Gender canyon: getting girls into schools in the South is literally a matter of life and death … Can `gender-sensitive' education help … ?

New Internationalist, August, 1999

NOTHING gets people going so much as sexual politics. Except perhaps race. Or religion. And when the three are mixed together you get something pretty explosive. One of the hottest issues in my local elementary school in recent years has been that of gender-segregated swimming, a storm which had thankfully blown itself out by the time I became a governor. The school had its own tiny unheated swimming pool, just about big enough for children to learn their first few strokes. It also had (and still has) a fascinatingly diverse multicultural population, which includes Kenyans, Chinese, Serbs and Albanians. A consistent one-third of the school's children come from the local Muslim community; most of their families migrated originally from rural Pakistan.

To make a long story short, representatives of the Muslim community (of whom there are three on the governing body now, though there was then only one) requested that girls should swim in separate sessions to boys, saying that their children (often those least likely to learn to swim outside school) would otherwise be unable to take part. After much debate the governors eventually decided to agree to this, at which point many of the (generally liberal, feminist-sympathizing) white parents erupted in protest, finding the whole idea of sexual segregation outrageous. Those parents who felt most strongly about the issue then withdrew their children from swimming altogether. After a year or so of this, probably to everyone's relief, the pool became unsafe and the lessons stopped.

This minefield of an issue is fascinating precisely because there was no easy resolution to it - it is often too easy to endorse multicultural education in a bland way that assumes it is uncomplicated and unproblematic. But despite the complications, I think all parts of the school community - children, staff and parents - genuinely see its cultural diversity as enriching.

The first migrants to this area came when their villages near Mirpur in northeast Pakistan were submerged under the floodwaters of the new Mangla Dam in the 1960s. In those days before unemployment rose and the immigration shutters went down, the former colonial power, Britain, allowed some of those displaced to immigrate; the rest were relocated within Pakistan. In the intervening years there has been a steady influx of new Pakistani migrants to East Oxford and, while the school now has some third-generation children whose parents were born in England, the majority still enter school at five speaking only Punjabi or Urdu.

Starting at a school run in a different language is inevitably alienating, no matter how much support you are offered in your first language. But at least all have access to schooling: their cousins in rural Pakistan often miss out on education altogether, particularly the girls. Pakistan has one of the widest gender gaps in the world, and despite promising in the early 1990s to reduce this gap and make sexual equality in education a priority, its governments' efforts on this front have been dismal (see map, Band of shame).

Life savers

On a worldwide level, girls continue to be denied schooling to a much greater extent than boys - fully two-thirds of the estimated 125 million children currently out of school are girls. Girls' exclusion from education is not just immoral and unjust - it is a flagrant abuse of their fundamental human rights. More strikingly, it is also a matter of life and death.

By failing to achieve the goal of basic education for all children in the 1990s the world has effectively sentenced millions of children to death. How could this be? How could education possibly save so many lives? According to the World Bank, the best available estimates show that each year of schooling that a girl receives reduces the under-five mortality rate by up to ten per cent, as more educated mothers reap the benefit of their greater understanding of health, sanitation and nutrition. (1) On this basis even just one year's schooling would have reduced infant-mortality rates sufficiently to save two million of the children these out-of-school girls will one day have - though of course `Education for All' would have entailed many further years of schooling, each of them multiplying the number of child lives saved.

The incontrovertible case for investing in girls' education was made in a high-profile speech in Pakistan in 1992 by one Lawrence H Summers, who was then Vice-President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. As the advocate of a feminist cause he was, to put it mildly, an unlikely candidate, having gained notoriety for endorsing the dumping of toxic waste in low-wage countries. After his spell at the World Bank he joined the US Government and is now President Clinton's right hand at the Treasury.

But his speech had all the more impact in development circles because it came from a conservative economist, a World Bank clone. `Reflecting the biases of an economist,' he said, `I have tried to concentrate on the concrete benefits of female education and explicitly contrast it with other proposed investments. Expenditures on increasing the education of girls do not just meet the seemingly easy test of being more socially productive than military outlays. They appear to be far more productive than other social-sector outlays and than the vastly large physical capital outlays that are projected over the next decade.' (1)