Planning and implementing educational change at the macro-level in support of gender equality in education in conflict-affected contexts

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

Proposal

In this paper, we first present a series of lessons learned from the Global Partnership for Education’s (GPE) stocktaking studies on Gender, Disability and School Heath Interventions, as well as GPE Results Report, and then reflect on some common promising strategies and characteristics of countries that have made progress towards gender parity in education. These would be tied to how their Education Sector Plans (i.e., macro level) have paid attention to girls’ education and gender equality. We will also discuss how the series of regional Gender Responsive Education Sector Plan workshops GPE and the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) have been supporting, with engagement of Plan International and other partners have started helping some countries in better reflecting girls’ education and gender into their plans. Particular reference will be made to GPE results for girls in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. The presentation will also draw on analysis generated through GPE’s new Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX) mechanism, specifically the Discussion Paper on Gender Equality in and through Education, which highlights key gaps in global goods and points to potential high-impact areas for investment.

The paper discusses several interventions the GPE Secretariat is currently working on. We describe how the GPE Secretariat is building on GPE’s Results Reports, the Gender Stocktaking Report 2017, which assessed the extent to which Education Sector Plans (ESPs) and GPE’s program grants reflected gender and girls’ education. Statistics over the years show that while many countries improved parity in education, some have made more visible gains than others, and, on aggregate, girls continue to be disadvantaged.

Although it will not be possible to establish any causal effect, the premise of GPE is that if the sector plans reflect girls’ education and gender, there is a higher likelihood of large-scale progress being made in these areas, as they are “mainstreamed” in the education system. Indeed, a macro-level barrier is that since Ministries of Education and the different education stakeholders have limited time, budget, and capacity, even if they are committed to improving girls’ education and gender equality, when these are not translated into something very tangible and incorporated within the framework of their usual operation (such as the ESP and annual plans/budgets and reporting), it can be easily be left aside, or result in a piecemeal, fragmented approach which limits impact. In fact, while many countries have developed girls’ education or gender in education strategies, at times these end up as policy intentions that are not necessarily realized or followed up. Some of the countries that have made specific efforts to integrate girls’ education or gender into their sector plans therefore have both demand and/or supply-side strategies in favor of girls’ education or gender equality that have a large coverage/scope, which are costed, and have systems to monitor progress and uphold accountability. This said, it is important that there first be a good analysis of the situation which feeds into the strategies of the ESP, including a gendered situation analysis for different sub-sectors, economic quintiles and geographical zones.

We argue that the modality of plan development is also key and needs to ensure inclusive and meaningful stakeholder participation so that diverse perspectives are reflected, and that the strategies selected respond to perceived local-level challenges, which also help to scale up promising initiatives already being implemented. We also refer to different contexts; as countries become more developed and parity is achieved at the national level, there is a tendency to forget gender equality/gender, rather than looking more deeply at sub-national disparities or at the gender equality aspects of the education system as a whole (i.e., gender equality “in” and “through” education). Lastly, our paper will report on the experiences and outcomes associated the GPE’s efforts, in partnership with UNGEI, to organize workshops on Gender Responsive Education Sector Plans, with the objective to strengthen country partners’ capacity in making sector plans more gender responsive. Through this, we hope that more countries would have sector plans that better respond to the needs of girls and boys and accelerate results at scale.

Author

• Aya Kibeski, Senior Education Specialist, Global Partnership for Education