Socio-Cultural Factors Affecting Girls’ Participation in Secondary Education in Rural North West Nigeria

This study empirically investigates the socio-cultural factors that limit girls' participation in secondary education in rural communities of North West Nigeria, using data from Katsina, Zamfara, and Sokoto States. Despite improvements in basic education enrolment nationally, rural girls in the North West continue to face severe secondary schooling participation barriers rooted in deeply embedded cultural practices and gender norms. This study employs a concurrent mixed-method design, combining a household survey of 450 families with adolescent girls aged 12 to 18 in rural communities with 30 focus group discussions involving parents, community and religious leaders, and girls themselves. Socio-cultural factors assessed include early marriage expectation, purdah norms, parental perception of girls' education value, bride price customs, and religious justification for limiting female schooling. Binary logistic regression identifies the strongest participation predictors, while thematic analysis explores the reasoning behind observed practices. Results confirm that early marriage expectation and parental perception of limited returns to girls' education are the two most statistically significant barriers to participation. Purdah norms interact with distance to school to create compounding barriers. Religious leaders who positively endorsed girls' education were associated with significantly higher participation rates in their communities. The study concludes that socio-cultural transformation, community engagement, and religious leader advocacy are necessary complements to supply-side school provision interventions. It recommends a multi-stakeholder girls' education coalition in each state involving community and religious leaders as central partners in designing locally acceptable participation incentives.

Keywords: girls' education, socio-cultural factors, North West Nigeria, rural education, gender barrier.