Beyond ‘What Works’: An Integrated Contextual Framework for Understanding Girls’ Educational Participation and Exclusion

Despite decades of major investment in education globally, girls' education still faces wide inequalities in participation, retention, completion, learning, and progression. This suggests that intervention performance depends less on programme design than on context and social forces. The so-called “what works” agenda has provided strong evidence on cash transfers, school feeding, health and sanitation programmes, mentorship, and community mobilisation, but little research explains why these interventions work, fail, or produce unequal outcomes in different contexts. This theoretical review aims to bridge this gap by examining the theoretical bases of current academic thinking on girls' education and by providing a model of educational participation and exclusion. The study conducted a qualitative, critical, and integrative analysis of 55 peer-reviewed articles, policy reports, and foundational texts and identified nine primary theories: human capital theory, liberal feminism, capability theory, rights-based theory, social reproduction theory, intersectionality, ecological systems theory, critical pedagogy, and postcolonial/decolonial feminist theory. It showed that these theories relate to many dimensions of girls’ education, equality, agency, economic returns, power, structural inequality, coloniality, and multi-level context, but their fragmented, intervention-based approach fails to account for causal factors and context-specificity. Drawing on ecological, capability, feminist, intersectional, and decolonial perspectives, the review proposes an Integrated Contextual Framework that reframes “what works” as context-responsive, equity-oriented, and epistemically just. This framework has implications for how girls’ education interventions are designed, implemented, evaluated, adapted, and sustained, and it gives researchers and policy-makers a framework to understand better—and address—persistent school inequity.