MDG 3 and the negotiation of gender in international education organisations

Abstract

Gender equality in education has held a prominent position in global policy making over the last decade through international frameworks and declarations such as the Dakar framework of Action on Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This paper draws on interviews conducted with participants who hold a gender brief in international organisations, active in the global Education for All movement. It examines the ways in which global commitments to gender equality in education are being understood in policy and programme work and what this reveals about gender mainstreaming in global education organisations. The MDG framework has been actively used in a number of organisations to leverage action on gender, primarily with regard to improving girls’ access to schooling and achieving gender parity – equal numbers of girls and boys in school. This has meant that more substantive understandings of gender, which relate to the experiences of girls and women in and beyond school, often go un‐discussed and un‐addressed. The need for organisations to develop a more substantive notion of gender equality work linked to activism on women’s rights is highlighted as a considerable challenge. This would take gender mainstreaming from a technical exercise to a political contestation with regard to processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Keywords:

• gender mainstreaming
• gender
• Millenium Development Goals
• NGOs
• multi‐lateral agencies

Notes

1. See http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/plat1.htm§atement.

2. Six specific sub‐objectives focused on ensuring equal access to education, the eradication of illiteracy and improving women’s access to vocational education, science and technology, non‐discriminatory education and training, resources for monitoring, and the promotion of lifelong learning.

3. This three‐year project, funded by the ESRC through the ESRC and Department for International Development (DFID) joint funding scheme (award number RES‐167‐25‐0260), and directed by Elaine Unterhalter, is examining initiatives which engage with global aspirations to advance gender equality in and through schooling in contexts of poverty. The project is concerned with how these are understood, interpreted and acted upon in different sites and what meanings of gender, education, poverty and global obligation are negotiated. Case study research is examining how global policy goals are being interpreted and acted upon in five different sites in Kenya and South Africa and in global institutions. I am grateful to members of the project team – in particular Jenni Karlsson and Elaine Unterhalter – for helpful comments on drafts of this paper.

4. Moreover, as a collaborative research team split between Kenya, South Africa and the UK we felt that it was important to ensure that our own research focus and methodologies did not themselves contribute to reproducing vertical neo‐colonial power relations, by making Kenya and South Africa subjects of our research without also scrutinising institutions in the North and in the UK. This global research turns the gaze on to Northern‐based policy makers in global institutions, as they too become the subject of our scrutiny.