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Panel 6 - The education age, past due

Girl-friendly = child-friendly

One prime gauge of educational quality is how narrow the classroom gender gap is. A school is truly child-friendly when both girls and boys find it a safe, welcoming and healthful environment, centred on the rights of the child, where teachers demonstrate respect for those rights and where students discover that education is not only relevant to their lives but also a source of joy.

Slowly - some may say painfully so - the gender gap in primary education is narrowing, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa and South Asia - regions where it has historically been the widest. Persistence and creativity have brought this vital change, through measures such as the African Girls' Education Initiative, which UNICEF helped launch in 1994. With its support, for example, more girls are in school throughout Zimbabwe thanks to community discussion groups on gender issues and life skills workshops that are helping break patterns of gender imbalance and inequity.

Two girls share a textbook in a multi-grade public school in Davao, on the island of Mindanao (Philippines).

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is high-level political commitment, backed with adequate resources, that is improving gender parity in primary schools: Since 1986, the primary school enrolment rate of girls has climbed from 80 per cent to 96 per cent nationally. Even in rural areas - where enrolment rates are lowest for all children - girls' enrolment rate has gone from 60 per cent to 80 per cent in the past five years.

More heartening is the fact that nearly 95 per cent of girls who enrol in primary school complete this level of education. And a new milestone was reached in 1999 when, for the first time, girls comprised 52 per cent of the students accepted into Iran's public universities.

Golnar Mehran, a professor of education in Teheran, credits government policies, especially since 1985, with the increases. One simple but highly effective strategy has been the training of more women teachers, a vital measure given Iranian social and cultural views on the segregation of the sexes. Many families are reluctant to send their daughters to schools with male teachers, and in fact all schooling up to the university level is separate for boys and girls. Now, with more women teachers, girls have more role models, and schools have become less threatening for both parents and students. Education officials have also sought to locate schools closer to communities to reduce the distances girls must travel.

More changes are needed, though, if schools are to become fully girl-friendly. These will entail revisions in texts and curricula so that they no longer stereotype girls and changes in teaching methods so that girls are encouraged to think critically and act independently. Their physical safety and security also must be ensured, and facilities must be built to meet their need for personal privacy.

Other, more resistant barriers to girls' full participation in education remain. A survey in three Iranian provinces found that 25 per cent of those families whose daughters do not attend school believe that education is irrelevant for girls in their future roles as wives and mothers. Another 34 per cent said that poverty kept their daughters at home, because while education is compulsory and free through high school, there are always costs for supplies and uniforms - and thus daughters are likely to be kept at home so that sons can attend.

Nevertheless, Iran's achievements are impressive, especially the changes in girls' own thinking. Says Professor Mehran, "When we ask them what they want for their future they say, 'I want to work, but if I don't, I want to be educated.'"

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