EDUCATION AND WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT

Data from around the world show that increased education is associated with the empowerment of women (Grown 2003). Educated women are more effective at improving their own well-being and that of their family. They are better equipped to extract the most benefit from existing services and opportunities and to generate alternative opportunities, roles, and support structures. These empowering effects of women’s education are manifested in a variety of ways, including increased income-earning potential, ability to bargain for resources within the household, decision making, autonomy, control over their own fertility, and participation in public life.
These are strongly conditioned by such factors as level of economic development, depth of the labor market, and degree of gender stratification. The impact of women’s education is greater in settings that are already relatively egalitarian. Under such conditions even modestly educated women are more likely to participate in important family decisions, to work in nonfarm occupations, and to control economic resources.
However, the world is still far from achieving gender parity in enrollment and completion rates, particularly in secondary school. Worldwide, it is estimated that 54–57 percent of all out-of-school children are girls. In South Asia girls constitute two-thirds of all out of school children (UNESCO2004). There are two indicators for tracking progress toward gender parity in education: the ratio of girls to boys in primary, secondary, and tertiary education and the ratio of literate females to males ages 15–24.
Writers have identified four approaches that increase girls’ participation in primary school that can also be applied to secondary school. These strategies have all been effective in a variety of countries:

• Making girls’ schooling more affordable by reducing fees and offering targeted scholarships.
• Building schools close to girls’ homes, involving the community in school management, and allowing flexible scheduling.
• Making schools girl-friendly by improving the safety of schools, the design of facilities (such as latrines for girls), and instituting policies that promote girls’ attendance (such as permitting married adolescents to attend).
• Improving the quality of education by training more female teachers for the secondary level, providing gender-sensitive textbooks, and developing a curriculum for girls that is strong in math and sciences and that projects gender equality.

MAKING SCHOOLS AFFORDABLE
There are two ways to make school affordable for poor families:
By eliminating user fees and other school fees to reduce direct costs and by providing incentives to families to send their girls to school, for instance, through scholarships, take home rations programs, or other means.
Eliminating or substantially reducing school fees has resulted in increases in primary enrollment, particularly for girls. When free schooling was introduced in Uganda in 1997, primary school enrollment nearly doubled from 3.4 million to 5.7 million children, rising to 6.5 million by 1999. Total girls’ enrollment increased from 63 percent to 83 percent, while enrollment among the poorest fifth of girls rose from 46 percent to 82 percent (World Bank 2002). In Tanzania the elimination of primary school fees in 2002 resulted in additional enrollment of 1.5 million students (Coalition for Health and Education Rights 2002). Nigeria government can look into these examples to encourage more girls in schools.