The e-Newsletter of the Gender Network

March/April 2012 | Vol. 6, No. 1

Safe education for girls in conflict and post-conflict situations

by Pamposh Dhar, ADB Consultant ADB supports the Governments efforts to provide equitable access to quality education More young people will emerge from the school system with formal credentials and better prepared to join the workforce and with a better chance to rise above the poverty they were born into. For centuries, girls and women from low caste families or minority communities, living in poverty-stricken areas of the country, have suffered silently and perhaps not even dared to dream of a better future. But they can dream now for their daughters, thanks to the efforts of the Government and the development agencies that support Nepals efforts to provide improved and accessible education opportunities to all her people. An ADB-supported project has encouraged girls to finish secondary school by providing scholarships and safe hostel accommodation, improving the quality of teaching, and modernizing the school curriculum to make it more relevant to the job market and the realities of the day. As a result of these and other measures, the percentage of girls in secondary school (grades 6 through 10) rose from 40% in 2002 to 47.2% in 2008. Financed jointly by ADB, the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), and the Government, the Secondary Education Support Project (2003-2010) initially provided 40,000 scholarships to girls from poor families to help them complete school. In addition, it supported female teachers through intensive training to upgrade their skills, and rental allowances to help them live safely near their place of work. In the sparsely populated mountainous regions of the country, many villages are quite far from a secondary school. To continue their education, children need to stay away from home. Safety, always a concern for young girls, became even more of an issue during the 11 years of conflict in Nepal, from 1995 to 2006. Many therefore tended to stop their education at the end of primary school, which greatly reduced their chances of finding reasonably-paid work, without secondary schooling. To enable girls to continue their education in safety, the project built and renovated hostels for girls in the countrys mountainous belt and in other high-poverty areas. It also built 190 secondary schools in the poorest districts. In response to an emerging situation, the project added 200 classrooms to existing schools to accommodate children from internal migrant families fleeing the worst of the conflict. To make the secondary school experience a little easier for girls, 178 toilets were added to schools, 65 of them separate facilities for girls. Layers of disparity Access to education is constrained not just by the paucity of schools or classrooms, but also by layers of disparity based on region, community, caste, and gender. Villages in the mountains and the far western region of the country are the least developed, with
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commensurately higher levels of poverty. Among the majority Hindu community, the outlawed but still prevalent caste system remains a strong barrier to social and economic mobility. Indigenous communities and religious minorities also have fewer opportunities than high-caste Hindus. Gender cuts across all the other categories of disparity, with girls having less access to education than boys and women earning lower incomes than men. Girls and women from poor families among socially repressed classes suffer the triple disadvantage of poverty, class, and gender. Quality of education Less earning power is primarily the result of less education, which is why encouraging girls as well as boys to complete school is so important. The quality of education is another factor and here, too, the poor face a disparity. The more expensive private schools have traditionally had a higher pass rate in crucial school examinations than the more affordable public schools. Owing to cultural preferences, parents tend to enrol boys in private schools and girls in public schools. To offset this imbalance, the project established minimum qualifications for teachers, trained a huge backlog of untrained or insufficiently trained teachers in permanent jobs with public schools, and streamlined and modernized the school curriculum. Pass rates for the crucial school leaving certificate examination more than doubled in public schools between 2004 and 2009, jumping from a dismal 32% to a much better 68.5%. Pass rates for the important examination at the end of grade 8 also increased, from 74.4% in 2003 to 85% in 2009. For girls, this rate rose from 74% to 83.6% during the same period. Gross enrolment rates exceeded the projects targets, rising from 55% to 80% for grades 6 through 8, and from 35% to nearly 60% for grades 9 and 10. Revamping curriculum to meet the current context The project supported the development of a national curriculum framework that revises secondary education courses to impart the knowledge and skills needed for a modern workforce. The new curriculum also provides a better foundation for higher education, technical education, and vocational training. At the same time, it allows for some local content to make education more relevant to the lives of children in different parts of the country. The last major curriculum revision in Nepal had taken place in 1992, before the start of the conflict and the sweeping political and social changes that have occurred in the country since then. The framework adopts a holistic teaching approach to school education and guides the development of course content for each grade, textbook design, teacher training, assessment and examination. The new approach also supplements periodic examinations with continuous assessment to give teachers and students regular feedback on performance. This has helped to reduce class repetition rates. Professional teachers To teach the newly revised courses, the project helped develop new textbooks and other training materials. It also sought to improve the quality of teaching by setting minimum standards for teachers and training more than 8,500 teachers who have permanent tenure in public schools but have never received any training themselves. All secondary school teachers now need to have at least a bachelors degree.

To attract more women teachers to secondary schools in remote areas, the project instituted a system of rental allowances. This helped support women teachers find safe and convenient accommodation near the schools. Responding to needs Apart from the 200 additional classrooms built, two other project components were modified during implementation to increase the impact of the project. The project design had provided for only 40,000 scholarships, but this was found to be such an effective way to support children from disadvantaged backgrounds that the number was increased to 60,000 during project implementation. While two-thirds of these went to girls from poor backgrounds, lowcaste families and minority communities, the remaining third were awarded to boys from similar backgrounds. The government funded the additional scholarships by increasing its portion of the funding for the project. Similarly, the project had provided for training teachers in the new curriculum. However since a large number of teachers had not received basic training, the focus shifted to training these teachers in all aspects of modern teaching methodologies. Several other project features encouraged girls to continue their education into secondary school, including the construction of safe hostels for girl students; scholarships for management training for women teachers; and the provision of 178 toilets in schools, including 65 exclusively for female students. The project target for school toilets was exceeded, increasing convenience and safety for girls. Ten feeder hostels were built for female secondary school students in poverty-stricken areas. A feeder hostel provides accommodation for girls attending any school in the area. Seven existing girls hostels in mountainous areas were renovated. During implementation, it was found more feasible to provide rental allowances for female teachers than to build separate hostels for them. One hundred and twenty five (125) teachers applied for these allowances, enabling them to make their own preferred arrangements to stay close to schools located in remote areas. Scholarships were provided to 100 female and male teachers from disadvantaged communities for management training. The project was implemented in a flexible manner against the backdrop of an internal conflict in the country, affecting all aspects of life. Dreams of a better future Rajkumari Chowdhary, a member of the indigenous Tharu community, lives in the village of Manchara in the Kailali district in the Far-Western Development Region in a modest home with her husband and daughter. Rajkumari started working as a domestic worker when she was 10, for a wage of 2,000 rupees (less than US$30) a year paid not to her but to her parents. She is determined to chart a very different course for her daughter, Angita. She will study as much as she can, be independent, stand on her own feet, says Rajkumari with determination.

The views expressed in this paper are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), or its Board of Governors, or the governments they represent. ADB does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this paper and accepts no responsibility for any consequence of their use. The countries listed in this paper do not imply any view on ADB's part as to sovereignty or independent status or necessarily conform to ADB's terminology.