Cover(final) - United Nations Girls' Education Initiative

INTRODUCTION 7
Formulae and beyond
The calculations for this report and the detailed
methodology for scoring are presented in the
Annex. The weightings of the eight major
indicators listed above were:
Political Will 15%
Educational Infrastructure 15%
Quality Inputs 15%
Access to Basic Education 15%
Transparency and Accountability 10%
Incentives 10%
Equality 10%
Barriers 10%
Within each indicator, sub-indicators were not
always weighted equally. Each sub-indicator
uses a five-point scale (quintiles) for ranking,
with an A grade representing a score of 80 per
cent or more, and an E grade representing a
score of less than 20 per cent.
Availability of data has had an important
influence on the distribution of weightings to
ensure that lack of data does not unduly impact
the overall scores for a country. What emerges
in the final analysis is that while a country doing
poorly on one indicator can partially make up
by doing well on another, the interlinkages
between these indicators imply the need for
holistic policy attention if gender equality goals
are to be met.
It must, however, also be noted that the
quantitative results of the report card are only
as good as the data that they are based on.
Maldives has enacted a host of policy
interventions and measures to ensure gender
equality. However, due to the inability to access
the required data, it could not be included in
this South Asia analysis.
While this report uses a country as the unit of
analysis, clearly there are huge variations within
countries, not only large ones like India, but
also smaller ones like Sri Lanka, with reasons
ranging from conflict and security issues to
those of poverty and exclusion. While this report
highlights key issues and problems across
countries, translating this into a disaggregated
state-level analysis, which brings out regional
variation within countries, would be a useful next
step.
For now, though, the report first presents the
Country Report Cards as an overall summary
for each country of performance within the four
broad domains: (1) the governance domain: the
big picture, (2) the capabilities domain: cycle
of basic education, (3) resources and
opportunities: in and outside the classroom, and
(4) the security domain: from a gender point of
view. The remainder of the report provides a
deeper analysis of each domain via the
indicators and sub-indicators as listed in Figure
2 above. Finally, the Conclusions point policy
makers and educationists towards specific
policy advocacy priority recommendations for
South Asia which emerge from the analysis.