Progress towards the development target of achieving gender parity in education by 2015 may be inconsistent, but there are noteworthy successes. What do they teach us about addressing child labour and exploring interaction between early education and women’s empowerment?

A chapter in UNESCO’s 2003 Education for All Global Monitoring Report synthesises a wide range of international experience. Highlighting the policy changes that have been important in pioneering states, where rapid progress towards Education for All (EFA) has been made, it focuses on women as active agents of transformation of education systems that discriminate against gender.

It is vital to understand child labour, while meeting the needs of working children and addressing concerns of their parents, in order to allow children to enter and perform well in classrooms. The need for children to work is one of the most important causes of under-enrolment in school. Measures to reduce or remove the need for child labour are required to boost enrolment among girls and boys. Offering pensions to the elderly can have an indirect effect on reducing child labour.

UNESCO makes a powerful case that school feeding programmes help schoolgirls. Bangladesh’s national Food for Education (FFE) programme illustrates how food incentives – provided as meals or snacks at school or dry food rations to take home – can significantly increase the enrolment and retention of girls in school. In India there is evidence that in areas with school feeding programmes, early primary school retention rates for girls are higher than for boys. UNESCO warns, however, that these ‘successes’ may be accompanied by deteriorating quality – girls attracted by Bangladesh’s FFE have found themselves in huge classes.

Early childhood care and education (ECCE) is supportive of gender balance in primary education. The informal, learner-centred and activity-focused learning in pre-schools enables girls to subsequently survive the more formal teacher-centred learning they encounter in school.

Among the dozens of innovatory schemes that could be applied in other countries are:

• an initiative in Bangladesh to provide additional funds to rural secondary schools and their female students – conditional on girls remaining unmarried.
• a programme in Brazil to stop the poor dropping out of school by providing income subsidies to families with school-age children – payments are made directly to the mothers 
• a Cambodian scheme helping girls from remote areas and from ethnic minorities to get into lower secondary schools and to enable those who are already enrolled to stay
• moves in Africa to cease punishing pregnant girls and single teachers and allow young mothers to complete education
• South Africa’s whole-school approach to tackling school violence
• a programme in India to enhance female teachers’ participation in training courses and build professional confidence and creativity.

UNESCO stresses the crucial role of states in promoting EFA but also highlights the need to:

• ensure that resources meant for distribution to the poorest do not end up going to others
• involve local communities and parents
• include issues of reproductive health and gender-based violence in school discussions – whatever the strength of local taboos against talking about female sexuality
• ensure that parity is not achieved at the expense of educational quality
• forge multisectoral partnerships of non-governmental organisations, religious organisations and state agencies.

Source(s):
‘EFA Global Monitoring Report 2003’ UNESCO chapter four, November 2003, Full document.

Funded by: Jointly by UNESCO and bilateral agencies

id21 Research Highlight: 20 May 2004

Further Information:
Ulrika Peppler Barry
EFA Global Monitoring Report Team
c/o UNESCO
7, place de Fontenoy
75352 Paris 07 SP
France

Tel: +33 1 45 68 21 28
Fax: +33 1 45 68 56 27
Contact the contributor: efareport@unesco.org

UNESCO

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