The education of women directly benefits human capital. At the heart of these benefits is the profound way poverty can be alleviated if women were educated.
“Because women carry a disproportionate burden of the poverty and landlessness that permeates developing societies, any significant improvements in their role, via education, can have an important impact on breaking the vicious cycle of poverty and inadequate schooling”(Todaro, 377).
Investment in girl’s education holds some of the highest returns of all development investments, yielding both private and social benefits that attribute to individuals, families, and society at large. One particular development issue is that, investment in education reduces fertility rates. Women with formal education are more likely to use reliable family planning methods, delay marriage and childbearing, and have fewer and healthier babies than women with no formal education. The World Bank estimates that one year of female schooling reduces fertility by 10 percent (World Bank, 3). Through education, not only are women given direct control over their bodies but it also benefits the national goal of over populated nations to decrease fertility.
Another benefit is that female education lowers infant and child mortality rates (life expectancy at birth). Women with some formal education are more likely to seek medical care, ensure their children are immunized, be better informed about their children’s nutritional requirements and adopt improved sanitation practices (World Bank, 2). Lower mortality rates directly benefit each woman’s family and at large improve the quality of human capital.
A very prominent benefit that comes with female education is that it protects against the spread of HIV/AIDS. It slows and reduces the spread of HIV/AIDS by giving females economic independence, delaying marriage, introducing family planning, as well as giving them greater information about the disease and how to prevent it (World Bank, 2). Education has also been shown to be one of the most cost-effective means of improving local health standards.
Education also increases women’s labour force participation rates and earnings. When women are educated they become a valuable asset to farms and factories, offering new insights and innovations, this is especially evident in agriculture production. Given their direct involvement in agriculture and subsistence production, educated women could produce more goods of better quality for family consumption and the market or informal sector. Women have economic potential just as men do. If women remain uneducated, some of that potential is lost, and their host nations will not be able to harness their development goals. To educate a mother is to create intergenerational education benefits. A mother with a few years of formal education is considerably more likely to send her children to school.
“Growing research suggests that mothers play a central role in supporting children’s education. Nonliterate mothers, obliviously, cannot be of much assistance to the child in the education process. Conversely, literate and educated mothers not only push their children to go to school, but are also able to help them with their school work when they do go to school” (SIL International, 2)
By educating a mother, human capital is made sustainable through the perpetual education of the children she will influence.
These benefits, if achieved, would change the face of the developing world forever. To educate a women, not only increases human capital, but directly affects the well being of her family and community creating a means for every nation to achieve their development goals. Although the benefits of educating females are significant and would seemingly solve many problems, there are many barriers in achieving these goals. It is important to understand the dynamics behind achieving educational outcomes and also to understand the societal factors that can explain the current state of womens education in the developing world. Parents in the developing world are often more willing to invest in their sons than their daughters. In certain societies, parents tend to favour sons on more levels than just education; but also in how much food they get a dinner, or the distribution of an inheritance. Such behavior might not be seen as obvious discrimination of their children but “may be a rational response to constraints imposed by poverty and to expected returns determined by labour market conditions and traditions” (Meier, 267). Naturally, since parents do not expect as much in return for educating their daughters, the investment is not so attractive.
There are many financial costs that prevent girls from receiving formal education. Even when school is public, it still requires families to support it with their savings and resources. Learning materials, transportation, uniforms and boarding fees are some of the non-tuition costs of sending children to school. These out of pocket expenses may be greater for girls than for boys. For example,
“Parents reluctance to send daughters to school without proper attire raises the cost of their attendance, and in some cultures, parents’ concerns for physical and moral safety of their daughters makes them unwilling to let them travel long distances to school each day”(Meier, 268).
In so many cases, it is simply too expensive for parents to fathom sending their daughters to school, especially when they have sons to educate. In addition, parents may not be able to afford the opportunity costs of educating their female children. They feel that their daughter is too important in maintaining the house that if she were to give her household duties up, they would incur a lesser quality of lifestyle. In most places girls work more in the home and marketplace than boys. They cook, clean house, fetch water, and help their mothers care for younger children. “Clearly, girls who work more than their brothers will be less likely to attend school or will be more over-worked if they do (causing them to perform less well)”(Meier, 269). Opportunity costs also consider that alternative training is lost if women attend school. Parents feel that girls are forgoing important childcare, household and craft training at home. If a woman’s goal is to enter the informal sector producing a craft that she learned to do from her mother, than alternative schooling seems like a waste of time and an unwanted burden; especially if that time could be spent perfecting or selling the craft.
An interesting barrier is that parents might consider education to be negative because it reduces the appeal and likelihood of their daughters making a good wives. “In many traditional societies, education beyond the acquisition of literacy is contrary to the social pressure for women to become wives and mothers and threatens their possibilities of marriage”(Meier, 269). A strong difference in treatment between boys and girls is often not out of discrimination, but out of tradition and religious belief. More technical barriers that women face include; persistent harassment and violence on the way to and in school, feelings of male superiority in mathematics and science, early marriage, absence of policies to address dropout cases because of pregnancy, inadequate basic services in schools (eg. separate, clean latrines, for girls to maintain their hygiene), lack of gender –sensitive teachers/curriculum and materials, lack of confidence in girls as quality learners, school calendar/schedule in conflict with girls’ domestic or market responsibilities etc. (UNICEF in Action, 1-3). These barriers are structural issues that are hard-wired into the existing system, which makes it difficult for policy makers to change them. “Serious Obstacles to girls’ education still exist. HIV/AIDS and deepening poverty in lesser – developed countries have increased an already daunting array of social, cultural, and economic barriers that traditionally keep girls at home and at work rather than at school. – Girls still have a steep climb to reach full development of their potential.” (UNGEI, 4) When the costs of educating women do not outweigh the benefits financially (and immediately), it is hard to alter the perception of the traditional society. Although the barriers to female education are strong and many, there are effective strategies, solutions and responses that can be taken to alleviate these barriers.
The first step nations need to take is to realize that gender implications in policy and programs are becoming more severe. It is important to address women’s education as separate from their families and households, and deliver programs to them based on their individual needs. “Improvements in women’s education and training will depend on the introduction of flexible class timing, incentives for parents to release girls from home production, and the removal of traditional biases regarding appropriate training for women”. (Meier, 279)
Some ways in which nations could alleviate the household barriers which women find themselves in would be to: provide child care programs to siblings so the girls do not have to stay at home to look after the young siblings, and allow school fee wavers and vouchers for uniforms and supplies to help financial burdens. In response to policy barriers nations could create laws to ensure girls safety, reallocate the national budget to put girls education at a higher priority and create national dialogue about female equality in schools. Concerning barriers of infrastructure, a nation should create latrines in all schools especially for adolescent girls, build rural housing for female teachers to stay in, and create small school strategies, such as multi-grade cluster schools. The hardest barriers to overcome lie within the beliefs and practices of the community. Responses to these could include creating village committees organized to promote culturally acceptable female education, ensuring equal access to economic opportunities for educated girls, (namely property laws and equal hiring processes), gender awareness training and employing female social promoters who tutor girls and provide encouragement. To break down actual educational systematic barriers a nation would have to develop a curriculum that addresses female learning needs, hire gender sensitive teachers, create flexible school calendars and schedules, and better design the school to allow for a cheaper learning environment (UNICEF in Action, 5).
I believe that for equality in girl’s education to be combated properly, a partnership program needs to be created. A teacher from the developed world could be matched up with a teacher from the concerned developing country. Together they could create a curriculum that does its best to embrace the existing traditional values, while implementing new strategies that are relevant to improving the quality of education for girls. This one to one partnership would work best in small rural schools, and should have a contract of at least one year. The teachers would teach the class or schoolhouse jointly. I believe that this type of partnership would create a situation were it would be easier to break down the barriers to education and at the same time, it would not neglect the culture and needs of the women and girls of that specific village community. A simple sharing of teaching space and ideas could create an atmosphere that could change the entire educational structure, and allow women’s education to prosper.
The broad social benefits of girls’ education include increased family incomes, more productivity in the workforce, later in life marriages, reduced fertility rates, and healthier children and families, to mention a few. The barriers that exist that prevent the achievement of these benefits are based around this glooming era of female subordination. If this issue of gender inequality in schools can be eroded by programs and new policies that realize how much human capital could be improved if females were educated, then developing nations would recognize that devoting priority and resources to quality education for females is among the best investments a society can make. The benefits that come with educating women are so profound that if given the proper attention, they have the capacity to direct the poorest countries out of poverty and maximize their economic growth. Educating women is therefore the single most viable answer to creating a backbone for the further advancement of all developing countries.
Education…. Is both the seed and the Flower of economic development. (Harbison and Myers 1965, p. xi)