• Girls education

Girls education

The Safe Schools Program (Safe Schools) is a five-year project under the U.S. Agency for International Development, Bureau for Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade, Office of Women in Development. The objective of Safe Schools is to create safe environments for both girls and boys that promote gender-equitable relationships and reduce school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV).

This report summarises the results of the participatory learning and action (PLA) research activity conducted in October and November 2005 in the Machinga District in the Southern Region of Malawi.

The key findings of the report include:

• based on the most common responses from pupils, parents and school committee members, the concept of gender-based violence is not clearly understood
• many teachers concentrated on physical or sexual violence, without recognising the different forms of psychological violence 
• focus group discussions revealed that boys and girls are victims, as well as perpetrators, of gender-based violence. The main perpetrators of gender-based violence at school are boys and teachers 
• girls identified toilets, boreholes, classrooms and football grounds as areas where they felt unsafe. Similarly, boys identified toilets, boreholes and the main roads as unsafe places 
• the most common pathway for reporting abuse at the classroom level is for the victim or observer to report to a school monitor or take the matter directly to a teacher 
• there are several actions taken against perpetrators of SRGBV. When the offence is grave, such as having a sexual relationship with a pupil, the Primary Education Advisor is asked to transfer the teacher to another school, however, evidence from the study indicates that transferring teachers does not solve the problem.
  

Despite a lack of knowledge about school-related gender-based violence all schools in the Machinga District have some kind of reporting structure in place in the event that violence against children occurs. Increased sensitisation about children‘s rights to pupils, teachers and parents in addition to cataloguing possible sanctions that can be imposed on perpetrators is a possible entry point for reducing SRGBV in schools and in the communities around the schools. Lastly introducing guidance and counselling services for both perpetrators and victims might also help to reduce the incidence of abuse in schools.

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