Gender gaps in educational access, schooling quality and labour market outcomes are pervasive in Pakistan. This brief discusses the findings of three recent studies in Pakistan that highlight the role of education in improving individual productivity, increasing earnings, bringing people out of poverty and providing a pathway to gender equality in the labour market. The papers note the policy implications of the research both for education and labour market policy.
This paper provides a preliminary survey of the educational attainment of Ghana's adult population. It describes patterns and trends and makes some allusions to possible associations between educational attainment and outputs and outcomes.
All nations are committed, via their espousal of the Millennium Development Goals, to eliminate gender disparities in education over the next few years. This policy brief examines the major causes of existing inequalities in education, based upon an assessment of recent research results, and sets out lessons for policy change. Although the causes of inequality are complex, policy reforms to improve women's rights in the household and the market place, to reduce the direct costs of schooling to households, and to improve school quality in gender-aware ways can do much to encourage and sustain increased enrolments amongst both girls and boys. Although the 2005 target of achieving gender parity at primary and secondary levels has been missed, that for 2015 can be reached if carefully focussed reforms are employed.
In this study we examine whether gender bias in education depends on the extent of female decision-making power. Household headship is used as a measure of female autonomy, with different types of households theorized to reflect varying degrees of female autonomy. Most female-headed-households in Pakistan are formed either because women are widowed or because husbands migrate. Women in male-headed-households are hypothesized to have least autonomy followed by married women heads whose migrant husbands may retain some decision-making power. Widow heads are hypothesized to have the greatest degree of autonomy among women in different households. The econometric findings suggest that married women heads gender-discriminate as much as male heads but that widow-heads have significantly lower bias against girls in enrolment decisions than male heads. The results also suggest that educated female heads gender differentiate less than both uneducated female heads and than male heads. The evidence suggests that households having better educated women with more independent status discriminate against the education of their daughters less than other households.
The achievement of gender equality in education, and of women's empowerment more generally, have recently become established amongst the highest international priorities for policy action. This paper examines the processes by which they came to be included amongst the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It argues that the revised targets to 2015 are more practicable than earlier goals. However, it shows that rates of progress will need to be improved, and that financial support from the north is still running at less than half the required levels. Goal achievement presupposes some agreed understanding of the meaning of gender equality. The paper reveals important contradictions between the language of analysis and the vocabulary of policy. Finally, it examines some of the instruments available for monitoring progress and building pressure for policy reform. It shows that failures to meet policy undertakings are as evident – and as serious in their implications for the possibility of achieving the MDGs – amongst aid donors as they are amongst developing-country governments themselves.
There are many obstacles to the successful provision of universal primary and secondary education. The failure of state schools to provide adequate schooling is a serious hindrance to achieving the international goal of Education for All. Non-state providers of education are regarded as an alternative but the variation in the quality of education provided is a growing concern. Educational partnerships between the public and private sector have been regarded as a way out of this impasse in the United States and Western Europe and there has been considerable debate about the economic and political implications of these public private partnerships (PPPs). Disentangling the economic and political dimensions of provision would further our understanding of these new models of educational provision. This paper sets out a typology of identifying the economic and political aspects of provision through using the Hirschmanian concepts of 'exit' and 'voice'. The idea of exit draws on the mainstream economic understanding of free entry and exit with the latter occurring when individuals were no longer satisfied with what was on offer in the market. The term voice is used to denote political activity undertaken by an individual to ensure the continued provision of a good and/or the quality of the good. Conceptualizing educational provision in relation to exit and voice permits the examination of how the role of the market and community affect the access to and quality of education. Educational initiatives by state and non-state providers in India are mapped onto this typology to gain an understanding of how the new models of education, such as PPPs, would affect the current provision of education.
Recent evidence from Pakistan points to significant pro-male bias within households in the allocation of education expenditures. This raises two important questions: Is less spent on enrolled girls than boys through differential school-type choice for the two sexes, for example through a greater likelihood of sending boys to fee-charging private schools? And, if indeed this is the case, are girls thereby condemned to lower quality schooling, on average, than boys? By asking these questions, this paper makes three contributions to the literature. Firstly, this is one of a very few studies in Pakistan to explore the question of the relative effectiveness of public and private schools despite there being an unprecedented expansion of fee-charging private schools in the last two decades. Secondly, unlike existing papers which focus on primary schooling, this study looks at potential learning gaps by school-type for students in their last year of middle school (grade 8), very near their transition to secondary schooling. Thirdly, it exploits unique, purposively-collected data from government and private school students and thus, in estimating achievement production functions, is able to control for a number of variables typically 'unobserved' by researchers. The findings reveal that boys are indeed more likely to be sent to private schools than girls within the household, so that differential school-type choice is an important channel of differential treatment against girls. Private schools are also found to be of better quality – they are more effective than government schools in imparting mathematics and literacy skills. Girls lose out vis a vis boys in terms not only of lower within-household educational expenditures but also in terms of the quality of schooling accessed.
This paper summarises the evolution of education policy in Pakistan over the past two decades and provides a preliminary assessment of the role of donors in this process. It shows that educational outcomes have been consistently poor, relative both to other countries and to the government's own policy targets. The paper argues that with the shift of aid modalities away from projects towards sectoral programmes and, more recently, budget support, the direct impact of financial aid on educational outcomes has become more difficult to trace. Nevertheless – not withstanding some successes - the generally poor performance of the education sector does not provide obvious evidence for aid's beneficial effects.
This literature review synthesizes what is known about the relationships between education, training and the labour market in Ghana. It focuses upon the returns to education and training in both formal and informal sectors of the economy. The implications of recent trends in these returns are discussed. Characteristics of the broader labour market environment in Ghana, and of pathways from education and skills training to employment, are identified. Priorities for research are indicated.
A Public Private Partnership (PPP) makes it possible to disentangle funding from operation. One form of PPP in education is private operation of publicly funded education. While evidence is thin, a prominent recent study based on cross-country data suggests that private operation of schools with public funding raises student achievement levels, leading to efficiency gains. If it is accepted that primary education should always be publicly funded, and if the superior efficiency of this type of PPP in education is accepted or presumed, then some issues for policy are: (i) whether to give public funds directly to schools (supply-side financing) or as vouchers to parents (demand-side funding); (ii) to anticipate the potential equity effects of different ways of giving public funds for private operation; and (iii) to consider the feasibility of implementing educational PPPs in developing countries. Experimentation with alternative delivery modes, accompanied by rigorous evaluation of their respective efficiency and equity impacts, is desirable before scaling up interventions.
Differential labour market returns to male and female education are one potential explanation for large gender gaps in education in Pakistan. We empirically test this explanation by estimating private returns to education separately for male and female wage earners. This paper contributes to the literature by using a variety of methodologies (Ordinary Least Squares, Heckman correction, 2SLS and household fixed effects) in order to consistently estimate economic returns to education. Earnings function estimates reveal a sizeable gender asymmetry in economic returns to education, with returns to women's education being substantially and statistically significantly higher than men's. However, a decomposition of the gender wage gap suggests that there is highly differentiated treatment by employers. We conclude that the total labour market returns are much higher for men, despite returns to education being higher for women. This suggests that parents may have an investment motive in allocating more resources to boys than to girls within households.
The author demonstrates that collaborating with children using a gender-sensitive life-cycle approach yields social and health dividends. The paper focuses upon young people and children engaged in HIV/AIDS education, not only as consumers of information but also as generators of knowledge pertinent to their needs, aspirations, anxieties, fears, hopes and dreams. This subject-centred approach to education is facilitated by innovative methodologies that allow young people to talk frankly with adults and amongst themselves, to participate in community theatre designed to help different types of people address issues of common interest, and to work with experienced adult researchers in generating relevant data.
The low presence of female teachers serving in schools in deprived rural areas is one of the main constraints militating against girls' access and achievement in basic education in Ghana. Studies suggest that low self-esteem among girls is a key factor preventing them from attaining higher levels of education, which can be enhanced through more gender sensitive teaching methods, and the presence of female teachers as role models. This paper investigates the reasons why the majority of Ghanaian teachers avoid –if they can - postings to rural deprived areas and why girls, in particular, are not entering the teaching profession. The study adopts a predominantly qualitative approach, exploring the perceptions of primary stakeholders involved in basic education, including female teachers living in deprived rural areas, girls at upper primary and secondary levels of education and community members. Districts with the lowest percentage of female teachers were selected for the study – where, also, the lowest percentage of girls enter and remain in the basic school system. The paper suggests reasons why Ghanaian girls continue to miss the opportunity to be taught by female role models and why they do not opt to become teachers themselves.
This paper argues for the multidimensional measurement of poverty in Pakistan particularly in the context of Millennium Development Goals. It critically examines the Poverty Scorecard, which was recently introduced by the Government of Pakistan for the identification of poor households under the Benazir Income Support Programme. By employing the Alkire and Foster measure to analyze household data from two provinces, Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwah (the re-named North-West Frontier Province) and Punjab, it provides an alternative method to estimate multidimensional poverty and identify poor households. The paper also investigates the relationship between household consumption and multidimensional poverty. It contrasts the results obtained by using a multidimensional measurement of poverty with those of the official poverty line. The limitations of the official poverty line are identified and the role of household consumption in explaining deprivations is discussed.
In the early 1990s, large numbers of children in India remained out of school. International commitments to achieve education for all (EFA) globally meant that India was an important case for donors. India was pressed to accept aid for primary education, and agreed with some reluctance. Although subsequent donor involvement was substantial and influenced aspects of both policy implementation and management, it is shown that Indian education policy priorities remained self-determined. The government of India – though falling short of securing universal education for its children - succeeded in using external resources and expertise in ways which suited its own purposes, whilst minimising external impact on policy development. The politics and economics of this process are discussed.
