Stipends Alone Won't Close the Gap. Mentors Might.

I have reported on girls' education for over ten years, and I have watched a quiet consensus form: pay families a stipend, and girls will stay in school. The logic is sound, the schemes are well-meaning, and the cash genuinely helps. And yet, standing in too many courtyards, I have come to think we are solving the cheaper half of the problem and ignoring the harder half.

What money can and cannot buy

A stipend can buy a uniform, an exam form, a bus fare. These are real barriers and removing them matters. But a stipend cannot answer the question a fourteen-year-old girl is actually asking, often silently: who, exactly, am I staying in school to become? When she cannot picture a single woman from a life like hers who studied and built something, the money keeps her enrolled but not convinced.

We have made it affordable to stay in school. We have not always made it imaginable to.

The case for mentors

The girls I have met who pushed through, against distance and doubt and a dozen reasons to quit, almost all had one thing in common, and it was rarely the largest stipend. It was a person. An older girl from the next village who was studying nursing. A teacher who stayed back twenty minutes. A field worker who simply kept showing up and asking about marks. One concrete human being who made a different future look possible because she was living it.

Mentorship is harder to fund than cash transfers. You cannot wire it in one click, you cannot count it neatly on a dashboard, and its results are slow. That, I suspect, is precisely why we underinvest in it. It does not photograph well in a quarterly report.

What I am not saying

I am not arguing against stipends. Take the money away and many girls fall out immediately. I am arguing that money alone treats girls as a budget line rather than as people deciding what to want. Pair the rupee with a mentor, and you fund both halves of the problem: the cost of staying and the reason to.

If I could redirect even a small share of what we spend transferring cash into training and placing local women mentors, I think we would be astonished at the return. The cheapest part of keeping a girl in school is paying for it. The most powerful part is showing her who she could become.