Paper short abstract:

High quality data are crucial to achieving SDG4 on education. Data on gender and education raises issues of rights, needs and capabilities. The paper reports on initiatives in Indonesia and Kenya using the Accountability for Gender Equality in Education (AGEE) Framework and associated critical processes of participatory reflection to identify data gaps on gender equality in and through education.

Paper long abstract:

High quality data are crucial to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 on inclusive quality education and lifelong learning. This is particularly imperative to understand inequalities and leave no one behind. Thinking about gender and education raises issues associated with rights, needs and capabilities. Although sex-disaggregated data have long been collected through official statistics, such as administrative data on schools or examination results, and is a key feature of household surveys considering levels of poverty or learning, the inequalities associated with gender cannot be simply understood by gender disparities.

Through its mandate to monitor SDG 4, UNESCO has supported countries to assemble and use high quality data on gender equality in and through education and highlighted areas where wider conceptualisations and more inclusive processes are needed. A number of UNESCO resources have considerably widened the scope of how to think about gender data in relation to education. These include: the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Reports, published since 2002, and GEM gender reports, published since 2012, databases including the World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE), Scoping Progress in Education (SCOPE), and Profiles Enhancing Education Reviews (PEER) Visualizing Indicators of Education for the World (VIEW) which enable a review of key trends with an equity and gender lens. This range of data can be used by all stakeholders to think about trends in relation to data on gender and education, and what to consider in learning from past crises and preparing for those in the future.

The Transforming Education Summit Call to Action on Gender Equality and Girls’ and Women’s Empowerment in and through Education (2002) called for “data systems to better collect and understand the intersections between gender and other intersecting characteristics such as minority status or disability that intersect and lead to marginalization, inequality and learning poverty, and use data to take targeted action to leave no one behind.” To track action in this and related areas, UNESCO and UNICEF have established a multistakeholder Global Platform and a Global Accountability Dashboard to monitor government responses – with the aim to stimulate action and accountability. Yet there is need to fill data gaps and improve quality at country-level, and to begin reflection on how experiences of crisis can be used to identify additional data needed to plan to prevent deepening inequalities.

This paper reports on initiatives in Indonesia and Kenya using the Accountability for Gender Equality in Education (AGEE) Framework (www.gendereddata.org), and its associated critical processes of participatory reflection, to identify data gaps on gender equality in and through education. The AGEE Framework, which draws on the Capability Approach and ideas about human development and participation, provides a distinctive perspective to understand gender equality in education and through education and to support for girls’ needs, rights and capabilities.

The paper considers for each country some of the reasons for missing data at the national-level, challenges with approaches to planning for the collection and analysis of new data, and plans to address this. The paper draws on country-level collaborations geared to cross-sectoral dialogue and reflection amongst stakeholders from key government ministries and civil society. Working with women’s rights and gender equality activists in communities, AGEE dashboards facilitate inclusive policy dialogue associated with particular forms of marginalisation. In reflecting on the reasons for missing data in each country, solutions on the way forward will be presented.

This paper will expand understanding of approaches to collect and use data that spotlight how and why particular girls and boys remain marginalised, excluded and subject to discrimination. These insights will contribute to work to overcome persistent intersectional inequalities in and through education and help build a richer community of practice to scale up action aimed at achieving the SDG 4 goals and targets and supporting discussions regarding a post SDG framework.