WUNRN
Getting
Education Right for Girls & Women
By Caroline Sweetman Editor, Gender &
Development Journal - 17th April 2014
Education is a fundamental human right, but what's needed
to ensure a quality empowering education for all? Gender & Development
editor Caroline
Sweetman introduces the Education
issue.
Shockingly similar prejudices live on today. In the past
year, women's
right to education moved to the top of the international policy
agenda in the wake of the attack on Malala Yousafzai, a teenage girl who advocated Pakistani girls' right to education,
in October 2012. Currently, an
estimated 61 per cent of the 123 million young people who lack basic reading
and writing skills across the world are young women.
Since 2000, the MDGs and the Education
for All (EFA) initiative have challenged the world's governments
to get girls into school. It's resulted in considerable progress, though (as
ever) these global statistics air-brush out a more complicated picture.
From 2000 to 2011, the global primary school enrolment rate grew from 83
per cent to 90 per cent, and the number
of out-of-school children dropped by almost half from 102
million in 2000 to 57 million in 2011.
But getting girls into the classroom on the first day of
school is the first baby-step to ensuring
a quality, empowering education for all. While economic poverty
obviously presents families with practical challenges in getting girls into
school, it's not the only issue. Globally, even in the richest households,
girls are still more likely to be out of school than boys and while lack of
money makes things worse, the
underlying issue is gender inequality and stereotypes about
women's place in the family and society. If there are few jobs waiting for
educated girls, and being a mother is still girls' most important role, it's
hardly surprising money is spent on educating boys instead. And education
presents real risks for girls. Mothers fear inappropriate relationships with
male teachers, and worry about girls' safety travelling home. Gender-based
violence (GBV) makes school and universities unsafe.
In the new issue of Gender
& Development, co-edited
by Nitya Rao,
education specialists, development practitioners and feminist activists explore
what it takes to make education truly empowering, and share real-life
experiences of programmes aiming to do this.
It's really important that we support female education because it is right and just to do so.
Strategies include tackling gender based
violence in schools, working with boys on gender equality, and
supporting young women to proceed to higher levels of education, developing
integrated programmes that combine gender equality in schools with adult literacy,
health and sex education, economic empowerment and women's
rights. Anita Reilly
focuses on Plan UK's work in Sierra
Leone in the wake of the end of the civil war in 2002 to improve
adolescent girls' chances of getting to junior secondary school, and staying
there long enough to make a difference.
It's really important that we support female education
because it is right and just to do so -
not only because we think educated women are likely to behave in ways
governments and development organisations would like them to, for instance
choosing contraception, or following environmentally-friendly farming
methods.
Female education has often been depicted as a magic
bullet to resolve a host of development problems from child and maternal
mortality and under-nutrition to addressing poverty and economic growth, but
the essence of real empowerment is you get to decide for yourself. And it's a
good start if your schooling emphasises social responsibility and civic
education. In their article, Amanda Moll and Lotte
Renault share insights from a CARE project in
As the Zambian feminist Sara Hlupekile Longwe
said way back in 1998, we need to support education for empowerment, not schooling for subordination.