Eliminating Gender Disparity in all Levels of Education

Women have an enormous impact on the well-being of their families and societies - yet their potential is not realized because of discriminatory social norms. And while their status has improved in recent decades, gender inequalities remain pervasive and its impact show throughout their lives. In some countries, infant girls are less likely to survive than infant boys because of parental discrimination and neglect. Girls are more likely to drop out of school and to receive less education than boys because of discrimination, education expenses, and household duties.

By 2005, the number of girls in primary and secondary schools world-wide should be equal to that of boys: this is the target of the third Millennium Development Goal (MDG). Tacit within this target is an underlying conviction that poverty cannot be effectively addressed without the success of the above-mentioned education goal. Further, it underscores the importance of women's education in ensuring the success of MDGs.

So what is coming in the way?
Today, in the fag-end of 2005, developments in education reveal that as far as the MDG's goal for gender equality is concerned, the world still has a long way to go. In its The State of the World's Children 2004 report, UNESCO states that 'the global number of children out of school stubbornly remains undiminished at 121 million - and the majority is still girls;' 65 million girls to be exact.

Discrimination in girls' access to education is owing to customary attitudes, early marriages and pregnancies, inadequate and gender-biased teaching and educational materials, sexual harassment and lack of adequate and otherwise inaccessible schooling facilities. Girls undertake heavy domestic work at a very early age. Girls and young women are expected to manage both educational and domestic responsibilities, often resulting in poor scholastic performance and early drop-out from the educational system.

Critics of the MDG have said that the target goals are over simplistic and too quantitative. The indicators chosen for monitoring do not take into account the myriad of differences among countries and cultures. The indicators are reduced to mere numbers such as: the ratio of boys and girls at all levels of education; gender disparities in adult literacy; the percentage of women in waged employment in the non-agricultural sector; and the percentage of women holding seats in national parliament. These indicators do not take into consideration other key areas for which there are no international comparable statistics such as the frequency of child-brides or violence against women, which have as much influence on how girls are educated as say, how much budget a government decides to set aside for them.

What needs to be done?
The Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) states that governments need to create an educational and social environment, in which women and men, girls and boys, are treated equally and encouraged to achieve their full potential. It also means respecting their freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief, and where educational resources promote non-stereotyped images of women and men. It is also essential to create a gender-sensitive educational system in order to ensure equal education and training opportunities and full and equal participation of women in education, administration, policy and decision-making; provide access for and retention of girls and women at all levels of education and last but not the least develop training programmes and materials for teachers and educators that raise awareness about the status, role and contribution of women and men in the family.

This in itself is a challenge for governments who fail to think outside of the conventional goals and statistics. Even if training material for teachers and educators are developed to tackle this, they need to be equipped with good education and communication tools to achieve the objective. Worldwide today, there are a number of gender and education projects today which have a strong communications focus. Let us look at one such success story.

An example from Malawi
Culturally in Malawi, the socialisation process victimises girls because they are considered to be the weaker sex. Spending valuable resources such as money to pay for their education is considered a waste because they are expected to get married and be supported by their husbands. As a result, girls' educational attainment has remained low; their health, especially reproductive health, has been poor; they lack training in most vocational skills and generally, their participation in development activities has been very minimal. In the past, some mechanisms were put in place to try and improve the participation of girls, such as through free secondary school education. However, such mechanisms proved to be short lived. This pointed to the need for a new strategy to look into a more workable system of assisting girls to remain in school, healthy, skilled and economically empowered thereby improving their position in society and increasing their participation in leadership and decision-making processes. Thus a project with a strong education and communications focus was developed.

Meeting the Development and Participation Rights of Adolescent Girls
This United Nations effort seeks to increase gender equity and equality through skills development. It addresses 'the life situation of adolescent girls in a holistic manner with the purpose of creating an enabling environment for adolescent girls' equal participation in leadership and decision-making processes in all spheres of society.' This project is part of the Southern African Youth (SAY) Initiative.

The objectives of this Project include

• Increasing the participation of girls in youth initiatives
• Increasing the number of girls taking up administrative posts at school, community, organisation, and district levels
• Improving girls' educational status
• Providing different vocational skills for girls, including those that were culturally believed to be "male" vocational skills
• Improving reproductive health services for adolescent girls
• Increasing girls' economic independence

Main Communication Strategies
The Project identified 5 barriers to girls' obtaining equality and then helped devise interventions. These barriers were low participation of girls in development activities in the communities; poor education attainment; poor reproductive health; lack of vocational skills training; and low socio-economic status. The project's strategy is to address these barriers in a manner that includes the whole community. The aim is to facilitate positive changes in attitude and behaviour on the part of the community.
In that context, the community was involved in the entire planning process: Community members identified the problems and their suggested interventions. One hundred adolescent girls were trained in agriculture, sewing, and computers; in addition, 24 project staff were trained in the development of information, education, and communication materials. The project trained a total of 276 peer educators and close to 2000 teachers on how to reduce drop-out rates among girls and improve their school performance. A total of 641 girls were trained in life skills and a total of 137 community- based condom distributors were also trained.
Project activities included establishment of girls-only clubs, low-cost community youth centres, adolescent girls' literacy programmes, youth-friendly health services, and sexual reproductive health services for out-of-school young people.

Facts:

• Of the staggering 65 million girls out of school, 83 percent are found in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and East Asia and the Pacific.
• The Global Campaign for Education reported that, in Bangladesh, 1.5 million girls are out of school. This, in spite of the fact that Bangladesh is a good example of a country whose government, under pressure from women's groups has really bitten the political bullet and taken decisive action on gender equity.
• More than 40 percent of women in Africa do not have access to basic education.
• Educated mothers immunize their children 50 percent more often than mothers who are not educated.
• The children of a woman with five years of primary school education have a survival rate 40 percent higher than children of women with no education.
• If a girl is educated for six years or more, as an adult her prenatal care, postnatal care and childbirth survival rates, will dramatically and consistently improve.
• AIDS spreads twice as quickly among uneducated girls than among girls that have even some schooling.
• According to recent studies, education contributes directly to the growth of national income by improving the productive capacities of the labour force.
• As female education rises, fertility, population growth, and infant and child mortality fall and family health improves.
  ¡ Increases in girls' secondary school enrolment are associated with increases in women's participation in the labour force and their contributions to household and national income.
• Women's increased earning capacity, in turn, has a positive effect on child nutrition.
• Children especially daughters of educated mothers are more likely to be enrolled in school and to have higher levels of educational attainment.
• Educated women are more politically active and better informed about their legal rights and how to exercise them.

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