Help us decide the future themes of the GEM Report

The spotlight on the GEM Report and the outreach activities rolled out globally after its release give a chance for its theme to shift the education agenda. The 2010 Report on marginalization brought equity into the limelight, for example. But have you ever thought how the themes of the GEM Report are being decided?

A woman has won the ‘Nobel prize for mathematics’ for the first time

 

The 2019 Abel Prize, also known as the ‘Nobel prize for mathematics’ was won by Karen Uhlenbeck last Tuesday, the first woman to ever receive the award. The award makes her one of the pioneers for women mathematicians, alongside Maryam Mirzakhani, the Iranian who was the first woman to win another prestigious prize in 2017, the Fields Medal, awarded by the International Mathematical Union.

Uhlenbeck receives the #AbelPrize 2019 “for her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.” @UTAustinhttps://t.co/LhIpziMySU pic.twitter.com/gNw7INgxwX

— The Abel Prize (@abel_prize) March 19, 2019

Dr Uhlenbeck is an American professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin and won for her “pioneering achievements” in various fields of mathematics. In one of her interviews she acknowledged the gender imbalance in her field of research and the barriers she faced to continue with her passion. Of graduate school she said: “It was evident that you wouldn’t get ahead in mathematics if you hang around with women. We were told that we couldn’t do math because we were women”. “Even when I had my Ph.D. for five years,” she said later, “I was still struggling with whether I should become a mathematician. I never saw myself very clearly.”

Roxana, a Romanian student on an Erasmus exchange programme, “learned to look beyond stereotypes”

This content comes from our newly released interactive youth version of the 2019 GEM Report.

The EU’s higher education strategy includes a target for at least 20% of graduates to experience part of their study or training abroad. Erasmus is the largest and most prominent student mobility programme in the world. Participants study up to 12 months in another European country, which home institutions recognize towards students’ degrees. Evaluations of the programme suggest a positive effect on employment, career opportunities and personality traits, as well as a substantial influence on participants’ social lives.

Roxana, a student from Romania, studied for a year in Portugal through the Erasmus programme. “One of the biggest challenges was to get out of my comfort zone. One of the things that I learnt is tolerance and how to better understand the past, the future and the behaviour of a nation,” said Roxana. “I learned to look beyond stereotypes. I understood that it is not always about the nationality, but also about the personality. Living in an international community improved my analytical skills, by always trying to understand the reason, before judging. Also, this helped me develop my willing to take risks in my professional and personal life”.

George teaches in a double-shift school in a refugee camp in Kenya to increase access to education

This content comes from our newly released interactive youth version of the 2019 GEM Report.

Low and middle income countries hosted about 89% of all refugees in 2017. About 52% of all refugees are under the age of 18. About 40% live in managed camps or collective centres, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Displacement intensifies the usual pressures on teacher management systems. Coordination of teacher recruitment, compensation and development is often further compromised in fragile contexts where multiple humanitarian and development aid agencies operate under different rules.

George, who spoke at the launch event for the 2019 GEM Report in Nairobi, Kenya, works in a secondary school in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp. In his camp, a ‘two-schools-in-one’ approach was tried out to help make up for the lack of secondary schools. Two sets of students attend, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon, each covering the 8 lessons a day as required for the curriculum. Each have their own deputy principle, heads of departments, teachers and different uniform. It has been such a success it has now been copied in three other schools, and the number of students enrolled has gone up.

“The two-schools-in-one was to solve congestion in classes. However, the congestion problem has not been resolved. This is because next year, over 6000 students will be competing for 2500 spaces in the five secondary schools in Kakuma Refugee Camp. More classes need to be constructed. Because of access to education, students acquire skills of peaceful living and conflict resolution, which is important for reconstructing their mother countries.”

What does the ‘feminization of migration’ mean for migrant women and their education?

The effects of migration and displacement are usually considered to be the same for men and women. However, this is often not the case. It is important to recognize how gender relations in both origin and host communities influence women’s and men’s experiences as migrants and refugees. This blog reflects on issues related to migration.

New GEM Report analysis on the intersections between gender, education, migration and displacement is being discussed today at a side event in New York during the 63rd session of the Commission of Status of Women with the African Union and the UN Girls Education Initiative. It offers a preview of the 2019 Gender Report to be released on July 5 at the G7 Ministerial Meeting in Paris.

Just under half of global international migrants are women. However, looking beyond averages, some countries are major hubs of gender-specific emigration, such as the Philippines for women and Nepal for men. And although this average figure has not changed in decades, women are now increasingly more likely to migrate to take up jobs, rather than to join male family members as dependants. This phenomenon has been termed the feminization of migration. Demand and supply for migrant women’s labour are affected by unequal gender norms in the labour market.

Migration can potentially liberate female migrants from restrictive family control and rigid gender roles. Becoming a breadwinner, not only abroad but also at home by migrating to the city, can enhance a woman’s status within their community back home.

But this opportunity can also be a major challenge. First, their departure can complicate the life and education of the children they leave behind. Second, migrant women can suffer from disadvantage related to class, race or ethnicity that intersect with their immigration status. They can be more vulnerable to sexual and racial abuse, harassment and discrimination at the workplace.

Displacement can exacerbate gender inequality in education

The effects of migration and displacement are usually considered to be the same for men and women. However, this is often not the case. It is important to recognize how gender relations in both origin and host communities influence women’s and men’s experiences as migrants and refugees. This blog reflects on issues related to displacement.

New GEM Report analysis on the intersections between gender, education, migration and displacement is shared today on International Women’s Day and will be discussed at a side event in New York on March 11 during the 63rd session of the Commission of Status of Women with the African Union and the UN Girls Education Initiative. It offers a preview of the 2019 Gender Report to be released on July 5 at the G7 Ministerial Meeting in Paris.

It shows that among refugees, gender gaps in enrolment rates are often worse. In Kenya and Ethiopia only 7 refugee girls are enrolled in primary school for every 10 boys; and only 4 girls are enrolled for every 10 boys at the secondary level. In Mogadishu, Somalia, an analysis of 486 settlements in 17 districts found that only 22% of the internally displaced girls over 5 years old had ever attended school, compared with 37% of the boys.

Additional challenges to gender equality in education in displacement settings are found in the violence surrounding many settings. Girls’ education is even sometimes the target of extremist militant groups as seen in Nigeria by the Boko Haram. The Education under Attack 2018 report profiled 18 countries where girls and young women were the targets of attacks on education. In Afghanistan, the Islamic State attacked 94 co-educational schools from 2013 to 2016.

Teachers multitask in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar camps for Rohingya refugees

This content comes from our newly released interactive youth version of the 2019 GEM Report.

Anowar is a Rohingya refugee who has been living in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh for over a year. He is a learning instructor in the Burmese language. ‘I’m happy. We Rohingya need education. If we don’t get it, we’ll suffer a lot.

At the beginning, it was a bit difficult because children were scared by the things that had happened in Myanmar. They saw lots of people being slaughtered when they were fleeing, so they were depressed. We helped them come to school for education and helped cure them of the depression.’

Jui is a host community teacher in camp #2, supported by UNICEF. ‘I noticed that the children are very excited about getting such love and caring.  We go to them and ask if they have any problems, and after listening, we provide them with a lot of games that we have and if there is any serious issue then we go to their parents and solve it there.

That is why they feel happy to come here in school, because we communicate well with them; they feel inspired, and that makes me feel very good. We don’t just make them aware of education – we make them aware of health as well. For example, a few days ago we were told to prepare the kids to take the diphtheria vaccine.’

Tracking the full range of education expenditure towards SDG 4: Senegal’s National Education Accounts

By Ousmane Diouf and Lily Neyestani-Hailu

Over the past two years, Senegal has been updating its education sector plan – the PAQUET 2013-2030, aiming to reflect the new vision and commitments of the global education goal, SDG 4. While updating its plan under the guidance of its national education group, Senegal developed with UNESCO’s help its National Education Accounts, an approach that the GEM Report has strongly supported for many years.

National Education Accounts classify data from all funding sources – government, households and donors – into a common framework, giving a better picture of who pays for what. By allowing for an integrated view of all financing flows, the approach focuses on how to achieve targets in an equitable manner, helping better target educational resources and improve policy decisions.

The approach also supports monitoring of progress towards SDG 4, as the level of education spending per student by source of financing is one of the thematic indicators. Finally, publishing data on how resources are being used informs the various stakeholders – from government to teachers to communities – to help ensure that resources reach their intended purpose.

National policies respond to evidence from the national education accounts

In Senegal, the national education accounts have shown that, for both public and private spending, the share of household expenditure has been increasing and was equal to the share of the government spending in 2016 (about 48% each), although there are differences between sub-sectors. The share of aid in total education spending amounted to only approximately 3%.

Undocumented children cannot go to school in South Africa: ‘The system is letting them down’

This content comes from our newly released interactive youth version of the 2019 GEM Report.

Kutenda is a 13-year-old Zimbabwean boy in South Africa who is lucky to be in school at all. He has no documentation because the country’s permit requirements for Zimbabwean migrants have changed so many times. The last permit scheme specifically for Zimbabwean migrants expired in 2017, so families now have to apply for new permits, as well as new study permits for their children. These can take 6-12 months to be issued, leaving a lot of ‘illegal’ Zimbabwean children in the country. Kutenda can continue his studies only because of a personal risk taken by his principal.

Gary, the principal, risks a fine of 5,000 South African Rand (US$350) per undocumented child he lets attend his school. In the past, with 63 such children attending, he’s been at risk of being personally fined up to ZAR315,000, or US$22,150. ‘I don’t regard myself as the top guy. I’m just passionate about education. In many instances, schools will not allow them in because they’re going by the book. I can’t understand that.

The system is letting them down. It is a constitutional right for a child to be educated, but it seems as if Home Affairs overrides the constitution. If they were not in school, where would they be? They’d be out in the streets; they’d become delinquents. So, having the children in the school – educating them, teaching them values and attitudes – they’ll become better people, and that can one day be beneficial to the country and the economy of the country.’

Despite treaty commitments to non-discrimination, making the right to education conditional on citizenship and/or legal residency status is maybe the most common way of explicitly excluding migrants in constitutions or education legislation.

John is a Cuban teacher who moved to Canada in 1997 and faced difficulty finding work

This content comes from our newly released interactive youth version of the 2019 GEM Report.

The reluctance of some countries to recognize teacher qualifications across borders is one of the most important challenges for migrant teachers.

‘Becoming a teacher in a foreign country is really challenging. I had two or three interviews where I said that I was not a Canadian citizen yet, and kind of never got a call again. Some universities’ requirements are very strict for foreign teachers. Some would only grant me a quarter of a Canadian credit for every Cuban credit. Some thought that a teacher with an accent from a small Caribbean country did not have what it takes or have much to offer.

We, foreign teachers, bring our culture, different teaching perspectives, experiences and values from our old country to Canada with the end goal of helping our students become lifelong learners.’

Teacher migration can create shortages in the countries they leave. Caribbean countries have experienced high teacher emigration in recent decades, not least because of active recruitment efforts in the United Kingdom and the United States. Facing shortages in public schools in the early 2000s, the New York City Education Board increased international recruitment, attracting hundreds of teachers from the Caribbean. For small island states, even small numbers of emigrating teachers can create significant shortages.