Education is viewed as the development panacea and most important factor in women’s empowerment, which in turn is seen as an essential precondition for the elimination of world poverty. Educated girls are expected to get married later, obtain paid employment, and become ‘empowered women’ who will ‘lift the developing world out of poverty.’ My paper and PhD research departs from a puzzle, where girls’ education doesn’t seem to be leading to this expected outcome. In 2019, I lived and worked within the nationwide network of boarding houses (dar taliba) which allow girls from remote villages in Morocco to access education by providing free accommodation close to local schools. Across the houses, girls achieved an average pass rate of 90%, compared to the national average of 53%. Despite this, few go on to achieve the goals advertised by the development world of further study and paid employment. In fact, many girls obtain their diploma and return to their village to get married, where on the surface, their lives are not dissimilar from uneducated girls. Traditional measures of women’s empowerment would therefore consider girls’ boarding houses in Morocco a development failure. Through my ethnographic fieldwork, I problematise the education-equals-empowerment equation and argue that we need to rethink Eurocentric notions that empowerment unfolds along a single, linear pathway, with paid employment and financial independence as prerequisites. I explore ‘alternative empowerment pathways’ linked to education that are overlooked by dominant development metrics, such as education’s impact on self-confidence, agency, and girls’ ability to articulate their aspirations and make decisions about their own lives. I focus on exploring informal and less overt forms of empowerment including girls’ mobility, household bargaining power, self-confidence and self-esteem and gender dynamics within marital relationships. My paper is based on my experiences of working in girls’ boarding houses in 2019, in addition to subsequent research trips and fieldwork that I will undertake from July – November 2022. In my paper, I will explore issues including: - Girls’ education as the development panacea - Is education empowering rural girls within the traditional empowerment framework? - Why is education failing to empower girls? Is education disempowering? - Preliminary findings on empowerment pathways which challenge Western concepts of empowerment