The achievement of gender parity in education in Botswana and Namibia could mean that southern Africa is one step closer to achieving the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), intended to reduce poverty by the year 2015.

While coming up with the goals, at the United Nations Millennium Summit held in New York in September 2000, member countries promised to “ spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanising conditions of extreme poverty to which more than a billion of them are currently subjected.”

Goal Three of the MDGs seeks to “Promote gender equality and empower women,” setting targets to eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005 and at all levels by 2015.

This is a priority shared by the Education for All (EFA) programme, endorsed by 164 governments at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal in April 2000, with a target for 2005 to achieve gender parity in primary and secondary education.

The recently released UNESCO 2003/2004 Education for All Report, which has been called “the most comprehensive survey of education trends worldwide” measures efforts being made in all parts of the world to enrol more girls in school.

In line with the Beijing Platform For Action Declaration that education is a fundamental right to which both women and men should have access, countries in the region have continued to embark on various activities to achieve gender parity in education.

These activities have paid dividend as the results of the report reveal that Botswana and Namibia have achieved a perfect Gender Parity Index (GPI) score of 1. The index measures the enrolment gap between boys and girls and the score reflects an equal number of boys and girls enrolled in schools.

Botswana’s successes can be partly attributed to government’s policy of allowing pregnant girls back in schools after giving birth and also for establishing programmes to empower girls and women and to sensitise men to the importance of respect, human rights and citizenship, both of which the report cites and commends.

The government of Namibia in August 2003 proposed to embark on a national plan on the MDGs involving civil society and the private sector. The capacities of civil society have been harnessed to work with communities, delivering on the MDGs in health, education, HIV and AIDS and the environment. This collaboration, and multi-sectoral approach has the effect of reaching a wider audience more effectively.

According to the report, substantial progress towards gender parity has also been made in other countries in the region, with Swaziland and South Africa likely to achieve perfect GPI scores in the coming year. Malawi, Tanzania and Zimbabwe are also cited as having made notable progress.

Malawi, although yet to achieve a perfect GPI score, has made efforts to ease the way for more girls to attend school. The government has made secondary education free for girls and scrapped primary school fees to encourage enrolment, but hidden costs, such as those for exercise and textbooks still remain a challenge.

Reports from the director of basic education in the Ministry of Education indicate that of 1.2 million pupils who enrolled in primary schools in 1994, 900,000 children, most of them girls, had by this year dropped out, highlighting the urgency with which such issues have to be dealt with to ensure the sustainability of high enrolment levels.

The report however also highlights that girls still face discrimination in getting an education in may parts of the world even if there has been some limited progress in recent years. The report maintains that in many African countries, equal access to education between boys and girls remains a challenge.

This can been attributed to traditional and religious practices, early marriages for girls, deep-seated ideals that perpetuate inequalities between the sexes and which require special attention and commitment if they are to be removed within the time-frame envisaged by the MD and the EFA goals.

Poverty, the high cost of education on parents, the need for children to contribute to the family income through wage labour, violence and HIV and AIDS also contribute to the poor enrolment of children in schools in the region.

These reasons, and the “low levels of awareness about the Millennium Development Goals among civil society organisations in Southern Africa,” means that efforts to enrol and keep more girls in school are lagging behind in many countries.

Gender parity in education is a priority, not only because inequality is a major infringement of fundamental human rights but also because it represents an important obstacle to social and economic development.

Education helps to increase women’s productivity to a significant extent, adding to household incomes and reducing poverty. Furthermore, as female literacy rates rise, birth rates tend to fall, families are healthier and women, whether as heads of households, or as contributors to the family income have more financial and social resources.

This has the effect of freeing up more resources for the education of both male and female children, and also lessens the need for children, especially girls to work so as to supplement the family income.

Other practical measures that have been suggested and that succeeded in other countries include abolishing school fees and other charges, locating schools closer to homes, providing school meals, recruiting more female teachers, implementing a code of ethics for teachers and supplying safe water and separate toilet facilities.

The continued prevalence of educational inequality is a major infringement on the rights of women and girls. It remains a major impediment to social and economic development, and although both Botswana and Namibia have achieved it, the parity goal in education still remains elusive to a number of countries in the region and requires urgent action through a number of inter-related interventions.

Furthermore, sustaining the achievements made by Botswana and Namibia, and the strides made by other countries in the region will require governments’ continued commitment and targeted energies.

For those countries in the region still to achieve this MDG, hope should not be lost because, as Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF pointed out, “The 2005 goal is a target, not a deadline. The important thing is to get moving toward the target and to do so with a sense of purpose”. (SARDC)

Southern African News Features can be reproduced in print or broadcast with credit to SARDC and the author. SARDC has been reporting on SADC from a regional perspective since 1990.