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Gender Checklist: Education
Why is gender important in education projects?
Education is a human right and an essential tool for achieving equality, development, and peace. Nondiscriminatory education benefits both men and women and ultimately equalizes relations between them.
To become agents for change, women must have equal access to educational opportunities. Literacy of women is key to improved health, nutrition, and education, and to the empowerment of women as full participants in decision making in society.
Investment in formal and nonformal education and training for girls and women, with its exceptionally high social and economic return, has proved to be one of the best means of achieving sustainable development and economic growth.
Every person must have access to basic education and other essential services. Without such access, the poor in particular, and their children, will have little opportunity to improve their economic status or to participate fully in society.
Education is key to improving the status of women. A pre-liminary step in gender analysis in the education sector will be to examine the gender indicators for the sector in the developing member countries (DMCs). The following questions should be asked:
- What are the overall participation rates at the various levels of education?
- How do girls compare with boys, and women with men, in educational participation rates at the various levels of education?
- Do the gender participation rates differ between regions?
- What are the broader social and economic factors that influence access to educational opportunities?
On the basis of this preliminary analysis, the extent of a project’s GAD potential can be evaluated. Education projects with the highest GAD potential will be those that target the areas of greatest gender inequity in the education system and regions of a DMC. For example in industrializing DMCs, or in modern urban areas within DMCs, women may benefit most from projects that include strategies to increase female enrollment at the senior secondary and higher educational levels, particularly in technical and nontraditional career areas for women. In DMCs or in areas within them that have a predominantly rural population, projects that focus on the primary education of girls, nonformal education in rural and small community settings, literacy classes, and distance education may be the most beneficial to women.
School projects at both primary and secondary levels should address the following:
Levels of access and attainment of women
- Where the participation rates for girls/females are lower, the PPTA feasibility study should carefully examine the underlying causes, and the project design should contain elements designed to overcome the constraints identified.
Textbooks and curriculum improvement
Projects focused on textbooks and curriculum improvement should aim to remove gender stereotypes in the content and images of textbooks.
Training of female teachers
GAD issues in the education sector focus on girls and women not only as students but also as members of the educational profession. Teachers are important role models to boys and girls and to their communities. Significant numbers of women in the teaching profession, particularly at the higher levels and in decision-making positions, can raise the aspirations of girls and young women and positively influence social attitudes toward women.
Social attitudes
To promote female access to education, an analysis of social attitudes toward education and the values attached to the education of males and females is important.
Box 1: Basic Education (Girls) Project, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, 1998
The long-term objective of the project is to bring more women into the mainstream of socioeconomic development by progressively improving their educational level. In the short term, the overall project objective is to expand access to improved primary education for girls. The project approach is flexible, which means that project impact and effects are continually assessed during implementation, and lessons learned are applied to subsequent activities.
The project provides selected unserved or underserved small ethnic minority communities with village-based primary schools staffed by trained teachers and equipped with adequate relevant learning materials. The project also provides targeted assistance to reduce the private cost of education to poor families.
To increase female enroll-ment and improve the retention of girls in particular, the project promotes community participation in school management by involving village committees, the Lao Women’s Union, and NGOs.
The project supports community-level mobilization activities that motivate villagers to
- send their girls to school and keep them there;
- assist with activities supporting school construction;
- help maintain textbooks;
- participate in school and community activities; and
- identify the need for targeted assistance to help relieve some of the household costs of education.
The success of teaching depends to a large extent on the availability of teaching and learning materials. The project supports the review of existing materials and best practices, as well as the development, testing, production, and distribution of supplementary materials and teacher’s guides in needed areas. This component includes the revision of curricula and instructional materials to conform to the learning needs of students, especially the girls.
Finally, the project is focused on teacher training. It seeks to increase the number of female and ethnic minority teachers by supporting minority students, mainly females, with scholarships, health-care allowances, books, educational materials, and commodities such as blankets, mosquito nets, and torches. After completing their studies, the recruits will teach in ethnic minority schools in project districts.
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