The PFA declared at Beijing urges national authorities to eradicate illiteracy among women and the girls.

To show their commitment to the declaration, most countries in the region have continued to embark on various activities to achieve gender equality in education and improve the participation of females in science and technology.

With the help of agencies like the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), curricula and other educational materials that promote gender stereotype in the educational systems are being revised to make them gender sensitive.

In Zambia and Zimbabwe, school text-books and supplementary readers which portray women positively are being designed to replace the gender-stereotyped materials.

Regulations that contribute to unequal access and inadequate educational facilities are being revised in some countries. Governments are moving towards adapting unitary curricula that prepare boys and girls to enter the labour market on equal terms.

Apart from improving curricula, SADC governments are making efforts to improve the enrolment and retention of female students in schools.

In Malawi, the government has made secondary education free for girls in an effort to close the enrolment gender gap in secondary schools.

The Angolan government also made education free in all government schools. A positive discrimination quota system to guarantee women's access to the scheme has been introduced. To cater for those who could not attend school due to various reasons including war, adult schools have been introduced.

A special project that exclusively helps girls, women and demobilised soldiers' access vocational training has also been put in place.

Informal adult schools have in recent years mushroomed in the country to fill the gap left by inadequate formal schools. These schools are providing basic education for people who could not be absorbed in the formal schools and those disadvantaged by the unfair system which segregated girls.

These schools however lack government support. Classrooms are very few resulting in different classes being conducted in the same room. This situation has disadvantages in that it retards progress due to unavoidable confusion. With adequate government support these schools could go a long way in reducing illiteracy that is very high in Angola.

Recent research on Angola shows that the country now has a number of female lecturers and tutors in mechanics, carpentry, electronics and metallurgy, areas traditionally regarded as male domains. There is still need to open more avenues for girls to take up such posts if gender balance is to be realised in work places.

Mauritius has taken it even further and declared education free for all, from grade one up to college and University level. This has resulted in enrolment ratios favouring female students.

Girls in Mauritius also perform better than boys both at primary and secondary levels unlike in the other SADC countries. For example, in 1995, for every 100 girls who sat for high school certificate examination, 72 passed whereas only 64 out of 100 boys passed the same examinations.

It is however, regrettable to note that despite girls' better performance at school, their participation in science and technology and science related fields still does not reflect their performance.

The situation in South Africa is the reverse of most countries where there are more boys than girls in schools. For instance, in 1996, there were over 200 000 more girls than boys in the South African school system. More girls pass standard ten than boys, and there are more females at universities and colleges than males.

Since 1994, female students in that country outnumbered male students for the first time at undergraduate level. Possible reasons for this are that boys were more involved in the political activism giving rise to higher dropout rates. In rural areas, boys would be tempted or obliged to join the ranks of the migrant workers far earlier than girls.

Throughout the region educated girls tend to fetch a higher lobola (bride price), which is a powerful incentive to parents to keep their daughters in school.

In Mozambique, although free education exists at primary school level, women's access to education is lower than men's due to various factors including socio-economic and cultural norms that require girls to concentrate on household chores while boys go to school. To address these problems the government has come up with a Strategic Plan for Education (SPE) which proposes three main objectives for the education system:

• increase access to educational opportunities at all levels of the education system for all Mozambicans;
• maintain and improve the quality of education; and
• develop an institutional and financial framework that will sustain Mozambican schools and students into the future.

The government also assigns particular importance to increasing female enrolments at all levels of education. To this effect the Ministry plans to extend recruitment of female teachers, school directors and matrons for boarding facilities. Measures to revise curricula and learning materials to adapt the learning needs of girls, as well as to ensure that the textbooks distributed to schools are sufficiently durable to be used by more than one student, are already in place.

At secondary teaching level where girls account for 36 percent, the government plans to promote girls' access to education through:

• provision of grants and exemption of enrolment fees to girls from low income households and those who perform well in their studies;
• development of a gender sensitive environment; and
• sensitisation of the society to reduce the girl's burden of domestic work.

In Zimbabwe pregnant girls are expelled from school, although in theory they are allowed to remain in school.

In an effort to improve the retention of female students in schools some educational centres in Namibia and Tanzania have established schemes that assist female students who have financial problems. Such women's organisation schemes are improving the enrolment, retention and completion of education by many female students who could otherwise not have completed their education.

Some countries in the region have introduced affirmative action programmes to reduce the gender gaps. At Lindi Technical Centre in Tanzania for instance, women now constitute 84.2 percent of the total students.

Zimbabwe has done well but there is more to be done in addressing the imbalances that have side-lined girls for a long time. The government has introduced several policies that seek to increase enrolment and retention of girls in the education system of the country. Affirmative action has been introduced in schools, colleges and universities. Affirmative action is also needed at work places because employers still prefer male workers and appoint them to decision-making positions at the expense of female workers who are at times more qualified than the males.

Affirmative action has however brought its own problems, not only in Zimbabwe but the SADC region as a whole. Often, female students who acquired places at various institutions of learning through affirmative action are marginalised by male students and sometimes by teachers and lecturers. Their male counterparts view them as a "weaker sex" that need to be assisted to make it into institutions of higher learning.

Governments should design policies that provide long term solutions. Instead of continuing to admit female students with lower points, the disparities that cause performance gaps should be addressed.

Performance gaps are high as a result of household duties that occupy girls at home while boys have all the time to do their home work and study. Teaching material and curricula which are biased against girls have also contributed to these performance gaps.

In Lesotho women are comparatively more literate than men, however this is a result of the different duties that boys and girls perform. Boys are accepted in South African mines even without meaningful education and hence tend to drop-out of school earlier than girls.

As a result, literacy rates stand at 70 percent for women and 40 percent for men. Despite this high literacy percentage rate, women are still confined to non-technical jobs.

In Swaziland, women have very limited chances and the illiteracy rate is high among them due to the traditional belief that women are for marriage. In some parts of the country more than 50 percent of women do not have any education at all. Dropout rates for female students are higher than those of men at all levels of education. Girls are therefore made to work as housemaids until they are old enough to be married. Such attitudes should be changed. This could be done through campaigns that educate men on the importance of educating girls, and making them realise the contributions that educated women make in society.

Training institutions are very few and are failing to cope with the growing population. There is only one university, and it is heavily dominated by male students. The limited capacity of the university in that country further complicates the learning process for girls who are expected to compete with boys who have more time to study and do their homework.

In Botswana the situation has improved, but gender gaps in academic performance still remain. Female enrolment in schools is generally higher than that of males both at primary and at secondary levels.

The Girls Advisory and Support Project budgeted at US$20 000 is being implemented by the National Directorate for Primary Education. The project is aimed at motivating girls to take interest in education, and discourage them from dropping out from school in the middle of the course.

However, the situation is changing positively although more needs to be done. Enrolments for female students have improved but dropout rates are still high.

While commendable efforts are being made in the whole region to reduce illiteracy among girls and women not much has been done to cater for the disabled girls.

In Botswana for instance, the disabled girl-child has not benefited much from the programmes that have so far been put in place to address disparities in education. Her situation is made worse by the fact that special schools to cater for the disabled children are hard to come by in Botswana.

Out of the estimated over 5,000 disabled children in Botswana, one third have never attended school, 80 percent attended school for a very short period and half are out of school. There are no government-run special schools for the disabled.

The NGOs that are running special schools for the disabled children often do not receive financial assistance from the government.

The situation is equally difficult in Namibia where all the efforts seem to have been centred on the girl, without any special focus on the disabled children. The country has few special schools to cater for children with disabilities and nothing seems to be in progress to address the shortage.

More than 50 percent of disabled children above the age of six have never attended school of any form. This is mainly due to the scarcity of schools for the disabled children. Windhoek, the capital city has only three special schools to cater for children with disabilities.

In Mozambique, the Ministry of Education has placed great importance on expanding educational opportunities for children with special needs. Children with disabilities similarly find their opportunities to learn limited, both because their access to schools is restricted and because programmes and services responsive to their special needs are not widely available. At present there are only four schools for children with special needs, which together serve not more than 300 students.

In Zimbabwe special education is the primary responsibility of the Ministry of Education where it is administered as a separate department, Special Education Section.

Many children with special educational needs begin their school career later than their peers. This is due to late identification of development problems/impairment or parents' ignorance of educational opportunities for disabled children.

The disabled girl-child needs special attention as she is in a more difficult situation than able- bodied girls. She suffers two kinds of discrimination -- the one she shares with all other girls because of her sex and discrimination because of disability.

Despite the fact that the disabled girl-child deserves special attention, no country in the SADC has given the matter specific attention. Very little has been done to address the education needs of the disabled girl-child.

It is evident in the whole SADC region that the education system is generally still biased against girls and dropout rates are still high though efforts have been made to redress the situation. This is a challenge, considering that SADC countries made a commitment to achieve the global goal of Education For All by The Year 2000.

• Introduction to the SADC Gender Monitor
• Global, Regional and National Commitments
• SADC Countries' National Priority Areas of Concern