Educating the Girl Child: Best Foot Forward?

• Author: Pigozzi, Mary Joy

What does it take to get girls in school and keep them there?

This is a key question, as the United Nations and its partners move towards ensuring the right of every child to a basic education.

Yet, fully two thirds of the out-of-school children are girls, many of them out of school by virtue of discrimination on the basis of gender alone.

With regard to girls' education, progress is being made and experience gained worldwide, and the related knowledge base is expanding greatly. Initial efforts to promote such education focussed on the barriers that served as obstacles. These are fairly well documented now, and there is a growing understanding of the range of technical approaches that can be employed to overcome them according to the particular context. Thus, many successful strategies for addressing girls' education are known and have been documented.

There has also been an evolution in the activities that are being emphasized by nations and agencies that support girls' education. The initial emphasis on their access remains a key concern, but it has been combined with attention to educational quality and learning achievement, as it is clear that keeping girls in school is just as important as getting them there.

There has also been a subtle but important shift from a focus on girls to a focus on gender issues, which has allowed for deeper and more substantive analysis of the causes, outcomes and responses to gender disparity. It has also resulted in attention to issues specific to boys' education and to outcomes in which boys are also benefiting. Increased experience and assessments of progress have resulted in a general commitment to "mainstreaming" girls within gender-sensitive education systems that have "opened up" to include a range of approaches, reflecting the need for greater flexibility throughout. A fourth area where considerable evolution is evident is in the increase in the number and range of partnerships that are being formed to support girls' education. All this shows considerable progress in the "what" of their education. Next comes the question of "how?"

It is well known that the same strategy applied to the same obstacle in different contexts often has substantially different outcomes. In girls' education, this has led to a growing interest in the nature of the environment which has allowed change to occur specifically, in being able to understand the conditions that contribute to successful implementation so that they...