Improvements in the education of girls is one of the most positive shifts in the developing world over the past decade. Supported by aid agencies, including Camfed and more recently the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, efforts to send girls to primary and secondary school and on to further and higher education have made great strides.
In his new year message, the pope will urge rich countries to support the education of poor children as part of a big debt relief programme in the 2025 papal jubilee year.
It’s also a cross-party issue. Ministers, academics and thinktanks all say improvements in girls’ education – especially in maths and science – have positive knock-on effects, from higher economic growth and reduced levels of poverty to lower birth rates and greater financial independence for women.
What is less discussed are the unintended side-effects of encouraging girls and women to enhance their educational qualifications and join the labour market without addressing other key economic issues, including social housing.
More extensive and higher levels of education mean both parents work and generate higher incomes but, wherever they are in the world, they quickly find most of this extra cash is devoted to paying for a roof over their head and, when it is privately provided, childcare costs.
The correlation between soaring property prices and the rising household incomes that result from a higher participation rate among women is a strong one in every developed country.
Looking back, we can see the trend in Britain for women to join the labour force accelerated in the 1980s. And while men’s wages continued to rise over the next 40 years, the transformation in household incomes came from having a second salary coming in, not the main wage earner securing stellar pay rises.
At the same time, a shrinking social housing sector meant households with two working people were forced into the private housing market. At first they outbid households with one working parent for the “best” family homes. Then, once two working parents became the norm, they bid against each other, driving prices ever higher.
The definition of the “best” home is often a personal matter. That said, we can see what it means from where prices rise most strongly. These are the homes nearest good schools, good transport links and high-paying jobs, and with ample space to bring up a family.
It is clear in the UK that property plays the biggest role determining how much families can spend every month, based on analysis of regional disposable incomes.
Social housing is the backstop every country needs to cure this ill, or at least reduce its impact. Ahead of the budget, the UK Labour government pledged to boost the amount of social housing with a £500m top-up for the affordable homes programme – “bringing total investment in housing supply to over £5bn”.
Most governments know that only social housing can bring some balance to a local housing market and provide a low-cost option for average-wage households.
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Nigeria is among many countries to have social housing programmes for this reason. But the developing nation’s state-funded initiatives are tiny relative to the issue they are trying to resolve. Its social housing budget falls below health, education and social welfare in the pecking order, just as it has in the UK over the past 40 years.
By next year, 1.6 billion people are expected to be affected by a global housing shortage, according to the World Bank.
Even the World Economic Forum in Davos, known for hosting the rich and powerful in the Swiss Alps for a week in January each year, has asked itself how to solve this worsening crisis.
Two working parents can achieve a sustained lift to living standards if they are among early adopters able to get on to the property ladder. But for those families that follow on behind, it is a different story.
This is not an argument against women gaining qualifications and joining the labour force. It is an acknowledgment of economic reality when market forces are allowed to dominate without an adequate social-housing safety net: parents end up needing to pay crippling housing and childcare costs, compared with previous generations.
Unless developing-world countries can get a grip on their property markets, they will follow the same path.
It won’t be easy. Mainstream economic thinktanks and international agencies such as the World Bank and IMF are against interfering in local real estate markets. Everyone with any spare cash – across the world – wants to benefit from the surefire hit that is private-sector property investing.
Yet, without the counterbalance of socially owned, affordable homes, private housebuilders will constrict new developments to maintain high prices, meaning households across the developing world will have their rising disposable incomes stolen by the purveyors of real estate – just like households in the rich west.
