Interventions for Girls Education - Part 4: Making Schools More Girl-Friendly
“A 2010 survey by the Ministry of National Education in Côte d’Ivoire found that 47% of teachers reported having sexual relations with students. In South Africa, a recent national survey found that 8% of secondary school girls had experienced severe sexual assault or rape in the previous year while at school.” - World Education Blog
We continue our series addressing interventions that work in girls education as outlined in What Works in Girls Education: Evidence for the World’s Best Investment [click on the title to download a free pdf of the book!]. The authors present a list of seven intervention areas which are critical to increasing the number of girls who enroll and stay in school:
In Chapter 4, the authors Gene B. Sperling and Rebecca Winthrop outline the importance of girl-friendly schools as a key to enrollment and retention of female students. But what does it mean for a school to be girl-friendly. Let’s take a look to their introduction of the issues:
“Although having a basic school nearby is an important first step to getting girls into school, it may not suffice to bring all girls into school or to keep them there. Moreover, practitioners’ experience suggests that girls’ enrollment rates and test scores may respond even more when those schools are equipped with girl-friendly amenities and features. Building on UNICEF’s child-friendly schools framework, researchers and practitioners advocating for girl-friendly schools are calling for transforming the school climate and school culture into one that is not only gender-sensitive but also promotes parity in the enrollment and achievement of girls and boys; reduces constraints on gender equity and eliminates gender stereotypes; and provides facilities, curricula, and learning processes that are welcoming to girls.
In creating girl-friendly schools, cultural requirements for privacy must be understood. Depending on the context, these may entail separate schools for girls, separate hours for girls in schools shared with boys, boundary walls for girls’ schools, female teachers, and the like. Such efforts are critical not only for increasing enrollment and achieving gender parity but also for creating high-quality learning environments and community cultures for girls. Involving communities has emerged as the best way to find out what matters most to parents and how to proceed (Herz 2002; World Bank 2001).
Interventions that have attempted to make schools more girl-friendly have typically implemented a package of interventions targeted at improving school quality and gender equality simultaneously. Research is needed to determine which components girls are responding to and which are most effective.” - Page 147
The authors go on to outline interventions which research tends to support as concrete interventions...
1. Preschool and Child Care Programs
My initial reaction to this was, how are preschool and child-care programs an intervention in making schools more girl-friendly. Then I realized, that the studies cited discussed school settings where preschool and child-care programs were being offered. The impact is two-fold!
Girls who otherwise are tending to younger siblings are able to attend school, if there is a place for those younger siblings to be cared for.
The younger siblings are now receiving Early Childhood Development, which has a positive impact of their future school success.
Sounds like a win-win!
Taking a moment to pause, I realize that such an intervention is not just good for girls in developing countries, but some of our "modern, western societies" could benefit from similar programs.
Think of the impoverished communities throughout the US from inner cities, Appalachia, the deep south and First Nation peoples - many children in these underserved communities are not receiving Early Childhood Development and while girls in the US do not typically stay home to tend to younger siblings, teen parenting is an issue. Although, the rate of teen pregnancy has gone down drastically since the 1990s, “research indicates that fully 30 percent of teen girls who have dropped out of high school cite pregnancy or parenthood as a key reason.” - Teen Pregnancy & High School Dropout - America’s Promise Alliance • page 2
“Making schools girl-friendly also means eliminating a range of explicit and implicit acts or threats of sexual, physical, or psychological violence against girls in and around schools. Around the world, girls are subjected to school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV), with documented cases in numerous countries. For example, one study found that 30 percent of girls in South Africa are raped in and around school (UNGEI, UNESCO, and EFA 2015; King and Winthrop 2015). Examples of this type of school violence range widely, as seen in figure 4.1, and can include when a teacher asks a student for sex in exchange for better grades or punishes a student with poor grades if she or he rejects the teacher’s sexual advances (Irish Consortium 2013). Girls are especially vulnerable to these types of violence, and it is reinforced by gender inequality in the society writ large, but boys can also be subjected to this type of abuse.
Effective SRGBV interventions address both prevention and response, which means efforts take on coordinated, multilevel, and multifaceted “whole-school” approaches. Tackling SRGBV requires cultural change, involving teachers, students, parents, community members, and local organizations (Camfed 2010; Michau et al. 2015; USAID 2008a, 2008b). Such an integrated approach also means recognizing that GBV within schools is related to GVB outside schools, making it essential to change attitudes and improve awareness toward violence beyond school walls (UNGEI, UNESCO, and EFA 2015).” - pages 152-153
Based on their research, Sperling and Winthrop offer up several promising interventions to deal with SRGBV.
2.1 School Safety Policies and Codes of Conduct for Teachers
“Reforming teachers’ codes of conduct and other safety policies can help quickly raise awareness of SRGBV, protect children from GBV, and enhance teacher– student interaction, especially when teachers, students, and whole schools are involved in creating these codes and policies. Not to mention, codes of conduct can help change the institutional climate concerning violence by strengthening mechanisms for reporting code violations and holding perpetrators of violence accountable (ICRW 2015). In addition, strengthening the legislative and policy frameworks dealing with violence against girls can help enhance linkages to services for victims.” - page 153
2.2 Gender Sensitivity Training for Teachers and Students
“Practitioners and researchers alike suggest that the prevention of SRGBV is key. Promising programs take measures to prevent violence at school, including initiatives like gender sensitivity training, especially training that seeks to transform gender norms (Barker, Ricardo, and Nascimento 2007). Programs’ intensity and duration are also connected to their effectiveness, with training for children suggested at 20 hours or more for 270 days or more and training for teachers suggested for at least 10 hours for four days or longer (CARE 2014).
Research suggests that gender sensitivity training programs should focus on transforming the unequal relations of power that perpetuate and tolerate both physical and psychological violence against girls and women. These power dynamics manifest interpersonally as well as systemically within the community and in broader society (Michau et al. 2015). However, it should also be kept in mind that communication about the issues of SRGBV needs to be both strategic and inclusive and not demonize or alienate innocent male teachers and boys. Instead, communication about SRGBV needs to balance negative images with positive and constructive ones (Fleming et al. 2013; USAID 2008a).” - page 155
“Safe spaces and girls’ clubs are popular features of girl-friendly schools as well as popular strategies for increasing girls’ confidence and capacity to stand up against GBV and other issues of gender inequality. In a review of forty-nine studies of interventions in low- and middle-income countries that made reference to girls’ health as an outcome, more than half included provisions for safe spaces (Hallman et al. 20130).
Safe spaces, generally meaning girls-only spaces, are important components to interventions seeking to improve social and psychological outcomes for girls, especially because public spaces are often reserved for men and shared spaces like the school lobby, the canteen, and the classroom can become sites of violence or harassment (Bhatla et al. 2015). Finding safe spaces may involve helping girls map locations where they feel safe, like community halls, youth centers, or even empty shipping containers in some cases (Baldwin 2011). Although widely supported among practitioners, their impact on girls’ educational outcomes is inconclusive. However, an ongoing randomized impact evaluation of a large- scale safe spaces project in Zambia—the Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program, led by the Population Council and funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID)—will provide much needed empirical data on this intervention (Lloyd 2013).” - page 158
We continue our series addressing interventions that work in girls education as outlined in What Works in Girls Education: Evidence for the World’s Best Investment [click on the title to download a free pdf of the book!]. The authors present a list of seven intervention areas which are critical to increasing the number of girls who enroll and stay in school:
Taking a moment to pause, I realize that such an intervention is not just good for girls in developing countries, but some of our "modern, western societies" could benefit from similar programs.
