Gender and Education for All THE LEAP TO EQUALITY

Chapter 7 - Gendered strategies for EFA

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Quantitative aspects of progress Gender inequality in education entails serious losses for society. The overriding case for achieving equal access to, and treatment within, education derives from principles of human rights, which are clearly enshrined and accepted internationally. In addition, however, gender inequality in education entails serious losses for society. Where girls and women are more educationally disadvantaged than boys and men, shifting the balance towards girls will, over the medium term, improve economic growth, increase farm output and the incomes of the poorest, nourish citizenship, enhance the well-being of children, reduce fertility, and improve the prospects for future generations. For a large range of reasons, removal of gender gaps in education should have first priority in all programmes of expansion and qualitative improvement. This report demonstrates the extent to which such changes in direction are required. The gender goal for 2005 aims to achieve parity in primary and secondary enrolments by that date. Chapter 2 shows that 52 out of 128 countries have achieved this goal, or are likely to do so by the intended date. The goal is likely to be missed, however, by more than half of these countries, one-third of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. Twenty-two of those countries that will miss the 2005 goal should be able to achieve parity by 2015, but fifty-four of them (two-fifths of the total) are unlikely, on present trends, to achieve parity even by then. In most of these cases, secondary schooling is the lagging subsector. These countries are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa sixteen), and in East Asia and the Pacific eleven), and they include China and India. Gender disparities in enrolments are overwhelmingly in favour of boys. In a significant minority of countries they favour girls – mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe and some southern states in sub-Saharan Africa. These disparities are usually small and they are concentrated at secondary level. However, they have often been worsening in recent years, and they will require policy attention if shifts back towards parity are to be achieved. This report uses a new Education for All Development Index (EDI) to provide a summary measure of progress towards EFA. It incorporates proxy measures for UPE, gender parity, adult literacy and school quality. Each of these elements are given equal weight, and the index can thus be used as a rough indication of the ‘average’ extent of national progress towards four of the six EFA goals. No attempt has been made to project values of the index to 2015, because at present only around half of all countries can be included in it, owing to lack of data. However, a cursory inspection of current values, for those countries represented, indicates that a major challenge exists. Only sixteen countries, from the ninety-four for which data are available, have achieved the four goals, or are close to doing so (having an EDI of 0.95 or higher). No country from South and West Asia (except Maldives), sub-Saharan Africa or the Arab States is yet in that category. Furthermore, more than one-third of the countries have EDI values lower than 0.80, indicating that they have far to go to reach EFA. It must be emphasized, however, that rapid progress towards EFA can be made by these countries. Planning and policy reform is capable of bringing many nations closer to achieving EFA over the next decade, provided that it is supplemented by strong external support from the aid community. As regards the gender goals, even for those countries likely to fail to reach gender parity at primary and secondary levels by 2005, policies are available to speed up their transition, and in such circumstances their longer-term prospects to 2015 are more promising.