Gender Considerations for Social Responsibility in Education Interventions: Researcher-Practitioner Collaborations in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Tanzania

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Achieving gender equality through international donor-funded education interventions and through gender mainstreaming has been a theme of social responsibility in rapidly changing global contexts since the late 20th century. Some of the earliest national government agency-funded initiatives targeted gender gaps in education for girls and women through multiple activities in particular country contexts. Following a similar Women in Development (WID) theoretical approach at the inter-governmental level, UNICEF’s “African Girls’ Education Initiative” funded 32 countries to pilot or expand education-related activities to address gender gaps in education (Chapman & Miske, 2008).

Alongside these agency-funded education intervention activities, gender mainstreaming emerged in 1995 as a key action strategy to address gender inequalities in institutions, policies and programs. In that year, the Platform for Action on women’s rights and gender equality was agreed to at the World Conference on Women in Beijing “with the vision of ending discrimination against women and girls.” Subsequently, international and national organizations developed policies of gender mainstreaming that required, for example, that all international development projects provide sex-disaggregated data, and that gender equality be a cross-cutting objective in agency-funded project proposals and project implementation and evaluation.

In the 25 years since the Platform for Action was created, intergovernmental organizations; national governments; international and national agencies; public, private, non-governmental and civil society organizations, and new actors in the global arena (e.g., gender-focused foundations, social entrepreneurships, and social media partnerships) have expanded work in and meanings of gender mainstreaming far beyond the early definition (Unterhalter and North, 2010). While governments, agencies, foundations and newcomers to the field create the policies, structures and guidelines, and provide the funding for education interventions to be implemented, they primarily contract with other entities (e.g., international, national, and local not-for-profit and for-profit research and consulting firms, non-governmental organizations, and individual consultants) to design, implement and evaluate gender and education initiatives. These organizations and individuals within them then interpret meanings of gender in education and other sectors, and design ways in which to implement policies and interventions, translating the concepts into toolkits, research instruments, studies, and innovative interventions.

Yet gender equality as a dynamic of social responsibility in education continues to be contested, resisted, silenced, hidden, or invisible. Although gender inequalities are addressed through gender mainstreaming and donor-funded interventions, they are also perpetuated through systems and individual interactions at macro-, meso-, and micro-levels (Maslak, 2008). Fundamental understandings of gender and the goal of creating gender awareness in order to confront gender inequalities at micro-levels continue to be addressed through education project interventions at local school and community levels, but are often relegated to low priority and are poorly funded. Practitioner-researchers in gender and education encounter these challenges and must deal with them over the long term and on a daily basis.

How do feminist practitioners, researchers, and practitioner-researchers work in socially responsible ways in the current, rapidly changing, complex global landscape of comparative and international education (CIDE) to create gender-responsive school communities? More specifically, outside of academia and the bureaucracies of international agencies, how do education and development professionals in small- to medium-size organizations (e.g., Civil Society Organizations, NFPs, small businesses, etc.) interact with project personnel, school stakeholders, and with each other to ensure that gender considerations are embedded in research and implementation in donor-funded education interventions at the project level and the school level? And what kinds of structures and evaluation research approaches can be used to assess and/or to negotiate gender attitudes and norms, knowledge, and meanings in effective and contextually appropriate ways?

This panel explores those questions through four cases of gender integration into education activities in three countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The cases draw on innovative work in gender-focused project design, implementation, research, and evaluation in Canada, Malawi, Tanzania, United States and Zimbabwe. Through their dual-authored papers, co-presenters explore findings from their studies, ways in which the findings are used to enhance gender-responsiveness at the various sites of intervention, and how they interact as partners in ways that question the traditional practitioner-researcher dichotomy. They describe partnerships that are collaborative and critical, characterized by knowledge exchange rather than predominately one-way knowledge transmission, and draw on appreciative inquiry with respectful negotiation.

The first case that addresses these questions examines research findings and use in a UNGEI-initiated two-year pilot project designed to address SRGBV in Zimbabwean schools. Existing evidence and new research on SRGBV interventions pointed to multi-dimensional interventions such as the “whole school approach” as promising for dealing comprehensively with SRGBV (Parkes, 2015). This presentation explores how the practitioner-researchers designed the pilot and then used baseline findings to tailor pilot project implementation in the schools and communities.

Designing and implementing an approach to gender mainstreaming or gender integration for an agency-funded education project in Malawi is the focus of the second case. Building on the funding agency requirement that gender be integrated into project implementation as a cross-cutting theme, the practitioner-researchers created an innovative way of engaging not only project beneficiaries (i.e., teachers, learners, ministry officials, community members and others) but also project management personnel in deepening their practical understandings of gender-responsiveness in education. Findings include ways in which resistance from within was addressed.

The third case highlights the way findings from a Gender and Learning field study, which have critical implications for girl and boy students’ experiences in Tanzanian schools and for their future opportunities, could be shared widely. Activity administrators and Tanzanian education officials had created “feedback schools” as an organizational structure through which 10 schools in each project district were identified to gather information which could then be disseminated in practical ways to teachers and administrators throughout the program.

The fourth case explores the gender and student support data collected from members of Parent Teacher Partnerships for the Gender and Learning study in Tanzania. Presenters reflect on the ways researcher-practitioners collecting the data at one of the field study sites needed to pause and negotiate understandings of gender and the importance of collecting and analyzing gender-specific data before proceeding. These interactions had important consequences for the individuals and for the work.

Sub Unit

• Committee: Gender & Education

Chair

• Shirley J Miske, Miske Witt & Associates International

Individual Presentations

• Working as socially responsible practitioner-researchers: An example of a SRGBV pilot project in Zimbabwe - Nancy Pellowski Wiger, Miske Witt & Associates, International; Lydia Madyirapanze, Forum for African Women Educationalists Zimbabwe Chapter; Jasmina Josic, Education Development Center; Shirley J Miske, Miske Witt & Associates International

• Integrating gender throughout a USAID-funded project in Malawi: Practitioner-Researcher findings - Kara Janigan, OISE, University of Toronto

• Negotiating understandings of gender in data collection and analysis of Parent Teacher Partnerships in Tanzania - Acacia Nikoi, University of Minnesota; Mathew Laizer, Miske Witt and Associates, International

• Gender learning through feedback schools as a model for systematic learning to inform program intervention - Jovina Tibenda, RTI International; Kristeen B Chachage, Miske Witt & Associates, International

Discussant

• Kristeen B Chachage, Miske Witt & Associates, International