Shifting gender norms among parents, teachers, and community members in order to promote girls’ education outcomes

• In Event: Ensuring girls’ empowerment to improve education outcome: harnessing the gatekeepers

Proposal

Save the Children is in the process of completing a pilot program in Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire that works to shift understanding of gender among families, teachers, and other adult community members in order to improve education outcomes for girls in beneficiary communities. . Data were collected at two points in time (2016 and 2018) from the same cohort of children and caregivers. Measures include children’s gender attitudes and learning outcomes and caregivers’ reports of the learning environment, including perceived safety, parental support for girls’ and boys’ education, exposure to violence against women in the household, female participation in household decision-making and community level norms about early marriage and household chore division. We use these data to explore the following research questions: What home, school and community factors predict how children’s gender attitudes evolve during early adolescence? What is the relationship between gender attitudes, norms and education outcomes (including literacy, numeracy and social emotional skills, as well as primary school retention and completion)? How do these relationships differ for girls and boys? And finally, to what extent can changes in gender attitudes, socioemotional skills and learning outcomes be attributed to two different programmatic components: teacher training in gender sensitive pedagogy versus community mobilization ?

Authors

• Sarah Press, Save the Children

• Jane Leer, Save the Children - USA