Can better sanitary care help keep African girls in school?

This blog was written by Elizabeth Tofaris, University of Cambridge, on behalf of the Impact Initiative for international development research, which seeks to connect policymakers and practitioners with the world-class social science research supported by the ESRC-DFID Strategic Partnership to maximize the uptake and impact of research from the Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research and the Raising Learning Outcomes in Education Systems Programme.

For young girls in developing countries, not being able to manage their periods can hinder access to education. Research from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London demonstrates that in rural Uganda, providing free sanitary products and lessons about puberty to girls may increase their attendance at school.

Uganda, Kitengeesa. A worker trims and stacks sanitary pads before they are lined and sewn at the AFRIpads factory. Started by volunteers in 2009, AFRIpads manufactures reusable fibre sanitary pads. Credit: Nyani Quarmyne/Panos

Period taboos

In many poor communities, menstruation is still often seen as an embarrassing, shameful, and dirty process. Such taboos around the topic mean many adolescent girls are often unprepared for their periods and how to manage them. Less than half of girls in low and middle income countries have access to basics such as sanitary towels or tampons, soap and water, or facilities to change, clean, or dispose of hygiene products.

In Uganda, only 22% of girls are enrolled in secondary schools compared with 91% in primary schools, with those living in rural areas being the least likely group to go to school. Researchers believe that the cost of hygiene products and the difficulties in managing periods play a key role in keeping girls out of school.

Gender norms also harm the education of boys

Last month, the 2018 Gender Review of the GEM Report focused on the universally acknowledged fact that girls face many more barriers in education, especially in the poorest countries. Yet, this fact often overshadows another concern, which receives a lot less visibility, yet is important in equal measure: that gender norms affect the education opportunities of boys as well of girls.

The GEM Report unveils its latest policy paper putting the spotlight on disaffected boys and young men, often from marginalized or poor backgrounds, whose educational development and life chances are compromised.

Much of this stems from gender norms that continue to condition the identities and expectations imposed on boys and girls in classrooms and which have ramifications for their relationships with their families, teachers, peers and communities.

Poverty is a key driver of boys’ disadvantage in education

Meeting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development depends on offering equal opportunities for all. Yet, in a large number of countries boys persistently lag behind. Reversing this is no easy feat. Boys in Latin America and the Caribbean have been less likely than girls to enroll in upper secondary education for at least 20 years.

And the situation is worse for the poorest. In Honduras, while only 65 males completed upper secondary school for every 100 females in 2011, just 27 poor males did so for every 100 poor females.

Getting more girls into science, technology, engineering and mathematics degree courses

It may sound improbable but only 4% of countries have achieved gender parity in tertiary education. But, unlike primary education, there tend to be more females than males enrolling in higher education institutions with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa.

Yet, women are less likely than men to earn degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). In countries such as Chile, Ghana and Switzerland, women make up less than a quarter of students enrolled in STEM degree courses.

Stereotypes keep girls out of STEM degree courses

Gender stereotypes are a massive driver of these disparities. Consciously or unconsciously, teachers’ gender beliefs are passed on to their students, inadvertently shaping the choices they make about their futures. For instance, in the United States, anxiety expressed by female mathematics teachers was found to be associated with female students’ perceptions that boys were outperforming them in mathematics.

A randomized experiment in France assessed the effectiveness of a one hour, one-off visit by a volunteer female scientist to grade 10 and grade 12 classrooms. Exposure to such a female role model significantly reduced the prevalence of stereotypes associated with jobs in science, for both female and male students. While there was no significant effect on the choice of track the following year among grade 10 students, the probability of grade 12 students being enrolled in selective science programs increased by 30%.

Teachers who are running countries

President Mokgweetsi E.K. Masisi, Photo: UN Women/Ryan Brown, https://bit.ly/2GWwJ7X

Mokgweetsi Masisi, a former teacher and education minister, has just been sworn in as Botswana’s fifth President. On appointment, Masisi said that young people, who make up 60% of the population, were the country’s future leaders and the country would invest in them with scaled up technical and vocational education and training and with new ways of tackling poor education at every level. He re-committed to implementing the new education sector plan, which would introduce pre-primary education and said that his government would, “continue to focus on and intensify the maintenance of the existing schools facilities to ensure enabling environment for effective delivery of education, learning and training programmes.”

He is far from being the only teacher to make it to the top. Analysis from 2009 taken from the Who‘s Who database had shown that at least 7% of politicians worldwide were academics or educators before going into politics.

The United States tends to favour academics or educators for presidents it seems. No fewer than 10 presidents were teachers or academics, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, James Garfield, Chester Alan Arthur, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Barack Obama.

Tracking of aid to early childhood development needs to improve

This blog was written by Asma Zubairi, a researcher at REAL Centre at the University of Cambridge.

How much do donors spend on early childhood development? This is the key question for our new report for Theirworld Just beginning: Addressing inequality in donor funding for Early Childhood Development.

Young Lives/Lucero Del Castillo Ames

Early Childhood Development (ECD) is widely recognised as a vital area for global policy attention given evidence that children’s futures are shaped by investment in their early years. Such priority is recognised in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with ECD cutting across health, education, nutrition and child protection. But our analysis shows that, while aid spending on ECD has been increasing in recent years, it has not kept pace with health and nutrition.

For the report, we rely on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Creditor Reporting System (CRS), which is the global aid reporting mechanism through which stakeholders are able to track the volume, recipients and sectors targeted by aid. For example, the Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM Report) also relies on this database for its annual factsheet, the next of which is due in May, that helps hold donors accountable for their pledges on aid to education.

Some donors may claim their spending is misrepresented in our Report. To take one example where we are already aware of potential discrepancies, according to our analysis using aid disbursements from the OECD-CRS database, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) is one of the largest donors to ECD overall but one of the 69 out of 93 donors who do not report spending anything on pre-primary education. Yet a recent report to Congress indicated, for example, that USAID disbursed $22.5 million in aid to pre-primary education in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Jordan in 2016.

#MakeitPublic: GEM launches new campaign calling on all governments to report on education progress to their citizens

The 2017/8 GEM Report showed that national education monitoring reports are a vital tool for transparency and accountability yet only government in two countries produced such reports between 2010 and 2016. Only one in four did so annually.

Monitoring should provide timely and relevant information on whether progress is being made towards the objectives of the national education strategy or plan. Monitoring reports can interpret evidence, identify problems to support decisions and follow-up actions, and provide the basis for evaluation. When the assignment of responsibilities and the links between inputs and results is clear, they also serve as an accountability mechanism.

National monitoring reports are the tool through which governments capture progress on education commitments to report it to their citizens. While NGOs fulfil this reporting role in many countries, a government report carries special weight. Governments prepare a range of monitoring reports, many of which fulfil statutory obligations to other bodies, e.g. the legislature, the supreme audit institution or an international organization. In addition, citizens need a regular report on the implementation of the national education strategy or plan to be able to hold government to account. Such a document can demonstrate the executive’s commitment to transparency and to communicating government expenditure, activities and results to citizens in an accessible manner.

A unique opportunity to design and deliver education for refugees

Teacher Lim Bol from South Sudan teaches refugees in Uganda

By Joseph Nhan-O’Reilly on behalf of a coalition of organisations working to support education for refugees including the Initiative on Child Rights in the Global Compacts, a coalition of 30 UN, civil society and philanthropic organisations that are working to ensure that children’s rights are promoted in the two global compacts on migrants and refugees.

On September 19, 2016 the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. The Declaration was hailed as the foundation of a new approach by the international community to large movements of refugees and migrants, as well as to protracted refugee situations.

It sets out a Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF), with specific actions needed to ease pressure on host countries, enhance refugee self-reliance, expand access to third-country solutions, and support conditions in countries of origin for return in safety and dignity.

In adopting the Declaration, UN member states also called on UNHCR to develop a Global Compact on Refugees. The Compact will combine the CRRF with a Programme of Action that sets out actions for both Member States and others to ensure the full implementation of the promises made in the Declaration.

Consultations on the Programme of Action begin again this week in Geneva and will focus on measures to help meet the needs of refugees and host communities, including to education.

Why are people talking about a teacher shortage in New Zealand?

At the end of February, the government of New Zealand called the teacher shortage a “ticking time bomb“, with the number of people training to join the profession at the pre-primary, primary and secondary education levels having dropped by 40% between 2010 and 2016.

The Education Minister, Chris Hipkins, said “the numbers were going in the opposite direction between 2008 and 2010”. As a result, one media outlet, the Education Gazette, was advertising over 600 primary and secondary school teachers’ jobs. The shortage was picking up traction.

The shortages were worse in some areas, such as Auckland and Maukau, the main union for secondary school teachers, the PPTA, found in a survey taken last November. The Auckland Secondary Schools Principals’ Association (ASSPA), for instance, showed in a new paper that the teacher shortage in high schools in Auckland was projected to hit 3000 by 2027.

The gaps are also found to be more extreme in some subjects. “Principals are considering the prospect of cancelling subjects for lack of trained and qualified teaching specialists,” the union said. A Council for Educational Research report conducted in 2015 showed that 71% of secondary schools had difficulties covering the teacher shortage, 52% of which were in key curriculum areas. The president of the Secondary Principals’ Association of New Zealand, Sandy Pasley, said a multi-agency planning taskforce group had been set up with the ministry to look specifically at the teacher shortage for “hard to staff subjects” such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

A postcard from this year’s Comparative and International Education Society Annual Conference

By Will Smith, Senior policy analyst at the GEM Report

The most unique aspect of the Comparative and International Education Society Annual (CIES) conference is the convergence of the global education community into a single location. It is a tremendous opportunity to learn about key trends in the field and, most importantly, exchange ideas with some of the best thought leaders in this space.

The 62^nd CIES conference, held in Mexico City, saw a focus on South-North dialogue and South-South collaboration, and an ambition to expand awareness of and engagement with the voices and actors that have historically been marginalized in education research and institutions.

I represented the GEM Report team at this year’s conference participating in several workshops, consultations and panels on topics ranging from accountability, privatization, inclusion, and gender over the week-long event.

The Chilean students are back for more: protesting for education equality

For the third time in the past 12 years, Chilean students are back on the streets calling for equality in education. This time they are protesting a decision taken by the Constitutional Tribunal to overturn the Higher Education Law, which would have made university education free and banned universities operating for profit.

Credit: Ibar Silva

The education scene in Chile has seen a few U-turns. Free education was overturned in 1981, which led to an explosion of private providers and one of the most stratified and segregated education systems in the world. High school students hit the streets in 2006. They were followed in 2011 by university students who protested against the cost of tuition, the related student debts, and the rise of private institutions. As a result, when Bachelet was elected for her second term with 62% in 2013, partly on the wave of these protests, she brought in free tuition reforms and turned over the voucher-heavy education system that had been creating unwanted inequalities in access.

It was these reforms that recently have been claimed to be unconstitutional by a group of private universities. They were also claimed by many to be unsustainable, initially estimated by the Ministry of Finance to cost $3.14 billion per year.

Private higher education institutions are nothing new. They have been growing steadily the world over, as we showed in our recent policy paper. They account for 49% of student enrolment in Latin America, rising to 80% of students in Chile in 2015. Chile, according to the OECD, now has the fourth most expensive university system in the world. And, subsequently, the cost frequently falls on students’ shoulders. National education accounts for 2013 show that households in Chile were covering 55% of the costs of total higher education expenditure.