• Wednesday, October 05, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Making some simple, basic changes in education policy can result in many more girls attending school, experts said at a meeting here this week on Gender Equality in Education.

Take the case of Kenya. The United Nations says that the country has made huge strides towards the goal of education for all by incorporating gender awareness in school administration. 'We offered free lunches, but not only that, we make sure that sanitary towels were available in schools, and that decreased absenteeism enormously,' Kenya’s minister of education, Prof. Sam Ongeri, told IPS.

'Feeding students is one thing but when girls are made to feel comfortable and empowered at school, it makes an enormous difference,' he said in an interview during the conference, acknowledging that problems still remained.

Kenya and many other countries have made progress in 'narrowing gender gaps in education over the past decade,' says the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), which organised the two- day meeting ahead of World Teachers’ Day, celebrated Oct. 5.

But in certain regions, girls are still 'being left behind in educational opportunities', the agency says in a report, adding that 'being born a girl carries with it a significant education disadvantage in many countries.'

According to UNESCO, too many governments are moving too slowly to eliminate gender gaps, with 69 countries failing to achieve gender parity in primary school enrolment. This translates to 3.6 million girls missing from primary school, the agency says.

Overall, there are some 67 million children out of school, and more than 50 percent are girls. Besides poverty and conflict, social and cultural norms are often to blame for girls’ marginalisation in some areas. But the latter is a sensitive topic at international governmental organisations.

UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova told IPS that the United Nations has been working to establish 'non- traditional' places of learning for girls and women in countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.

'There are certain cultural sensitivities in many countries in the world, but we’ve been working to set up community centres of learning, especially for dropouts or illiterate young girls,' she said. 'We also sometimes use mobile schools for nomadic populations. With these measures, we can reach out to hundreds of thousands of women.'

She said it was important for UNESCO to 'encourage governments' to make girls’ education a priority in their national policies, but at the same time to be 'creative', especially in helping those who drop out of school.

'I think that providing education for the dropouts is the biggest challenge,' Bokova told IPS. She has stressed previously that a lack of education for girls means high numbers of adult women without literacy skills. Currently two-thirds of the world’s 796 million illiterate adults are women, according to UN figures.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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