘Gross Graduation ratio from first degree programmes (ISCED 6 and 7) in tertiary education, male (%) GGR_6t7_M’ – Get data here – gives for 3.94% for sub-Saharan Africa men & 3.94% & ‘Gross Graduation ratio from first degree programmes ISCED 6 and 7 in tertiary education, female %, Indicator GGR_6t7_F.. ’ Get data here – for sub-Saharan Africa is 3.41% and for North America & West Europe is 50.29%. So the gap between female graduation rates in sub-Saharan Africa and in the North America and Western Europe region is 46.88% with 0.53% due to female and male gender graduations rates being different in sub-Saharan Africa – so 98.9% of the difference is due to regional inequality.
7. UNESCO UIS ‘Gross Graduation ratio from first degree programmes (ISCED 6 and 7) in tertiary education -GGR.6T7 , both sexes %’ – Get data here – using SDG regions gives Europe and Northern America region in 2000 as 29.31% and in 2023 as 44.96% for an increase of 15.65% and gives Sub-Saharan Africa region as 2.56% for 2000 and 4.03% in 2018 (latest year)for an increase of 1.47 % and World gives as 17.45% in 2000 and 26.70% in 2023 an increase of 9.25%
8. & 9. & 10. UNESCO UIS ‘Out of School Estimates’ (Accessed June 2025) – Get data here – for Africa (sub-Saharan Africa plus North Africa) gives 119,250,000 for 2024 and shows this is the highest number this century. It also shows 96,000,000 for 2010 and 107,230,000 for 2000 meaning there was a fall in the first decade of the 21st century and then an increase of 23,250,000 between 2010 and 2024.
11. Research.Com ‘101 American School Statistics: 2024 Data, Trends & Predictions’, Get data here – shows in 2019, 15.3 million US students enrolled in high school (9th to 12th grade).
12. UNESCO UIS ‘Out of School Estimates’ (Accessed June 2025) – Get data here – shows the number of children in the Rest of the World (World total minus Africa) was 285,470,000 in 2000 and 153,650,000 in 2024, a fall of 131,820,000 so far this century
13. UNESCO UIS ‘Out of School Estimates’ (Accessed June 2025) – Get data here
14. UNESCO UIS ‘Completion rate, secondary education, both sexes UNESCO %’ – Get data here & UNICEF ‘Percentage of children aged 5-17 years engaged in child labour’ Get data here
15. UNESCO, UIS ‘Completion rate, upper secondary education, female %’ – Get data here – , gives 2.71% for Chad in 2019 & World Bank ‘Indicator SP.DYN.IMRT.FE.IN Female Infant mortality rate’ – Get data here – gives 5.94% for Chad in 2021 minus the 0.38% rate for high income countries (as a maximum estimate of the current proportion of infant deaths that are unavoidable) for 5.56% in avoidable deaths.
16. UNESCO UIS, ‘Gross Graduation ratio from first degree programmes (ISCED 6 and 7) in tertiary education -GGR.6T7 , both sexes %’ – Get data here – gives 55.52% for Portugal in 2021 & ‘Indicator, Completion rate, primary education, both sexes (%)’ – Get data here – gives 53.50% primary school completion rate for Madagascar in 2024
