The Girl Child's Education

by Ilana Breitkopf

Education is the key to ending poverty. Two thirds of all those who have no access to education are girls and women. Sixty five million girls and women never even started school, and an estimated 100 million do not complete primary education, often because the quality is poor and their opportunities are far from equal to those of boys. More than 542 million women are illiterate, many as a result of inadequate or incomplete schooling.

In an age of enormously expended access to all levels of education, of high aspirations for political participation, and huge growth of knowledge economics, nearly three quarters of a billion girls and women are being denied education. The right to education is a fundamental human right as an empowerment right, education is the primary vehicle by which economically and socially marginalized adults and children can lift themselves out of poverty, and obtain the means to participate fully in their communities.

The manifest injustice of this state of affairs and the marked gender inequalities associated with it, prompted the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000 to set two of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (which were agreed upon by all world's countries and all the world's leading development institutions), to address the problem:

MDG 2: Achieve universal primary education, with the target of ensuring that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling by 2015.

MDG 3: Promote gender equality and empower women, with the target of eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005 (This target has not been met), and in all levels of education by 2015.

There are complex interrelationships between poverty, cultural and ethnic differences, geographical marginalisation and gender inequalities. We need to learn more from the outcomes of initiatives to promote gender equalities and consider what has made them successful or unsuccessful.

There is a huge popular demand for education and for governments to fulfil the promises they made at the Millennium Summit. For Northern donor governments there is pressure to meet financial commitments made in 2000; for developing-country governments there is pressure to develop good quality plans and transparent means of achieving Equal Education For All (EFA).

Girls' labour, official and unofficial, continues to constitute a major obstacle to accelerating progress toward achieving gender parity and equality in primary and secondary education by 2015. Since the majority of girls out of school are likely to be working, efforts to increase girls' education must go hand-in-hand with efforts to progressively eliminate child labour.

But poverty is not the only factor at play for the girl child. Lack of access to good quality education is a major determinant. So are tradition and culture, in which the women's generally low status in society, and the limited expectations or opportunities of securing decent paid work as adults play pivotal roles. Moreover, this view is compounded in the parents' eyes if the quality of education is poor, grades low, or the curriculum deemed irrelevant to the girls' future.

Social traditions and deep rooted religious and cultural beliefs are often barriers to expanding girls' educational opportunities in undeveloped countries around the world.

• In parts of the Horn of Africa girls are abducted for marriage causing them to be reluctant to walk the far distance to get to school.
• Throughout the Sahel region of Africa and parts of the middle East, a dowry system often promotes that girls leave their studies.
• Trafficking, particularly of young indigenous girls is lucrative and continues in some countries despite legal sanctions.
• The AIDS crisis in Southern Africa and Asia turns many young girls into the head of the family.

These are just few examples of the obstacles to girls' gaining an education.

Despite these conditions, there is much desire for change; parents in even the poorest circumstances everywhere hope that their children will receive an education.

Generalising about the status of girls' education in even a single country is often misleading. Variations within each individual country are substantial. Girls' educational development in different parts of Mozambique, for instance, varies widely for cultural, economic, and geographic reasons. Religion, remoteness from urban centres, marriage practices, migration patterns, the burden of disease, seasonal labour requirements, cash flow, and other factors all contribute to the wide variety of reasons for girls' enrolment and retention differences within the same country.

High quality analyses of the local and national situations for girls' education, linked to a focused intervention and budget allocation, are critical. No single approach will resolve everything. A variety of interventions and initiatives are needed to improve education for girls so that they achieve success in both primary and secondary school.

All development partners require both creativity and discipline if they are to undertake a variety of interventions that focus on process, and they need to bring these interventions together within one plan for the education sector. A wide range of development and government workers, at different levels of the aid system, need to allocate the thinking, time, and money required to promote girls' education (from projects to Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and budget support; from local government to ministry headquarters).

Commitment to the long-term goal of increasing girls' participation at all levels of the education system will require adjustments to policies, such as changing the school day to accommodate girls' chores in the short term; but also changes in attitudes, such as encouraging communities to rethink how much domestic work should be expected of school-age girls.

In the end a girl child out of school contributes to a vicious cycle, eventually preventing her from giving her own family a good start in life and slowing economic growth and social development of the country as a whole. It has been proved that entire societies develop when girls and women are enabled to be fully contributing community members.