WUNRN
AFGHANISTAN - FEMALE LITERACY -
CHALLENGES & BENEFITS
In
By Lauryn Oates – 21 June 2013
"A quality basic education
system that serves girls and boys equitably represents
Last year, I
worked with the Afghan government's Central Statistics Organization and
Unicef, writing up the results of an ambitious national survey, routinely
conducted by the UN in developing countries every few years: the multiple
indicator cluster surveys. These are intended to monitor
progress on the millennium development goals and focus on the situation of
women and children.
In Afghanistan, the survey
data was collected in 2010-11. It managed to cover every
single province of the country, including insecure provinces. It included more
than 13,000 households, 22,000 women, and nearly 15,000 children under the age
of five, gathering information for more than 80 indicators, including literacy and education, child protection,
water and sanitation, health, nutrition and more.
As I pored over the findings and looked at the background characteristics
of respondents, I noticed something remarkable: the single greatest predictor
for nearly every single indicator was the mother's education level. It was such
a glaringly evident pattern, you could set your watch by it.
The more educated a mother is, the more likely she is to give birth with a
skilled attendant present, and therefore more likely to survive childbirth.
She's more likely to register the births of her children, to marry later and
give birth later, to have children who are attending school, who are
vaccinated, who are well nourished, and who survive infancy and then childhood.
Her children are less likely to be involved in child labour and to be abused,
and they have more books in their homes. Their access to water and adequate
sanitation facilities is better, and they live in wealthier households. It's a
pattern found all over the world. Multilateral agencies, NGOs and governments
are increasingly recognising that human development hinges upon the status of
women.
But this has
not been reflected in the way that donor governments fund international aid and development. In recent years, two-thirds
of education aid globally came from just six donors: the
European Commission, the World Bank, the
One of the
reasons has to do with the lag time between donors' investment and the return
on it, a point made by John
Richards (pdf), a Canadian social policy scholar. Richards points
out that funding the high quality delivery of education is demanding on
expertise, planning and resources, and there may be a decade or longer between
investments made and demonstrable results. But as Richards also shows, few
countries have been able to escape poverty (defined as per
capita GDP of $2500 or lower) unless they
achieve an 80% literacy rate.
In
Still, education remains a tough sell to donors. Governments are under
pressure to show tangible and quick results for money spent. Reforming
curriculums, revising textbooks and changing teacher certification systems just
aren't as romantic as a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new brick schoolhouse.
Such opportunities for "Kodak moments" have sometimes distracted
from the tough slog of reforming education, which demands dedicated long-term
planning, significant technical assistance and a willingness to engage in some
trial and error. It requires donors and implementers to keep knowledgeable
staff on the ground for years at a time, and not in one-year rotations as so
many aid agencies and embassies do. It demands airtight accountability measures
and flexibility in delivery mechanisms in order to re-evaluate methods when
things aren't working. Most importantly, the focus must always be on
people-level outcomes.
I've been around Afghanistan long enough to see many of the new schools
featured prominently in donor reporting to the taxpayers back home crumble a
few years after they were built, or wind up empty because there was no planning
beyond the building of the school: problems caused by failure to figure out
where the teachers would come from, how the school would be kept safe from
insurgents and how it would be supplied with desks, books and other materials.
Further, a lack of contextual expertise often results in school building that
is not environmentally sustainable, not suitable to the local climate or
exceedingly overpriced.
Meanwhile, the
school day in
A quality basic education system that serves girls and boys equitably
represents
But it will take a lot of money, a lot of time, and a serious commitment
that can outlast the current uncertainty over the prospects for peace. So we
need to start talking about results in terms of human capital and the social
rate of return, rather than in metrics such as the number of buildings built.
We need to learn how to communicate the impacts of investing in education that
may be less visible, such as the importance of good textbooks or good governance
in education ministries. And we need to get unashamedly to the heart of the
matter: the education of women and girls.
Lauryn Oates is
project director for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan.