needed to ensure that all parts of the educational system are aligned with the goal of improving learning, overcoming political challenges and technical constraints that are often particularly severe in developing countries (Pritchett, 2013; World Bank, 2018).

**Within countries, access to formal education varies substantially across gender, location and socio-economic classes, contributing to inequalities across these groups.** Figure IVa highlights the gender dimension, displaying the difference between men’s and women’s average years of schooling against GDP per worker. In most of the poorer countries, women are less likely to be educated than men, while this gap disappears or even reverses with development.<sup>3</sup> Figure IVb visualizes the extent of educational disparities across administrative units for countries at different deciles of the income distribution. Poorer countries feature very large gaps in average education between regions, while richer countries tend to be more homogeneous. In addition, the importance of the family’s socio-economic status for children’s educational achievements has been widely documented in several rich countries (Bj ̈orklund and Salvanes, 2011), and its role might be even larger in poorer countries (though intergenerational data are less readily available for developing economies). These different sources of within-country heterogeneity highlight the importance of understanding the barriers faced by different groups in human capital accumulation and utilization, an issue discussed in greater detail in Section 3.

Figure IV: Schooling Gaps within Countries <!-- Start of picture text --> (a) Gender Gap (b) Across Regions<br>4 15<br>EGY<br>CAFCOD LBR HTITGOGMBYEM SENBEN PAK IND ARM USA<br>20 BDI MWINERMOZ SLEUGAMLIRWA TZANPLZWEZMBTJKCMRLSOKHMKENBGDSDNMRT CIV COGMMRKGZHNDNICVENGHASYRVNM BLZ LAOPHLBOLMDASLVMARGTMJAMSWZIDNUKRJORIRQMNGTUNNAMGUYARMECUALBPERPRYLKADZABRBCHNZAFFJIIRNCOLBRADOMBWAGAB SRB THACRIBGRMDVMEXMUSURYARGR HRV OUCMYSKAZHLLVAPANHUNRUSTURGRCLTUPOLSVKCYPESTPRTTTOSVN CZE MLT ESPITANZLISRKORJPNFRAFIN GBR BELTWNCANISLDNKDEUBHRAUSAUTSWEHKGNLDSAUKWTUSA NORCHEARESGPIRLLUX MAC QAT 105 ETH NPL SEN IRQ PERPAN URY POL FRA<br>-2 0<br>7 8 9 10 11 12 6 7 8 9 10 11<br>Log GDP per worker in PPP (2015) Log GDP per worker in PPP<br>Average Years of Schooling<br>Years of Schooling Difference: Men - Women (2015)<br><!-- End of picture text --> _Notes_ : The left panel plots the difference in the average years of schooling in the population above 25 between men and women against log GDP per worker (in PPP terms) in 2015. The right panel plots (for countries belonging to the first to tenth deciles of the income distribution, plus the United States) average years of schooling in the population above 25, across regions (grey dots) and for the whole country (black dots), against the country’s log GDP per worker (in PPP terms). Data on years of schooling by gender is taken from Barro and Lee (2013), years of schooling by region is from IPUMS International (, n.d.), while GDP per worker is taken from version 10.0 of the Penn World Tables (Feenstra et al., 2015).

> 3Evans et al. (2021) document that in most developing countries gender gaps in education have typically widened first (as boys started going to school) and then shrunk in a second phase (as educational expansions started involving girls as well).

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