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EFA Girls First Report to the WB Global Seminar
Seriesby Dr. V. Seeberg J. Liu01/29/2006

• Girls education is the most effective means of
  combating many of the most profound challenges to
  human development. UNICEF, 2004, State of the
  Worlds Children.
• If we can prioritize, as soon as you have
  peace, girls education should be right up there
  with things like HIV/AIDS and hunger. Stephan
  Klasen, interviewed by UNICEF, 2005, The Gap
  Report.
• Save the Children noted research has shown that
  education is a prerequisite for progress on each
  of the Millennium Development Goals, and that
  girls education is an especially powerful lever
  to move the world towards a better future.
• Save the Children, 2005, The power and promise
  of girls education.

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• On the personal level?education helps women marry
  later, have fewer children, reduces infant
  mortality rates, increases their earning power,
  improves family hygiene, nutrition, overall
  health care, childrens well being, and their
  daughters chances of enrolling in school by 40
  percent or more.
• On the economic level?econometric studies show
  that even small amounts of education lead to
  significant gains in economic growth. Yamarak and
  Ghoshs (2003).
• Educated mothers are more likely than fathers to
  invest their earnings in the health care, food
  and education of their children. One study found
  that increases in child survival rates are 20
  percent higher if the mother is educated instead
  of the father (Save the Children, 2005).

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Girls First, 3

• All these different groups developing
  countries, donors, development partners and
  developing agencies were able to see that gender
  disparity is a major flaw in development that
  needs to be addressed.
• Cream Wright, interviewed by UNICEF, 2005, The
  Gap Report
• Broad concensus exists in the EFA community that
  girls schooling initiates trans-generational,
  sustainable development particularly in declining
  communities and marginal regions. Educated girls
  become mothers of development and are the means
  for reducing poverty, containing population
  growth, engendering public health, increasing
  educational attainment, improving human resources
  and strengthening the nation.
• More recently, consensus is building that
  empowerment effects of girls schooling are
  vitally important. It develops girls confidence,
  improves their all-around well-being, and enables
  them to fulfill their potential and improve the
  welfare of their families.

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Girls First, 4

• In China
• Supporting girls schooling addresses what the
  Asian Development Bank calls Chinas biggest
  challenge, namely, extending development to its
  isolated, rural, and hard-to-reach citizens
  (Spohr, 2002).
• Indeed statistics bear this out. And since
  improving gender parity is the best predictor of
  progress towards EFA goals, then investing
  heavily and effectively in girls education in
  the isolated, rural West is a highly promising
  strategy to assure Chinas success in reaching
  EFA goals on time. So far progress in this area
  has been mixed.

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Girls First, 5

• Western China Girls and new poverty urgency
• Western residents, a disproportionate number of
  whom are members of national minority
  populations, represent nearly 9 of Chinas
  population but make up over 40 of the absolute
  poor.
• Pollution, overgrazing and over logging have lead
  to erosion that has made much of the rural
  environment unproductive.
• Several years of falling agricultural prices,
  coupled with the lure of the big city, have
  increasingly resulted in the abandonment of
  potentially productive farmland (China Economic
  Times, May 10, 2001).
• In 2000, the floating population was estimated at
  100 million in 2000 (Mancebo, 2002) and swelled
  to 140 million a few years later (National
  Working Committee on Women and Children and
  UNICEF in Cui, Nov. 6, 2004 Luo, 2005).
• As mostly younger males leave, women carry more
  of the agricultural and household burden than
  ever often grandparents are the only ones left
  to care for the school-age children.

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Girls First, 6

• The absolute number of female illiterates has
  been increasing annually as was their proportion
  among all illiterates. Every year approximately
  one million new illiterates emerged throughout
  the country, the great majority of whom were
  girls who had dropped out of school (Wang, 2003).
  
• In this context, in recent years stories of girls
  clamoring for an education in remote corners of
  western China have made headlines nationally and
  internationally (see Haski in Liberation,
  February, 2002, March, Bo in China Daily, Oct,
  2003 Yardley in the New York Times, Mar 2004),
  and famously in The Diary of Ma Yan.(Haski,
  2004).
• Families in one of our typical villages in the
  mountains of Shaanxi Province lived on RMB 380
  to 405 (US 47 50) and elementary school fees
  ran around RMB 160 (US 20).

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Girls First, 7

• The many-fold burden on the left-behind children
  in western China
• The village schools are of much lower quality
  than the urban ones
• They dont have the family support or structure
  to facilitate their learning
• Girls must do much more housework.
• The resources of communities are exhausted, as is
  much of the land.
• Families have more burdens than resources.

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Girls First, 8

• Paradoxically, we have found,
• Evidence from our case studies in remote regions
  the remarkable availability and readiness of
  left behind girls (and their parents) to invest
  their energies in education and to persist in
  school battling harsh environmental conditions,
  personal deprivation and illness, and brazening
  out cultural constraints.
• In just such locations we have found girls
  desperate to stay in school so that they can
  escape the grim circumstances of their families
  lives but also to take on unexpected
  responsibilities for their birth families and
  communities. These new roles of personal
  empowerment suggest a cultural change is
  underway.

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Girls First, 9

• Not long after the start of the school year,
  fees were due. Dad said, we have no money in the
  house, come home. When you see the hopelessness
  in your mothers eyes about all the money being
  gone, you wont have the heart to ask for money
  to study. When I heard dads words, I cried,
  and when he saw that, a tear dropped from his
  eyes. Dad is very strong, he never cries, but
  that day he shed a tear. I had to listen to dad
  and return home.
• After I got home, I heard the village cadre say,
  Guanlans mother is sending scholarships for
  students who had to eave school. When I heard
  that I got unbelievably happy, and two days
  later, really, you came to our village to rescue
  us drop-out students. I returned to school, to
  start on a new path, to realize the dream I have
  had forever. a Guanlan Scholarship girl.
• I know that nowadays a person should possess
  knowledge before she can change her fate. -- a
  Guanlan Scholarship girl.

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• In a Tibetan autonomous county seat schools, one
  girl student in the 6th grade Tibetan language
  track, an only child, her mother was illiterate,
  but her father was a senior secondary graduate
  who worked as a government official ganbu she
  intended to go to the Tibetan language senior
  secondary school and on to university, although
  she admitted it would be difficult for the family
  to pay for it. In the long run, she wanted to
  return to work in town to be near her parents.

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Girls First, 11

• Nonformal education, in the process of providing
  economic opportunities and resources for womens
  self-development, can also engender fulfillment
  as human beings.
• Whats most important, womens self-confidence
  and self-provision can greatly improve their
  status in the family and in society comment on
  , a womens micro credit training project made by
  a male official for foreign-aid projects in
  Tianzhu County of Gansu (Zeng, 2005, p. 4).

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Girls First, 12

• We add a caveat
• Critical attention to empowerment of girls
  needs to be incorporated into projects for girls
  education. At the micro level, empowerment allows
  for the creative energies of individuals to
  engage in finding appropriate solutions to local
  problems. At the macro level, the girls
  empowerment engenders cultural change. Without
  the inclusion of empowerment, individual and
  social, the developmentalist focus in policy
  implementation often engenders distrust and lack
  of buy-in or demand. It is critical to
  incorporate local initiatives in order to
  successfully address the complexities of poverty
  alleviation and educational access programs, and
  how they influence female and family well-being.

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Girls First, 13

• It is no longer debatable that the girls
  education is the most effective tool for
  development. What is critical now is what we do -
  at the individual level, at the family and
  community level, at the national level, and the
  global level - to ensure that our girls, future
  wives, future mothers, and future citizens of the
  Least Developed Countries are not left behind as
  the world moves on to greater heights in
  technology and information (The Forum for African
  Women Educationalist (FAWE, 2001).
• The MDG clock for gender parity has struck
  midnight. (UNICEF Gender Achievements and
  Prospects in Education The Gap Report, UNICEF,
  2005) While China missed reaching its MDG of
  gender parity goals for primary and secondary
  school, the real question for girls in China,
  including left behind girls, is whether attending
  school will lead to more than knowledge and
  self-confidence but to opportunities to
  contribute to local development and the
  well-being of the community.

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Girls First, 14

• Conclusion
• Girls education in western China must be placed
  first and must address the changed female
  identities and raised expectations at the
  personal and at the economic level.
• Policies must incorporate measures that provide
  the basis for girls and women to realize more
  fully their potential over their lifetime, to
  ensure their well being, and to enable them to
  improve the lives of families over several
  generations.