Education and Training in Ethiopia An Evaluation of Approaching EFA Goals

It is recommended that Finnish development cooperation support the ESDP II andtarget particularly the following areas:• extending the concept of special needs education and inclusiveness to coverdifferent kinds of learning difficulties and supporting pre-service and inservicespecial needs teacher education and career guidance and counselling;• supporting TVET teacher education, including special needs education in thearea;• renovating the existing school facilities (water, toilets, security);• promoting ICT-based pre-service and inservice teacher education and trainingand supporting senior secondary education as a prerequisite for admission toteacher training;• improving the capacity of school management and woreda-level administration;• supporting non-formal education for out-of-school youth; and• promoting females’ access to education and resources.Investment in education contributes to economic growth and labour productivity inEthiopia. In the long term, the payoff for spending on basic education will be high both inthe private and in the public sector. Parents’, especially mothers’ level of education has animpact on children’s health and education. Improving girls’ opportunities to enter andsurvive in primary schools requires particular attention. Compared internationally,Ethiopian literacy, women’s inequality, access to education, youth unemployment andpoverty indicators fall short even of the averages of the other sub-Saharan countries. Thedevelopment needs of the education sector are huge. Considering the sustainability ofdevelopment cooperation, Finland’s aid to the education sector should concentrate onexpertise based on previous experiences and updated new areas.6.2 Gender Policy ConcernsWomen’s development-related problems cannot be solved without an examination ofeconomic and social structures and the relationship between men and women in societyand the economy. The traditional Women in Development approach merely attempts tointegrate women with the current developmental trend without considering men’s role indevelopment processes and without addressing the model of development itself.The fourth world survey of women’s role in development prepared in 1999 as the basicdocument of the Beijing+5 evaluation process discusses the history of ideas ofdevelopment from women’s perspective and analyses the problems involved in the WIDpolicy (FDRE, 2000; United Nations, 1999). Since then the debate has expanded to includealso a gender-role point of view, where the issues are considered from the viewpoint ofboth genders. The WID perspective has been replaced by the GAD (Gender andDevelopment) perspective, which differs from WID in three ways:• The emphasis shifts from women to gender roles and the unequal distributionof power between women and men.58