By Deborah Hamanjanji
March 25, 2026
Freedom in education goes beyond being able to enter a classroom; it entails learners being able to freely turn access into impactful opportunity and choice. Zambia has made significant strides in enhancing access to free education, especially for marginalised and low-income households. However, an emerging question has lingered in the minds of many Zambians: have the government's investments in female education left the boys to fend for themselves?
Advancing Freedom Through Girls’
Education
Since 2022, Zambia’s Free Education
Policy has contributed to a 12.4% increase in school enrollment, with 80% of households
reporting that they had benefited from the program. This expansion of access
has been particularly significant for marginalised and low-income families, allowing more girls to enter
classrooms who might otherwise have been left behind.
In tandem with broader enrollment
efforts, the government has worked to develop more STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics) opportunities for female students. Targeted
programs, particularly in peri-urban areas, have paved the way for girls to
pursue STEM subjects that were traditionally male-dominated, opening new
pathways for future careers in high-demand fields.
UNICEF reports that the Gender Parity Index (GPI) at primary school is 1.03 and at secondary school 0.94, highlighting near gender equality in education. For decades, girls were disproportionately disadvantaged by poor menstrual health and education, early marriage, teenage pregnancy, and restrictive cultural norms. Prioritising girls’ education has therefore been and will always be justifiable and essential in promoting freedom, opportunity, and social mobility.
Addressing Boys’ Barriers to
Learning
Advocacy groups focusing on male
children contend that, due to cultural perceptions that boys are more
economically “flexible” or capable of contributing to household income than
their female counterparts, they are disproportionately compelled into child
labour. This dynamic contributes to low enrolment rates and higher levels of
school dropout among male learners in rural and impoverished areas.
Other barriers include drug abuse, lack of mentorship, porous school infrastructure and few options for affordable and quality STEM-streaming schools. This is where equity, rather than equality, becomes critical. Zambia’s education system has rightly developed targeted interventions to support girls and should rightly to do so. The challenge is that the government policies seem to have been hesitant in designing comparable, context-specific support for boys, specifically for young boys residing in rural and impoverished households.
Consequently, the policy direction Zambia must take for education is that of evidence-driven equity. Adaptive equity entails identifying and responding to the emerging and specific challenges affecting girls and boys before inequality inevitably widens.
Learning from Bangladesh
A developing country that demonstrates the feasibility of adaptive equity is Bangladesh. The government used stipend programs to increase girls' participation, but later expanded assistance to economically vulnerable boys in impoverished districts where dropout levels were high. This recalibration preserved gains for the girl whilst preventing new inequalities from emerging, illustrating how policy can adapt to changing needs.
Building Opportunity for All in
Zambia
For Zambia, an education policy rooted in evidence-driven equity requires the Ministry of Education to gather and publish more sex-specific data on dropout rates and transitions into STEM-stream schools. This information will help inform policy as the government can better ascertain the scale of certain demographic-specific gender parities and allocate resources in accordance with the context-specific needs of both girls and boys.
Secondly, a cost-efficient approach
to enhance education access for boys involves strengthening already-existing
STEM and technical public secondary schools by using shared laboratories,
rotating specialist teachers and expanding partnerships with colleges or
private institutions, furthering opportunity and educational freedom for young
boys without burdening the government budget.
Zambia has already demonstrated a
strong commitment to addressing historical educational inequalities affecting
girls, and still has much progress to make. However, building on this
foundation of reform requires broadening the focus of educational equity
efforts. The next step is ensuring that boys at risk of underachievement also
receive timely, targeted support.
Supporting boys need not weaken
girls’ progress; policies should allocate resources to address the unique
barriers each group faces. A Zambia wherein all citizens can acquire the skills
to participate and shape the nation’s social, economic and political scene
safeguards freedom, but this can only be done if our educational policies
calibrate a space of opportunity for both genders.
Zambia’s success in advancing girls’
education marks the start, not the end, of reform. True educational freedom
requires policies that empower all children boys and girls alike to learn,
grow, and shape the nation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Deborah Hamanjanji is a research
fellow at the Impact Center for Policy Research and a student of development
studies at the University of Lusaka