Announcing JEiE Volume 8, Number 2 – Special Issue on Gender in Education in Emergencies!

Published
Topic(s):
Research and Evidence
Gender
English
Arabic
Portuguese
Spanish
French

We are pleased to announce the publication of Journal on Education in Emergencies
Volume 8, Number 2 – Special Issue on Gender in Education in Emergencies
!

JEiEVol8No2This issue of the Journal on Education in Emergencies (JEiE) offers an in-depth analysis of the unique gendered effects humanitarian emergencies have on boys and girls. It adds to more than two decades of EiE research that demonstrates how conflict and crisis exacerbate existing political, economic, and cultural barriers to education access and widen the gender gap in educational attainment.

Spurred by the commitment G7 leaders made in the Charlevoix Declaration on Quality Education for Girls, Adolescent Girls, and Women in Developing Countries to advance gender equality in education through sex-disaggregated data and evidence-based systems of accountability, this issue brings attention to the role that scholarly research can play in improving access to and parity in the quality of education for learners affected by displacement, political fragility, and violence.

JEiE Volume 8, Number 2 includes five research articles, one field note, and three book reviews. The contributing authors reveal new evidence on gender-based violence as experienced by students in high-, middle-, and low-income countries; explore the intersection of race, gender, and displacement as refugee students encounter new learning environments; and interrogate gaps between boys and girls in education access and the learning they reported achieving during the school closures and lockdowns related to COVID-19. Some of the authors trace the effects increased domestic responsibilities and the perceived safety of their host communities have on refugee girls’ ability to access secondary education. They also offer innovative approaches to collecting, disaggregating, and analyzing data on program outcomes in emergency contexts. One of three book reviews in this issue documents the implications for the EiE field of a century-long evolution of what it means to be an educated girl in India and Pakistan. The two other reviews report progress in support for girls’ and refugees’ education, as described in high-level interagency reports and by the facilitators of tertiary education in Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp.

The contributing authors share learning from research and field work conducted in varied contexts, including North America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. This special issue of JEiE ties the crisis of girls’ unequal access to quality education with the worldwide impact of COVID-19 in several ways and brings into stark relief the vulnerabilities of education systems that are simultaneously confronting existing inequalities and novel emergency situations.

As a diamond open access journal, the full JEiE Volume 8, Number 2, as well as previous issues of JEiE and all individual articles, can be downloaded for free from the INEE website: https://inee.org/journal

This issue is available in English; the abstract and title of each article are also available in français, español, português, and العربيه.

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Journal on Education in Emergencies
Volume 8, Number 2 – Special Issue on Gender in Education in Emergencies


TABLE OF CONTENTS AND ABSTRACTS

Editorial Note: Journal on Education in Emergencies Volume 8, Number 2
Carine Allaf, Julia Dicum, and Ruth Naylor

In this editorial note, lead editors Carine Allaf, Julia Dicum, and Ruth Naylor reflect on the conceptual debates they encountered in the process of curating this JEiE Special Issue on Gender in Education in Emergencies. Highlighting the COVID-19 pandemic and the persistent gaps in enrollment and learning between boys and girls, the editors consider what it means to be in an “emergency” context. They frame the contributions each contributing author has made to creating evidence-based systems of accountability and sex-disaggregated education data, goals set in response to the commitments G7 leaders made in the 2018 Charlevoix Declaration.

 

Peacebuilding Education to Address Gender-Based Aggression: Youths’ Experiences in Mexico, Bangladesh, and Canada
Kathy Bickmore and Najme Kishani Farahani

Building durable peace through education requires addressing the gender ideologies and hierarchies that encourage both direct physical aggression and indirect harm through marginalization and exploitation. Although formal education systems are shaped by gendered patterns of social conflict, enmity, and inequity, schools can help young people expand on their inclination, relationships, and capability to participate in building sustainable, gender-just peace. In this paper, we draw from focus group research conducted with youth and teachers in public schools in Mexico, Bangladesh, and Canada to investigate how young people understood the social conflicts and violence surrounding them, what they felt citizens could do about these issues, and how their teachers used the school curricula to address them. The research revealed that GBV was pervasive in students’ lives in all three settings, yet the curriculum the teachers and students described, with minor differences between contexts, included few opportunities to examine or resist the gender norms, institutions, and hierarchies that are the roots of exploitation and violence.

 

Barriers to Refugee Adolescents’ Educational Access during COVID-19: Exploring the Roles of Gender, Displacement, and Social Inequalities
Nicola Jones, Kate Pincock, Silvia Guglielmi, Sarah Baird, Ingrid Sánchez Tapia, Erin Oakley, and Jennifer Seager

As of 2021, more than 80 million people worldwide have been displaced by war, violence, and poverty. An estimated 30 million to 34 million of these are under age 18, and many are at risk of interrupting their education permanently—a situation aggravated in recent years by the global COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we adopt an intersectional conceptual framework to explore the roles gender and other social inequalities have played in shaping adolescents’ access to education during the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine two refugee populations: the Rohingya, who have been excluded from formal education opportunities in Bangladesh, and Syrian refugees in Jordan, who have access to formal education in their host country. We provide novel empirical data, as well as insights into the adolescent refugee experience and the short-term consequences for education resulting from the pandemic. In the article, we draw from quantitative survey data on 3,030 adolescents, and from in-depth qualitative interviews we conducted in the spring of 2020 with a subset of 91 adolescents who are part of an ongoing longitudinal study. We also conducted 40 key informant interviews with community leaders and service providers.

 

Girls’ and Boys’ Voices on the Gendered Experience of Learning during COVID-19 in Countries Affected by Displacement
Nicole Dulieu, Silvia Arlini, Mya Gordon, and Allyson Krupar

This paper presents research on girls’ and boys’ gendered perceptions of their learning during COVID-19-related school closures. The research was conducted in ten countries affected by displacement across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. We applied statistical analysis using multivariate logistic regression models from the results of a survey conducted with parents or caregivers and their children. We complemented the quantitative study with qualitative methodology, which provided a nuanced understanding of girls’ and boys’ perceptions of their learning and the concerns they voiced during the school closures. Our results show that the children in displaced settings are likely to perceive a decline in learning during the pandemic, and that the factors influencing this perception differ between boys and girls. Girls’ perceptions of learning “nothing” or only “a little bit” were more strongly associated with material barriers, such as limited access to learning materials and household economic circumstances, than was the case for boys. The boys’ experience of learning “a little bit” or “nothing” was more strongly associated with increased negative feelings, including feeling sad or worried, increased violence in the home, and increased responsibility for looking after siblings or other children. This research notes the importance of supporting displaced children by providing adequate resources to enable equitable access to learning, and calls for cross-sectoral programming to support displaced children who are dealing with emotional pressure.

 

Intersectionality: Experiences of Gender Socialization and Racialization for Iraqi Students Resettled in the United States
Flora Cohen, Sarah R. Meyer, Ilana Seff, Cyril Bennouna, Carine Allaf, and Lindsay Stark

Individuals from conflict-affected countries, such as Iraq, face formidable challenges when they resettle in the United States. Drawing from intersectionality theory, we explore the lived experiences of adolescent boys and girls from Iraq who have resettled in Texas and Virginia. In this qualitative study, we focus on the school as an institution that is positioned to enforce, or to combat, systemic and interpersonal inequalities among young refugees, especially in terms of gender and race. Our thematic analysis identifies the ways their interactions with teachers, peers, and family in the school context have shaped the socialization of these adolescent boys and girls from Iraq. The study findings reflect the importance of understanding how education settings can affect the intersectional experiences of conflict-affected youth who have resettled in the United States.

 

Refugee Girls’ Secondary Education in Ethiopia: Examining the Vulnerabilities of Refugees and Host Communities in Low-Resource Displacement Settings
Shelby Carvalho

Refugee girls are one of the most marginalized groups in the world when it comes to school participation, and they are half as likely to enroll in secondary school as their male peers. Gender disparities can be made worse by conflict and displacement, and they often increase as children get older. As many low- and middle-income host countries move toward more inclusive models of refugee education, it’s critical to identify barriers that may differentially limit the inclusion of refugee girls. I use two unique household surveys, conducted in Ethiopia, to examine the household and community factors that shape participation in secondary school. My findings suggest that the magnitude and sources of disadvantage vary across groups. Domestic responsibilities and concerns about safety in the community are more likely to limit secondary school participation for refugee girls than for refugee boys and host community girls. Other factors, including parental education and exposure to gender-based violence, are less likely to differ between refugee and host community girls. These findings have implications for education and social protection policies that target girls’ education and wellbeing in both refugee and host communities.

 

Data Disaggregation for Inclusive Quality Education in Emergencies: The COVID-19 Experience in Ghana
Abdul Badi Sayibu

Organizations that are implementing interventions in emergencies undoubtedly face some major challenges in analysing the necessary data. This is primarily due to the organizations’ lack of direct access to beneficiaries and the rapidly evolving nature of emergencies. This paper outlines how the Plan International project called Making Ghanaian Girls Great!—generally known as MGCubed—used phone-based surveys to assess the uptake of a Ghana Learning TV programme that the project implemented in partnership with the government. Due to the need for real-time information to guide the implementation of this intervention in an emergency context, there was little time to undertake a major statistical analysis of survey data. This paper discusses how the MGCubed project adopted a simple data disaggregation method that used a logic tree technique to gain valuable insights from the phone-survey data. The method enabled the project partners to explore the insights the dataset provided in real time without conducting a more complex and time-consuming analysis.

 

Book Review: UNESCO’s GEMR Gender Report 2019: Building Bridges for Gender Equality, and INEE’s Mind the Gap: The State of Girls Education in Crisis and Conflict
Nora Fyles

In her review of UNESCO’s GEMR Gender Report 2019: Building Bridges for Gender Equality and INEE’s Mind the Gap: The State of Girls Education in Crisis and Conflict, Nora Fyles finds that, while the scope and objectives of the two reports differ, both contribute to the evidence base on gender and education in a range of crisis contexts, including migration and displacement. They also summarize international, regional, and national legal and policy frameworks; draw from the literature to describe gender dynamics in education; and provide specific examples and case studies. Both reports establish a foundation of evidence on the status of girls’ education in crisis contexts and point to critical concerns that should drive the agenda to advance the agenda of the Charlevoix Declaration.

 

Book Review: Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia by Shenila Khoja-Moolji
Laila Kadiwal

In her review of Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia, Laila Kadiwal describes how the author dismantles homogenous assumptions about Muslim girls that are embedded in Western aid and foreign policies, as well as in Muslim societies’ domestic policies. This book, which takes readers across South Asia and from 19th-century colonial India to present-day Pakistan, presents the educated Muslim girl as a dynamic figure, not the monolithic figure that is often assumed. Kadiwal urges anyone working in education to look at the underlying conditions of why Muslim women are often treated as subjects rather than agents.

 

Book Review: Borderless Higher Education for Refugees: Lessons from the Dadaab Refugee Camps edited by Wenona Giles and Lorrie Miller
Spogmai Akseer

Spogmai Akseer reviews Wenona Giles and Lorrie Miller’s edited book, Borderless Higher Education for Refugees: Lessons from the Dadaab Refugee Camps, which offers interesting takeaways on how refugees view higher education as a transformative power in their lives. Giles and Miller and the various contributors to this book tackle the complicated issues of higher education for refugees head on. They demonstrate that it is necessary to provide higher education for refugees so that they will be able to navigate ongoing systems of inequality and overcome some of the social, political, and economic barriers they face.