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Gender Checklist: Education :
Key questions and action points in the project cycle
Gender issues in education projects
Does the project have mechanisms for measuring its impact on women?
Do the project objectives deal directly with the needs of women, particularly among the poor, and did they have a hand in setting the objectives?
Key Questions
- Are the project objectives specifically related to the needs of poor girls and women?
- Did women participate in setting these objectives?
- What are the causes of gender differences in enrollment? Are the differences caused by admission policies and practices or inadequate school facilities (lack of boarding facilities) for girls? Are school fees a barrier to female enrollment? at which levels of education? Are the constraints related to concern for the safety of girls in long-distance travel from home to school?
- How should the project deal with cultural norms that keep women and men separate? Is separate infrastructure of equal value and equal quality needed for girls/females and boys/males? Do schools accessible to the client population have female teachers? What are the financial and political implications of these considerations?
- Who decides on education expenditures in the household?
- How are the investment returns on educating girls and boys viewed? Is educating girls considered a good investment for the family? Is there an expectation that boys will support their parents in later life, thus making boys’ educational attainment more important than girls’?
- Is the education of girls considered an advantage or an impediment to marriage? What impact will education have on customs such as dowry or bride price?
- Are there concerns that the education of girls will make them unwilling to comply with their parents’ plans for their future?
- Is the labor of female children considered more necessary to the household than that of male children?
- Are the sexes segregated in training programs, schools, or colleges because of social beliefs (e.g., that girls or women should be taught only by female teachers)?
- Are female students being taught the same subjects as male students, or does the curriculum differ for male and female students? Are there beliefs that girls should learn only certain subjects? Are these subjects taught at schools that are accessible to the client population?
- Do textbooks or other educational media promote gender stereotypes (e.g., images of women holding babies and men holding agricultural implements)?
- Is training of female teachers included in the project?
- Are women being encouraged through career counseling to participate in all forms of training?
- Are women involved in school management, in the parent-teacher association? And what proportion of women hold decision-making positions in the ministry of education?
- How committed is the exe-cuting agency to involving women at various levels in education projects?
- Will special funds or other provisions be required for monitoring and for gender impact and benefit analysis, to ensure that women benefit from education pro-jects?
- Are gender aspects inte-grated sufficiently in the pro-ject to meet the Bank’s country strategic objectives for GAD or the DMC’s goals for GAD?
- Does the monitoring and evaluation system explicitly measure the project’s effects on women?
Key Strategies
- Assist the DMC in formulating goals, strategies, and action plans to increase the education of girls and women.
- Develop participatory strategies for project design, imple-mentation, and monitoring and evaluation (M & E). Include stakeholders, students, teachers, communities, local government, and non-governmental organizations in project planning and design.
- Consider involving NGOs to increase community participation by women in particular.
- Conduct a study to examine economic and social factors affecting enrollment, dropout and attrition, and graduation rates among girls/women at the various levels of the education system. Include data on employment issues or labor demand for women and barriers to women’s participation in the workforce.
- Consider using social marketing approaches to influence cultural attitudes and to promote the value of education for girls and women.
- Consider the need for remedial actions at lower school levels or for upgrading programs to increase female participation in the academic and technical fields prerequisite to entry into professional schools and higher education.
- Ensure that opportunities for training or scholarships that might be provided by the project are equally accessible to males and females.
- Ensure that schools accessible to the client population have female teachers. Ensure the security of female teachers through the involvement of the local community or other means.
- If vacancies for teachers’ positions are to be filled, identify local candidates if possible.
- Allocate funds, if necessary, to enable the executing agency to develop strategies for increasing women’s participation. Gender advisers may have to be recruited for this purpose.
- Include staff deployment programs to ensure that teachers are available in rural schools and to reduce absenteeism and transfers.
- Integrate gender as a specific subject in all training for primary/secondary teachers.
Tips
- Reserve seats for female staff in development programs for teaching staff
- Implement an affirmative action plan to bring more women into school management boards and teacher organizations
- Sensitize the local community to the importance of girls’ education
- Provide extension and continuing education programs for marginally qualified people, especially women, to equip them for entry into professional schools and higher education
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Design specific measures to address identified con-straints on girls/female participation. For example:
- Consider providing scholarship/stipends to en-courage female enrollment at levels of the edu-cation system where female enrollment is low.
- Establish separate schools for girls in rural areas.
- Allocate funds for stipends for girls to ensure their access to educational opportunities.
- Mobilize communities and train government extension workers to raise the level of com-munity awareness of the need to educate girls.
- Consider allocating flexible school hours.
- Allocate resources for girls’ hostels.
Design specific mechanisms to facilitate women’s involvement in school management, teacher organizations, etc. For example:
- Set quota systems or implement an affirmative action plan.
- Ensure that role models for decision-making and leadership positions (program directors, school principals, etc.) are included in the project.
- Involve NGOs to facilitate community participation in school management committees.
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