Evaluating Education Access and Performance in Secondary Schools with a Gender-Responsive and Equity-Focused Lens

[Awuor Ponge]

[Rituu B Nanda]

Patricia Rogers response on Pelican Community

Here's the relevant section from a realist review of community accountability programs to improve educational outcomes I worked on with my colleagues Gill Westhorp and Bill Walker. The full report can be accessed here including all the details of the cited reports.

5.10 Gender 

Community-accountability and empowerment interventions are more likely to empower women and girls and generate improved learning outcomes for girls where the specific barriers, including cultural barriers, to their participation are understood and addressed. 

Gender discrimination affects both girls’ participation in education and women’s participation in school management. Arvind (2009) and Pailwar and Mahajan (2005) reported on interventions that addressed girls’ exclusion from education on the basis of gender in Rajasthan and Jharkhand—very poor states. Interventions involved sensitisation, mobilisation, deliberation, agreement on joint action and collective action. This involved both recognising existing gender norms and working to reconstruct them. 

In Ethiopia, GAC were established to support girls’ enrolment, protection and success in BESO schools (World Learning 2007). GACs developed their own locally appropriate strategies that variously addressed enrolment, financial and material support, tuition, counselling, addressing ‘harmful traditional customs such as, inheritance of widows to brothers or uncles, polygamy, female genital mutilation, early marriage, abduction, and rape’ (p. 15), rescue of abducted girls, advocacy for legal action, health advice and strategies to avoid stigma and discrimination. However, women were not usually represented in PTAs and did not participate in decision making. Even within the GACs, male involvement and the involvement of religious leaders was seen to be essential (p. 74).

 In rural Honduras and Guatemala, women were less likely to acquire skills through CMS (Altschuler and Corrales 2012, p. 16). In Guatemala, women remained almost completely excluded from school councils, while there was tokenism in El Salvador (Garcia 2006, pp. 17–18). Upadhyaya et al. (2007) note that, in Nepal, mobilisation was seen as a vehicle for information dissemination, rather than engagement and that this was a barrier to addressing gender issues.

 In Pakistan, community participation was seen as critical in increasing enrolment of girls and identifying local female teachers and a policy of gender-specific committees for gender-specific schools was adopted. Despite this, there were very few female members of SMCs/PTAs, engaging women was slower, women were often not aware of SMCs and women’s roles were often not addressed in training or awareness raising (Khan and Zafar 1999). However, the authors reported: ‘Since research shows that the presence of mothers on committees enhances activity levels and reduces drop-outs, an increased representation of women on such committees or separate mothers’ committees is called for’ (p. 45).

Patricia Rogers

[Awuor Ponge]

Dear Prof. Patricia Rogers,

Thank you for sharing this wonderful resource. It is very helpful. I will go through it and see how I can domesticate the information therein to my context.

Truly appreciated.

[Prerna Goel Chatterjee]

Hi

This is a link to the meta-evaluation Prof Vimala Ramachandran and I worked on. Hope you find it useful.

http://www.isstindia.org/publications/meta_eval.pdf

Regards
Prerna

[Awuor Ponge]

Dear Prerna,

Thank you so much for sharing with me this wonderful resource. It will definitely be of value to my study.

Truly appreciated.

Cheers!