Addressing Gender Inequalities in Education and Building Evidence: The Safe Schools Common Approach

• In Event: Micro- and macro-level opportunities for and barriers to girls’ education: practitioner perspectives on achieving sustainable development goals 4 and 5

Proposal

The complex barriers to gender equality in education require multi-sectoral solutions and collaborations between government and civil society. In this paper, we discuss one approach our organization is testing in over 30 countries to promote more effective and sustainable cross-sectoral collaboration on these types of issues, which can be called the “collective impact approach”. This builds off the Collective Impact Theory developed and studied by the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Collective Impact Theory holds that complex social problems cannot be solved by one government department, NGO or UN agency, and nor should they try. Collective impact approach begins with identifying the broad range of interested stakeholders, bringing them together in a formal process of long term planning, and continuing to make room at the table for all who want to support the goals.

The first part of our paper presents a series of descriptive reflections on the experiences and impacts of our Safe Schools Common Approach, organized according to five conditions found to be important for effective, sustainable, collective impact at scale: agreeing on a common agenda; adopting shared measurement systems; implementing mutually reinforcing activities; maintaining continuous communication; having a backbone support organization. We then connect these descriptive reflections to discussions of several areas where we argue further research and understanding is needed: gender responsive pedagogy, and transforming gender norms and gender-based violence.

The paper concludes with a brief discussion of three areas where our organization has been generating promising evidence relevant to the opportunities and challenges discussed in the presentation:

Focus on norms: We have been understanding more and more how important it is to address perceptions of what is considered acceptable and desirable behaviour at the community and school level. We have found that addressing this by working with local community champions and using social and behaviour change communication strategies can be effective, and we are now developing tools which can measure these changes. We encourage practitioners and policy-makers to more fully consider these types of interventions in their programs and policies.

Focus on quality and learning: While addressing the barriers to girls’ participation in education is fundamental, this should not be at the expense of improving the basic quality of education services. In fact, we have found through our programs that by improving the quality of teaching and learning materials, attendance of girls also rose significantly as the benefits of education became clearer. We recommend governments and donors keep learning outcomes at the center of their thinking.

Focus on social and emotional learning: While we maintain the importance of foundational skills such as literacy and numeracy, we are beginning to understand the importance of other less traditional skills, particularly for the most marginalized girls in contexts of crisis. Girls who have been excluded and faced discrimination from an early age often have low self-esteem and have not been supported to develop key social and emotional skills such critical thinking or assertive communication. We have found that integrating teaching of such skills in the curriculum, or providing after school mentorship or girls club programs, can be an essential to ensuring that the most marginalized benefit from education.

Author

• Tim Murray, Save the Children