"Girls also have abilities:” Shifting gender norms to achieve gender equity in secondary education in Tanzania

• In Event: Gender Justice in Educational Access and Equity in Global Perspective

Proposal

Overview:
In the past decade there has been considerable progress on girls’ access to education, and in some locations in East Africa girls’ attendance and learning has overtaken that of boys. This information disguises the reality that in East Africa many girls are still facing profound education challenges including gender-related and economic disadvantages. Harmful gender norms combined with characteristics such as poverty, disability, conflict, and living in rural locations all have a powerful influence on education outcomes producing a reality where rural girls and girls from low income families are still under-enrolled and under-achieving compared to boys widening the achievement gap with each additional year of secondary schooling (UNESCO 2021). Using qualitative process tracing methodology (Beach & Pedersen 2016), our research documents the causal process for how the Binti Shupavu program in rural Tanzania successfully shifts harmful gender norms both in the community and in digital spaces, thus improving school-going girls’ perceptions about gender, confidence and agency. Our findings represent year 1 results of a broader 4-year mixed methods cluster randomized control trial design looking at the impact Binti Shupavu on girls’ agency and educational outcomes (Sidle, Oulo, Kafanabo, & Swai 2022).

Background & Rationale:
Studies have argued that one important cause of the gender gap in secondary education is that girls’ educational aspirations are in direct competition with societal expectations on their roles as domestic support in family homes and gender norms related to expectations to become wives and mothers (Unterhalter et al., 2014). Our research reveals the specific ways that these gendered norms affect school-going girls in Tanzania, and further shows that these experiences are augmented by serious and persistent gender-based violence and harassment experienced by girls during their daily journeys to and from school.

“Girls face strict challenges like being harassed, or at home, being told to stay home and get married while boys go to school, or being expected to cook and do housework while boys are not allowed to help”(Binti Scholar)

While not all gender norms are negative, harmful and discriminatory practices still undermine girls' opportunities to develop their agency and capabilities (Harper et al., 2018). In Tanzania many discriminatory practices are tied to beliefs about son preference and girls’ initiation into adulthood. Initiation rites, commonly called “unyago” are conducted at a young age, distracting girls from schooling to initiating them into an adult focus on marriage preparation, further delaying their educational pursuits and increasing the instances of dropout (Dimoso et al., 2023). In some ethnic communities, the traditional rite of passage ceremonies occur almost immediately after menarche (the break of their first menstrual cycle) (Dammery 2015).

In rural Tanzania, the harmful effects of initiation on girls’ schooling are augmented by the everyday forms of school-related sexual harassment and gender based violence that adolescent girls face both within school and on their way to and from school (Mutasingwa & Mwaipopo 2022, Oulo et al. 2021). Sexual harassment from young male taxi drivers (‘boda boda’ drivers) stationed at community centers poses a particularly serious threat and barrier to girls’ safe passage to school and has been documented as a primary factor in school-related gender based violence and transactional sex among adolescents (Thiaw et al., 2024, Wamoyi et al. 2022).

Our research suggests that the reality faced by school-going young women in Tanzania necessitate a direct engagement with gendered norms. Unfortunately many such programs have yielded marginal or null effects (Brown 2022), arguably because they fail to account for the context-specific cultural norms that perpetuate gender disparities (such as unyago or boda boda drivers) thus making it difficult for interventions to achieve lasting change (Gazta & Jadhav 2022). Indeed, suggesting that a one-size-fits-all approach is inadequate (Psaki et al., 2022).

Method & Findings:
Our research documents the causal process of the Binti Shupavu (Brave Daughters) life skill programs in rural Tanzania, revealing both the process and key mechanisms for how the program successfully shifts harmful gender norms that empower girls to participate more freely in school. Data comes from 25 qualitative focus group discussions with 124 participants including 103 Binti Shupavu scholars, 5 teachers from schools where Binti Shupavu operates and 16 parents of Binti students. We used a semi-structured interviewing techniques and applied inductive coding methods to examine key themes, pathways, and processes in the data. This analytical approach allowed for insights to emerge organically as grounded theory and to be triangulated between participant types (Maxwell, 2005) and mapped against pre-identified overarching program theory developed in collaboration with participants at the beginning of the study in 2022 (Beach & Pedersen, 2016).

Analysis revealed five interconnected process pathways that together work to achieve the ultimate program outcome of improved agentic capacity. This paper focuses on the pathway related to gender-norm shift, which emerges from a multi-pronged process with three distinct interconnected processes. First, positive relationships with adults (both program staff and parents, fostered in Binti through a mentoring pedagogy and short-term parental engagement sessions) result in shifting perceptions and expectations of girls and by girls themselves. Second, the focus of the curriculum content and pedagogical approach creates positive feedback loops of knowledge-application-integration that enabled girls to re-author positive beliefs about gender and related leadership and self-governance skills needed to navigate sexual harassment, and gender-based violence in their environments. Third, these processes are aided by the use of digital technology in the Binti classroom, supporting girls’ ability to navigate potentially harmful digital social media content and advocate for the digital re-authoring of girls’ identities absent of harmful gender norms.

These results have important implications for girls' education practice and gender-norms change work more broadly. Our causal process map provides a potential framework for designing programs in similar contexts in the region that aim to replicate Binti Shupavu’s results.

Authors

• Aubryn Allyn Sidle, Cornell University, Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy

• Elizabeth Resor, UC Berkeley

• Eugenia Joseph Kafanabo, UNIVERSITY OF DAR ES SALAAM

• Ema THEOBALD Boki

• Aikande Simon Muro, AMPLIFY Girls

• Brenda Oulo, University of Sheffield

• Anande Nnko, Girls Livelihood and Mentorship Initiative (GLAMI)