Thaier al-Sudani / Reuters
Schoolgirls pass an American soldier in the Ameen district of Baghdad on 14 October 2008, during the years of US military presence in Iraq.
For millions of girls, the walk to school is ordinary: a uniform, a bag, a friend at the gate. For millions of others it involves a boat, a mountain path, a checkpoint, or no school at all. A 2025 report by UNICEF, Plan International and UN Women estimated that about 122 million girls worldwide are still out of school, even though the number has fallen by roughly 39% over the past two decades.
Why does it matter so much? Girls who complete their education tend to marry later, earn more, raise healthier children and take a fuller part in public life. That is why aid agencies treat girls' schooling as one of the most powerful investments a country can make.
The 30 photographs below, taken by news photographers between 2008 and 2017 and first gathered by HuffPost, show girls on their way to class, in lessons and celebrating results across five continents. Together they show how much the school day has in common around the world, and how unequal the journey still is.
Africa
Somalia: Garowe, Puntland
Simon Maina via Getty Images
Boys and girls walk through Gambool high school on 10 September 2013. The school, funded by the European Commission, was built for 1,750 pupils. Garowe is the capital of Puntland, a state in north-eastern Somalia; it is sometimes wrongly placed in Somaliland, which is a separate, self-declared state. The photo was taken days before a Brussels conference on a "New Deal" for rebuilding Somalia.
South Africa: Johannesburg
Siphiwe Sibeko / Reuters
Schoolgirls walk past riot police outside the Hillbrow magistrate's court on 12 October 2016. Inside, students arrested at the University of the Witwatersrand were appearing in court after protests demanding free higher education, part of the nationwide #FeesMustFall movement of 2015 and 2016.
Kenya: Kikuyu
AFP via Getty Images
Two schoolgirls walk towards a commuter train in Kikuyu, just outside Nairobi, on 13 September 2016. Kenya's railway dates to 1896, when British colonial authorities began building the Uganda Railway inland from Mombasa.
The Gambia: Kairaba Avenue
Thierry Gouegnon / Reuters
Two girls in uniform walk along Kairaba Avenue, a main road in the greater Banjul area, on 24 January 2017. The picture was taken during the country's political crisis that month, when long-time leader Yahya Jammeh refused for weeks to accept his election defeat.
Morocco: High Atlas Mountains
Fadel Senna via Getty Images
A girl walks to school in Taghzirt, an isolated village in al-Haouz province south of Marrakesh, on 4 March 2016. In remote mountain areas, distance is one of the main reasons girls leave school early. The same province was later struck by the deadly earthquake of September 2023.
Central African Republic: Bangui
Thomas Koehler / Photothek via Getty Images
A student stands in a classroom in the capital, Bangui, on 12 March 2014. The country was then in the grip of a civil conflict that had closed many schools and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
Middle East and Central Asia
Iraq: near Najaf
Haidar Hamdani via Getty Images
A schoolgirl climbs a riverbank after crossing by small wooden boat in Al-Mishkhab district, about 25 km south of Najaf, on 1 April 2015. Local women told the photographer that the boat was one of the few ways they had to get around.
Syria: Eastern Ghouta
Bassam Khabieh / Reuters
A girl with a school bag walks through eastern al-Ghouta, near Damascus, on 21 October 2014. The area was under siege for years during the Syrian war, yet many families kept sending their children to makeshift schools.
Iran: Tehran
Behrouz Mehri / AFP via Getty Images
A group of schoolgirls watches an open session of Iran's parliament on 27 February 2013, during a debate on a draft law to restrict journalists' and camera crews' access to those sessions.
Iran: Aradan
Ahmed Jadallah / Reuters
Schoolgirls walk through Aradan, east of Tehran, on 12 March 2008. The small town was the birthplace of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president at the time.
Afghanistan: Baghlan province
Shah Marai / AFP via Getty Images
Afghan schoolgirls board a bus in Qara Zaghan village on 7 May 2013. Scenes like this are now impossible for older girls: since March 2022 the Taliban have barred girls from school beyond grade six, and in December 2022 they banned women from universities. Afghanistan is the only country where girls are officially barred from secondary and higher education.
South Asia
India: Rajasthan
Jonas Gratzer / LightRocket via Getty Images
Children from nomadic families, aged 6 to 14, sit under a temporary roof in the village of Bilwadi on 29 October 2014. The shelter keeps off the desert sun while they learn arithmetic and how to read and write in Hindi. Mobile and open-air schools like this help children whose families move with the seasons.
India: Kashmir
Waseem Andrabi / Hindustan Times via Getty Images
Kashmiri schoolgirls play during recess in Kulhama, in Bandipora district, on 11 August 2015. Breaks like this are part of the school day everywhere, from the Himalayas to the suburbs.
Pakistan: Peshawar
A. Majeed / AFP via Getty Images
Pupils pray for Malala Yousafzai at their school in Peshawar on 12 October 2012. Three days earlier, the 15-year-old campaigner for girls' education had been shot by a Taliban gunman on her school bus in Swat. She survived, and in 2014, at 17, she shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi.
Bangladesh: Savar
Thomas Trutschel via Getty Images
Girls in school uniform walk home along a road in Savar, near Dhaka, on 13 April 2016. Bangladesh is often cited as a success story, with roughly as many girls as boys now enrolled in primary and secondary school.
Sri Lanka: Colombo
Lakruwan Wanniarachchi / AFP via Getty Images
Muslim schoolgirls stand at the edge of a seaport in Colombo on 20 May 2013, after a school trip from their home town of Kalmunai on the east coast, reportedly about 370 km (231 miles) away.
East and Southeast Asia
Japan: Kyoto
Reuters
Schoolgirls in surgical masks cross a street at lunchtime on 19 November 2014. Long before the pandemic, masks were a common sight in Japan during cold and pollen seasons, worn both for protection and as a courtesy to others.
Philippines: Zambales
Lorgina Minguito / Reuters
A woman walks with pupils through the shallows of a rocky beach on the first day of classes, 1 June 2015, in Sitio Kinabuksan, Subic, north of Manila. For coastal and island communities, getting to school can mean wading, boating or long walks along the shore.
Hong Kong
Anthony Wallace via Getty Images
Students walk down a busy city street on 4 July 2016. In one of the world's densest cities, the school run often means trams, buses and crowded pavements rather than open roads.
China: Shanghai
Johannes Eisele / AFP via Getty Images
Children attend class at a primary school in the Jinqiao area of Shanghai on 1 September 2014, the traditional first day of the Chinese school year.
South Korea: Seoul
Ed Jones / AFP via Getty Images
Students sit the College Scholastic Ability Test, known as the suneung, at Poongmun high school on 13 November 2014. The exam is so important for university entry that on test day stock markets open late and planes are grounded during the English listening section.
Europe and the Americas
England: Manchester
Christopher Furlong / Getty Images
Students at Withington Girls' School celebrate their A-level results on 15 August 2013. Results day each August decides university places for hundreds of thousands of students across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Spain: Seville
Marcelo del Pozo / Reuters
Pupils in period costume walk during a school trip to a permanent exhibition at the Velázquez research centre on 11 May 2009. The painter Diego Velázquez was born in Seville in 1599.
Germany: Berlin
Konzept und Bild / Ullstein Bild via Getty Images
Seventh and eighth graders swim during a school triathlon on 19 June 2010. Sport is a regular part of the German school week, and swimming lessons are a standard part of the curriculum in many states.
Russia: Moscow
Natalia Kolesnikova / AFP via Getty Images
School leavers celebrate their last day of classes in Red Square on 25 May 2011. Russian schools mark the end of the year with the "Last Bell" ceremony, when graduates often wear ribbons or old-style uniforms.
United States: Chelsea, Massachusetts
Brian Snyder / Reuters
Sixteen-year-old Precious Perez, who has been blind since birth, listens in a US history class on 24 January 2014. She walks to her public high school with a friend, takes voice lessons and plays goalball, a team sport designed for visually impaired athletes. Her story is a reminder that access to education also means access for disabled students.
Brazil: Acre
Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP via Getty Images
Girls take part in a lesson at a forest school in Xapuri, in north-western Brazil, on 8 October 2014. Xapuri is known as the home town of Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper and environmental campaigner murdered in 1988.
Haiti: Port-au-Prince
Thony Belizaire / AFP via Getty Images
Brazilian UN peacekeepers hand out juice and crackers to pupils at the Immaculate Conception School on 6 February 2013. Brazil led the military side of the UN mission in Haiti, which helped with security and rebuilding after the 2010 earthquake.
Cuba: Havana
STR / AFP via Getty Images
Schoolgirls read in class on 13 November 2012. Cuba has reported near-universal literacy since a mass literacy campaign in 1961.
Ecuador: Carchi province
Eitan Abramovich / AFP via Getty Images
Girls pose at a rural school in La Palizada, Tulcán, close to the Colombian border, on 7 November 2012. Small rural schools like this one often teach several grades in a single room.
Where Girls' Education Stands Today
The progress behind many of these photos is real. Far more girls are in school today than a generation ago, and in many countries girls now outnumber boys at university. But the gains are uneven. Conflict, poverty, child marriage, long distances and unsafe journeys still keep tens of millions of girls out of class, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and in crisis zones. Afghanistan has gone backwards entirely.
If these pictures moved you, organisations such as UNICEF, the Malala Fund and Plan International publish up-to-date figures and run programmes that help girls reach school and stay there.
Sources: Photos by the credited Reuters, AFP and Getty Images photographers, first collected by HuffPost; Girls' Goals report: 122 million girls out of school (2025); Garowe; Female education in Afghanistan; Malala Yousafzai; College Scholastic Ability Test.
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