1. Can you tell us a bit about the main barriers to gender equality in your context?

Charles North (CN): First, GPE is committed to gender equality to ensure all girls and boys enjoy equal education opportunities.

An estimated 129 million girls worldwide remain out of school, challenged by distance to school, cultural norms and practices, school-related gender-based violence, and early or forced marriage. And both boys and girls face barriers to getting a good education in conflict-affected areas and in households that depend on their labor or income.

But as we know, barriers to gender equality are multifaceted—beyond unequal schooling. In every country, women face some form of gender inequality—from pay disparities to the lack of access to capital. These factors are also compounded by cultural norms and stereotypes that hold women back globally.

These barriers don’t just exist in lower-income countries. For example, according to the Center for American Progress, in its Women’s Leadership Gap report: “Although they hold almost 52 percent of all management- and professional-level jobs, American women lag substantially behind men in terms of their representation in leadership positions.”

2. What policy change do you think is needed to accelerate progress toward gender equality in education globally?

CN: Well, since there are various kinds of barriers, there needs to be targeted policy changes. A blanket policy change would not suffice. For example, in terms of equal schooling for girls and boys, I think policies that reduce travel time and distance from home to school would remove a key barrier to attendance.

Policies are also needed to address cultural norms and practices regarding girls’ schooling, school-related gender-based violence, and early or forced marriage. Progressive policy changes in these areas can be catalytic in accelerating progress toward gender equality.

But, as I mentioned earlier, gender equality goes beyond equal access to schooling. Therefore, policy changes must also tackle other areas as well, including disparities in pay, for instance.

Major changes in compensation policies across the public and private sectors could have a significant impact. The same goes for access to capital, land rights and access to justice.

3. What do you see as the role of GPE in strengthening gender equality in partner countries?

CN: GPE mobilizes its partners to put gender equality at the heart of national education systems so that all girls and boys have the chance to learn and thrive. We use a variety of approaches to support and incentivize attention to gender equality.

For example, GPE provides grants to support implementation of education plans that promote gender equality.

To date, GPE has invested more than US$1.5 billion to supplement domestic investments in gender equality. These include funding gender-responsive strategies for girls’ education, awareness-raising campaigns, community gender training, female teacher recruitment and separate toilets, among others.

GPE also uses its results-based partnership model to work with lower-income countries to prioritize planning and spending on girls’ education throughout the education cycle to achieve gender equality. And, in late 2020, GPE created the $250 million Girls’ Education Accelerator to support opportunities for girls to attend school and learn.

Find out more about how gender equality is hardwired into GPE’s strategy here.

4. If you could ask anything from education partners to catalyze progress in gender equality, what would it be?

CN: Principal on my list would be to “hardwire” gender equality in planning and decision making. This requires a commitment to addressing inequalities and having access to high-quality data that can reveal the disparities.

Partners must dig deep into the data and community dynamics to identify and understand the root causes of that inequality. Only then can they begin to formulate an intervention that can have an at-scale impact in addressing gender inequality.

In El Salvador, for example, the government’s commitment to addressing inequality through the GPE 2025 process led to the inclusion of the education ministry’s gender equality unit in the policy dialogue where priorities were being set for GPE funding. By ensuring the right people were in the room, El Salvador embedded gender equality into early learning, its priority reform.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the development partners engaged in the GPE 2025 process realized that a complex set of challenges made it difficult to prioritize an area of reform that would bring about system transformation. A participant described what happened next:

The discussions triggered by the country’s engagement with GPE’s new model led the partners to agree that insufficient data and coordination have been hindering progress on the country’s system-wide girls’ education strategy.