1.  We have chosen to restrict our comments to addressing the debate on the role of formal and non-formal education for women in unlocking their potential and thereby working towards poverty reduction. ActionAid has also taken this opportunity to make some policy recommendations that the Committee might consider in preparing its final report.

  2.  The Committee is aware of the immense social harm done by the denial of education to hundreds of million of women of each new generation. Over the past 40 years very little progress has been made in reducing the "gender gap" in education. The relative gap between boys and girls enrollments at primary level has remained about the same in most of Sub-Saharan Africa and has increased in South Asian countries such as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Everywhere, it is poor women from rural areas or from minority groups who carry the heaviest burden of educational inequality. Even in countries where overall enrollment statistics are relatively good, disaggregated data reveal that poor rural women are still excluded from knowledge, education and skills.

  3.  Confronted with evidence that the economic and social position of poor women is deteriorating even faster than the position of poor men, and that poor women have failed to reap the benefits of more open economies and more democratic governments, the need for international action to ensure women's access to knowledge, information and skills has become more urgent than ever.

  4.  In this context we greatly welcome the commitment of DFID and the other DAC donors to eradicate the gender gap in formal school primary enrollments by the year 2005, well ahead of their 2015 target for universalizing primary education. Moreover, we applaud DFID's record on gender and education. DFID is notable among the major donors for possessing an expert group of field-based Education Advisers and for investing in an ongoing programme of high-quality applied research. As a result, the Education Division staff tend to help governments and civil society organisations develop locally appropriate initiatives to address the needs of girls and women rather than having to import standardised project blueprints from elsewhere. For example, patient, long-term work with communities, teachers and Ministry of Education officials in Malawi finally resulted in the implementation of fairer policies towards girl pupils who become pregnant (one of the main causes of school dropout in Southern and Eastern Africa). Projects such as this one have helped pave the road to improved educational opportunities for girls.

  5.  However, ActionAid believes that DFID's commitment to appropriate education for poor women could be even stronger. We urge the Committee to take note of the following views and recommendations as it begins to prepare its conclusions from the inquiry.

A RIGHTS-BASED APPROACH TO WOMEN'S EDUCATION

  6.  Fundamentally, we believe that a rights-based approach to women's education—which aims to equip women with an informed ability to act, to participate fully in society and to exercise and defend their rights—is more likely to produce a lasting effect on poverty than an instrumentalist approach, which seeks merely to give women the "functional" minimum of education that experts have calculated will reduce their fertility rate, help them run small businesses, or teach them how to feed their families.

—  ActionAid urges DFID to reject the current trend among donors to instrumentalise the education of women and girls as a means to other ends, and instead look for forms of education which will enable them to secure their rights and to participate more fully in the life of their community and their society. We believe DFID should seek to press other donor governments to follow a similar policy.

WIDENING THE SCOPE OF NON-FORMAL EDUCATIONAL ALTERNATIVES

  7.  Neither formal nor non-formal education is a magic formula tht will automatically lead to an improvement in women's autonomy, status or decision-making power. Non-formal programmes which lack a rights focus can be just as ineffective as formal schools in effecting change. For example, training in business skills for women entrepreneurs even when accompanied by access to small loans, does not in itself enable women to analyse and resist family power relations that give men control over their cash resources. ActionAid believes that a strong emphasis on empowering women to act to defend their own interests and to achieve their rights is needed if education is to have a significant long-term impact on reducing women's poverty. Without it, even the short-term instrumental objectives of functional education programmes may not be achieved.

  8.  We believe that a rights-based education policy must extend beyond the narrow definition of education as formal, primary schooling. While target-led initiatives to expand formal educational opportunities for girls at primary level are a necessary part of a strategy to increase women's access to knowledge, skills and information, they do not go far enough. Women's organisations in the South are increasingly questioning the purpose and value of formal education systems which can perpetuate rather than overcome stratification by gender, class and ethnic or language group. The colonial education systems inherited by countries like Rwanda, Uganda and Pakistan, for example, were designed to equip a tiny indigenous elite with the cultural and academic qualifications to take up privileged roles in oppressive regimes, not to reduce inequalities or promote democracy. Simply expanding these systems without fundamentally altering curricula, teaching methods or the organisation of school systems, has "reached education to a certification process"[32] in which women and especially poor women are losers twice over. The vast majority of them leave school without having gained a qualification which will lead to economic mobility, but also without having been trained in areas appropriate to their lives that would enable them to be more articulate and organized as citizens, more effective as traders or farmers, or more confident as human beings.

  9.  By contrast, good non-formal programmes run by organisations committed to women's empowerment, teach women and girls to value themselves as deserving, important members of society, and give them the skills to insist on better treatment from spouses and employers as well as political institutions. In these programmes learning grows out of the practical concerns of local women: domestic violence, health, nutrition, birth control, and women's legal rights as well as the need for entrepreneurial skills, basic literacy and numeracy. Not only are these programmes more accessible and appealing to girls and women because of their flexible schedules and low costs, they can be far more effective than conventional primary education in enabling women to cope with threats to their livelihoods and well-being. For example, women farmers in many African countries urgently need to defend their customary rights to land which are being undermined by the shift to export agriculture which is dominated by men. This requires women to exercise a mixture of political and organisational skills: they need to be able to access information, to analyse the economics of household production, to practice "bureaucratic literacy" as well as to confidently engage with state agencies—none of which is part of the formal primary curriculum.

—  DFID should systematically assess and encourage the best of these non-formal alternatives and support initiatives aimed at integrating non-formal programmes into the state system or adapting non-formal approaches for use in formal schools.

INVESTMENT IN ADULT LEARNING PROCESSES

  10.  DFID also needs to work with governments to find ways to reduce the cost and increase the accessibility of secondary schooling for girls if education is to translate into real economic gains for women. Furthermore, DFID should commit to investing in adult learning processes. A few years of primary education, or even a primary school certificate, are no longer of much use in getting jobs in most developing countries and new research suggests that real productivity and wage gains are achieved only at secondary level. There are strong arguments that in order to reach the poorest, the balance of education spending must be shifted from secondary and tertiary levels (which still receive a disproportionate share of education budgets in most developing countries) to primary and basic education. However, pro-poor measures to shift resources to primary schools need to be balanced with measures that ensure that more poor people, and especially poor women, will be able to continue their schooling at secondary level.

  11.  Finally, ActionAid notes that DFID's commitment to education for women does not extend to calling for wider and deeper debt relief or to ending structural adjustment conditionalities which restrict social spending. The fiscal squeezes arising from these external pressures have forced governments to pass more and more of the cost of schooling onto parents, especially as they simultaneously try to pursue the massive expansion of primary education necessary to achieve joint targets agreed with donors. There is convincing evidence to show that the rising costs to households of educating children have had a negative effect on educational opportunities for girls, with girls from the poorest households suffering disproportionately.

—  ActionAid urges DFID to address the links between the provision of high quality and appropriate education and the pressures on developing country governments to reduce social expenditures. Moreover, new forms of debt relief must be considered which encourage developing country governments to invest in appropriate and well targeted education programmes.

ActionAid

January 1999