53% of children in the central region of Burkina Faso finish primary school compared with 8% of children in the most remote Sahel region; that’s a gap of 45%. And the worst-off are from the minority Tuareg ethnic group, where only 3% finish primary school. If governments want to improve education and get all children into school, they have to understand the pattern of inequalities that underlie the national figures. Otherwise, they can’t make effective use of resources, public education campaigns, political attention or anything else. The mainstream narrative – about the runaway incomes of the richest people in the richest countries, the absurdities of boardroom pay and tax avoidance and so on – might prick our sense of fairness, but it has only a limited amount to offer the analysis and treatment of extreme poverty. The second, lesser known, inequality story is about the things that keep people poor. This story offers fertile ground for the coalitions and policy agendas that can actually address both poverty and inequality.

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