Introduction
This 'Views on Education' section serves to enhance your knowledge of education and its relation to poverty through expert commentary. In this case, we asked Kathleen McHugh (Senior Management Specialist at 'Save the Children') about gender equality. Don't miss reading Kathleen McHugh's full interview transcript in the More Solutions section of the site either.
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View #1: How can the world increase gender equality?
Kathleen McHugh, Save the Children:
I think the case of gender equality is going to be through education.
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...I think the goal is to encourage more girls to go to school. A lot of times girls are discouraged from going to school, so working with families to encourage the parents to [recognize] that daughters have worth, and that you should educate the daughters [is important]. When mothers are bringing their kids to a clinic we'll give a lot of 'education explaining,' that if you send your girl to school, when they become mothers, their daughters are going to take better care of their children, probably have fewer children, and they will live longer.
So I think it would probably be like a four or five prong approach targeting schools, targeting kids to encourage them to go to school, targeting the parents, and then targeting the civil society leaders and local governments to encourage participation. That's we're going to run into a lot of barriers. It's pretty remarkable: I just heard from Pakistan, from where we have our program for the earthquake, and it's a less than 10% literacy rate for men and a less than 1% literacy rate for females, which is absolutely astounding. [T]hat’s probably one of the lowest I've ever seen. And it's just such a remote place that the camps that we're setting up now where these people are living for the winter, about 80% of the kid that we've established have never been to school before. ...That's going to be a tremendous opportunity for us, to really make a long-term difference in these children's lives, even if we just have this passive audience for a year, those kids will have been to school and will hopefully be able to, when they return to their homes, to establish schools in their local villages. And that can really impact a whole generation.
So its going to be advocating on a couple different levels, and then when we do have opportunities, to really set up those schools and have inclusive environments - it might be having separate schools for girls and boys if that’s what is dictated by the culture - but just getting kids in school is going to have that long term positive effect.
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Sources
McHugh, Kathleen. Telephone Interview. 5 January 2006.
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