Action on agency: operationalizing a ‘local’ definition of agency girls’ education practice in east Africa

• In Event: Evidence-based decision making in education
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Local and global manifestations of girls' education

Proposal

Today, 76% of countries have incorporated ‘soft skills’ into their national education plans (Roth et al. 2017), but there is still little consensus on which skills are most important, for which countries, or which kids. For girls in nations with persistent gender inequality, agency is a soft skill uniquely suited to support positive educational outcomes precisely because it can help girls challenge and change the harmful gender norms which keep them from school (Sahni 2017). Leading thinkers in the girls’ education space have identified agency as an important ‘mediating factor’ required for girls to translate knowledge gained into ‘empowered action’ (Kwauk & Braga 2017), yet there remains little consensus amongst practitioners about how agency can ‘taught,’ how it can be measured, or how its impact can be assessed according to locally specific scales (Donald et al 2017, Laajaj & Macours 2017). Whereas, work in girls’ education has largely focused on low-cost and scalable life skills programs which deliver soft skills alongside sexual education content, few of these programs address local conceptualizations of gender, the relationship between gender and power (Haberland 2015), or how these power relations might be mediated via skills like agency.

This research is driven by the underlying hypothesis that agency is one of the most powerful skills for improving marginalized girls’ educational outcomes because it is a skill which can enable young women to directly confront the relationship between gender and power in their communities. We know that harmful gender norms are a leading barrier to girls’ schooling around the world thus girls’ education practice must be focused on skills that will enable girls to successfully negotiate and change the norms and attitudes that keep them from school. Yet we also know that gender norms are context driven and culturally specific. Existing definitions of agency do not allow for the contextualization of the construct in practice nor do they support the operationalization of agency in programming.

Our paper begins by developing a new definition of agency—one that synthesizes the education, economics and human development literature and that can be adapted to the specificities of place. From the view of our theoretical framework, Agency is not a static or one-dimensional term, but rather is a critical core capacity that results from the cultivation of a series of positive self-beliefs and life skills—indeed many of the same life skills that are currently part of girls’ education programs around the world (Sidle 2018). We argue, however, that just as gender norms are specific to culture and place, so too is agency a capacity which must be considered in local context—with the relative importance of specific skills and specific self-perceptions changing based on specificities of place. In order to test the validity of both this definition of agency as well as agency as a critical skill of interest for girls’ education, we engaged with a collective of 18 East African Community Based Organizations called the AMPLIFY network. AMPLIFY partners represent girl-serving organizations in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda who have come together to share resources, best practices, and co-create an alternative to scale.

Utilizing a participatory mixed-methodological tool called Group Concept Mapping (Trochim & Kane 2005), AMPLIFY partners were asked to brainstorm their desired outcomes for girls in their organizational contexts. Members then sorted and rated these outcomes based on the specifics of their organizations and populations. Brainstorm and sort-rate data was then analyzed using multi-dimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analysis which mapped these outcomes into a visual geography and then grouped them into clusters of conceptually similar outcome-areas. The resulting ‘concept map’ showed two primary findings: 1. That AMPLIFY partners agree that girls’ agency is the most important outcome for their programs, and 2. AMPLIFY partners conceptualize agency as a combination of positive self-beliefs and concrete life skills, such as self-awareness, goal setting, decision making etc. Each organization identified a unique set of skills that were important for their respective contexts, while simultaneously reaching consensus around a set of self-beliefs that they all agree are important for girls. Such consensus and divergence is in line with the idea that agency can and should be understood as a locally-situated construct and one whose measurement must be adaptable to the specifics of place. The implications of these findings are important for girls’ education practice and the measurement of life skills programs—suggesting that programs, skills and measurement must attend to the specificities of place.

Authors

• Aubryn Allyn Sidle, Cornell University

• Margaret Butler, Komera