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TRENDS
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Changes effected
through new policies, programmes, and directions in turn create
fresh challenges and result in new priorities. These are discussed
in the following pages. |
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New
Challenges
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Certainly
the focus on girls' education from a gender perspective has
raised many important issues about boys' education, and it is
fully recognized that a gender-sensitive education is one of
the things that will make the vision of Education for All a
reality. Similarly, the evolution over the decade in girls'
education and, in particular, attempts to better understand
the gender gap have resulted in a much better understanding
of exclusion-from school, but also in the classroom, even for
many who are already in school but excluded from effective learning.
This work, often pioneered by a focus on girls, can make it
possible to adapt what is known to include other excluded and
marginalized groups. One of these groups, among many, that is
a challenge consists of adolescents. Adolescence is the transitional
period between being a child and an adult, a time of rapid physical,
intellectual, psychosocial, ethical and spiritual development.
Increasing their capacities and opportunities, and ensuring
their safety and support will enable adolescents to avoid high-risk
behaviours (such as HIV/AIDS, unwanted pregnancies, and violence)
and situations that undermine their rights (such as exploitative
and hazardous work or sexual exploitation). In short, positively
influencing young women and men at this stage of life offers
numerous opportunities to break the cycles that undermine human
rights and development. |
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The HIV/AIDS
pandemic presents unexpected challenges of enormous proportions.
Girls are disproportionately negatively affected, whether they
are infected or not. Immediate and concerted effort is essential
or the hard won gains in girls' education of more than a decade
will be eliminated in a few years. |
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It is very
apparent from the work in girls' education that access to and
quality of education are inextricably linked-it would be easier
if this were not the case. This bears on very closely to two
other critical aspects of girls' (and boys') education: the
need to understand both demand and supply and how these play
out, one against the other. Everybody agrees that quality is
important, but the experience of and challenge arising from
girls' education is that the very notion of quality must change
in some very fundamental ways. A quality education includes
learning the basics and learning how to learn in a safe, secure,
gender-sensitive, healthy, and protective learning environment.
This finding presents an enormous challenge to systems that
often find it difficult to offer basic education meeting the
conventional definition of quality. |
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New research
on globalisation is showing the enormous potential of the processes
that accompany it to increase disparity. This is particularly
alarming as women are already the bulk of the poor and globalisation
could exacerbate the situation. In the face of this challenge
and to break the cycle of women's poverty, girls' education
has to take on a new urgency. On the other hand, the promise
of the possibility of new information and communication technologies
being brought to bear to close the growing digital divide could
make an enormous difference in alleviating unfair disparities.
A challenge for girls' education is deeply embedded in this
possibility, however. There is a growing body of evidence that
girls and women are less likely to benefit from these new technologies
than their male counterparts. |
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A challenge
that is not discussed much, but is emerging, is a worldwide
growing push from forces in support of religious fundamentalism.
Often this results in a decrease in, rather than increase in,
the rights and empowerment of girls and women. The links of
fundamentalism to patriarchy and their implications for educational
change deserve more attention if girls' education is to move
ahead at an accelerated pace. |
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Understanding
of these challenges and monitoring how they are affecting girls'
education require more robust data that extend beyond the conventional
education statistics. It also demands disaggregated data so
that the nature of challenges can be properly understood. |
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Priorities
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It is not
possible to address all issues simultaneously. Priorities have
to be set-some can be set globally, but good analysis at local
and national levels is critical to determine how best to overcome
the barriers to girls' education in a timely manner. Simple
access to any kind of basic education remains a major issue
for millions of children, the majority girls. |
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Careful and
strategic application of lessons learned to close the gender
gap and address educational quality are essential if all are
to receive a quality basic education. There is no single intervention
that will work everywhere-each context will have to adapt what
is known to the particular and nuanced circumstances that are
working against girls' education. Linked to this is the fact
that efforts in support of girls' education must move from what
are primarily limited efforts to go to massive scale. This will
present enormous challenges around the world, but without such
an effort the majority of excluded girls will remain on the
outside looking in for the foreseeable future. |
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To make this
extra effort, to accelerate progress, will require ingenuity,
persistence, ongoing fostering of new partnerships, and significant
resource mobilisation and utilisation. There are probably fewer
"lessons learned" in girls' education with regard to resource
mobilisation than any of the other areas selected for discussion.
Yet this topic may present one of the greatest remaining challenges.
It is hard to reach girls (poor, with disabilities, affected
by conflict or HIV/AIDS, engaged in child labour, for example)
who must be included, and it is likely to take more resources
per child to reach them than it took the reach those who are
already in school. |
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To reach
Education for All girls must be included-without this the world
will have failed to deliver on the promise of a basic education
for all. Girls can be included. It is possible. It must be achieved. |
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Knowledge/Information
Dissemination. Disseminating the knowledge of (a) what the range
of possible strategies to be used with respect to improving
girls' education are; (b) what local conditions and opportunities
call for; and (c) what the optimal mix of strategies can be,
is a continuing challenge. Further, expanding the educational
opportunities for girls and women tend to lead to the emergence
of issues about the availability of career opportunities. If
girls are gaining as much education as boys, then the rationale
for excluding them from certain careers becomes less and less
justifiable. An underlying challenge in this area is to understand
what the key elements of a successful strategy are and which
aspects were context-specific. For example, there have been
many attempts to replicate the success of the BRAC schools but
none have come close to replicating either their organizational
efficiency or their appeal to girls. |
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Developing
a consensus on what quality education means. The increased enrolments
that often result when parents are encouraged to send their
daughters to school almost always bring into sharp focus a debate
on quality. The sudden increase in enrolments can cause acute
shortages of classrooms, textbooks, teachers and pedagogical
materials. There can be a deterioration of quality on a number
of dimensions: performance, repetition and dropout rates, teacher
morale and turnover, and parental satisfaction. The challenge
then becomes identifying the critical indicator or set of indicators
for measuring shifts in quality and assessing which of the many
input variables contributes most to maintaining quality. Once
this has been established, a national consensus needs to be
developed and shared so that limited resources are effectively
spent. |
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This question
requires a close collaboration between technical experts, who
can assess the impact of different sets of quality indicators,
and community and government interests who can use that information
to come to political and economic decisions about the organisation
of schools. |
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Monitoring
and Feedback. The effective implementation of any new initiative
requires close monitoring and processes for continuous review,
assessment, evaluation and re-formulation. When done in an environment
in which stakeholders are empowered to share their views, these
processes will lead to a more effective implementation, in which
bottlenecks and unexpected consequences are dealt with more
quickly and lessons are shared more systematically. |
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Changing
Environment: The rapid change in technology, particularly information
technology, and the forces of globalisation have made the issue
of exclusion from basic education even more urgent. Countries
without significant numbers of computer literate men and women
are in danger of finding themselves permanently thrust into
the periphery. Females are particularly vulnerable because all
the available evidence suggests that women, even in the West,
are only a small minority of internet users, computer programmers,
web designers, etc. |
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As the gender
gap closes, it becomes clearer that it is the marginal girl
that needs to be reached. This girl is likely to be poor, to
live in remote areas-either geographical or culturally, to be
of a different religion or ethnicity. Providing an education
of sufficient quality and relevance will more and more challenging
and expensive. However, we should be encouraged by the success
that has already been experienced in educating populations hitherto
considered unreachable. |
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We need to
be particularly vigilant about viewing 'the girl child' as a
unitary concept. As has been noted before, while gender is a
very important human parameter, it is not the only one. The
relative disadvantage of each individual girl is mediated by
her race, family income, ethnicity, religion and nationality
to name but a few factors. Are the programmes, policies being
put in place being utilized by those who need them or simply
magnifying the advantage of those already of high status? In
particular, what does it mean when female enrolment increases
more sharply at the secondary and tertiary levels than it does
at primary, even in countries with relatively low enrolment
levels? |
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As we work
towards attaining universal primary education, it will be important
that each region and country develop reasonable targets and
benchmarks for girls' education. |
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It would
be a mistake to ignore the changes that have taken place in
the global environment when we discuss achieving universal access
to schooling. It is patently clear that our notion of basic
education will need to encompass levels of technical competence
that were undreamed of in 1990. In a modern economy, more and
more of even the most basic jobs (in factories, supermarket
cashiers, etc.) require a familiarity with computers. How many
of the girls in school (both in the developing and the developed
world) will be able to attain computer literacy during their
school career over the next decade? |
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CONCLUSION
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The participants
at Jomtien identified girls' education as an important issue
and this was underscored at the Amman Mid-Decade Review of EFA.
At Dakar, in 2000, it remains, unfortunately, a pressing priority.
The urgency of addressing the issue cannot be underestimated.
This is where the biggest part of the problem lies with regard
to denying children their right to basic education. |
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The picture
is not all bleak, however. Over the decade, there have been
significant changes. The Middle East is one region that has
demonstrated that the education of girls is quite doable, even
in situations where it initially appeared that there might be
serious traditional barriers. It can be done. |
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Also, over
the decade much has been accomplished in terms of understanding
what it takes to make a difference with regard to girls' education.
Whereas ten years ago, issues of access were predominant it
is now known that: |
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Access
and quality are inseparable. Supply of and demand for education
are intricately linked-this is especially the case when
the education of girls is considered by families and communities
Gender
discrimination is deeply rooted throughout education systems
and to ensure that all girls participate and learn, it is
essential that systemic gender bias be eliminated. There
are cases where school places are available, but girls do
not attend because of gender bias. This points to the need
for a new understanding of what quality education really
is-learning environments that are rights-based, child-friendly,
effective with children, gender-sensitive healthy for children,
and protective of children.
Girls'
education is not just a matter of concern for educators-it
is everybody's business. It is everybody's business because
it is society that creates the conditions that mitigate
against girls' education and it is that very same society
that is paying the high price for not educating its girl-children.
This shared responsibility calls for actions outside of
education in support of girls' education as well as actions
within education systems.
The
concept of expanded partnerships promoted at Jomtien has
proven to be sound in regard to advocating for and implementing
girls' education. Effective strategies have mobilised and
engaged a wide range of partners; parents and community
members, as well as girls themselves, have proven to be
critical partners in most situations.
Careful
analysis prior to implementing interventions is absolutely
essential. It is known that girls' education is complex
because of the multiplicity of factors that come into play
when decisions are made about whether to educate a girl
or not, and when a girl decides whether to stay in a learning
environment or leave it. Interventions that have not taken
into account the complexity of the situation are likely
to run into problems.
Resources
are critical. Reaching the excluded, the majority of whom
is female, is proving to have higher unit costs than the
costs of those who are already included. The attention to
quality also adds to the resource needs, but it has been
shown that quality improvements made under the auspices
of girls' education benefit boys, sometimes more than they
do girls, so they are investments in systemic improvements.
Good
analysis demands disaggregated data and this is often hard
to find. Nevertheless, one of the contributions that a focus
on girls' education is making is to underscore the call
for better and disaggregated data so that education actions
can be appropriately targeted to make good use of existing
resources.
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Thus, the
emphasis from Jomtien on girls' access to basic education has
shifted considerably. While some would argue that this change
may be adding unnecessary complexity, results on the ground
indicate that when this complexity is given due consideration,
in fact, significant change is possible, and in a relatively
short period of time. Furthermore, lessons from expanding girls'
education are being applied to other disadvantaged groups. |
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A focus on
girls using a gender perspective has lead to much better understanding
of how to meet some of the new challenges of the millennium,
such as globalisation and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Understanding
that these processes have a differential impact on sub-populations
has facilitated the development of more effective and targeted
actions. |
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There have
been some hard lessons learned, but these are now part of the
knowledge base and so should not be repeated. At the same time,
the knowledge base relating to girls' education is so much deeper
and broader than it was in 1990, and the experience on the ground
is much vaster. Community by community and country by country
it is becoming clear that girls' education is not just a possibility,
it is a reality. In many cases, the desire to overcome what
seemed an intractable problem has provided opportunities to
experiment and to offer options for change to existing systems
of education that were very inflexible. Thus, girls' education
has contributed in a modest way to the need to reform education
systems so that they better meet the needs of the 21st Century. |
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There are
many models and approaches, there are many actors and supporters,
but, in the final analysis, the evidence is in. Girls' education
can be achieved. Without it, Education For All will never happen. |
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INFORMANTS
UNICEF
Sheldon
Shaeffer, Chief Education Advisor Mary Joy Pigozzi, Senior
Education Advisor Peter Buckland, Senior Education Advisor
Vigdis Cristofoli, Assistant Programme Officer
WORLD
BANK
Carolyn
Winter, Girls' Education specialist, Human Development Department
Kekelwa Nyaywa-Dall, Consultant, Human Development Department
USAID
Susie
Clay, Office of Women in Development Sharon Benoliel, Center
for Development Information and Evaluation Victor Farren,
Center for Development Information and Evaluation
UNDP
Anjimile
Mtila Doka, Senior Advisor, Social Analysis and Policy John
Lawrence, Consultant
UNESCO
Warren
Mellor, EFA Forum Secretariat Aicha Bah Diallo, Chief, Basic
Education Division Anna Maria Barthes, Programme Specialist,
Section for Science and Technology Education S. Saba Bokhari,
Programme Specialist, Basic Education Division Ulla Kulha,
Consultant, Division of Basic Education Jean Baptiste Saddiki,
Consultant, Division of Basic Education Namtip Aksornkool,
Principal Specialist, Literacy and Women's Education Denise
Lievesley, Director, Institute for Statistics Nicole Belle,
Consultant, Institute for Statistics Chu Shiu-Kee, Programme
Specialist, Institute for Statistics Ulrika Peppler-Barry,
Deputy Executive Secretary, EFA Forum Secretariat
UNFPA
Delia
Rarela-Barcelona, Senior Technical Officer, Coordination Branch,
Technical and Policy Division
Academy
for Educational Development
Beverly
Jones, Senior Vice President and Director, International Basic
Education Chloe O'Gara, Ready to Learn Center
Rockefeller
Foundation
Joyce
Lewinger Moock, Associate Vice President
FAWEP
eninah
Mlama, Executive Director Eddah Gachukia, former Executive
Director
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