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Archive for the 'gender equity and empowerment' Category

How do we monitor violence affecting schoolchildren and efforts to reduce it across the world?

By CEID Blogger, on 30 November 2021

by Jo Heslop, Jenny Parkes and Lucia Quintero Tamez

Violence against children occurs across the world in different contexts, affects all demographic groups, and causes serious harms to their rights, education, health, wellbeing and flourishing. In low and middle income countries, children face multiple forms of violence in and around schools, yet evidence needed to inform effective responses is still limited and uneven. Our team has created a guide for policy makers, practitioners and researchers to assess data availability and utility at country level in low and middle income countries.

Research has highlighted how violence is a social practice, shaped by relationships, norms, structures and conditions in the contexts in which violence occurs. For example, the #MeToo movement has brought to public consciousness how rape is connected to everyday sexual harassment, with both forms of violence situated within power inequalities (and associated impunity) based on gender, wealth, age and status. Similarly, violence affecting children in and around schools taking the form of corporal punishment, bullying, sexual harassment, intimate partner violence and child abuse, can be particularly acute in contexts with high levels of gender inequalities and poverty, which often underpin weak accountability systems in education, justice and child protection. It is important to collect data that reflect these multiple forms and contexts of violence.

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COP 26 and gender equality in education: mobilising data for sustainable change

By CEID Blogger, on 9 November 2021

By Helen Longlands, Elaine Unterhalter and Rosie Peppin Vaughan

As global leaders, practitioners and activists meet for COP 26 in Glasgow, the impacts of the worsening climate crisis coupled with the effects the Covid-19 pandemic on education systems are sharply evoked. These processes have gendered effects, which are particularly profound for the poorest and most vulnerable individuals, communities and countries. The reductions in aid and the failures of rich countries to deliver on the promises made at COP 25 have not helped progress towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed by the global community in 2015 in order to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all people and the planet by 2030. Indeed, this vision seems increasingly out of reach.

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Making gender equality a reality in education: what will it take?

By CEID Admin, on 8 March 2019

By Elaine Unterhalter, Professor of Education and International Development and Nicole Bella, Global Education Monitoring Report and Jane Davies, Global Partnership for Education Secretariat, March 2019.

This piece was originally published on the Global Partnership for Education blog, March 6th 2019. Reproduced here with the Authors’ permission.

In focus: Girls’ education and gender equality

To get more accurate and usable information on the multiple barriers that girls face in education, several projects are under way to measure discriminatory practices and norms and use that information to build education systems that don’t hold any children back.

Achieving gender equality is at the heart of the SDG agenda, and a core principle of GPE 2020, the strategy of the Global Partnership for Education up to 2020. SDG 5 (gender equality) explicitly targets key areas of inequality, and SDG 4 (education) outlines a number of gender equality related-targets. The General Recommendation 36 by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women brings these two sets of targets together, setting out the ambition to achieve gender equality not only in but also through education.

But what does gender equality in and through education look like? How would it be measured? These are questions we and other organizations are grappling with. Let’s review a concrete example.

More girls in school in Malawi, but low completion

Malawi was one of the first countries in Africa to introduce free primary education in 1994. This move led to an enormous expansion of opportunities for all children, most notably the poorest. The policy is credited with a reduction in some marked gender inequalities associated with girls dropping out of primary school and lacking support to enroll at the secondary level.

Statistics now show more girls than boys enrolling in primary school. The Malawi Education Sector Plan has been praised for highlighting issues concerning girls’ access, progression and achievement.

But commentators also note that many girls, particularly from the poorest socio-economic groups, drop out of the higher grades in primary school and do not progress to secondary school.

Only 66 girls for every 100 boys enrolled in secondary education actually complete and graduate. The reasons for drop out are complex, associated with family income and high levels of domestic responsibility.

It’s clear that statistics for gender parity in enrollment or completion do not tell us enough about the inequalities that girls face and that must be addressed.

Discriminatory gender norms remain strong

For example, researchers note authoritarian and often highly gender discriminatory school cultures, with teachers using discipline and ad-hoc guidelines that reflect and reinforce discriminatory gender norms in the society.

Similarly, while National Statistical Office figures indicate that the number of child marriages is decreasing, possibly as a result of the recent Marriage Act (which strengthens legislation to reduce marriage under the age of 18), the practice of child marriage still remains pervasive.

In 2015, almost a quarter (23.5%) of girls and women aged 15-19 years were married in Malawi, and 42% of women aged 20-24 reported they were married before the age of 18. Child marriage is often associated with conservative social, gender and religious norms, which give little scope for the autonomy and decision-making power of adolescent girls.

All of this indicates that a coherent education sector plan should take into account many aspects of gender inequality that may appear beyond the remit of the ministry of education, and require coordinated efforts between different ministries, civil society groups and communities to bring about change.

What information, resources and approaches to measuring gender inequality and equality in education can those involved in education planning draw on?

If gender parity figures do not give us the full picture, what else should we be looking at? Areas in which richer information is needed include, for example, entrenched discriminatory gender and social norms that limit girls’ and women’s right to education, families’ approach in households to organizing work and managing budgets with regard to girls and boys, teachers’ attitudes and dispositions, which may pre-date any formal education they received, issues of school-based gender violence, sexual harassment and coercion, and lack of reproductive rights, which are associated with teenage pregnancy and early marriage.

One project looking into measurement of these broader facets of gender inequality which affect education outcomes is the AGEE (Accountability for Gender Equality in Education) project, an innovative collaboration between academics at universities in the UK, Malawi and South Africa.

The project recognizes how important it is to improve the measuring and monitoring of gender equality in education and to develop a range of tools to document practices that may appear unmeasurable. These, if described, even by proxy measures, may allow for richer insights and better coordination of research to inform sector planning.

The project team is working with UNESCO and other organizations, and through these consultations and discussions has developed two indicator frameworks that look beyond parity in numbers and try to measure gender equality more broadly, both in and through education, for use at the national and international levels.

At the national level, it is consulting with key partners in Malawi and South Africa on a dashboard of measures that speak to local conditions. In current drafts, the national dashboard comprises information on:

  • gender and resources – financial, infrastructural, staff, ideas about planning
  • constraints to converting resources into opportunities; for example difficulties in implementing policies, distributing finance or understanding gender and other inequalities
  • attitudes of teachers, parents and students to gender inequality and gender equality that affect schooling
  • gender outcomes of education (progression, learning outcomes) and beyond education, for example political and cultural participation and connections with health, employment, earning and leisure.

National statistical offices in Malawi and South Africa, academics and activist organizations are reviewing the dashboard and seeing how it can be used to draw out key gender issues to inform more gender-responsive education sector planning.

At the international level, in partnership with a team at the Global Education Monitoring Report (GEMR), a framework has been developed to monitor gender equality across countries. This uses the national level dashboard, but also draws on data that is already routinely collected across countries.

A range of multilateral and bilateral organizations (eg. UNESCO, UNGEI, UN Women, FAWE, GPE, DFID), key NGOs, academics and activists are being consulted to refine this cross-national measurement framework and consider its links to national processes.

The GEMR’s framework uses a three-pronged rights-based approach to gender equality:  assembling information on the right to education, rights in education and rights through education. Six domains are monitored:

  • educational opportunities (gender parity indices across all level of education and different educational aspects)
  • gender norms, values, attitudes and practices
  • institutions outside education or legislation forbidding gender-based discrimination
  • laws and policies guaranteeing the right to education for girls and women, and gender-responsive planning and budgeting within the education systems
  • education system institutions and the extent to which they are gender sensitive and responsive (resource distribution -finance and teaching profession; teaching and learning practices and learning environments)
  • Outcomes of education (e.g. access to labor market, sexual and reproductive health rights and decisions, political participation, etc.).

Both the AGEE and the GEMR frameworks are aiming to help build education systems that take account of broader gendered barriers holding children back, especially girls, that identify strategies to address them, and then measure progress towards closing these critical gender gaps.

Similarly, GPE in partnership with UNGEI have been supporting developing country partners to apply a gender lens to education sector planning to advance this aim. Based on the Guidance for developing gender-responsive education sector plans prepared by UNGEI and GPE, with support from UNICEF, Plan International, UNESCO IIEP/Pole de Dakar, AU/CIEFFA, FAWE and ANCEFA, four regional workshops, reaching 25 countries so far, have helped governments, development partners and civil society representatives to take a deeper look at how gender equality needs to be considered at each stage of the planning cycle, including preparatory sector analysis.

This work will help improve how gender equality results are framed, monitored and reflected in education sector plans, strengthen accountability for gender equality results, and ultimately help achieve gender equality both in and through education – a positive transformation from which all girls, boys and our societies will benefit.

School violence – what works to address the global challenge?

By CEID Admin, on 25 February 2019

School violence – what works to address the global challenge?

Professor Jenny Parkes, Professor of Gender, Education and International Development at the UCL Institute of Education, speaks in this video from DFID’s Research and Evidence Division.

To read the IOE study authored by Prof Parkes and referenced at 01:31 by DFID in this video, visit: https://www.globalpartnership.org/content/rigorous-review-global-research-evidence-policy-and-practice-school-related-gender-based

The review is an output from the ‘End Gender Violence in Schools’ research project undertaken at the IOE. For further details see www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe-egvs

The Hair, Skin, and Education of Black Girls

By CEID Admin, on 11 June 2017

STUDENT BLOG #2 | Gender Equality Stream | June 11, 2017

By Veronique L. Porter

The Hair, Skin, and Education of Black Girls

gender blog picture3

Photo credit Devin Trent

I wrote this blog post in high anticipation of the Centre for Education and International Development (CEID) symposium on June 15th, and the discussions to follow around the CEID’s thematic areas including gender equality and women’s rights.

As I struggled to write this blog post, my classmate suggested I write about something I am passionate about. She is familiar with my social media, and knows my interests run wide and deep from my various posts. While my interests range across many areas, subjects, and themes, people of color are at the center. As an Education, Gender, and International Development student at UCL’s Institute of Education, right now I am keen to take a deeper look at Black girl’s education.

Despite my formal and informal studies and my life long experience, I somehow felt underqualified as I began to write. This is not an unfamiliar or irrational feeling. Rather it’s a response to subtle and obvious conditioning that my kinky hair and dark skin are not the features associated with educated, qualified people. And this reaction is not my unique struggle.

Black girls get these cues every day, often within the school environment. Schools in the United States often punish and suspend Black girls for being loud and aggressive at much higher rates than their peers, consistent with the perception of dark skinned women being angry and defiant. One ten-year-old student in the United States faced bullying at two schools over her dark complexion. To make matters worse, her teacher handed her a black crayon, instead of a brown one, during an assignment to draw self-portraits.

On an institutional level, many school policies regulate Black hair. Another US student was told her textured hair was “out of control and all over the place.” She was threatened with expulsion from the school if her hair was not “fixed or styled,” as her textured hair was considered a fad, which is against school policy. A school in South Africa told a student that she could not take her exams if she did not straighten her hair or make it “more beautiful.” A Black university student was barred from entering the university building in Brazil, because her “Black Power” hairstyle was too political. These are not policies that restrict styles but the texture as it naturally grows from these students’ heads.

The instances mentioned above are only a few examples of the intolerance that Black girls face based on their physical features. Stories like these regularly appear on news websites, in the content podcasts and blogs, and in my social media feeds, usually from sources that purposefully include Black news, events, and culture. The prevalence of these policies send clear messages to Black girls that they are not welcome in the learning environment without altering themselves. They should have a docile demeanor and be sure not to voice their opinion for fear of being perceived as being disruptive or defying authority. Highly textured hair needs to be altered for the classroom otherwise it is distracting or unkempt.

I say “Black” knowing that this is a very American way to label dark skinned people. Yet this is the most authentic way for me to describe the common denominator of the groups of people identified by their dark skin, and who face various types of oppression and discrimination in communities all over the world on the basis of their dark complexion.

My feelings of inadequacy, while sometimes frequent, are often brief. I know that I am knowledgeable and equally capable as my peers from other nationalities and of other complexions. But Black girls all over the world are shaping their personalities, their lives, their futures based on the information we give them in society and especially in school. There should not be an association with students’ physical characteristics and their learning. Schools can create and reinforce standards that make it more difficult for Black girls to learn by making them uncomfortable in their own bodies. But schools can also create a setting that values learning over appearance. The first step in creating a welcoming and equitable learning environment in schools is to allow Black girls to be Black students and eliminate policies that target their innate features.

I am looking forward to the ways the new Centre for Education and International Development (CEID) gender equality and women’s rights will contribute to girls’ education for girls of all backgrounds, ethnicities, and nationalities. But selfishly, I want more focus on the education of Black girls, so the Black girls of tomorrow don’t have to face the same oppression and inequality as the Black girls of today. I hope to discuss this topic more with my classmates and education experts during the CEID launch event, Thursday, June 15th.

Written by: Veronique L. Porter

Veronique has years of professional experience working in West Africa on education, youth development, and health, and supporting various USAID development programming from Washington, DC. At the time of writing, Veronique is studying the MA in Education, Gender and International Development (EGID) at the IOE.