Education quality is only one piece of the pie: The case for multi-sectoral approaches to improving education opportunities for girls.

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: GirlEngage: placing girls in the driver’s seat of sustainable education reform

Proposal

Girls and young women living in Burkina Faso face some of the world’s most challenging development obstacles. Rated 183 out of 189 countries on the UNDP Human Development Index, at least 57% of rural girls are out of school (UNESCO.2015b. “World Inequality Database on Education”), and 52% of girls are married before the age of 18. Girls living in the Northern Sahel region of the country are most at risk, with up to 86% married before the legal age. Once married, these young women face the burden of early childbearing, with maternal mortality rates ranking amongst the highest in the world. While societal norms and beliefs perpetuate the situation, evidence suggests that if all women in Burkina completed secondary school, under-five mortality would fall by 76% (Gakidou, Emmanuela. 2013. Education, Literacy and Health Outcomes Findings); they would five times less likely to become a child bride (UNFPA 2012); and economic returns would increase by 15-25% (Schultz, Paul.2002). It is clear that educating girls has an effect on a country’s key development indicators, particularly in health and economic development. Conversely, it is necessary to see how obstacles within these areas impact the ability for girls to successfully access and complete both primary and secondary education opportunities.

Between 2005 and 2012, Plan International USA sought to improve the educational outcomes of 27,000 children from the most vulnerable provinces in Burkina Faso through the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)-funded Burkinabe Response to Improve Girls’ Changes to Succeed (BRIGHT). While the program focused on educational quality and equity in the classroom (through teacher training and the recruitment of experienced female teachers), it also addressed key health and socio-economic challenges facing girls. BRIGHT invested in the construction of separate latrine facilities for boys and girls; built school-based water pumps to reduce the time spent fetching water during school hours; provided meal rations for struggling families; and created early childhood centers next to the school to ease the burden of childcare for older female students.

An independent impact evaluation conducted four years after project closeout and internal program evaluations indicate that Plan’s multi-sectoral approach led to a long-term, sustainable impact across several indicators. Compared with non-intervention schools, BRIGHT schools had 6% higher rates of school enrollments, and 22.9% of students completed primary school, compared to 9.4% in non-intervention schools. Ten years after the program start date, BRIGHT students continued to score .19 standard deviations higher than their peers. Despite these successes, internal evaluation data shows that more could have been done to address the health and socio-economic challenges facing girls and young women.

This session will present these findings in detail and discuss how they led to the design of a follow-on program called Promoting Equality and Safety in Schools (PEASS), which has added key components to complement the successes of BRIGHT: menstrual hygiene management (MHM) support for girls; targeted leadership program for girls; increased advocacy around laws to prevent gender-based violence and child marriage.

Author

• Sarah Havekost, Plan International USA