Strengthening Gender-Transformative Education Programming: Recommendations and Guidance for USAID Implementing Partners

Group Submission Type: Pre-conference Workshop

Description of Session

This workshop will provide an opportunity for the workshop participants to engage in a hands-on session that addresses the policy, research, and practice around gender-transformative education programming in the international development sector. The workshop will focus on the 2023 USAID Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Policy and the supplemental guidance for strengthening gender-transformative education programming, expected to be published in early 2024.

A recently conducted gender and education landscape analysis, focused on USAID’s global and regional programmatic efforts to promote gender equality in and through education, noted significant recent shifts within USAID to move beyond seeing gender as a binary (male/female) and toward transformative education programming. The findings from this analysis suggested that education programs must move beyond striving to achieve parity in education or mitigating gender-related barriers precluding access and/or learning. Instead, programs must work to address the root causes of gender-based inequities, ensuring that women and girls, men and boys, and gender diverse individuals can reach their full potential in society. This approach is critical not only to attain gender equality but also to meet sustainable development outcomes.

The 2023 USAID Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Policy outlines seven guiding principles to meeting the objectives of the policy, including that the norms, behaviors, relations, structures, and systems that sustain and perpetuate gender inequality must be transformed. Through the commitment to gender-transformative programming, USAID staff and implementing partners ensure that in the education sector, women and girls, men and boys, and gender diverse individuals have equal rights and agency, have equitable access to quality education, exercise their own voices, and live free from restrictive gender norms and violence. The Agency is currently engaging stakeholders from implementing partners’ learning networks to develop a guidance document on gender-transformative education programming to supplement the policy’s principles and assist different actors within the education sector to design programs, create partnerships, and monitor progress to strengthen the implementation of gender education programming.

The objective of this workshop is to increase participants’ understanding of considerations and recommendations from the landscape analysis toward advancing gender equity in and through education. The workshop will have three segments, each including different modes for engaging participants in conversation with the presenters as well as one another. The session will first provide an overview of the recently published 2023 USAID Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment Policy followed by a set of considerations and recommendations emerging from the recent landscape analysis (available in a corresponding brief: www.edu-links.org/resources/toward-transformative-gender-education-programming). Afterwards, in the small group setting, participants will review the learning case studies from the guidance document that are promoting reflective practice and encouraging imaginative responses to integrating intersectional approaches to gender in education programming. The session will wrap up by convening the reflections and responses from the small groups to review and discuss key strategies outlined in the guidance document for gender-transformative education programming. The workshop will also provide an avenue for networking among the participants who may come from the research, implementation, or donor side.

Sub Unit

• Pre-Conference Workshops, Book launches, and Visual Art Exhibits / Pre-Conference Workshop

Chair

• Jasmina Josic, Education Development Center

Workshop Organizers

• Jasmina Josic, Education Development Center

• maureen jacobs plaisimond, Education Development Center

• Melissa Katelyn Donaher, DDI Center for Education, United States Agency for International Development USAID

Presenting author

• Scott Pulizzi, Education Development Center (Edc)

• Bethany Johnson, USAID