Cover(final) - United Nations Girls' Education Initiative

INTRODUCTION 5
Other measures developed earlier, too, such as
the Gender Equality in Education Index (GEEI)
recognize the importance of context in assessing
gender equality. They too have sought to capture
the overall environment in the country that can
enable or hinder women’s exercise of agency,
apart from the specific analysis of their
educational achievements in terms of enrolment
and survival in schools. 21 The Right to Education
Project has also developed a framework based
on the 4As of availability, accessibility,
acceptability and adaptability with recommended
gender disaggregation of indicators. 22
In this report, we try to move the analysis one
step forward by grouping the indicators used
into four categories (see Figure 2).
In the first category, we have attempted to
capture the governance context in terms of
political recognition of gender disadvantage and
policy commitments to address the same both
from a governance and accountability
perspective. Educational expenditures have
been considered a proxy for political will, and a
test of commitment is often the sustaining of
educational expenditures during times of crisis,
alongside not just the presence of a supportive
legal and policy framework, but also its
implementation. The role of civil society
organizations including NGOs, teachers’ unions
and communities are critical to ensuring state
accountability to provision of basic entitlements.
The remaining three categories are defined in
line with the MDG taskforce, as discussed
earlier. First, we use girls’ and women’s access
to different levels of basic education through
their life-cycle – from the pre-primary and
primary levels through secondary education
and as adults – as an indicator of their basic
educational capabilities.
Next, the emphasis shifts to a multi-pronged
analysis on access to resources within the
classroom (education infrastructure, quality and
incentives) and opportunities beyond. Apart from
UNDP’s Gender-related Development Index
(GDI), we have included the Gender
Empowerment Measure (GEM) to assess how
far girls and women are able to translate their
education into earnings and political decisionmaking
opportunities. Even though both Sri
Lanka and Bangladesh, for example, have
achieved gender parity in primary and
secondary education and despite symbolic
milestones like former Sri Lankan President
Sirimavo Bandaranaike being the world’s first
woman minister in 1960 and the several
successive Bangladeshi Heads of State being
women, we find that they trail behind on more
holistic gender empowerment measures.
In the final security domain, we have interpreted
violence in broad terms as economic violence
(reflected through poverty and child labour) and
socio-cultural violence (inherent in child
21
Unterhalter, E. (2006). Measuring gender equality in education in South Asia. Kathmandu: UNGEI.
22
Right to Education Indicator based on the 4A framework: Concept Paper prepared by Gauthier de Beco, Independent
Consultant, for The Right to Education Project, May 2009. http://www.right-to-education.org/sites/r2e.gn.apc.org/files/
Microsoft%20Word%20-%20Concept%20Paper_final.pdf