Human capital endowments such as investments in health and education can ensure that people meet their potential and fully contribute to society.
• Progress seen in health, but more needed with respect to maternal mortality. By some markers, such as life expectancy, global health endowments have improved over the last two decades;74 however, significant challenges remain to reducing high maternal mortality in many countries.75 Estimates suggest that in 2015, roughly 303,000 women died during and following pregnancy and childbirth, and that most of these deaths could have been prevented.76 Beyond worrying maternal mortality rates, given women tend to outlive men, they face additional health problems such as dementia and non-communicable diseases (for example, breast cancer and diabetes).77
• Education gaps closing, but not evenly. Gaps between boys and girls with regards to several aspects of education-including enrollment, completion of primary school, and transition to secondary school-have narrowed,78 yet these gains do not accrue evenly across countries, with low-income countries seeing the poorest performance.79 Furthermore, girls in low-income countries who enter secondary school are less likely than boys to finish. The story at the tertiary level differs, with global enrollments for females stronger than those for males. However, gaps remain in the fields studied, with women being overrepresented in education and health, and underrepresented in engineering, manufacturing, construction and science.80
Overcoming these challenges requires addressing both demand and supply-side barriers. On the demand side, barriers to achieving adequate health and education outcomes include low economic resources, poor knowledge and information, limited mobility, and general social norms preventing women from seeking health care or girls from completing school. Supply-side barriers for health include availability and affordability of qualified health-care providers, and adequacy of care; for education, they include availability of education facilities, services, and properly trained teachers.
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74 World Bank Group 2016 Gender Strategy: Both men (from 66 to 69) and women (from 70 to 73) saw increases to life expectancy between 2000 and 2013.
75 World Bank Group 2016 Gender Strategy.
76 Leontine et al, "Global, regional and national levels and trends in maternal mortality between 1990 and 2015, with scenario-based projections to 2030: a systematic analysis by the UN Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group Alkema," The Lancet, Volume 387, Issue 10017, pp. 462-474.
77 World Bank Group 2016 Gender Strategy.
78 Ibid.
79 World Bank Group 2016 Gender Strategy: Only 23 percent of low-income countries have achieved gender parity at the primary level and 15 percent at secondary level.
80 Ibid.