Gender equality, education and development: tensions between global and national policy discourses in postcolonial contexts

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Equity, ambition, and omission: can the sustainable development goals be sustained? (parts I and II)

Proposal

Education and gender equality remain key foci within the development agenda, particularly since the international consensus garnered through the Education for All (EFA) and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Despite the widespread critiques of EFA and MDGs, the mobilisation they propelled led to considerable gains in widening access to education. Nevertheless, globally gender parity in enrolment remains unrealised in primary education (over one-thirds of countries), lower secondary education (54% of countries) and upper secondary education (77% of countries) (UNESCO, 2016). These disparities are mostly at the expense of girls at primary level globally, and at lower and upper secondary levels in countries with low enrolment ratios, with gender gaps much higher in countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. A majority of these countries are contexts of postcoloniality.

Equal access to education, while essential, does not guarantee gender equality. Schools, as formal state institutions, tend to reproduce existing gender regimes and power relations rather than subvert them. Furthermore, notions of gender and gender equality produce different interpretations across contexts and actors. Paying attention to the specificities of contexts in which gender equality discourses are interpreted, negotiated and enacted is, therefore, crucial to understanding the construction of gender and the hope of its transformation in and through education.

From a postcolonial perspective, we argue that global gender equality discourses tend to ignore the ways colonialism was integral to the rise of modernity in the West. The development of modern societies saw the development of institutionalised education in forms that now underpin the promotion of mass education around the world. These interconnections have a significant bearing on the relationship of gender and education, particularly in post-colonial contexts, where education is deployed in nation-building projects that simultaneously seek to modernise the nation by emulating the rationality, science and technology of the colonial power in the public realm and keep the nation’s distinction from the colonisers through the private/feminine. This feminine positioning involves the construction of ‘authentic’/’traditional’ womanhood to mark the cultural distinction of the postcolonial nation. The private/feminine and public divide that was intrinsic to western gender relations was, thus, redoubled in contexts of postcoloniality. Internally, women are regulated by their men and women with respect to intersecting kinship, national and religious norms; externally, they need to be ‘rescued’ from their men, including through the enforcement of international human rights regimes. Because women’s rights and education feature centrally in human rights discourses, the violation of both is constituted as regressive and premodern and can offer the grounds for global interventions. The collision of competing national goals—modernity and tradition—with international policy discourses such as the SDGs is potentially detrimental to the realisation of gender equality. Comparison of global gender equality policies with those at the national level, is important to understand variations in national level commitments to gender equality policies.

Authors

• Naureen Durrani, University of Sussex

• Anjum Halai, Aga Khan University