What do you wish for the education of the next generation of girls?

2020 is a pivotal year as the global community will mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (Beijing+25). The Beijing Declaration is considered as the key global policy document on gender equality and the most ambitious roadmap for the empowerment of girls and women everywhere.

To mark the occasion, as previous blogs have discussed, we have produced a joint fact sheet with UNESCO on gender equality in education with the latest facts and stats. It includes information on the bottom ten countries for girls’ education extracted from our WIDE database, (managed jointly with UIS). It supports UNESCO’s initiative, Her education, our future, calling for accelerated collective action in favour of girls’ and women’s education.

The bottom ten countries for girls’ education

The World Inequality Database in Education, WIDE, managed by the GEM Report and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, highlights the powerful influence of gender, combined with other factors such as ethnicity and location, over which people have little control but which play an important role in shaping their opportunities for education and life.

WIDE data shows that, in 9 countries around the world, the poorest girls spend less than 2 years in school on average.  And in 10 countries, none of the poorest young women have completed upper secondary school, all but 2 of which are in sub-Saharan Africa: Belize, Burundi, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Nepal, Senegal, the U.R Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

Looking at UIS data on out-of-school numbers, in primary school, more than two-thirds of girls in the poorest 20% of households are not enrolled in 2 countries. In lower secondary school, more than two-thirds of girls in the poorest households are not enrolled in 6 countries, with Benin, Guinea, Nigeria and Mali featuring on both lists. In upper secondary education, in the bottom 10 countries, no more than 2 out of 10 girls from the poorest households can expect to attend among those aged 15-17 years.

Gender gap in primary school enrolment has halved over past 25 years

Sunday is International Women’s Day. The year 2020 is also the 25-year anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing in 1995), which culminated with the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a key global policy document on gender equality and the most ambitious roadmap for the empowerment of girls and women.

To mark the occasion, we have released a new fact sheet on girls’ education looking at progress achieved over the past 25 years. Using UIS data, it shows that girls’ enrolment rates in primary and secondary education have almost doubled in low-income countries, and that the gender gap in primary enrolment was halved. But it also shows that the pace of change is not fast enough. GEM Report calculations show that, at the present rate, getting every girl into primary school will only happen in 2050. These figures will be built on even further in the GEM 2020 Gender Report due out this September.

We have long known about the benefits of educating girls. Our past research shows that if all women completed primary education, maternal deaths would be reduced by two-thirds. If they had a secondary education, child deaths would be cut by half, saving 3 million lives, and there would be two-thirds fewer child marriages. If all girls in sub-Saharan Africa, and in South and West Asia had a secondary education, the number of pregnancies under the age of 17 years would fall by close to 60%.

Are private actors the solution to achieve SDG 4?

By Dr. Maria Ron Balsera, ActionAid

SDG 4 aims to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’, with the leading principle of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to ‘leave no one behind’. Yet, the answer of how to get there differs widely depending on who we ask and where. Many voices are pushing for stronger partnerships with private actors. However, the negative effects on equity and other areas of the increasing privatisation of education is becoming a central concern for education, development and human rights scholars and practitioners. This is why we have carried out a new study looking at its impact in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda and additional research in Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria and Tanzania.  Our findings conclude that, rather than privatisation, we should focus on ensuring that public education is available, accessible, acceptable and adaptable and for this, it needs to be adequately funded.

There is growing evidence on the consequences of privatisation in terms of exclusion, segmentation, segregation, inequality of opportunities, stigmatisation of public education, diversion of essential funds, lowering teaching standards, narrowing of the curriculum, and so on– something we look forward to the 2021 GEM Report on non-state actors in education exploring further.

Private sector participation in education: where it occurs, and why

By Antoni Verger, Adrián Zancajo, Clara Fontdevila

The privatization of basic education is a global phenomenon, growing in all corners of the world. As a pre-cursor to a larger discussion on this issue to be featured in the 2021 GEM Report on non-state actors in education, this blog looks at its growth in different regions, why it emerged, and how it has developed.

The privatization of education has evolved differently and intensified further in some regions than in others. For instance, as the figure below shows, in Latin America the percentage of countries with more than 20% of private enrolments in primary education expanded the fastest between 1975 and 2015, whereas in Europe and in Central Asia the growth concentrated among countries with 10%-20% of private enrolment.

The pace and historical evolution of such developments also vary across regions. In the Middle East and North Africa, the expansion of private enrolment has taken place gradually since 1995, while in South Asia private enrolment expanded rapidly during the 2000s.

How can we stop language barriers holding back learning for people on the move?

One in five students have a migrant background in OECD countries, resulting in multi-lingual / multi-cultural classrooms. Yet only half of immigrants receive language support in OECD countries on average. Arriving in a new country and suddenly sitting in a new classroom must feel foreign enough without also being left to navigate learning a new language without support. Learning a language is the first step to opening up education systems to immigrants and helping them feel like they belong.

Moreover, not speaking the language of instruction holds back students’ learning. It is a key explaining factor behind the fact that two times as many foreign-born students leave education early in the European Union than natives.  Data from 2018 in OECD countries show that about 62% of first-generation and 41% of second-generation immigrant students did not speak the assessment language at home.

Not speaking a language of instruction can be related to worse education outcomes. In Uganda, refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo were automatically placed in lower grades because they lacked English proficiency. They ended up with higher repetition rates even when they had mastered the syllabus. This also ended up placing pressure on what are usually the least qualified teachers and raised protection risks for younger children. Burundian refugees in Rwanda faced the same challenge.

Want your Digital Health Education Program to Work? Hire a Youth Designer

By Mireille Sekamana, a junior designer from Kigali, Rwanda. She works with YLabs to design digital platforms that provide health education to empower young people in Rwanda. Mireille is taking part in the Switched On Symposium in Istanbul, Turkey, 19-21 February 2020, around sexuality education in the digital space. This blog follows one posted earlier this week with a new technical brief by UNESCO on sexuality education and information online

As a designer, part of my job is to sit with young people and understand the kind of information they need, what kind of services they’re looking for, and how they actually want to receive those services. Last week, I met with a group of young boys and girls at a youth center in Kigali, Rwanda to test a new component of a digital health education program that connects users to high-quality, youth-friendly services at local pharmacies.

The room was filled with a flurry of noise and excitement as we worked together to test and iterate on the prototypes. And suddenly, a thought came to me: Three short years ago, I was the young person sitting across the table being interviewed about this very product called CyberRwanda. I was the person who was invited to co-design a solution to a problem that I saw and identified in my life. And now, I am the designer leading these workshops.

Coming to work at YLabs, a nonprofit design studio that focuses on adolescent health and wellbeing, has been a great thing in my life, but I know that it had been a great thing for YLabs as well. Involving, and hiring, youth designers from the very beginning of a project help to make it more innovative, more cherished, and more sustainable.

If we do not provide young people with quality sexuality education, the digital world will

By: Joanna Herat, senior programme specialist for health and education at UNESCO, with expertise in comprehensive sexuality education, HIV, and school-related gender-based violence. Joanna is leading the team organizing the Switched On Symposium in Istanbul, Turkey, 19-21 February 2020, around sexuality education in the digital space.

Far too many young people grow up without quality comprehensive sexuality education (CSE), the sort that goes beyond the basics of sex and reproduction, to cover topics like relationships, gender equality, body image, and consent. While it’s hard to say how many people this affects, it’s fair to say that thousands, perhaps millions, of young people reach adulthood with confusing, conflicting and often negative messages about sexuality, exacerbated by embarrassed silence from adults.

Image: Getty/Ryan King

The need and the appetite for more sexuality education are there. Look at the success of Netflix’s 2019 coming-of-age comedy-drama Sex Education, which answers the myriad of questions young people have about growing up, their changing bodies, sex, and love. Amid the often-hilarious trials of adolescent life, the series deals with serious issues such as school-related gender-based violence, school violence and bullying, sexuality, and identity.

It is no surprise then, that increasing numbers of young people are turning to digital spaces for information on sex and relationships, interested in the privacy and anonymity it can offer. A new technical brief we have released for this week’s Symposium in Istanbul shows that 71% of 15-24 year olds sought sexuality education and information online in the past 12 months. Some may be seeking information in entertainment form such as in Netflix’ Sex Education, or in a more educational format such as certain web pages, chat groups, social media sites and through social media influencers.

Private supplementary tutoring: a global phenomenon with far-reaching implications

By Mark Bray, Centre for International Research in Supplementary Tutoring (CIRIST), Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, and UNESCO Chair in Comparative Education, The University of Hong Kong.

The GEM Report team is much to be applauded for focusing on the roles of non-state actors in education in its 2021 edition – the consultation for which is still open. Among these actors are private tutors. They may be university students and others who work informally as private tutors, teachers in public schools who take additional roles as private tutors, and entrepreneurs who operate tutorial centres as stand-alone enterprises and chains.

Private supplementary tutoring is widely known as shadow education because much of it mimics mainstream schooling. Across the world, many millions of students receive some form of shadow education each day. The 2017/8 GEM Report estimated that the size of the market would surpass US$227 billion by 2022.

How are donors helping to end the gender imbalance in science?

Many countries, usually poorer ones, are still far even from the target of parity in primary and secondary education enrolment, let alone the more aspirational target of non-discrimination in all aspects of the education system. Girls’ education therefore remains a priority area for many actors in international development. But how do donors approach the main priorities?

When preparing our Gender Report in the run up to the G7 Ministerial Meeting on Education and Development last year, the GEM Report team and UNESCO sent a questionnaire to the aid agencies of the G7 countries, selected international organizations and NGOs, asking them to put forward projects for tackling 12 priorities in girls’ education. Today, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we outline how big the problem is, and summarise selected responses to the issue.