Nigeria, others fail to attain gender parity, says UNESCO

Barely six months after Nigeria, alongside hordes of other sub-Saharan nations missed the 2015 global education goals, the country has, yet again found itself in the company of nations that have failed to achieve the goal of gender parity in both primary and secondary education.

In fact, a new Gender Report compiled by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) initiated Education For All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report (GMR) for the recently celebrated International Day of the Girl Child, shows that fewer than half of countries – of which none are in sub-Saharan Africa, have attained the status, even though all were supposed to achieve it by 2005.
 
In a release by Communications and Advocacy Specialist, EFA Global Monitoring Report, UNESCO, Catherine Redman, the Director General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, was quoted as saying, “Educating a girl educates a nation. It unleashes a ripple effect that changes the world unmistakably for the better. We have recently set ourselves a new ambitious agenda to achieve a sustainable future. Success in this endeavor is simply not possible without educated, empowered girls, young women and mothers.”

Commenting on the report, Director of the EFA GMR, Aaron Benavot said: “Lacking any other way of measuring gender equality, we have focused on getting equal numbers of boys and girls in school. But we will never achieve this unless we tackle the roots of imbalance: social barriers and entrenched discriminatory social norms. Unless we begin to understand equality as a much broader concept, girls and young women will never be able to reap the full benefits of education.”
 
The report, released jointly by the GMR and the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative, shows that, although the goal has not been met by all, progress towards gender parity is one of the biggest education success stories since 2000. The number of countries that have achieved the goal of gender parity in both primary and secondary education has risen from 36 to 62 since 2000.
 
It continued, “Boys are more likely than girls to drop out of upper secondary education. Only 95 boys for every 100 girls complete this level, and the situation has barely changed since 2000. In OECD countries, 73 per cent of girls compared to 63 per cent of boys complete upper secondary education.”
 
Furthermore, “Gender gaps in youth literacy are narrowing. However, fewer than seven out of every ten young women in sub-Saharan Africa are expected to be literate by 2015. The lack of progress in literacy among adult women is stark: two-thirds of adults who lack basic literacy skills are women, a proportion unchanged since 2000. Half of adult women in South and West Asia and sub-Saharan Africa cannot read or write.
 
However, on the issue of parity, the report recommended that education should be free; policies should be provided to address the problems that many boys face, as well as girls in accessing and completing education, while alternative secondary education options should be provided for out-of-school adolescents.

Regarding equality, it recommended the integration of gender issues into all aspects of policy and planning and a mix of legislative change, advocacy and community mobilisation is needed; governments, international organisations and education providers should join up to tackle school-related gender based violence and governments should recruit, train and support teachers effectively to address gender inequality.