Girls account for an estimated 90 percent of child domestic workers. Few
have a chance to attend school.
“You
have to understand that girls may get less protein than boys, that communities raise
girls to have different expectations.” |
Millions
of girls are not making it into school, despite a concerted international movement
to push the cause forward. In some African countries, the gender gap is even widening.
What’s gone wrong?
In Ethiopia, girls are
sometimes abducted for marriage when they’re no more than eight. In West Africa,
they’re recruited from poor rural families to work as domestics in coastal cities
or neighbouring countries. In South Africa, a recent report by Human Rights Watch
warns that sexual violence and abuse is hampering girls’ access to education. And
in Afghanistan, they’ve simply been barred from school under the Taleban regime.
Customs, poverty, fear and violence: girls still account for 60 percent of the estimated
113 million out-of-school children, and the majority live in sub-Saharan Africa and
South Asia. In 1990, faced with a deteriorating educational record in many countries,
the major development agencies and 155 national governments rang the alarm at a high-profile
conference in Jomtien, Thailand. Launching the Education for All initiative, ambitious
targets were set, notably to get all children into school within ten years, stressing
that “the most urgent priority” was to ensure access to, and improve the quality
of education for girls and women. Ten years later, in Dakar (Senegal), the world
community had to face up to the fact that “gender discrimination continues to permeate
education systems” and that “little progress has been made in increasing girls’ participation
in basic education.” This time round, they set 2015 as the date by which “all children,
particularly girls . . . complete free and compulsory primary education of good quality.”
More boldly, they pledged to eliminate “gender disparities in primary and secondary
education by 2005.”
For Christopher Colclough, a professor at the Sussex-based Institute of Development
Studies (IDS), there is “no chance whatsoever” of reaching the 2005 target. In sub-Saharan
Africa, where he has led a nine-country research project1 to diagnose constraints
to schooling and propose policies to improve outcomes, the gap between girls’ and
boys’ primary enrolment rates has increased in some places. “Governments recognize
that girls’ education is incredibly important but their policies to tackle it are
usually inadequate,” says Colclough, suggesting a “de facto political unwillingness”
to deal with the problem. Secondly, he notes “if you have a situation where women
and girls are discriminated against in society and not all children are in school,
it follows almost as night follows day that girls will be kept out of school most.”
Not that the task is easy. In many countries strapped by debt burdens, the goal appears
more elusive than ever, with families bearing increasing costs for educating their
children. “A lot of girls are dropping out of school or not being sent at all because
of the poverty of parents,” says Peninah Mlama, executive director of the Forum for
African Women Educationists (FAWE), a partner in the IDS study. “Traditional cultural
attitudes are still very strong, especially in rural areas. The little money parents
have to scrounge for sending children to school is seen as too big an investment
to risk on the girl child.” To make matters worse, the HIV/AIDS pandemic is cutting
into a generation of young adults–in Swaziland, it is estimated that three to four
teachers die every week of AIDS. In the absence of a breadwinner, girls are the most
likely to be denied access to school to head a household.
Hidden
costs
While there is no magic bullet for solving the quandary, there is little left to
discover about why girls stay on the sidelines, starting with the number one factor,
poverty. “Although we can’t underestimate the role of culture, even in the most conservative
societies like rural Yemen, the vast majority of families want to send their children
to school, and they will do so if you reduce the costs,” says Carolyn Winter, of
the World Bank. The problem lies in the complex weaving of “social and economic forces
that overlap and strengthen each other,” Colclough underlines. Waiving school fees
for example, does not address the question of how to replace a girl’s valuable labour
in the home and the fields, nor the profound bias in some countries against educating
daughters. Nor does it recognize the hidden costs of schooling, from clothing to
textbooks. Recruiting more female teachers, an indisputably positive influence, is
only truly beneficial if parents are informed of their presence, if textbooks are
revised to cut out stereotypes and training tackles attitude questions. In all the
countries where they conducted research, the IDS team found that teachers believed
that boys were more intelligent…. And when chores have to get done like cleaning
the classroom, girls are naturally expected to oblige.
“If there is one lesson we have learned, it’s that there is no single quick fix,
but there are usually to two or three actions together that are catalytic,” says
Mary Joy Pigozzi, a senior Unicef education advisor. Two are proven musts: getting
parents and communities involved in schools, and improving quality. Most importantly,
says Pigozzi, quality has be thought about in “engendered” terms through an “affirmative
action” approach that takes into account where the learner is coming from: “You have
to understand that girls may get less protein than boys, that communities raise girls
to have different expectations of themselves. Then you have to look at the quality
of the learning environment to address issues such as safety and sexual harassment,
and the whole teaching-learning process.”
Understanding the critical things that make a difference is one part of the story,
the other is how countries go about changing their ways. “Nearly every single policy
document mentions girls’ education, it’s almost as if it’s the politically correct
language to use,” says Mlama. “But governments don’t have the capacity and commitment
to really do something.” Many education ministries, for example, have set up gender
or girls’ education units, “often staffed by one or two people who don’t have the
skills and capacity to influence overall educational policy.” In meetings on education
reform, she continues, “they’ll be called in towards the end of the process or at
the final meeting with donors.”
Addressing
the bias
Outside pressure is founded upon irrefutable evidence: educating girls and women
has a significant impact on reducing poverty. Benefits include lower fertility and
infant mortality rates, better health and nutrition, higher productivity and chances
that the next generation will in turn be educated. But shaking up bureaucratic, patriarchal
structures might well be the most mammoth task of all. “Civil structures are often
set up so that there is very limited incentive to invest in improvements and work
towards goals and targets,” says Winter. Some examples of good practice involve skirting
slow bureaucracies and vested interests. In India, for example, the state of Uttar
Pradesh took advantage of a law on developing charities to set up a well-staffed
“parallel” structure to push through a comprehensive package on girls’ education
in rural areas. Women in the community walk girls to school, parent-teacher associations
and principals reach out to homes where children aren’t enrolled, and local groups
stress to mothers that schooling is a basic legal right.
Such fine-tuned strategies can only bear fruit when countries are ready to take the
first step, by addressing deeply set biases in their societies. Committed governments,
say activists, can start changing the tide, from making education compulsory to delaying
the age of marriage and opening their eyes to the realities of child labour. Otherwise,
ten years down the road, millions of girls will still go missing from the classroom,
keeping the wheel of poverty turning.
1. Partnership
for Strategic Resource Planning for Girls’ Education in Africa, conducted under the
auspices of FAWE, in collaboration with national governments and the Institute of
Development Studies, Sussex (UK). Other partners include the Governments of Norway
and Ireland, the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Bank.
www.id21.org An online education
reporting service run by the Institute of Development Studies
www.unesco.org/education, to keep up on international
initiatives
www.fawe.org
www.antislavery.org, for more information
about child labour and how to fight against it
www.girlseducation.org, to find out about
a new multi-agency partnership on girls’ education |
