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Girl’s education must be prioritized , says GCE |
08 March 2010 The Global Campaign for Education is using international women’s day to call upon governments to put women and girls on top of the education agenda.
Until this happens, gender injustices will continue to prevail in our schools and communities. Speaking in International Women’s Day (8 March), GCE Board Member Maria Khan said that steps must be taken to ensure all women and girls acquire a good education, across the globe.
“It’s unimaginable to achieve the Education for All targets without specific attention to the learning issues and concerns of women and girls,” said Ms Khan. “We should be talking about gender equality far more substantively and powerfully than we have so far. Gender equality in education includes the broader education challenge in terms of fighting the broader gender injustice, and we should be speaking about that issue far more than we have so far.”
According to UNESCO’s recently released Global Monitoring Report on the state of education, while the share of girls out of school has declined from 58 percent to 54 percent, gender disadvantage is still most pronounced in the Arab States, Central Asia, and South and West Asia.
The report stated that in nine of the 11 Arab states for which data are available, girls accounted for less than 40% of enrolment. It highlighted that in Yemen, nearly 80 percent of girls out of school are unlikely ever to enroll, compared with 36 percent of boys, and that in Pakistan girls accounted for 60 percent of out-of school children in 2006.
It showed numerous examples of gender disparity, such as in Iran, where unemployment rates among women aged 20 to 24 are twice the level for men of that age group; in Chad, Ethiopia and Mali, where women are 1.5 times as likely as men to be illiterate; in Algeria and Yemen, where female illiteracy rates are twice those for men, and in Bangladesh, where the rate of illiteracy among women aged 25 to 34 is 32 percent higher than for men in the same age group.
“We must banish this notion that girls are second best – and the best way we can do this is by prioritising education for all girls,” said Assibi Napoe, Chair of the GCE Board. “ We must make sure that they leave school with knowledge, confidence and pride. When I grew up women and girls were regarded as ‘frogs’, because they weren’t good for anything. But we had no boys in my family so my eldest sister was sent to school, and became the first woman to go to college. Everyone deserves that fighting chance in life.”
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