Many adolescent girls in poor rural areas don't attend school, and are neglected by society and aid groups alike, says gender expert
LONDON (TrustLaw) - How do you persuade a teenager's parents who can't afford to put enough food on the table to let her attend school in a poor rural village where most girls her age work unpaid at home or in the fields?
The answer to this question is of vital importance to the developing world's 283 million rural adolescent girls. Many of them live in poverty, bear heavy work burdens including farming, have limited access to healthcare, marry early – and don't finish school for those reasons.
While it's a tough challenge to get them into class, Catherine Bertini, professor of public administration at New York's Syracuse University and former head of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP), has no doubt it makes economic sense.
"When you look at the statistics about how much countries’ GDP (gross domestic product) increases once women are educated, it's huge – so if governments know more about that, hopefully they will also make it a higher priority," said Bertini, the lead author of an October report on the importance of girls in rural economies released by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Despite the seemingly obvious benefits, many girls still don't attend secondary school in developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with poor, rural girls worst-off.
In Tanzania, for example, only 1 percent are enrolled at secondary level, compared with 23 percent of rich, urban girls, according to the report.
The secondary school completion rate for girls is higher than 15 percent in just eight out of 37 sub-Saharan African countries, and in 19 others it is below 5 percent, the report notes.
Bertini said rural adolescent girls have been neglected for so long by their communities and governments, as well as development agencies, because they are "on the bottom of the ladder" in terms of social and development priorities.
TRIPLE DISADVANTAGE
While women's lack of political power is a well-known fact from the global to the local level, it's less clear why teenage girls get a raw deal when it comes to aid.
Bertini argues there must be more effort to collect data that is broken down according to gender, age and location, and to craft development programmes accordingly. Often this is not done, meaning that less than two cents of every development dollar goes to adolescent girls.
"It's the hierarchy of society, plus the hierarchy of development, plus the hierarchy of urban versus rural, and all of that means (rural girls) are at the very bottom," she told AlertNet in a telephone interview from the United States ahead of International Women's Day on March 8, which is themed on empowering rural women.
Putting in place practical measures that make it easier for poor families to free up their teenage daughters from onerous chores so they can go to school is a starting point for changing that discrimination.
You build wells at schools, for example, so girls can attend class and carry out their daily water-fetching task at the same time, Bertini suggested. Or you make day care available at or near schools, so adolescent women don't have to stay at home to look after younger siblings or their own children.
Another way is to reward girls' attendance at school with cash payments or food rations. Bertini cited schemes in rural Pakistan and refugee camps for Afghans in Iran, where for every month a girl went to class, she received a litre can of vegetable oil. The Iranian government told Bertini there were so many more girl pupils that they needed to build a new school.
The provision of hot school meals is also a tried-and-tested incentive, offered by WFP in many countries.
And aid groups could go further, helping girls set up their own part-time businesses making rudimentary sanitary pads – menstruation being another barrier to teen girls studying – or sewing school uniforms for their classmates, Bertini said.
But it's not just about education, in her view. In the case of rural adolescent girls, there's a need for better healthcare, financial services, security and protection, access to land and a greater focus on their role in agricultural development, she said.
Women make up 43 percent of the agricultural labour force in the developing world, with many adolescent girls taking on farming responsibilities. The report says these girls should be incorporated into country-wide agricultural development plans, and given more opportunities to receive training in agricultural skills and participate in rural youth groups.
PAYING ATTENTION TO WOMEN FARMERS
Bertini believes some progress at least has been made in alerting policymakers to women's core role in agriculture and, by extension, feeding the world.
“I do see that there is a difference between now and 10 years ago," she said. "(We are seeing) real policy related to gender, and real attention paid to making sure programmes are reaching women."
She should know. From 2007 to 2009, she was a senior fellow with the agricultural development team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where one of her main tasks was to mainstream gender issues into the organisation's programmes.
Besides devising a gender checklist for programme officers to use when drawing up project plans with grantees, Bertini's efforts influenced the thinking of Bill Gates himself, "who now understands that women are the vast majority of farmers and therefore, to be effective, we have to pay attention to their needs".
Yet Bertini is far from complacent, acknowledging there is a long way to go before real change is felt in the lives of rural girls. The most important shifts needed on the international level, she believes, are greater political commitment to agricultural development and women's role within it, and introducing the right mechanisms to reduce global hunger by boosting food production.
High food prices, together with an accompanying rise in hunger and social unrest, have certainly pushed these issues up the world's political agenda and into negotiating rooms at Group of 20 (G20) gatherings.
Bertini backs initiatives like the G(irls)20 Summit, which brings together female delegates aged 18 to 20 from each G20 country, plus European Union and African Union representatives, to come up with innovative economic ideas to empower girls and women. This year's event will develop a vision to present to G20 leaders who meet two weeks later at a June summit in Mexico.
Bertini hopes campaigns like this, together with International Women's Day, will help improve the lot of the 16-year-old girl labouring in the field, by spurring her government into action.
"In order to decrease hunger, in order to increase productivity, in order to improve livelihoods, women's and girls' voices must be heard," she said.
This week, UNESCO launched a world atlas of gender equality in education which shows that, while two thirds of countries have achieved gender parity at primary level, access to secondary education remains a challenge for girls in many regions, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South and West Asia.
(Editing by Rebekah Curtis)
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