Summary of the impact

The three studies described here have helped to improve the lives and prospects of girls in six African countries. Thanks to the IOE researchers and their project partners, hundreds of Nigerian families have allowed their daughters to return to school. In Kenya, a tougher approach has been adopted towards teachers who sexually abuse girl pupils. In Ghana, police are encouraging more girls to report assaults. Mozambique is promoting school clubs where issues such as HIV/AIDS can be discussed. Girls' clubs have been set up in Tanzania, and in South Africa education officials have been prompted to look for more effective ways of managing teenage pregnancy. The studies' reach has, additionally, extended beyond Africa, influencing many other countries' thinking on girls' education and two House of Commons inquiries into the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals and violence against girls and women.

Underpinning research

Context: Poverty, prejudice, and poor-quality education prevent about 100 million girls around the world from completing primary school. The UN and its member states are tackling this problem through Millennium Development Goal 3 (MDG3): "Promote gender equality and empower women". But what challenges must policy-makers and practitioners overcome to achieve this goal? This important question has been addressed in three IOE studies which have focused on Africa.

Study 1: Stop Violence Against Girls In School (SVAGS): Dr Jenny Parkes (PrincipaI Investigator) and Jo Heslop (Research Officer)

ActionAid invited the IOE to lead the research component of this five-year (2008-13) project which has involved girls aged 8-17 in 45 primary schools across Kenya, Ghana and Mozambique. The project used research, advocacy and community-level initiatives to support change at national, district and community/school level. The IOE team worked with eight partner organisations, including ActionAid. Key findings: The IOE's baseline report on the start-of-study findings paints an often bleak picture of girls' lives in impoverished communities (see reference R1). Most girls in the project districts (86% in Kenya, 82% in Ghana, and 66% in Mozambique) had suffered some form of violence in the previous 12 months. Almost one in three had experienced sexual violence during that time but few had reported attacks. Many girls had also missed out on schooling because of chores, childcare and unaffordable fees. Research methods: A mixed methodology study was conducted in the three countries (R2). Questions were asked about patterns of gender violence and legislation and policies for combating violence and discrimination. In collaboration with colleagues in each country, Parkes and Heslop designed the research and developed the annual monitoring and evaluation system. They also trained the study teams and led the analysis. The baseline study involved all 45 schools (13 in Ghana, 17 in Kenya, and 15 in Mozambique) and 2,757 respondents, including girls and boys, teachers and headteachers, parents, school board members, community leaders, district officials and police.

Study 2: Transforming Education for Girls in Nigeria and Tanzania (TEGINT): Professor Elaine Unterhalter (PI) and Jo Heslop (RO)

The IOE was also ActionAid's international research partner in TEGINT, which involved 72 schools in eight states in Northern Nigeria and 57 schools in six districts in Northern Tanzania. This five- year project (2007-12) addressed the obstacles that hamper girls' education and increase their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. Local NGOs and research institutes in each country took part in the project. Key findings: The baseline study found that girls in Nigeria and Tanzania face multiple barriers to education — including early marriage, pregnancy, poverty and poor school conditions (R3). It recommended creating girls' clubs as spaces for collective empowerment. It also suggested increasing school management committees' capacity to promote gender equality and combat gender violence. Methods: The IOE researchers led the conceptualisation and design of the baseline study, conducted data analysis and produced national and cross-country reports. They also co-ordinated the endline studies and analysed the results.

Study 3: Gender, Education and Global Poverty Reduction Initiatives (GEGPRI): Elaine Unterhalter (PI), Amy North (RO) and Chris Yates (Research Adviser)

This ESRC-funded study (2007-11) used case study research to examine how global policies on gender equality, education and poverty reduction (such as MDG3) were understood and implemented in Kenya and South Africa. Key findings: The study revealed that there was considerable disconnection between the aspirations of global policy and the way in which it was being applied (R4 & R5). Officials in ministries and provincial education departments, NGO organisers and teachers had few opportunities to think about gender, education and poverty and the links between them and often had stereotyped ideas about the poor. Methods: The IOE led the conceptualisation, design and analysis of case study research in 10 sites in Kenya and South Africa and in international organisations, working with partner universities in each country.

References to the research

Indicators of Quality:
IQ1: Asmara Figue, Education Adviser, Save the Children: "The contribution of the IOE to ensuring the quality of the research work [in SVAGS] has been inestimable. They have played an invaluable role in bringing a diverse team together to design, plan and implement co-ordinated, coherent studies in three African countries".

IQ2: Professor Fiona Leach, an expert on gender, violence and education, describes the SVAGS monitoring and evaluation system as the first to track the impact of an intervention on gender violence in schools over time in a reliable, consistent way.

IQ3: R4, which was based on the TEGINT and GEGPRI research, won the Cambridge Journal of Education `best article of the year' prize for 2013.

Grants: The IOE (grant-holder Jenny Parkes) received £385,000 from the Big Lottery Fund via ActionAid for SVAGS. The Institute (Unterhalter) received £196,000 from Comic Relief via ActionAid for TEGINT. Each ActionAid project amounts to £4.5 million in total. The IOE (Unterhalter) also received £545,611 from the ESRC for GEGPRI.

Details of the impact

Principal beneficiaries and dates: Girls in the six African countries that the IOE researchers have worked in are the main beneficiaries. The benefits have been accruing since 2008.

Reach and significance: The countries that the researchers have been operating in cover an area almost 20 times as big as the UK and have an estimated school-age population of just over 100 million ¹. Each study has worked directly with several thousand girls and the projects have had a demonstrable impact (see below) on national — as well as local — policy and practice in these countries. The research is helping to shape international policies aimed at improving girls' educational and life chances. It has also influenced Westminster MPs' thinking on a) how to combat gender violence and b) what the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals should be. All three studies have achieved significant instrumental impacts ² (i.e. influencing the development of policy or practice). They have also had important capacity-building impacts.

Paths to impact: Local promotion of their findings by the SVAGS and TEGINT teams, supported by IOE staff, proved to be a valuable way of influencing politicians and community leaders. GEGPRI incorporated report-back sessions with participants at each research site, allowing them to reflect on findings with researchers. The findings were then fed into influential reports, including a special issue of The Lancet (see impact source S1).

Study 1:SVAGS — Sexual violence by Kenyan teachers: Following the IOE team's recommendations on codes of conduct for teachers, SVAGS encouraged the drafting of a Teachers' Service Commission (TSC) circular on sexual violence, issued by the Ministry of Education and the TSC. The Kenya National Union of Teachers helped to draft the circular and has declared that it will not protect teachers guilty of sex offences. The circular aims to ensure that offenders are not simply transferred to other schools. Awareness of the circular was guaranteed by a simple strategy: attaching it to teachers' pay slips. A database to track teachers with sex offence records has also been set up. Sanitation: The IOE's findings on the number of girls missing five days' schooling a month when menstruating triggered a media campaign for national funds to provide sanitary pads for schoolgirls. This achieved a remarkable result when the Kenyan government agreed to set aside US$3.7 million (£2.3m) for this purpose from June 2011 (S2 & S3). Police initiatives in Ghana: The finding that child protection systems were inadequate resulted in the project building new links between the Education Service and the Police Service. Police in the project area have since worked more closely with schools and communities, raising awareness of appropriate responses to violent acts and encouraging girls to feel more confident about reporting these crimes. This model is now being copied in the nine other regions of Ghana. School clubs in Mozambique: The baseline study underscoring the importance of school clubs — coupled with a petition from a project school — drew a rapid response from the Minister of Girls' Education. Officials were directed to create space in schools for pupils to discuss issues such as violence, gender and HIV/AIDS. The government later said that by 2014 every school in Mozambique should have a club. University teaching: Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique, adopted teaching approaches based on the participatory pedagogies used in workshops run by Parkes and Heslop (S4). The SVAGS baseline report is on the reading list of the MA course on Education and Development at the University of East Anglia. Commons invitation: The SVAGS study led to Parkes being invited to make a written submission to the House of Commons International Development Committee inquiry into violence against women and girls in 2013. The evidence she submitted with Heslop — highlighting the pivotal role of educational institutions — generated one of the few references to education in the resulting report (S5). This document summarises their proposals and comments: "More detailed analysis and guidance is required on how [DFID] programmes ... can best address violence against women and girls ...This expertise exists, as the excellent evidence we received attests, and must be used".

Study 2: TEGINT — Girls' clubs: Following IOE recommendations about the importance of building up girls' clubs, all but two of Tanzania's TEGINT schools have established clubs. Their 2,400 members have participated in children's bunges (parliament sessions), barazas (debates), and other activities affirming girls' right to education. In Nigeria, girls' clubs have been set up in every one of the 72 TEGINT schools. In 2010-11, more than 5,100 Nigerian girls took part in debates and other school activities highlighting gender equality. All girls' clubs in both countries are led by a mentor — usually a female teacher trained in promoting girls' rights, gender-sensitive teaching approaches, and sexual and reproductive health. These mentors were appointed after the IOE researchers recommended that strong female role models were needed. In Nigeria, 24 girls and six female teachers from across all states led the development of the Girls' Club Manual, containing guidelines for establishing and running these clubs. This manual is now being used throughout Nigeria. Girls' empowerment: The TEGINT endline studies showed that, in the project areas in Tanzania and Nigeria, girls who had joined clubs were more aware of their rights than non-club members and were more likely to challenge discrimination and violence (as measured by a girls' empowerment index that the IOE developed for the project). Reducing absenteeism: Mapping out- of-school girls is reducing absenteeism in Nigeria. Almost 1,600 out-of-school girls were identified in TEGINT districts in 2011 through termly mapping and outreach work led by girls' club members. Girls and mentors co-ordinated home visits and sought school or local government backing to encourage parents to bring girls back to school. Books or uniforms were sometimes offered as inducements. Hundreds of girls subsequently returned to school. Local government: TEGINT lobbying through girls' clubs led to the establishment of `gender desks' (posts focusing on gender concerns) in 17 local education authorities in Nigeria in 2010. Gender-sensitive school management: The study highlighted weaknesses in the management and monitoring of gender concerns in schools. Training and support was therefore given to all school committees involved in the project. This has so far enabled all TEGINT schools in Nigeria, and a third of project schools in Tanzania, to prepare gender-sensitive plans and budgets. Girls now take part in management committee meetings in over half of Tanzanian primary schools.

Study 3: GEGPRI — South Africa: As a result of this research, the South African education depart ment worked with provincial officials and schools to understand better the links between poverty, gender inequality and teenage pregnancy — and establish how schoolgirl pregnancy could be managed more effectively. One senior government official (S6) said the research had encouraged the department "to engage much more deeply with the complexity of inequality, the multiple causes of teenage pregnancy, the need to eradicate a `blaming girls' culture, how practically to bring girls back into schools. In my view, the research was ground-breaking: examining so many different layers of policy implementation and thinking about policy from the micro levels of schools, meso levels of district and provincial education departments, through to the macro levels of national and global policy". Global level: GEGPRI findings were used to frame the content of the UN Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI) conference in Dakar, Senegal, in 2010 (S7&S8). The conference was attended by activists, academics, practitioners, girls, and high-level policy-makers, and helped to accelerate efforts to improve education provision for girls. Insights from the study also fed into 16 country action plans on girls' education developed at the conference and were reflected in the Dakar Declaration, which stressed the multi-dimensional aspects of poverty (S9).

Studies 1-3: Ministerial Summit: In April 2013, the IOE findings also helped to inform a Call to Action that was issued at an eight-country `Learning for All' Ministerial Summit in Washington DC. Unterhalter was a member of the UNGEI group that helped to draft the Call, which, among other things, seeks strategic efforts to combat gender-based violence (S10). This Call was subsequently welcomed by the UN's Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown.

House of Commons: Unterhalter was also invited (with University of London colleagues) to present evidence to the International Development Committee's 2012 inquiry into the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals (S11). Several of the researchers' recommendations - e.g. that there should be a standalone gender goal and that gender should be threaded through all the goals - were adopted by the Committee.

Sources to corroborate the impact

S1: Waage, J., Banerji, J., Campbell, O., Chirwa, E., Collender, G., Dieltiens, V., Dorward, A., Godfrey-Faussett, P., Hanvoravongchai, P., Kingdon, G., Little, A., Mills, A., Mulholland, K., Mwinga, A., North, A., Patcharanarumol, W., Poulton, C., Tangcharoensathien, V., & Unterhalter, E. (2010), The Millennium Development Goals: a cross sectoral analysis and principles for goal setting post 2015, The Lancet, 376(9745), 991-1023.

S2: Leach, F., Slade, E. & Dunne, M. (2012) Desk Review for Concern: Promising Practice in School Related Gender Based Violence Prevention and Response Programming Globally. Dublin: Concern Worldwide.

S3: `Kenya: Government funds free sanitary pads for schoolgirls', Guardian, July 29, 2011.

S4: Head of the Department of Science and Maths Education, Eduardo Mondlane University.

S5: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmintdev/107/107.pdf (See paragraph 16, page 14)

S6: Former Chief Director for Equity in national Department of Education, South Africa.

S7: E4 Conference Engendering Empowerment: Education and Equality: Conference Report. New York: UNGEI/Institute of Education. http://www.ungei.org/files/E4_Conference_Report.pdf

S8: Engendering Empowerment: Education & Equality. A companion volume to the E4 conferences (2012) UN Girls' Education Initiative.

S9: Dakar Declaration on Accelerating Girls' Education and Gender http://www.ungei.org/index_2527.html

S10: Head of the United Nations Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI) Secretariat

S11: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmintdev/657/657we03.htm

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¹ UNESCO education statistics (2012): See Demographic and Economic Data — Table 2. http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/tableView.aspx?ReportId=173
² Using Evidence: How Research can Inform Public Services (Nutley, S., Walter, I., Davis, H. 2007)
³ All weblinks accessed 5/11/13