Education, Gender and Development

A Capabilities Perspective

Mari-Anne Okkolin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317203582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This compelling book takes a novel approach to the complexities of girls' and women's education in the global South. To unravel the critical issues and processes behind educational advancement and to identify the factors that support the construction of educational well-being and agency from gender perspective, the book narrates the stories of women who have successfully built their educational careers to higher education. The book creatively applies the human development and capabilities approach to analyze and assess educational advancement and development.

Mari-Anne Okkolin offers a fresh voice to the field of education, gender and development. The book draws on rich, in-depth evidence from Tanzanian women who have reached higher education, placing them amongst the very small percentage of women in the Tanzanian and sub-Saharan contexts. The book explores the women's school experiences, everyday life practices and familial arrangements, and the values, expectations and assumptions associated with education and the schooling of girls and women.

Due to the multi-disciplinary nature of the book, it will be of great interest to multiple academic audiences: post-graduates, researchers and academics. It is of particular relevance for all those interested in education, sociology, development studies, gender/women's studies, and qualitative research methodology. The book will appeal especially to scholars working with the capabilities approach. It will also be of value beyond academia, for education practitioners in planning and implementing education and equality policies internationally.

Part I

Setting the Scene

1 Introduction

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, TEDGlobal 2009)

Leyla, one of the ten highly educated Tanzanian women whose stories are told in this book, described her everyday life experiences as follows: ‘my brothers talked about school, and other issues, what is happening in the town and world issues, while I was with my mother in the kitchen preparing the meal’. Leyla’s story reflects the idea of the education and schooling of girls and women in her family. At the same time, it resonates with the broader socially constructed idea of Tanzanian woman, including the idea of adequate and appropriate education for girls and women.

In many developing countries, the socio-cultural expectations for the future role of girls, that is, marriage and family, the high social status attached to marriage and motherhood, and the conflicting gender ideologies at the community level, diminish the demand for female education and promote gendered differences in educational opportunities and outcomes. This is evident, in particular, when moving from the lower to the advanced and higher levels of education. As reported in the final analysis of the Millennium Development Goals era, the largest disparities in enrolment ratios are found in tertiary education and the most extreme disparities are those at the expense of women in sub-Saharan Africa (UN 2015a). This challenge and shortfall is explicitly acknowledged in Goal 4 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 25^th September 2015 (UN 2015b)¹.

Apart from the evident challenge regarding the widening gender gap and declining trend in girls’ and women’s educational progression, female students’ educational outcomes in the global South are characterised by non-enrolments, overage enrolments, absenteeism, poor motivation, low self-esteem, poor academic performance, high levels of dropout, high levels of illiteracy and, consequently, limited labour-market opportunities. This kind of story is heard often from Tanzania, the country-case selected for this book to represent and exemplify the problem of education and gender globally. But, alongside the hegemonic development discourse and education policy narratives, different stories exist. In this book, the stories of Leyla, Genefa, Hanifa, Amana, Amisa, Rabia, Wema, Tumaini, Rehema and Naomi are told. At the heart of the book lie their experiences and insights into critical issues and processes behind educational success.

In her famous TED talk entitled ‘The danger of a single story’, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie emphasises: ‘of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes […] but there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.’ Hence, ‘stories matter – many stories matter’ (Adichie 2009). In 2006 when I initially met and spoke with the women whose stories are represented in the book, only 2 per cent of Tanzanians were enrolled in higher education and only 30 per cent of Master’s degree students were women. Evidently, only a tiny proportion of Tanzanian women had succeeded in reaching the university level of education, including the women who participated in my research. This makes their educational career and stories, by definition, a contestation of the idea of Tanzanian woman and a process of ‘becoming something else’. Indisputably, women’s stories are packed with problems and barriers, but despite all the challenges, against the odds, they were able to reach higher education. How? This is what the book is about and the reason why their stories matter.

Fukuda-Parr (2012) has argued for the importance of understanding the power of narratives and discourse in international development arenas. She claims that the overarching Millennium Development Goals (MDG) narrative, for example, is fundamentally about the normalisation and institutionalisation of particular development ideas and bringing those to the forefront of policy dialogue. Without going into the international development debate and criticism of the MDGs here, it is of relevance to recognise the concerns that are directed at the quantification and oversimplification of complex development challenges (see also Unterhalter 2014). Subrahmanian (2005) has made a statement that echoes Fukuda-Parr’s remarks, according to which, achieving ‘substantive equality’ in education depends essentially on two processes to reveal what has been reached and realised, and how. Therefore, she proposes, in the analysis and assessment of gender equality in education, the focus should be on the socially constructed pathway(s) to equality, referring particularly to the quality of experience.

What the arguments made by Fukuda-Parr, Unterhalter and Subrahmanian suggest is that, in the planning, implementation and assessment of global policies, that is, institutionalised mainstream development narratives, too little attention is given to the notions of social justice and equality of opportunity and treatment, let alone to the understanding of dynamics and underlying power relations in any human endeavour, including education. What they assert suggests further that it is of critical importance to learn from those who are ‘the targets’ of global and national goals. As an example, Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen (2005, xiii) has commented that the denial of ‘voice’ from the common people is just elitist, cynical and tends to encourage impassivity; for him, ‘participation in arguments is a general opportunity, not a particular specialised skill (like composing sonnets or performing trapeze arts)’. With respect to this critique, within the research on education, gender and development, as in the research on development in general, the research strand that gives emphasis to people’s ‘voices’ has intensified its status.

One of Nussbaum’s (2001) central points in addressing the ‘upheavals of thought’ is that the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we feel shape our emotional and ethical reality. Likewise, reflecting the purpose of storytelling and the social responsibility of the writer, Susan Sontag (2007) emphasises how a ‘writer of fiction both creates […] a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will’. Sontag proposes: ‘the writers who matter most to us are those who enlarge our consciences and our sympathies and our knowledge’.

All the critical remarks presented above consider essentially the question of whose voice and story are of relevance to be told and heard. In doing so, they call for broadening the horizon from one story to the richness of stories and acknowledging the value and power of narratives. In this book I wish to respond to these demands. Drawing on rich, in-depth evidence, the book narrates the stories of ten highly educated Tanzanian women who have constructed their educational careers all the way to higher education. At the core of the book are the questions: How did they do it? How did they manage to achieve various educational ‘beings and doings’, in contrast to the majority of Tanzanian women; and, what factors supported and enabled them to pursue and realise their educational aspirations? This directs the analytical interest towards the women’s school experiences, everyday life practices and familial arrangements, and to the values and attitudes attached to the education and schooling of girls and women – reflecting the expectations and assumptions attached to the idea of Tanzanian woman. The book illustrates also the extent to which the women had the freedom to exercise educational agency; that is, to have de facto alternatives, autonomy to make decisions and to take actions accordingly. My argument is rooted in the capabilities approach (CA) initiated by Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum (see e.g. Sen 1985, 1993, 1999; Nussbaum 2000; see also Comin and Nussbaum 2014). The approach asserts that well-being and agency are equally important and interdependent aspects of human life; yet they are ontologically and analytically distinct.

This book is interdisciplinary in nature and contributes to the social and human sciences in various ways. By giving ‘voice’ to the women, my aim is to take ‘into consideration not only the global benchmarks, but also, and most importantly, the situation on the ground’ (Lehtomäki et al 2014). The book thereby complements the understanding of gender equality and equity in education, gained on the basis of the hegemonic narrative, which guides the way that governments collect and present statistical data and international organisations make comparisons. Different from most of the writings on gender, education and development, which are characteristically problem-oriented, my aim is also to provide positive portrayals of women in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, I wish to demonstrate how the conceptual frame of the human development and capabilities approach can be operationalised and empirically applied, towards which much of the capabilities criticism has been directed. Therefore, the outcome of the book is capabilities-informed analysis and understanding of the complexities and intersecting issues of girls’ and women’s education and schooling in the global South, with a special focus on women’s narratives and female agency.

The book is contextualised into Tanzania and the country provides a macro-case for the research. Yet the insights and evidence discussed in the book are of critical importance to be taken into consideration in the planning and implementation of education policies in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Apart from the relevance to the global South, due to the adaptation of the capabilities approach in particular, the book contributes to the debates on educational advancement and assessment internationally.

An essential outcome of the book is its contribution to the qualitative research literature. Among others, Mauthner and Doucet (2002, 2003) argue how the research methods that we apply are not neutral techniques but are based on theoretical, epistemological and ontological assumptions. Hence, the research encounters, as well as our methodological choices, are sites where some voices may be enhanced and others silenced. In this book, women’s stories represent such a qualitative and interpretative research paradigm, which places emphasis on people’s life-worlds and ‘voices’ (see Okin 2003 and Nussbaum 2004). At the same time, their narratives advance such epistemological and methodological engagement in the educational debate, which validates the voices and subjectivity of those who are the ‘targets’ of equality and equity policies (see Unterhalter 2007; Walker 2010). Evidently, by choosing what to study and how, the researcher can present the particular story that she wants to be told and heard. To phrase it differently, deciding what aspects of the phenomena to pay attention to impacts on the selection of ‘indicators’, the data collection and analysis methods, and, in consequence, on the data per se, the results, and, finally, the scientific claims that can be drawn on these grounds. Because of the implications of scientific premises and positionings, and to advance transparency of the qualitative research process, various methodological and ethical considerations, subjectivity and evaluative aspects alike that have been taken into account alongside the study will be explicitly represented.

I have organised this book into four parts. Part I consists of chapters that elucidate the study on which the book is based: it introduces briefly the phenomena of education, gender and development par excellence, the ten highly educated Tanzanian women and the research process, including the researcher. In this section I thereby argue why to address education, gender and development, how this has been empirically carried out, and by whom. As a research monograph and the first study that explicitly combines the use of the capability approach with sociologically informed engagement with reflexive hermeneutic premises, I devote especially large space to the deliberation of scientific presuppositions, research methodology and conceptual considerations.

The chapters in Part II cover the background needed to understand the field of study. I start with a broader discussion and research on education, gender and development (Chapter 5) and continue by locating the gendered educational challenges and achievements in the Tanzanian context (Chapter 6) The primary emphasis in Chapter 7 is given to an explanation of principal theoretical and conceptual approaches to address and assess gender equality in education and to a positioning of my study in the frame of ‘equality of capabilities’. Thereby, this chapter also involves an explanation of how the capabilities approach is analytically applied in the study.

The largest part of the book consists of three empirical chapters in which the women’s experiences and insights are represented in detail. At the very core of the book is Part III, which accounts for the women’s school experiences (Chapter 8), social and familial experiences (Chapter 9) and agency notions (Chapter 10). Within the school environment, the themes of school infrastructure, human relations and the learning environment are revealed. In Chapter 9, the analytical lenses are angled towards women’s everyday life and customary practices. The purpose of this chapter is also to find out about women’s ideas of themselves, ‘Us’, and what enabled them to overcome educational barriers and reach higher education, what made the difference for the majority of others, ‘They’, around them.

Chapter 10 is about women’s agency, aspirations and freedoms, which are examined on the basis of the question: Who decides? This chapter aims to illustrate the extent to which the research participants had the freedom to exercise educational agency; in what ways their ‘beings and doings’ were in accordance with the socially constructed idea of Tanzanian woman, including the hegemonic idea of adequate and appropriate education for girls and women; and how these women aimed to become something else. Therefore, the focus of analysis is on the processes through which educational choices are made, as contextualised and pre-conditioned by socio-cultural structures (discussed in the two previous chapters). The concluding chapters in Part IV briefly summarise the key findings and discuss the meaning of ‘story telling’ methodology for educational policy planning, implementation and assessment for ‘transforming our world for sustainable development’ (UN 2015b).

Note

1 The selected education and gender targets and indicators of the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals relevant to this book are listed in the Appendices. Also, Education for All (EFA) Goals and the full preamble of the Incheon Declaration are included in the Appendices.

Bibliography

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Unterha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• PART I: Setting the Scene
• PART II: Education, Gender and Development
• PART III: Women’s Many Stories
• PART IV: Conclusion
• Appendix A1
• Appendix A2
• Appendix A3
• Appendix A4
• Appendix A5
• Appendix A6
• Index