‘Scaling Up’ Good Practices In Girls’ Education

Abstract

This publication focuses on the key issues to address and strategies to put in place in order to meet international targets and national goals for universalizing girls’ access to, retention in and completion of quality education. The right of all children to edu- cation that is free from discrimination and of a sufficient quality to enable their full participation in society has been a goal emphasized through all major modern univer- sal rights treaties, and development discourses. In particular, the Convention against Discrimination in Education, 1960, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), 1979, have defined discrimination in many spheres, including education, as a violation of universal rights. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989, has made the promotion of free primary education and quality education an obligation for governments to respect for children and youth up to the age of 18 years. The strong case for promoting universal rights and gender equality in educa- tion has been supported in more recent international documents. Girls’ and women’s education has been embedded in these international visions of development priorities. Two goals lay out the priorities for attention to gender issues in education. These are: (a) eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005; and (b) achieving gender equality in education by 2015. These goals have developed from the 1990 Jomtien World Conference on Education for All (EFA), and expanded in the fol- low-up World Education Forum (WEF), held in Dakar in 2000. They are supported by the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) for gender equality and women’s empower- ment. This publication focuses on the issue of accelerating action through ‘scaling up’ successful interventions, or components of interventions that are amenable to replica- tion. Much has been learned and documented in recent years about the kinds of policy and programmatic interventions that can have the greatest impact on bringing girls to school. Much less is known about strategies that can keep girls in school and ensure that they receive quality education, but attention has increasingly shifted to learning policy and programmatic lessons in these areas. ‘Scaling up’ lessons that have been proven effective, however, is not a simple mathematical calculation about multiplying inputs across scale. It requires rigorous learning about the conditions that facilitated success, strategies for dealing with the multiple constraints that emerge in the course of pro- gramme or policy implementation, and the management of economic and social uncer- tainties that may disrupt the everyday schooling participation of girls. Achieving gender parity – the equal enrolment of boys and girls in education – has seen significant progress, though international data suggest that there are still disad- vantaged groups that need to be reached. These are groups that may be disadvantaged because of geography, social identity or physical ability, for which special measures that can be integrated with the schooling system as a whole need to be developed. Achieving gender equality, however, is a steeper challenge. This requires the insti- tutionalization of non-discriminatory measures that ensure that, within an overall com- mitment to gender equality, there is redistribution of opportunity and of resources, to enable girls to overcome what are often entrenched social biases against their equal participation in society, economy and politics. ‘Gender equality in education’ thus focuses on both equality of opportunity and equality of treatment. This recognizes that to secure equal outcomes from education for both women and men, there is a need to focus on gender equality in the process of education – whether girls and boys have the same opportunities in education (rather than access to education of unequal quality), are equally treated within education processes, and whether education unlocks equal opportunities for men and women post-schooling. Lessons from experience show that for change in favour of gender equality to become a reality, it is not just a question of more educational resources being required for women, but also education with empowering content and processes. Where women have access to resources, they can become drivers of their own change processes. Ensuring that the content of education is empowering will help accelerate the process whereby women and young girls can serve as change agents within their communities to demon- strate the value of girls’ and women’s education, and by embodying the rights that are being sought on their behalf. What, then, does the transition from parity to equality mean? It means interven- ing more proactively to address the structural roots of gender inequalities. It means taking actions on multiple fronts to question the norms and social rules that construct the identities of men and women in ways that keep them in positions of inequality, where their contributions are differentially valued, and hence are rewarded unequally. Put another way, focus on parity through access measures has created a shift in gender relations. For the shift to deepen and sustain – for these changes are still vulnerable to changes in wider economic and social structures – attention is needed to the gendered terms on which girls and boys enter and participate in schooling systems. For countries that are still lagging behind in achieving gender parity, strategies that address structural roots of inequality more proactively may help them move faster towards achieving both sets of goals in the desired time frame. In this publication, we focus on some of the well-known lessons of what constitutes ‘good practice’ for girls’ education, and synthesise some of the lessons that are evident about the underlying conditions that give rise to, and sustain these forms of good prac- tice. Numerous initiatives – led by governments, by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and supported by donors and international civil-society organizations – have contributed to creating a groundswell of change, from a historical perspective, in rela- tively short periods. Much of the promotion of education in recent decades has represented significant change in many societies, particularly in terms of dissolving resist- ances to the participation of women in public life to some extent. Implicit in attempts to ‘scale up’ is the importance of ensuring that we know the comparative advantages of different kinds of action in order to achieve a co-ordinated, multi-pronged, partnership- based approach. Experiences from ‘scaling up’ gender-equality initiatives in education were documented in 2004 in two workshops, organized by the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) partners. This publication draws mostly, but not solely on the case studies and reports that resulted from these workshops. Lessons from good practices reviewed for this publication demonstrate the bias in education policies in developing countries towards targeted ‘girls’ education’ initiatives, with far less attention paid to the kinds of systemic reform required by a commitment to gender mainstreaming. While targeted interventions send out clear messages about the value placed by state/intervention on girls’ and women’s education, and also help to accelerate change in the education access of disadvantaged groups and girls through the creation of specific measures – on their own they may do little to alter systems of provision in such a way that girls enjoy equality of treatment and equality of opportu- nity once they are within the system. To sustain the changes brought about by targeted interventions that are aimed at acceleration, gender-aware reform of education systems is critical. This suggests a challenge for ‘gender mainstreaming’ in education that is yet to be addressed. The review undertaken for this publication points to the importance of a sig- nifi cant knowledge base, not just on ‘what works’ but on ‘what makes strategies work’. Overall, better knowledge of what works and how it works for promoting gender equal- ity in education is an important first step and requires significant investment by donors and national governments in considered empirical research. Syntheses of existing knowledge encounter severe constraints in drawing specific technical lessons from exist- ing knowledge, which may not provide the required information from which lessons can be gleaned. The publication concludes with the observation of four areas where further work is urgently needed. First, there is a need for detailed work on gender-equality initiatives, investigating how they may be ‘scaled up’, and the kinds of institutional support required to ensure that the institutional lessons of ‘what works’ are more accurately understood, as relevant to diverse planning and policy contexts. In particular, these assessments need to be made independently; that is, they need to be carried out by teams of researchers that are not only constituted by people associated with the interventions, to avoid the risk of selective reporting of lessons. Second, there is the need to identify what initiatives need to be ‘scaled up’ and how, who the responsible authorities would be, and what kind of institutional support is needed for these initiatives to thrive. This will depend on whether the locus of implementation is at district level or at national level. A third information need is the development of realistic cost models based on analysis of the appropriate level and agents for the implementation of the ‘scaled up’ activity, and on assessing all possible contributors to the process. Not all gender-equality initiatives will cost the same. Finally, without a discussion of how to improve implementation structures, mechanisms and procedures, there will continue to be an imbalance between the development of ambitious and progressive policies and their translation into meaningful change on the ground. This is the largest gap evident in the literature on good practices and ‘scaling up’. Without technically and empirically based rigorous analysis to inform change and reform, discussions of ‘scaling up’ will continue to be abstract rather than real.