`Gender equity and community participation in BESPOR’s WholeSchool Development component: formulation consultancy report

1.Summary

The Government of The Gambia (GOTG) has made good progress since the early 1990s in narrowing the gender gap in enrolment at Lower Basic (LB) level. The main gender and basic education issues in The Gambia now are gender gaps at Upper Basic (UB) level, and the issue of the type of schooling girls are receiving. As part of the Whole School Development component of BESPOR, it is recommended that thefollowing activitiesare undertaken to address these issues;

  • Piloting girl-friendly UB schools
  • Replicating best practice in UNICEF Girl-Friendly Lower Basic schools
  • Identifying the most effective strategies for increasing numbers of female teachers in remote areas
  • Exploring how to increase proportions of boys enrolled in specific ethnic communities with a gender balance adverse to boys

There is a good base for promoting community participation in school development and management, thanks to the PTA structure set up by the Department of State for Education. BESPOR will pilot a Gambian model of Whole School Development which puts communitiescentre-stage in school development planning. The challenge will be to promote gender equity and the meaningful involvement of marginalised social groups. Through awareness-raising, skills training and confidence building, both mothers and fathers will be supported to take an active role in school development planning. In particular, members of Mothers’ Clubs will be supported to take a greater part in decision-making about schools.

2.Background

WholeSchool Development (WSD) is a component of BESPOR, alongside Teacher Development and SWAP development. This report concerns proposed initiatives for the WSD component that specifically concern; i. gender equity in basic education and ii. community participation. Activities in both these areas will need to be fully integrated with school development planning. The mechanisms for achieving this will need to be developed during the early stages of the WSD process in Region 5. In addition, it has not yet been possible to meet some of the Gambian stakeholders, or identify potential Gambian partner organisations. For all these reasons, this report represents work in progress rather than a completed plan. It will be updated as more information becomes available, for instance as a result of meeting stakeholders who could not be seen during the inception phase.

As well as specifically gender-related interventions, there will be gender mainstreaming into all elements of BESPOR. This is covered in the inception reports for Teacher Development, Whole School Development, SWAP development and Monitoring and Evaluation, rather than being set out here. For the purposes of BESPOR, community participation is being promoted in relation to Whole School Development only, so it is only covered in this report.

2.1Government/sectoral policy

2.1.1Gender equity

The Republic of The Gambia Department of State for Education’s Education Policy 2004-2015 contains a commitment to ‘mainstream gender concerns atevery stage of the educational process for the realisation of the EFA gender parity and equity goals’. Specifically, there are commitments to revitalising gender mainstreaming through minimising educational costs, especially for girls, increasing the number of child-friendly school environments and equal participation of women and men in PTAs and school management. In addition, the corresponding action plan mandates the posting of more female teachers into rural areas and a reduction of gender disparities in teacher recruitment, training, promotion and posting, partly by continuing the Remedial Initiative for Female Teachers (RIFT) programme. It is not clear yet to what extent these and other commitments contained in the Policy are being implemented, although it is known that RIFT came to an end recently. The GOTG’s policy of providing basic education free of charge, in that there are no school fees payable, is very positive in gender terms.

The Gambiahas been allocated $4M from the EFA Fast Track Initiative (FTI) Catalytic Fund. The FTI’s objective in relation to gender equity in basic education is to increase the proportion of girls’ enrolment to 50% at basic and secondary levels by 2010. In order to achieve this, the government plans to pursue these strategies;

  • Provide financial assistance to girls at Upper Basic level; this is already done via a Scholarship Trust Fund for disadvantaged girls, which helps with uniforms and other ‘indirect’ costs.
  • Make school environments more sensitive to girls’ needs, notably by; providing separate latrines for girls and boys and sanitary amenities for menstruating girls, implementing a sexual harassment policy and extending guidance and counselling services to lower basic schools, in order to reduce teenage pregnancy and early and forced marriage.
  • Sensitisation campaigns designed to boost demand for girls’ education
  • A review of the curriculum to identify and remove gender bias, so as to improve girls’ performance

The Girls’ Education Unit within DOSE, which runs a Scholarship Trust Fund for girls, has recently been re-named the Gender Education Unit. According to staff, this is so it can better address a perceived incipient ‘backlash’ against DOSE’s success in narrowing the gender gap against girls. The work of the GEU is highly relevant to BESPOR. For instance, the Unit recently organised a conference for about 60 UB and Senior Secondary level schoolgirls in Region 4, where issues such as teenage pregnancy, sexual harassment and the causes of girls’ poor performance were discussed.

To build coherence and complementarity and to lever resources, it is essential that BESPOR activities are in line with the objectives and strategies of the Education Policy, the EFA National Plan and the EFA Fast Track Initiative proposal. BESPOR also needs to learn from and build on work done in the field of girls’ education by non-governmental agencies in The Gambia, such as UNICEF and FAWE-GAM.

2.1.2Community Participation

DOSE’s Planning Unithas set up a PTA structure to facilitate parents’ support to their children’s schools. In Region 5PTAs already exist, and some at least are active. It is not yet known how well they can be said to represent local communities. According to Region 5 education authorities, the chief functions of the PTAs in Region 5 are to support their schools with labour and cash and to act as mediators in cases of dispute with the community.

There appears to be no constitution for PTAs at national or regional level, and individual PTAs may suffer from a lack of clear terms of reference. This has contributed to tension between PTA Executive Committees and Head Teachers on occasion. There is, however, reported to be a training manual for PTAs, available from the Director of CREDIT.

At regional level, the Integrated Basic Services (IBS) department is responsible for community participation activities. Both its senior officials and field workers will need to be involvedin, or at least kept informed of, such activities under BESPOR. The nature of this involvement will need to be discussed with them. In addition, each community has a Village Development Committee which will need to be consulted, as well as the village heads (alcalos) and imams.

Following the success of the Mothers’ Clubs in supporting UNICEF Girl Friendly Schoolsand boosting girls’ enrolment (see below), Region 5 education authorities have begun to set up such clubs in other schools. It is not clear how many new clubs have been established or how many meetings they have yet had.

2.2Beneficiaries and parties involved

2.2.1Gender equity

  • WholeSchool Development

The main beneficiaries of the gender element of the Whole School Development component of BESPOR will be girls in Region 5 who are attending LB or UB schools. However, many of the strategies for boosting gender equity in basic education, such as better sanitary facilities and trained counsellors, benefit boys as well as girls. As the Whole School Development activities are rolled out across Region 5, both girls and boys of school-age throughout the region should benefit.

In some schools in Region 5, there is a gender disparity in favour of girls. So far this has been noted in some communities where boys are required to tend cattle. For instance, in Karantaba UB School, only 35% of pupils are boys. The scale of the problem needs to be ascertained; how many schools and communities in Region 5 are affected? In keeping with gender equity principles, and subject to sufficient resources being available, BESPOR will explore the issue and the best way to address the disparity. So out of school boys in these communities may also be specific beneficiaries of BESPOR.

2.2.2Community participation

Through the school development planning process that is an important element of Whole School Development, BESPOR will facilitate the involvement of both mothers and fathers in decision-making about schools, thus giving them more power in relation to their children’s education. The project will specifically target members of disadvantaged and marginalised social groups in these communities.

As part of the process of replicating ‘girl-friendly’ best practice, and in keeping with existing Region 5 educational policy, BESPOR will facilitate the establishment of Mother’s Clubs linked to every pilot school. It will also look at ways of learning from, mobilising greater support for and consolidating their activities. A key feature of BESPOR’s approach to Mothers’ Clubs is that the project will support them to take an active role in making decisions about schools, as well as supporting them.In addition, it will explore ways of enabling fathers as well as mothers to support schools financially and through work, in order to promote a gender equitable division of labour in this regard.

2.3Situation Analysis

2.3.1Enrolment

Since the early 1990s, GOTG has made good progress in reducing gender disparity in LB enrolment, so that there is now near gender parity at lower basic (LB) level. This is due to an increase in the proportion of girls enrolling rather than a decrease in numbers of boys, so it is very positive. However, there is still a considerable gender enrolment gap at UB level, and a large one at secondary school level; see the figures below.

1992/3 / 2001/2
Lower Basic / 41 / 48
Upper Basic / 36 / 42
Secondary school / 26 / 34

Table: Changes in girls’ percentage of enrolment at different levels, 1992/3-2001/2(taken from the Education For All National Action Plan (2004-2015) p.24)

Figures from the EFA Fast Track Initiative proposal (December 2004) are different from those in the table above, perhaps because they are more recent. That document reports girls’ enrolment at 49% for LB, 44% for UB and 37% for SS.

It is not clear yet to BESPOR to what extent the gender gap at UB level is due to girls not continuing from LB to UB, and to what extent to girls dropping out after they have started Grade 7, the first grade at UB level. This will need to be investigated in order to help shape appropriate responses. In relation to this question, it will be interesting to see whether the trend towards Basic Cycle schools and the abolition of the Grade 6 Primary Completion Certificate are helping to reduce the drop in girls’ enrolment between LB and UB levels. This question needs particular attention once good EMIS data is available.

In specific communitiesthere now appears to be a gender imbalance against boys at LB level, in that more girls than boys are enrolled in LB schools. The problem is said to affect Fula communities in particular, but this needs to be researched. The scale of this problem, and its causes, needs to be investigated. However, it needs to be stressed that, at national level, boys account for 51% of children enrolled in LB, and 56% of children enrolled at UB level (see EFA Fast Track Initiative proposal). In keeping with the principle of gender equity, it is recommended that BESPOR investigates the issue. However, in view of the comparatively small scale of the problem in relation to overall gender disparities disadvantaging girls, BESPOR should avoid diverting a large amount of project resources into this problem.

The gender-disaggregated figures for enrolment at different education levels suggest that, as far as enrolment is concerned, there is now a need to shift the focus from LB level to closing the gap at UB level. This will achieve a much greater impact than focussing on the relatively small number of ‘hard to reach’ girls who are still missing out on LB. The gender gap at UB level is generally attributed to factors such as girls’ early marriage, teenage pregnancy, inadequate sanitary facilities for menstruating girls and, in general, school environments that are not friendly to girls. Sexual harassment may be a factor here, and this should be investigated further. UB schools involved in BESPOR’s Whole School Development component should address these and any other issues that depress girls’ enrolment, attendance and completion.

2.3.2Performance

At LB level, small gender disparities have been identified for performance in Maths and Social and Environmental Studies. In English and Science, no statistically significant difference has been found. [1]

No data on comparative performance of girls and boys at UB level has been sighted.

However, during the inception phase, interviewees such as Deputy Head Teachers and the Gender Education Unit’s officer reported that girls perform significantly worse than boys both at UB and SS levels. Some interviewees attribute this to girls’ heavy domestic work-load, which sap their energy and ability to concentrate in school. Other factors are almost certainly involved too, and again this should be investigated.

2.3.3Quality of teaching and learning for girls

It is clear from interviews, document review and observation that the quality of teaching and learning in Gambian government schools, especially in remote rural areas, is less than satisfactory. Teachers tend to rely on ‘chalk and talk’ and rote learning without comprehension, rather than on a child-centred, problem-solving approach to learning. There is also a dearth of learning and teaching materials. Teachers have frequent recourse to corporal punishment or the threat of it.

These general shortcomings affect female and male pupils alike. However, they are also gender issues. This is partly because the poor quality of teaching and learning at LB level in The Gambia may interact with a cultural pattern of ‘son preference’ to depress parents’ demand for girls’ education, especially at UB level, where the gender enrolment gap is still high. Put simply, parents may be justified in thinking; ‘What is the point of sending my daughter to UB school, when she has learned so little at LB, and in any case she will be married off soon?’ Gender-differentiated attitudes to corporal punishment among pupils in The Gambia have yet to be investigated. A recent multiple country study by ActionAid suggests that girls find harsh and punitive school settings a deterrent to attendance and completion.[2]

Another important reason why poor educational quality is a gender issue is that the schooling offered may disempower girls. For instance, gender stereotypes and other biases in the curriculum and in learning materials might discourage girls, and militate against them performing well. A gender review of the curriculum and learning materials may need to be carried out, unless one has already been done.

As well as the ‘formal curriculum’, there are also gender issues arising from the ‘informal curriculum’ in Gambian schools. The informal curriculum includes teachers’ treatment of male and female pupils. There are modules in both the Primary Teachers’ Certificate and Higher Teachers’ Certificate courses at GambiaCollege that address gender issues, and these have been sighted.[3] However it is not clear how well they are taught, or how effective they are in encouraging student teachers to question gender stereotypes and prejudices that might affect their behaviour towards boy and girl pupils.

The informal curriculum also includes the amount and type of school housekeeping work allocated to girls and boys, such as cleaning the compound and toilets. According to girls interviewed at an Upper Basic school in Region 5, for instance, they usually do most of the work of sweeping the compound while the boys ‘sit under a tree’. Similar situations were reported at other schools visited. This is particularly significant because girls also tend to perform more work in and around the home than boys. This combination of heavier domestic workloads both in the home and the school can be expected to depress girls’ performance compared to boys. The Girls’ Education Unit recognises the problem, and has distributed posters encouraging a more equal gender distribution of labour both at home and at school.

2.3.4Teachers

Gender mainstreaming into BESPOR Teacher Development activities is addressed in the relevant Formulation Consultancy reports. However, there is another significant gender issue pertaining to teachers, namelythe small proportion of teachers in rural areas who are female. The evidence is that a lack of female teachers has a depressing effect on girls’ enrolment for various reasons, including the lack of positive role models for girls, and girls’ perceptions and experience of schools as girl-unfriendly, male-dominated environments. The reasons why female teachers are reluctant to accept remote rural postings include; long distance from family, lack of physical security and inadequate accommodation. Young unmarried female teachers in other West African countries, notably Nigeria, also explain their unwillingness to work in remote areas by referring to the associated difficulty in finding educated husbands, so this might be a factor in The Gambia too. Effective and efficient strategies for addressing the gender imbalance need to be identified and implemented.