Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 3 | Beating the Odds: Providing Education for Women and Girls in Africa, page 2

At Makerere University, efforts to address gender imbalances have been underway since 1990. That was the year that the university implemented a government-initiated affirmative action decree designed to promote girls’ access to education at all levels; for Makerere, this meant the decision to institute an admissions policy that was supportive of women, similar to the system being used at Dar es Salaam. And, after more than a decade of internal debate on the subject, in 1991 Makerere also took the bold step of confirming its seriousness about addressing concerns related to women, gender and development by granting approval for the establishment of the Department of Women and Gender Studies—the first degree-granting women’s studies department at a university in sub-Saharan Africa. The university also established a Gender Mainstreaming Project, with the mission of exploring concerns and raising awareness about gender issues throughout the university system and eventually developing new gender-sensitive policies. At Makerere, women now account for about 35 percent of the university’s nearly 17,000 students—up from 24 percent in 1989, the first year that the university began tracking this figure.

Changes taking place at these two universities are reflective of an intensified focus on the status of African women socially and educationally, as well as on their economic contribution to the development of their countries. (Perhaps the only continent-wide issue that is receiving more attention than education is the growing AIDS epidemic.) On an international level, interest in women’s issues can be traced, at least in part, from the awareness generated by more than two decades of international campaigns and conferences such as the United Nations Decade for Women (1975-1985), the 1985 Third World Conference and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in, respectively, Nairobi, Kenya and Beijing, China, which put the spotlight on conditions affecting women throughout the developing world. In Africa, efforts to improve women’s status, particularly in the area of education, have been shaped around a growing understanding that in order for the African continent to keep pace with and even prosper in an increasingly globalized marketplace, nations will have to draw on the skills of all their people, including women, who make up more than 50 percent of the continent’s population. Pressure from bilateral funders that are also concerned with gender equity—such as the Scandinavian nations and the U.S. Agency for International Development—has also had a significant effect.

While national governments may, in principle, be supportive of gender-based educational initiatives, the reality is that few African countries have the financial resources to support and sustain major programs in this area. Recognizing this fact, Carnegie Corporation of New York has included a focus on women’s participation in higher education as an important part of its program strategy aimed at strengthening African universities. “Our investment in African universities,” explains Andrea Johnson, a program officer in the Corporation’s International Development Program, “takes the form of an institutional strengthening approach that integrates the foundation’s concern with women’s education. The Corporation has identified a few universities that are engaged in self-directed innovation or reform,” Johnson continues, “and we are working closely with them to develop effective programs.” To date, these have included scholarships designed to increase women’s access to undergraduate education, efforts to mainstream gender programs within universities and promoting research into the roots of gender inequity at African universities.

Implementing these programs and revising policies to be more attuned to gender-sensitive issues has not been easy, even at institutions such as Dar es Salaam and Makerere, where there is a commitment to change. At Makerere, for example, even the name of its pioneering women’s studies department was a battle, with some advocating for “Women’s Studies” and others determined to see the department dubbed “Gender Studies” as a way of acknowledging its charge to address concerns relating to both men and women.

Women faculty members who had lobbied long and hard for the department’s creation were having none of that, recalls Florence Ebila, a professor of literature at Makerere. “We said that we couldn’t just create a gender studies department because we didn’t feel that women’s issues had been addressed.” Finally, she explains, a compromise was reached, and the department is now called “Women and Gender Studies.”

At the University of Dar es Salaam, proposed changes triggered a major internal debate, reports M.H. Nkuyana, the university’s chief academic officer. “When we talked about developing a strategic plan for the university’s future, the majority of the faculty were against it,” he says. “Some said that because this is an academic institution, not a company, there was no need for what they viewed as a corporate strategic plan. But people like our Vice Chancellor and some other key staff members didn’t let the opposition discourage them. Now, as things have turned out, everyone is very supportive of the plan. But,” he says, “in the beginning it was very, very difficult.” The strategic plan, approved in 1994, also turned out to be an important victory for university staff concerned with gender equity because issues relating to promoting women’s education were an integral part of the overall plan.

At both universities, the focus on women has resulted in a closer examination of the overall quality of life at the university and its environment, as it relates to female students. This has also led to more open discussion about gender bias, sexual harassment and other issues that may negatively affect young women’s ability to fully participate in campus life. While the University of Dar es Salaam and Makerere University each have implemented written policies against sexual harassment and have created programs designed to offer counseling and support to students on gender-related issues, discrimination is still a concern, even if it is often manifested in ways that are not as blatant as in the past.

Problems in this area often stem from ideas about what is still considered culturally “acceptable,” even in a university setting. For instance, in many African societies, women are encouraged to be quiet and reserved, so a talkative and assertive female student might find herself being ridiculed by her male counterparts. In addition, “Some men feel that there is too much attention being placed on women’s problems, and that women are being given unfair advantages,” says John Paul Agaba, a second-year student at Makerere. But as one of several young men now majoring in the Women and Gender Studies program, he explains that his experiences at the university have given him a new appreciation of the complexities of gender-related matters. Now, he says, when he graduates, he hopes to be able to work on issues involving gender and national development.

Still, not everyone is convinced that focusing so much attention on creating a better educational environment in universities—for men and women—is the most important thing to worry about when the perception in most African countries is that only the elite will have access to higher education. There is also a concern that needed resources will be expended on improving universities when education in the lower grades is also in dire need of improvement.

A recently completed Ford Foundation study entitled The Education Pipeline in East Africa, which examined the link between the elementary grades and university education in three East African countries—Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania—reported troubling findings that speak to conditions affecting many other African nations, as well. Among the study’s conclusions are the fact that the education pipeline in East Africa is deeply inequitable and of extremely poor quality; that government commitments to provide “education for all” have not been met; that educational opportunity in the three countries is highly stratified; that decent schooling is increasingly the preserve of a small elite and that education reinforces and intensifies existing disparities in society. The report sums up this state of affairs as unacceptable on its own terms and as seriously detrimental to the realization of basic national development, human rights, social cohesion and democracy.

The significance of the situation for higher education is also clear. Consultation findings and research evidence confirm that the quality, equity, performance and effectiveness of higher education are inextricably bound to the condition of the pipeline. Because this connection is so robust, as one discussant involved in the Ford study put it, “many of the intractable problems facing higher education have their roots and solutions way down the pipeline.” The dilemma for both governments and funders is to create a balance between the needs of education at all levels and find equitable ways to allocate insufficient resources so they can be used effectively up and down the educational pipeline.

M.H. Nkuyana of the University of Dar es Salaam agrees. “The issue of education has to be addressed at all levels,” he points out. “For the sake of Africa’s future, having quality learning opportunities all across the board is not an option—it’s a necessity.”

But even just getting young children into the education pipeline can be difficult. According to UNESCO figures, around the world there are 113 million primary-school-age children who don’t go to school; estimates are that some 60 percent of these children are girls. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, there are 42 million children who don’t attend school, and to make matters worse, on the African continent, more than half of those who do start school drop out before completing the fifth grade—again, most of them girls.

Currently, there is a global effort underway called “Education for All” which, led by the World Bank and UNESCO and a variety of international organizations, is pushing for governments to adopt new programs that will ensure universal access to primary education by the year 2015. It’s a target date that even many supporters of the concept doubt will be achieved and even if it is, critics say it will have little impact if overall changes in educational systems are not made.

The effort to achieve greater access to education is not new to Africa: in the early 1970s, for example, under its former president, Julius K. Nyerere, Tanzania instituted a literacy campaign aimed at combating what Nyerere called the “unholy trinity” of “ignorance, hunger and disease.” This campaign resulted in significant increases in literacy among men and women and in more girls going to school. A similar primary education initiative launched in Uganda in the 1990s triggered increases in primary school enrollment to more than 6.7 million children, up from a low of about 2.7 million.

What was lacking, though, was the funding needed to help the education systems meet the challenges posed by these initiatives, which resulted in added strains being placed on already overtaxed and poor quality schools. Says one Ugandan teacher. “So we have 6.7 million children enrolled in schools; what kind of progress is that when you have the same number of teachers, the same number of classrooms? Right now, you’ve got primary classes in Kampala with 180 kids in each class—that’s not education. If ‘Education for All’ just means getting kids into the classroom, that’s not progress.”

Next page: For the sake of Africa's future, having quality learning opportunities all across the board is not an option–it's necessity." M.H. Nkuyana–Chief Academic Officer, Makerere University

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