Narrowing Education's Gender Gap

Her childhood lost to Liberia's civil war, Margaret, 24, now hopes to attend the newly built school in her village. Photo: Dan Sadowsky/Mercy Corps

Karto, Liberia — The sturdy new schoolhouse in this rural farming village of 2,000 represents a new hope — especially for young women like Margaret. Currently, she is one of 90 million girls around the world who don't go to school.

Of the many sobering global statistics about gender inequality, the disparity in education — and in many places, the utter lack of it — is perhaps the most detrimental to third-world development.

Seventy percent of the 130 million school-age children not in school are female. Education, especially for women, long has been recognized as essential to reducing poverty and achieving progress on a broad range of social and economic indicators. It can fuel a virtuous cycle of empowerment and development, since educated women are more likely to send their own children to school and to raise healthy families.

Narrowing the gender gap in education and ensuring free primary schooling for all are two of the eight goals enshrined in the UN Millennium Declaration, the roadmap to global development signed by 189 nations in 2000. Those goals are designed to improve the futures of young people like Margaret.

Quiet and demure when I met her, Margaret is active in the village's youth activities. She is 24, but, like so many of her peers, missed out on primary schooling because of her family's poverty — public education isn't free in Liberia — and the country's civil war, which scattered families and shuttered schools for most of the period between 1990 and 2003.

Women in this impoverished nation of three million inhabitants carry tremendous burdens: they rear the children, care for elderly and infirm family members, tend house, gather fuel, water and food, and cook the meals. In many cases, they also provide for their families financially, farming plots of vegetables, making charcoal, selling fruit along the road — whatever is needed to feed and clothe their families.

But, now ruled by Africa's first-ever elected female president, the women who populate the hundreds of thatched-roof villages in Liberia's hinterlands are making gains. In communities where Mercy Corps is working, girls are going to school, adolescents are learning a trade and women are assuming formal roles in community decision-making bodies.

Mercy Corps came to Margaret's village two years ago with an offer to help organize the village and help realize some of its aspirations. Soon, a community development council was elected to act as the village's governing body. Made up of men and women, elders and youth, the committee decided that its top priority was to replace its dilapidated school, a barn-like structure made of crumbling mud bricks and a leaky palm-frond roof.

The community asked Mercy Corps to help them build a new school. "For the past 14 years of war, half of our youth was left behind," one of the committee members explained. "We didn't want any more youth lives wasted."

Others explained their decision by praising what education could do for their children. After getting a primary education here, "they can go out and learn whatever professions they want to learn," one said, "and then come back and help develop the village."

The recently completed school, funded by the World Bank, currently enrolls 123 students who pay a modest tuition of 200 Liberian dollars (US$4) to cover the salaries of two government-employed teachers. It is a handsome, 4,000-square-foot building, featuring a red-brick base and a corrugated-zinc roof, six classrooms, a kindergarten annex, a kitchen, four latrines and a water pump.

Margaret, who farms cassava root and greens, longs to spend her days inside the building. She's already learned how to write her name through a Mercy Corps youth curriculum that covers lifeskills such as basic literacy and numeracy, self-respect, human rights and HIV/AIDS. But she wants to learn more, and hopes to enroll in school - she'd be in second or third grade - next term.

"Sometimes people take advantage of you if you can't read or write," Margaret explains, like when she's at the hospital or the store. "I want to go to school to help myself and my parents."

And her country, for that matter. For in Liberia and elsewhere, giving women the opportunity to get an education may be the only sure way to secure a better life for all.