The role of governance in girl‐child education: Insights on the odds against Nigerian women in leadership

Abstract It is widely recognized that prioritizing female education is the global best investment. This is because the promotion of girls' access to education is essential for increasing women's formal economic opportunities and their participation in public decision‐making in the long term. Thus, understanding the nexus between governance and women empowerment becomes central for developing new thinking and addressing prevailing challenges. The study, therefore, examines the impact of governance effectiveness on school enrolment, primary, female (% gross) in Nigeria between 1996 and 2020, using autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration and vector error correction mechanism (VECM) for the assessment of long‐run causality. Results show that governance effectiveness has a significant and positive effect on female primary school enrolment in the long run and in the short run. In addition, findings indicate that there exists bidirectional causality between the effectiveness of governance and female primary school enrolment, suggesting that these indicators are interconnected as they could influence each other. While it is recognized that government policies seem to have failed to redress the norms, societal values, and behaviors that contribute to the perpetuation of inequalities in education enrolment, good governance could further stimulate capacity development, thereby enhancing girl‐child education.