(Bloomberg) -- Thirteen-year-old Zeynep Kocak says she gave up hope of returning to school when her mother got her a job sewing buttons at a textile factory. She had all the schooling a Turkish girl needed, her mother told her.

Her chances to get an education were revived after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government, under pressure from the European Union, began handing out monthly grants of 39 liras ($26) to encourage parents to keep girls in school. Erdogan's government starts European Union entry talks on Oct. 3.

"School is mostly fun, factory work isn't," said Kocak, wearing her blue uniform, as she completed her first school week on Sept. 16. Her school is in Sultanbeyli, a poor district on the southeastern fringes of Istanbul.

About a million primary school-age Turkish girls, or 16 percent, are not in school, the United Nations Children's Fund says. Belgium, Finland and Denmark have a 100 percent enrollment rate. On average, fewer than 5 percent of girls are out of school in the 25 EU countries, United Nations figures show.

Turkey must "step up efforts to guarantee women's right to education," a July European Parliament report said. The illiteracy rate of Turkish women, at about 20 percent, is too high and too few women are in the labor market, the report said.

Erdogan says EU entry is critical to attracting investment, creating jobs and boosting income. The country will need to overcome opposition from EU politicians including Germany's Angela Merkel, who say Turkey isn't European enough.

`Positive Discrimination'

Turkey first applied to join the then-European Economic Community in 1959 and was accepted as a membership candidate in 1999. To meet entry criteria, it abolished the death penalty, allowed Kurdish-language courses, scrapped state security courts, revised the penal code and reined in the army. EU officials meet in Brussels on Sept. 28 to discuss an entry- negotiations plan that's expected to last at least a decade.

Erdogan, 51, said in a televised speech in the central city of Kutahya on Sept. 12 that the government will practice "positive discrimination" to encourage families to enroll their daughters in school.

"I'm calling on all Turkish families: don't deny your daughters the right to an education," he said.

Poverty is one of the main reasons cited by Turkish families for keeping girls out of school, Unicef says.

The country's per-capita income is $4,200, and more than 16 million Turks, or about quarter of the population, live below the internationally-defined poverty threshold. They have incomes below $4.30 a day after adjusting for local prices, according to the State Institute of Statistics.

Boy Bias

Lack of money alone doesn't explain the gender gap in the education system, said Edmond McLoughney, head of Unicef's mission in Turkey.

"There is a bias against girls within families, a patriarchal attitude," McLoughney said. "When a family claims they're too poor to send the girls to school, you almost always find that they come up with the money to send their boys." About 10 percent of boys of school age aren't enrolled, Unicef figures show.

The discrimination is acute in rural areas, where girls as young as 13 are married off by their families. Many people who live in districts such as Sultanbeyli are migrants from villages and stick to those traditions. In some rural areas, more than half the girls aged six to 14 aren't in school, Unicef says.

Ataturk's Dream

Husne Coser took her 10-year-old daughter Rujiye out of school this year.

"She's been going to school for three years," Coser, who herself never went to school, said as she stood outside her home in Sultanbeyli. "She has already learned to read and write. That's enough for a girl."

A Unicef campaign, named "Let's Go to School, Girls," is aimed at changing such attitudes. Unicef representatives go door to door, talking with families about the benefits of sending girls to school and informing them of their rights to grants.

The country's first constitution made primary education mandatory for boys and girls, and within a decade most primary and middle schools were turned into co-educational institutions.

Kemal Ataturk, Turkey's first president in 1923, sought gender equality in education and ensured that his adopted daughters benefited from it: One became Turkey's first female fighter pilot, another a professor of history.

The most recent EU report on Turkey found that "women remain vulnerable to discriminatory practices, due largely to a lack of education and a high illiteracy rate."

`Ready to Fight'

That may change as Turkish mothers who never learned to read or write themselves seek a different future for their daughters.

Rukiye Aytekin, a 23-year-old mother of four, said she's determined to keep her two girls at school, risking opposition by family elders.

"I can see there's going to be a fight," Aytekin said. "But I want my daughters to have a chance to do the things I never could. So I'm ready to fight."

As for Kocak, one of 120,000 girls benefiting from Turkey's push to educate more young women, she says she's happy her mother Bingol changed her mind about putting her back in school to study more mathematics and English.