Promoting Primary Education for Girls in Pakistan

Evaluation of USAID programme aimed at improving women’s education. Girls’ enrollments more than tripled in Balochistan and more than doubled in North-West Frontier Province. Boys’ education also benefited. The program has been less successful, though, in improving educational quality.

Concluions include:

• Commitment to educating girls, communicated consistently by diverse leaders through multiple channels to a wide range of audiences, appears to have been critical to broad increases in girls’ education
• Alignment toward a goal facilitates decentralization, community participation, and innovation. The latter two are probably necessary to achieve the magnitude of shifts in social norms required to change practices related to gender roles in traditional societies
• Policy emphasis on quality might have led to institutionalization of quality improvements, which in turn would contribute to the sustainability of gains in girls’ access to schooling
• Unrealistically high standards for teacher and student achievement do not lead to better performance. Instead, they appear to reinforce notions that girls are not capable and contribute to patterns of high dropout and repetition rates
• Boys have benefited as much as or more than girls from PED’s program innovations and quality efforts. In absolute numbers, boys’ schools increased significantly more than girls’. Community participation in education promises to improve quality, increase access, and reduce abuse of boys in schools
• Gender discrimination leads to distortions of supply and demand and limits the effectiveness and efficiency of strategies for system reform. Policy and program actions that require changes in gender role norms reduce these distortions
• Three-way partnerships (such as government–private sector–community, or government–donor–technical assistance) empower more stakeholders, facilitate innovation, and minimize deadlock better than two-way partnerships.

[author]

Also available is a synthesis report on USAID experience in girl's education