Gender implications of development agency policies on education and training

International Journal of Educational Development 20 (2000) 333–347 www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedudev

Gender implications of development agency policies on education and training Fiona Leach

*

University of Sussex Institute of Education, Education Development Building, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RG, UK

Abstract In this paper, it is suggested that the macro-policies which the donor agencies and the development banks are currently marketing in the field of education and training would appear to contradict their stated goal of reducing gender disparities in society, including those that prevail in education. Decentralisation of educational financing and control, the introduction of cost-sharing mechanisms and community involvement in the running of schools, the privatisation and deregulation of training, are all likely to undermine the most urgent task of increasing girls’ participation in education. It is also argued that education programmes specifically designed to address gender inequities have adopted a narrow and simplistic approach which has proved ineffective to date, largely because it has not been embedded in any clear understanding of the gendered nature of society and the role that schooling plays in perpetuating unequal gender relations. It is concluded that development agencies are unlikely to adopt the radical stance required to bring about the widereaching social and educational change.  2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Gender and education; Girls’ schooling; Educational reform; Development agencies

1. Introduction It is suggested in this paper that the macro-policies which the donor agencies and the international development banks are currently marketing in the field of education and training in the global drive for increased efficiency and reduced public spending contradict their stated goal of reducing gender disparities in society. These include disparities that prevail in the educational system itself. It is also argued that education programmes specifically designed to address gender inequities have adopted

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44-1273-678256; fax: +441273-678568. E-mail address: [email protected] (F. Leach).

a narrow and simplistic approach which has proved ineffective to date, largely because it has not been embedded in any clear understanding of the gendered nature of society and the role that schooling plays in perpetuating unequal gender relations. Almost all the examples of policies and programmes given in this paper are taken from World Bank policy statements and publications on education1. This is not inappropriate since the Bank is the most aggressive proponent of current education 1 The World Bank includes vocational education and training (VET) in its broad education agenda (e.g., see World Bank, 1991, Bennell and Segerstrom, 1998). It does not clearly differentiate between ‘vocational education’ and ‘vocational training’, nor between ‘education’ and ‘training’ generally. However, for the purpose of this paper ‘education’ is used to refer

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ideology, the most prolific source of policy recommendations on education and the largest single source of external financing of education to developing countries, providing 27.5% of total funds in 1995 (UNESCO, 1998). As its financial contribution to the education sector has grown, so has its influence on policy within the donor community, with the result that this tends to be closely adhered to by major bilateral donors such as USAID and DFID (though perhaps to a lesser extent by the Scandinavians). It should be noted that most international development agencies have made explicit commitments to promote gender equity through their development programmes. For example

Some commitments are more explicit than others, some are more recent than others. Those of the Scandinavian and Dutch bilateral agencies are probably the most explicit, the most ambitious, and the most longstanding. They also come closest to being grounded in a feminist perspective. For example, the Dutch use the concept of autonomy, defined as control over one’s body and life in terms of physical, economic, political and sociocultural autonomy, as the premise underlying their Women and Development programme (Stromquist, 1994, p. 30). Most donor attention to gender equity, however, only dates back to the Nairobi conference which closed the UN Decade for Women in 1985 and in education it only became a priority for many after the launch of the Education For All (EFA) initiative in 1990.

For the major agencies, gender equity and poverty alleviation have become the twin goals heading their development agendas. This twinning is not surprising, given that an estimated 70% of the world’s poor are women. At the same time, all the agencies involved in supporting formal education, including the World Bank, are committed to the goal of universal primary or basic education, as encapsulated in the EFA initiative. This cannot be achieved without getting more girls into school, as two-thirds of the estimated 110 million out of school children are girls; in sub-Saharan Africa alone some 27 million girls are out of school (UNESCO, 1996). In addition, dropout rates are higher for girls and achievement rates lower in many countries, so disparities increase as pupils go up the educational ladder to a degree where in some African countries fewer than 1 in 5 higher education students are female (UNESCO, 1998). The legacy of this gender imbalance in educational participation is to be observed in the global illiteracy rate for women — it is estimated that, of the 885 million illiterate adults (aged 15+), 64% are female (UNESCO, 1998). We should of course be careful not to generalise by assuming that girls are under-represented and underachieve in all educational systems. Most notably, in Europe, the USA, Japan and the Caribbean, girls are achieving higher examination scores at school than boys, even in subjects traditionally seen as in the ‘male domain’ (e.g., maths and science). In many of the successful economies of East and South East Asia and in Latin America, some Gulf states and Lesotho in Southern Africa, girls are also well represented at all levels of the educational system (although this trend is not even across all subjects). However, the patterns, causes and consequences of girls’ increased participation and achievement alongside boys’ perceived underachievement are complex phenomena and cannot be understood in the simplistic terms presented so strikingly in the media (see e.g., Arnot et al., 1998 for a detailed analysis of UK trends)2. It is also

to formal general education delivered in school, college or university, whereas ‘training’ is skill-specific, employment-related and usually short-term and non-formal (i.e. delivered outside a formal educational setting).

2 In the UK, gender interacts with class, ethnicity/race and locality in its impact on educational achievement, so that girls’ superior performance is not uniform; also the number of girls who study maths, science and technology at the upper levels,

The World Bank is committed to mainstreaming gender concerns into its operations, and significant steps have already been taken in this direction. There remains, however, a long way to go....... We continue to collaborate with and learn from our partners — governments, other international institutions, and nongovernmental organizations — in our joint effort to meet the goal of ensuring women’s full participation in development. (World Bank, 1994, pp. 7–8)

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crucial to note that greater female participation in education has not to date been paralleled in the labour market where women occupy the majority of low skill jobs and very few senior management positions. Despite higher levels of female participation in the better resourced educational systems, the scenario depicted above in terms of the under-enrolment of girls and low literacy levels for women is overwhelmingly true for the poorer countries of Africa and Asia, and hence for the majority of the world’s female population. It is this latter context that this paper seeks to address. Before engaging in an analysis of the macropolicies in education espoused by the development agencies, an overview is provided of the progress of the 1990–2000 EFA initiative. This is currently the main forum of coordinated externally-funded activity in education at the basic level, and includes attempts to expand girls’ education.

2. The education for all initiative The EFA initiative arose out of widespread concern over the inadequacy and in some cases deterioration of educational provision and literacy levels in many parts of the world during the 1980s, a situation in part exacerbated by economic recession and structural adjustment. The 1990 World Conference on Education For All, held at Jomtien in Thailand, brought together all the major development agencies and 155 national governments in a concerted decade-long attempt to redress this decline. At Jomtien, all those governments represented signed the World Declaration on Education for All and thereby pledged themselves to pursuing the goal of basic education in its various forms. This included accepting the ambitious goals of achieving universal basic (usually interpreted as primary, or primary and junior secondary) education by the year 2000, halving current illiteracy rates in the same period, improving learning achievement, expanding early child-

and achieve high scores in these subjects, is small and they constitute a highly self-selected group.

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hood education as well as basic education and training for youth and adults, and improving life skills for all through the use of diverse education channels, including the mass media. In the context of this paper, Article 3 of the World Declaration is important. It states that: The most urgent priority is to ensure access to, and improve the quality of, education for girls and women, and to remove every obstacle that hampers their active participation. All gender stereotyping in education should be eliminated. (WCEFA, 1990, p. 45) Of those governments represented, over 100 developed plans of action and strategies to achieve the targets set, many of which included specific strategies to address inequities in girls’ and women’s educational participation. The international agencies also committed themselves to increased spending on basic education, although as Bennell and Furlong (1997) (p. 1) show, this commitment has been followed through very patchily. In June 1996, a Mid-Decade Review of the Jomtien initiative was held in Amman, Jordan. Although considerable doubt was expressed over the quality of the statistics provided, they appeared to show that of the many goals laid down at Jomtien that of increasing girls’ enrolments had met with the least progress. The statistics claim that, although 60 million new school places have been created worldwide since 1990, the increase in girls’ share of primary enrolments has risen by only 0.4%, from 45.4% to 45.8% (UNESCO, 1996). This represents a closing of the gender gap by approximately 2.62 million girls. The same set of statistics also showed that 73 million girls remain out of school (UNESCO, 1996). Even more alarmingly, though, the statistics revealed that the gap between female and male primary enrolment rates in some areas of sub-Saharan Africa, and to a lesser extent in parts of East and South Asia, had also widened since 1990, even as overall enrolment rates were rising (UNESCO, 1996). At the same time, this gender gap is also widening between male and female adult literacy rates, where women already constitute nearly two-thirds of the world’s illiterates (UNESCO, 1996). This trend has not

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been helped by the almost total neglect by those governments and agencies participating in the EFA initiative of the role that adult non-formal education must play if universal basic education is to be achieved. Instead most governments and development agencies have chosen to translate the EFA initiative into a narrow effort to create more capacity in the formal system for school-age children, especially girls. Non-formal education continues to be the school’s poor relation. Outside the EFA initiative, Stromquist (1997) documents the same poor performance in implementing the 1985 Nairobi Conference’s forward looking strategies relating to education, which were endorsed by 157 governments in 1985. Of the 29 strategic actions, which included the removal of sexual stereotyping from the curriculum, the hiring of more women teachers who were to be trained in gender awareness, and support for women to move into vocational and professional occupations not considered conventional for women, 20 were repeated in the list produced at the 1995 Beijing Conference due to poor or nonexistent implementation. One has to ask: Why, despite all the public commitments and policy statements by donors, banks and governments on the need to increase female participation in education, and a not inconsiderable number of programmes directed specifically at getting more girls into school, has progress been so slow? At least a partial answer can be found in an analysis of the major policies directed at education in terms of their impact on gender equity. Such an analysis reveals strong contradictions between the macro-agenda of educational reform, promoted and led by the World Bank, and the goal of gender equity in education. These contradictions have meant that the stronger impetus supporting the reform agenda has neutralised attempts to achieve the latter goal. However, a more comprehensive answer would acknowledge that fundamental to this poor performance (and to the contradictions in policy) is the failure of both national and international bodies to understand, appreciate and act upon the powerful gender ideology embedded in all educational institutions, which, along with the family, is the state’s key agent of socialisation of the young. Merely getting more girls into school

cannot bring about equitable participation and achievement in education, let alone in society as a whole. The role of schooling in perpetuating gender relations in society will be examined in the latter part of the paper. First, however, there is a brief explanation of some of the ways in which the education reform agenda contradicts the goal of gender equity in education, followed by an analysis of the strategies adopted by the development agencies to increase girls’ participation in education, which have proved to be largely ineffective.

3. The education reform agenda The macro-policies on educational reform in developing countries as espoused by the development agencies and in particular the World Bank are directed at improving access to and quality in education and training in broad terms, while also reducing public costs. However, a closer examination of these policies reveals them to be in fact detrimental to an increase in girls’ enrolments because they are driven primarily by efficiency rather than equity considerations. As such, they sit uneasily alongside declarations that “projects will pay greater attention to equity — especially education for girls, for disadvantaged ethnic minorities, and for the poor...” (World Bank, 1995, p. 15) and the broader commitment to help redress gender inequities in all areas of society. Specific policies discussed briefly here relate to: the financing of education, the control of education (two key areas of reform highlighted by the Bank in its 1995 publication Priorities and Strategies for Education), and vocational education and training (discussed in detail in its 1991 policy paper Vocational and Technical Education and Training). 3.1. The financing of education There are a number of features which have dominated the international discourse on the financing of education since the early 1980s which are relevant here. Firstly, the market-driven ideology of reducing state funding in a broad range of

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social services including education, of introducing cost-sharing mechanisms in particular through charging fees (at least at the secondary and higher levels), and encouraging the growth of private or community funded schools, is likely to be detrimental to increasing girls’ access to education in the poorer countries. When schooling is genuinely free (and in some cases covered by a free meals programme), parents might well let girls attend even if they are not convinced of the value and relevance of their education. They are less likely to maintain the same attitude if they have to pay school fees, PTA fees or community levies, or to meet indirect costs such as uniform, transport or books, in particular in a context of economic recession. While primary education may still be notionally free in many countries in the sense that no official fees are charged, as advocated by the Bank (World Bank, 1995), economic stringencies have reduced public funds available for education. This has meant that in the poorer countries the burden of maintaining a minimum level of resourcing has been passed on to parents and the community, even for the most basic provision such as classroom furniture, books and paper. The reduction in state contributions to the social sector is a global phenomenon which all nations have had to come to terms with, but the already severe funding shortfalls in the poorest countries have been exacerbated by the imposition in many cases of structural adjustment programmes. As Rose’s cross-country statistical analysis (Rose, 1995) showed, countries which undertook World Bank adjustment programmes since the mid 1980s experienced a slowdown in the increase of female enrolments (as opposed to those countries which did not adopt adjustment programmes). The macro-policy of decentralisation, which is actively encouraged by most, if not all, development agencies throughout the public sector in developing countries, is being energetically implemented in education. Its potential benefits would appear to be clear, especially when compared to the poor record of the highly centralised systems of government which had evolved in most countries. These had suffocated initiative, enforced unnecessary standardisation, disregarded ethnic differences and local needs, and were massively

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inefficient. However, where decentralisation shifts the onus of taxation from the centre to the region, this may act as a constraint on equity, including gender equity, in poorer areas. These tend to be predominantly rural areas, where girls’ education is already likely to be resourced at a very low level. National statistics consistently show that the gender gap in literacy levels and school enrolments is much higher in rural than in urban areas; not only because available public funds are usually less but because parental attitudes are usually more conservative. In these circumstances, girls’ education will not be a priority. Bray’s research (Bray, 1996a) shows that regional disparities are particularly severe in countries with low public spending and strong community financing of education; therefore the consequences of decentralisation are likely to be negative for girls’ education in poor areas if provision is to be met from local revenues. 3.2. The control of education A policy of decentralisation may signify reduced state control, increased autonomy for schools and increased ‘ownership’ of the schooling process by the local community. Community participation is contained in the EFA measures but, as Stromquist (1994) points out If ‘full community participation’ amounts to ‘substantial decision-making authority’, it is not said what effects there will be for educational transformation if parents and other community members subscribe to views of girls merely as potential mothers and consider as a ‘relevant curriculum’ only one that trains women for domestic roles. (Stromquist, 1994, p. 26) As indicated above, this will be especially the case in rural areas, where conservative attitudes may prevail and there are few employment opportunities for women. The same can be said of promoting church or mosque based education, such as the mosque schools programme in Pakistan (Warwick et al., 1992), because these institutions do not usually espouse a broad view of women’s role in society. Moreover, the agenda on girls’ education is exter-

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nally driven and hence it is likely that local community scepticism as to the benefits of educating girls will be overlooked or downplayed, with donor and bank interventions concentrating more on the supply side (i.e. more school places for girls) than on the demand side (changing attitudes and convincing parents and girls themselves of the benefits of female education). It is also the case that school heads, governors and teachers, who under a programme of increased school autonomy have greater powers to allocate resources and make curriculum and timetabling decisions, are unlikely to be ardent supporters of broadening female pupils’ horizons beyond early marriage and childrearing into higher education and worthwhile careers. The record to date of teachers as a force for change in developing countries is poor and there is no reason to believe that this will alter without active intervention. 3.3. Vocational education and training As regards the skilling of young people for employment, current thinking within the World Bank is that this should be left to specialised institutions and to employers to carry out ‘on the job’, with periodic skill updating through work-related continuing education and training (World Bank, 1991)3. This stance is a turn-around on previous World Bank policies of the 1970s and the early 1980s which energetically promoted the ‘diversification’ of secondary school curricula by offering a number of practical and vocational subjects alongside the conventional academic subjects. This was an attempt to better prepare young people for employment and to counteract the argument that schooling was too theoretical and abstract and divorced from the reality of most young people’s lives in developing countries. In contrast, the role of formal schooling in the 1990s is seen as providing young people with a high quality broad-based general education which focuses on “basic general competencies — language, science and mathemat3 This approach is strongly criticised by Bennell and Segerstrom (1998) as ignoring for ideological reasons the success of publicly funded VET in both the advanced industrialised countries and the high performing Asian economies.

ics, and, increasingly, communication skills, as well as the development of attitudes necessary for the workplace. These competencies provide the foundation for subsequent education and training” (World Bank, 1995, pp. 26–27). Such basic general skills are now considered to be the primary requirement in a labour market characterised by rapid technological change and global movement. In principle an undifferentiated, broad-based curriculum should favour girls, who have traditionally been discouraged from taking the ‘difficult’ subjects of maths and science, and for whom a diversified curriculum has meant being excluded from ‘male’ areas such as carpentry, auto-mechanics and electrical work (preparation for ‘real’ jobs) and instead being channelled into home economics/domestic science courses (preparation for domestic life). However, if job-specific training is to be left to specialised institutions and employers, women will lose out as they are underrepresented in formal (modern) sector employment, where most of such training opportunities will be available. They are particularly absent from those grades where skill upgrading is most likely (e.g., supervisory and management positions) and continue to be found in low skill low paid jobs (e.g., on the assembly line, in secretarial work) where promotion prospects are poor. The World Bank supports the privatisation of VET (World Bank 1991, 1995) in the belief that “vocational education works best when the private sector is directly involved in its provision, financing and governance” (World Bank, 1995, p. 71). It recommends strategies such as reducing the restrictions on private institutions to set their own fees and design their own curricula and the removal of other regulations which might impede the operation of privatised VET. On the whole women are likely to have less disposable income to pay for training than men and to be more reluctant to take out loans to cover the costs of training because of their uncertain job prospects, and so they will again be disadvantaged. It is significant that, despite the pronouncements on gender equity, which must include equity in employment opportunities and working conditions, the 1991 World Bank policy paper on Vocational and Technical Education and Training manages to

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devote less than one page out of 72 to women and employment and to the need to eliminate bias in the labour market. This is indicative of the failure to grasp the reality of most women’s lives, which is that around the world they have always been heavily engaged in economic production, both in agriculture and in small scale enterprises (e.g., in the garment industry, food processing, handicrafts production). Moreover, economic deprivation and hardship, and the growing incidence of femaleheaded households, is forcing many more women to look for work in order to ensure their own survival and that of their children. The unequal participation of women in education and training has meant that they enter the employment arena with fewer marketable skills and qualifications than men. This, combined with in-built discrimination against female employees, who are seen by employers as a poor investment (they will leave to get married or have children) and as expensive (they will want maternity benefit or leave to attend to sick children), means that women will be confined to jobs at the bottom of the ladder. In particular, women are to be found in the so-called informal sector or shadow economy4, where they often survive on the margins of subsistence in jobs which are insecure, part-time, unskilled and often leave them an easy prey to exploitation, harassment and abuse (Mosse, 1993). Yet, it is this need for women to engage in productive work which makes the type of education and training opportunity made available to them a crucial issue of gender equity (Leach, 1996). Current policies on education and training are doing little to address this need. Even the recent and growing interest in supporting small and medium enterprise development (in recognition of the greater potential of the informal sector of the economy to generate jobs than the formal sector), is

4 The failure to recognise the role of women in the national economy can be partly attributed to their invisibility in the formal labour market (only 5% of those engaged in the formal economy in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s were women, according to the 1991 ILO/JASPA survey cited in Odaga and Heneveld, 1995). Labour statistics rarely take the informal sector into account, or seriously underestimate its volume of activity.

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strangely gender-blind. This can be exemplified aptly through the discourse surrounding externally funded initiatives in this field, where entrepreneurship and small/medium enterprise development are couched in economic terms and there is a strong bias towards private sector training in relatively high status skills e.g., in information and communication technology, industrial design, export manufacturing etc., all areas which are dominated by men. This offers a stark contrast to the agency discourse and activity surrounding training initiatives with women. Here the language and conceptual frameworks derive not from economics but from the social sciences and are situated within a context characterised by poverty, marginalisation and community welfare. Interventions for women in this area are usually aimed at providing them with skills not for profit but for survival, in a setting where the concept of a formal enterprise with structures, physical premises, balance sheets and short and medium term plans are largely absent. Women are seen as engaged in ‘income generation’ not in ‘business’. Yet women can be highly entrepreneurial in their search for economic survival and are more often than not the sole source of family income, not merely supplementing it or earning casual ‘pocket money’ (Leach, 1997). Depriving them of training for enterprise development contradicts both the gender equity and the poverty alleviation goals of the international agencies.

4. Strategies to promote girls’ education As part of the educational development agenda, specific strategies have been developed to promote girls’ education. It is argued here that these are illconceived, with donors and banks adopting a narrow, simplistic and functional approach to the problem of gender inequity in education which has largely been ineffective. Moreover, their approach has served to perpetuate unequal gender relations within both the educational system and the broader society, rather than to weaken and ultimately transform them. The extent to which this is the case can be clearly seen in the rationale given for promoting

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girls’ education, which focuses primarily on the reproductive role of women, i.e. child-rearing and homemaking, as opposed to their productive role. World Bank publications on this subject and the type of research that the Bank has sponsored exemplify this. For example, King and Hill’s book entitled Women’s Education in Developing Countries (King and Hill, 1993), which was the first major World Bank publication in this field 5, cites many examples of research studies where the claims of the benefits to educating women are viewed almost exclusively in terms of improved childrearing practices, improved family health and hygiene and lower fertility rates (i.e. education as a mechanism of population control). The authors detail the benefits as follows A better-educated mother has fewer and bettereducated children. She is more productive at home and in the workplace. And she raises a healthier family, since she can better apply improved hygiene and nutritional practices. Education can even substitute for community health programs by informing women about health care and personal hygiene, and it can complement such programs by raising income and promoting greater recognition of the value of these services. [......] So important is the influence of mothers’ education on children’s health and nutritional status that it reduces mortality rates. (King and Hill, 1993, p. 12–13) Even the importance of a woman’s education for her productive, as opposed to her reproductive, role

5 A few earlier brief studies exist, most notably a discussion paper by Herz et al. (1991) Letting Girls Learn: Promising Approaches in Primary and Secondary Education. It is interesting to speculate as to why the World Bank came so late to develop an interest in girls’ and women’s education. In part, this may be due to the heavy reliance of the Bank on economists (most of whom are men) and the economic bias of its development agenda which for a long time concentrated on promoting the industrial, commercial and financial sectors (also maledominated except at the lowest levels of labour). The Bank’s espousal of a poverty alleviation and social development agenda, with its emphasis on education and health, is very recent and has no doubt much to do with concern for global population growth.

is couched not in terms of her ability to earn an independent income but in terms of her contribution to family welfare ..women’s education also indirectly improves infant survival rates by leading to higher market productivity for women, and thus to better living standards for the family. (King and Hill, 1993, p. 18) Where the importance of women’s productive role is given due recognition, the literature argues for the promotion of their education on the grounds of ‘improved efficiency’ and ‘investment in human capital’. According to this argument, the economic productivity of women is currently very low in the majority of countries and this is wasteful of the human potential of roughly half the adult population. If educating women can produce economic gains by enhancing their productivity as well the social benefits detailed above, all the better. Stromquist (1994) sums up the World Bank approach as continuing “to see the treatment of gender issues as justified primarily by increased efficiency, national productivity and increased returns” (p. 27). Women are treated as a commodity, to be educated for the state to use more efficiently; they are not treated as citizens for whom social justice is a question of principle and education a basic human right, which affords them the opportunity to have greater control over their lives, whether in terms of running a business, owning property, being in full-time employment, or in terms of exercising their right to vote and the right to defend themselves against violence. Consequently, the development agencies have largely failed to recognise the importance of addressing the fundamental causes of women’s inferior status, which are embedded in gendered power relations and the gendered social and economic structures of society, and to see that the goal of gender equity in education cannot be achieved and women’s potential maximised, either socially or economically, until these causes are tackled. As Sutton, 1998 (in Stromquist et al., 1998) states: “it is perhaps more comfortable for external actors to treat girls’ education as an economic issue susceptible to

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technical solutions than to seek to neutralise power differentials between genders” (p. 395). It is significant in this respect that until recently most of the studies that emerged from the development agencies referred to ‘girls’ education’, rather than to ‘gender and education’ (despite the policy statements on gender equity). ‘Gender’ has been confused with ‘women and girls’ in the same way as in the development literature GAD (gender and development) has been confused with WID (women in development). As a result interventions have been directed at increasing girls’ enrolments as if the gendered nature of the society in which the educational system is embedded did not exert any influence over what happens to girls and boys both during their schooling and afterwards in their adult lives. The strategies adopted to increase girls’ education are indicative of this failure to understand the link between their under-enrolment and women’s status in society. International agencies, as already indicated, have concentrated on issues of supply, i.e. increasing girls’ access and retention through the physical resourcing of education. Supply-side initiatives include increasing the number of school places, providing all-girl classrooms, improving existing school facilities, including the provision of separate toilet facilities and the construction of boundary walls, locating schools within easy access of girls’ homes, recruiting more female teachers and increasing the supply of instructional materials (King and Hill, 1993, chapter 8; World Bank, 1995, chapter 8; Odaga and Heneveld, 1995). While there have also been attempts to increase demand for schooling by acknowledging the socio-economic constraints within the family operating on girls’ education (such as poverty, the need for girls’ labour in the household, early marriage and the lack of mobility for adolescent girls), these have been very small in scale and in only a few countries (Stromquist, 1994; Stromquist et al., 1998; Odaga and Heneveld, 1995). Moreover, these initiatives are confined largely to the economic and organisational aspects of demand such as the provision of scholarships, free textbooks or uniforms, flexible timetabling to fit with girls’ household duties, and the provision of child-care facilities. As such, they are likely to

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increase demand only in the short term and will do little to challenge deep-rooted scepticism within communities as to the value of girls’ education. More complex and ambitious demand-side strategies have included the revision of curriculum materials to eliminate gender bias, gender training workshops and programmes of advocacy and awareness raising. Although materials revision has recently become a favoured form of donor intervention, this is unlikely to be effective without a change in the attitude of those who teach the revised materials and a change in the dominant culture of the school (Stromquist et al., 1998). Programmes of advocacy, awareness raising and attitude change among teachers, school heads, government officials and the community, which might have a greater impact on gender roles and relations, tend to be rare — not surprisingly since their outcomes are uncertain and they tread on sensitive ground by questioning cultural values and traditional power relations6. Not surprisingly, therefore, development agencies have concentrated on the more visible, more easily implemented and less controversial aspects of support for girls’ education.

5. The gendered ideology of schooling With their narrow, economics-driven approach to addressing gender inequity in education, as exemplified by the World Bank, the development agencies have failed to question the nature of the school experience for girls and boys and to examine its outcomes in terms of impact on gender relations in society. In other words, they have neglected to consider whether education is actually serving as a vehicle to transform widespread attitudes and practices in society which are detrimen-

6 King and Hill (1993) (pp. 288–290) list different approaches taken by governments, NGOs, donor agencies and communities to raise girls’ and women’s participation in education programmes. Out of 15 different types of intervention, only two directly address the need to change attitudes: educating the community (with examples cited of projects in Mali and Morocco) and promoting gender-neutral instruction (with examples cited of Bangladesh, China, India and Kenya).

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tal to the equality of women and men in all spheres of life, including the transformation of attitudes and practices within the educational system itself — or whether it is serving largely as a means of maintaining the status quo, reflecting continuing inequities in male and female access to power and resources in the wider society, and perpetuating traditional stereotypes as to what are considered appropriate male and female roles and aptitudes (Deem, 1980; Arnot and Weiner, 1987; Walkerdine, 1989). A liberal feminist viewpoint would suggest the former was feasible, even if not the reality, whereas radical feminists would strongly endorse the latter view. The development agencies have taken the school as ‘given’, as an unproblematic and uncontested arena of opportunity for both females and males (as also for groups defined by social class, race, ethnicity or religion). In doing so, they continue to subscribe to the economic theory of human capital which views education as an agent of development, producing young people with the skills and attitudes deemed necessary for a modern workforce which can compete effectively for a share of global economic markets. In this respect, the education of women is important, not just because of its links with health and fertility and hence its favourable impact on social sector spending, but also because the lower ranks of the global workforce (e.g., the assembly line and the service industry) are becoming increasingly feminised. Basic literacy and numeracy are essential skills for an efficient workforce. However, much Western literature since the 1970s has argued that the school is not a neutral site for the transfer of ‘objective’ knowledge, nor an uncontested agent of development and change. It has been argued, instead, that schooling provides differential access and treatment to different groups in society, and that the knowledge, norms and values selected for transmission through the school are those of the elite; in this way, the school acts as an effective means of reproducing and legitimating the existing social and political order (e.g., Apple, 1995; Young, 1971; Bowles and Gintis, 1976). Radical feminist writing on education views the school as reproducing and legitimating the gender relations that prevail in society. They highlight

the role of the formal curriculum (e.g., subject choices, textbooks, teaching methods, forms of assessment) as well as that of the informal or ‘hidden’ curriculum in this respect (Acker, 1987; Stone, 1994). The hidden curriculum is made up of subtle but powerful messages which are transmitted and reinforced on a daily basis through the roles played by male and female teachers, their attitudes towards male and female students, their expectations of male and female achievement and career paths, the way they reward and discipline students, and the way in which the school is organised and managed. This socialising function of the school is no less present in developing countries. Indeed, given the very conservative and strongly patriarchal nature of most of these societies, role differentiation on the basis of gender is even more striking. Girls and boys are often excluded from taking certain subjects on the grounds of sex, textbooks are highly stereotyped and teachers show strongly differentiated attitudes towards boys and girls. In the case of Africa, there are a small number of highly revealing small scale studies which illustrate the all too often discouraging, dismissive and otherwise negative attitudes of teachers to girls’ education (e.g., Gordon, 1995 on Zimbabwe; Davison and Kanyuka, 1992 on Malawi; and Duncan, 1989 on Botswana). These attitudes underscore the authority and superiority of males and implicitly endorse gender-differentiated roles which reinforce girls’ negative self-perceptions and limit their expectations. Unfortunately, female teachers have been on the whole as much party to the reproduction of negative educational images of girls as their male counterparts. Teacher training plays a major but unrecognised role in perpetuating gender stereotypes. The way that the school is organised and managed further reinforces the messsage that society values women less than men. In the majority of countries, the school is still managed through a male dominated hierarchy. Head teachers are predominantly male; female teachers tend to teach the lower classes and to be given non-teaching tasks such as organising social events, offering counselling and dealing with difficult parents, while male teachers are made responsible for the curricu-

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lum, examinations and resource allocation (Davies, 1992). Female students in Africa, moreover, may be expected to come early to school to clean out classrooms (Davison and Kanyuka, 1992) or to help prepare school meals. Sexual harassment and abuse of girls goes unchallenged and pregnant schoolgirls are expelled while the male student or teacher responsible goes unpunished. Such differentiated behaviour has a significant influence on student perceptions of the status accorded male and female adults, on students’ classroom behaviour, their academic performance and their expectations of the roles that they will occupy in later life. In many rural parts of Africa and Asia, it is likely that the only woman in a professional capacity that schoolgirls may encounter will be a teacher. If she herself is seen as subordinate in the school hierarchy and is also not encouraging of girls continuing their education to higher levels, the opportunity of a positive role model for girls will be lost. Although development agencies have expressed concern over the low academic achievement of girls in many countries, they have been slow to link it to the low self-esteem and low expectations of women and girls, and slow to acknowledge the role of the curriculum in reinforcing this. One example can be found in the lack of importance attached until recently to the revision of textbooks to eliminate gender bias: King and Hill (1993) and Tietjen in a 1991 study for USAID (Tietjen, 1991) both suggested that the funds needed for revision would be better spent on producing more textbooks and instructional materials and that “improving the overall quality of education may be the most productive investment for attracting girls to school and keeping them there” (King and Hill, 1993, p. 311). It is only in the more recent World Bank Technical Paper by Odaga and Heneveld (1995) that full recognition is given to the importance of addressing gender bias in schooling. The 1995 World Bank’s Priorities and Strategies for Education goes so far as to acknowledge the need for gender-sensitive curricula. The way in which educational experiences are perceived as perpetuating gender disparities and the different strategies advocated to address the situation varies according to the stance adopted towards the causes of these disparities. Liberal

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feminists argue that ignorance, traditional values, a lack of proper role models and structural barriers are mainly responsible and that the solution must therefore lie in eliminating gender stereotyping in curriculum choices and content, gender-sensitive teacher education, improved knowledge dissemination and the promotion of equal opportunities through anti-discrimination legislation (Acker, 1987; Weiner, 1994). In other words, schooling can be transformed from within; it does not necessitate radical social or educational change. However, more radical strands of feminist thinking, drawing on social reproduction theory referred to above, view equal treatment of the sexes within the existing educational system as impossible because schools transmit dominant values on gender, which makes them powerful mechanisms of social control rather than of social change. This is exemplified in the way the school, not least the classroom, is organised, staffed and managed (Weiner, 1994). The educational system is merely a reflection of a patriarchal society in which women are subordinated to men in all spheres of life, in the home, in the school and in the workplace. Society has to be re-educated first. This view holds that education can be liberating but not in its present form. The culture of most developing nations is so heavily discriminatory towards women and accords them such a low status in society, that it is difficult to see how the school alone could bring about radical change. Without a collective recognition at the level of the state of the ideological value positions underpinning women’s subordination in all aspects of social, economic and political life, there can be no real change within schools. At the same time, change can only be brought to schools through interventions which address not just the provision of education but also its processes so that an environment which is conducive rather than hostile to all children’s learning can be created. However, as the next section will explain, that will not happen easily. 6. The institutionalisation of gender policy It is of course not surprising that agency policies and strategies adopted towards gender equality in

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education in developing countries have on the whole been timid, and have not sought to threaten the broader social and political status quo. For they are being proposed and funded by organisations which are themselves agents of socialisation and reproduction, even while projecting themselves as agents of change. To fundamentally address the gendered nature of schooling, these agencies would be required to engage in an analysis of the gendered ideology of their own institution, which would undermine their male power base. This could in turn lead to the questioning of other related power sources, such as the hegemony exercised by the rich industrialised states over the less powerful poorer states. For while the World Bank and others may well preach equity to the poorer nations of the world the fact remains that they offer no appropriate role model. Likewise, the bureaucratic institutions which manage and control the educational system are dominated by men at the senior echelons, in planning, policy-making and management (Goetz, 1995; Davies, 1992). There is little genuine political will and administrative energy to bring about radical change to the gendered content and control of education. All too often politicians and senior bureaucrats are ready to include strategies to enhance girls’ participation in education in their national education plans, or to create women’s units within ministries, not because they are convinced of the necessity but to increase their chances of securing donor funding. The failure of governments to institutionalise gender policy in education is revealed by Stromquist’s analysis of the implementation of the strategic actions after the 1985 Nairobi Conference, referred to above; few of the reports prepared for the 1995 Beijing Conference showed any serious effort to “engage in a feminist analysis of the inferior and persistent condition of women’s education” (Stromquist, 1997, p. 208). The donors and banks have also been guilty of failing to insist that gender policies be effectively implemented and have accepted the rhetoric produced by governments on equitable provision as if it was certain to become a reality. Instead, they have contented themselves with assisting governments to tinker with the mechanisms of provision, addressing only the symptoms

of the under-enrolment of girls and not the root causes, while generating their own rhetoric of gender to assuage public concern over women’s issues in the West. It seems obvious that gender policy can only be successfully implemented if institutions are responsive to gender issues. This applies to the institutions which manage the education of the young (which now include local communities), the schools which deliver it and the institutions which provide policy advice and additional funding (such as the World Bank). However, their own gendered structures and practices are rarely acknowledged, let alone challenged. Serious change is unlikely to occur, therefore, until external pressures oblige them to address their own gender biases and become committed to developing capacity within each institution to engage in critical gender analysis and to identify and implement the necessary change.

7. Concluding remarks In this paper, I have attempted to show that the current macro-agenda on educational reform is not compatible with commitments to promote gender equity. I have also shown that donor interventions under the EFA initiative have concentrated on the supply side of girls’ education, focusing on getting more girls into school (by providing more schools and female teachers) and keeping them there (by improving the overall quality of instruction through more books, better trained teachers etc.). In this, they have ignored the need to address the problem of girls’ education within a gender framework, and to acknowledge the importance of the schooling process itself in perpetuating gender bias. As a result, these interventions have had little or no impact on gender equity, either in terms of closing the gender gap in education or in raising the status of women in society. Until there is change in the schooling process itself, which continues to pass on negative and discouraging messages to girls as to their future role in society and fails to provide them with opportunities to maximise their potential, gender equity in education cannot be achieved.

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It is striking that, in the international development arena, there appear to be two separate channels of thinking, covering both policy and research, one relating specifically to girls’ education and the other to education and training in general. Most of the literature on the latter stays strangely silent on gender issues. For example, Bray’s study (Bray, 1996b) for the World Bank on parental and community financing of education in Asia shows that this tends to increase inequities and disadvantage the poor — while never unpackaging the term ‘poor’. If this were done, it would show clearly that the majority of those disadvantaged by costsharing strategies would be girls and women. Likewise both the World Bank’s 1991 policy paper on Technical and Vocational Education and Training and its 1995 paper Priorities and Strategies for Education fail to provide a gender dimension to their policy recommendations (although the latter does identify equity, including gender equity, as one of its six key areas of reform). And the Bank still insists that the basic policy instrument for expanding girls’ enrolments is to increase school capacity for them, by reserving places if necessary (World Bank, 1995, p. 116). These separate channels of thinking are indicative of the existence of two contradictory development agendas, on the one hand the drive for greater efficiency and reduced costs in educational provision (the ‘hard’ economics-driven agenda) and on the other a commitment to gender equity in education, society and the labour market (the ‘soft’ social development agenda). This agenda, in which the economic imperative is not surprisingly proving stronger than the social one, goes some way to explaining why the Jomtien goal of increasing girls’ participation in education has met with such disappointing results, as highlighted in Amman in June 1996. The pressure to reduce public spending and improve efficiency, in particular through structural adjustment packages, has not proved compatible with the goal of reaching universal primary/basic education by the year 2000 (Bennell and Furlong, 1997; Rose, 1995). At the same time, issues of gender have been dealt with apart from the main education agenda and relegated to the margins of policy debate, with the result that the discourse of gender is little more than rhetoric.

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It is crucial that these two agendas be integrated, rather than run parallel and in contradiction with each other. This requires incorporation of a gender analysis into all stages of policy development and implementation both by international and national bodies and the subsequent institutionalisation of gender policy in all types of government intervention (Swainson et al., 1998). This cannot be done effectively until the institutions which fund and support education engage in a gender analysis of their own structures and practices. Strategies for the way forward must be twopronged. On the one hand, in the wider society discriminatory practices which continue to hold women in subordinate economic and social status to men must be removed, by legislation where necessary. Information and sensitisation campaigns, lobbying by women’s organisations and female public figures, appropriate careers advice and promotion of positive role models can all help in facilitating women’s fuller participation in the labour market, in political life, in community leadership and in household decision-making. Without this, the benefits claimed by the World Bank and others of educating women will continue to be regarded with suspicion by parents and communities — and by girls themselves. Gender policies and strategies in education will only be effective if they are supported by, and in turn influence, broader social and economic changes. At the same time, within the educational arena, a start can be made towards achieving equity goals by providing, for example: teacher training which prepares gender sensitive teachers, a more democratic and caring school culture and management structure which places female teachers in positions of responsibility on a par with men, gender-appropriate textbooks and instructional materials which encourage girls to realise their full potential, imaginative career advice, programmes which address sexual harrassment and abuse (the prevalence of which is symptomatic of the low esteem with which women are regarded in society and which acts as a major constraint on girls’ education at the post-primary level) and programmes which prepare boys as well as girls for appropriate adult roles in a democratic society. Legislation which imposes real penalties for sexual harassment and

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abuse in school and which allows teenage mothers to continue their schooling needs to be enacted. However, it is highly unlikely that such crucial moves will be initiated by the development agencies, especially those led by economic considerations such as the World Bank; nor will the impetus come from the governments to whom they offer advice. Rather it will have to come from inside the country and from the grassroots.

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