{"id":1689,"date":"2014-06-30T22:42:05","date_gmt":"2014-06-30T22:42:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/imagine1day.org\/?p=1689"},"modified":"2014-06-30T22:42:05","modified_gmt":"2014-06-30T22:42:05","slug":"ethiopias-ministry-education-tackling-gender-equality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/imagine1day.org\/ethiopias-ministry-education-tackling-gender-equality\/","title":{"rendered":"How Ethiopia\u2019s Ministry of Education is Tackling Gender Equality"},"content":{"rendered":"
As the gender advisor at the Federal Ministry of Education, Leanne Baumung is one of the architects behind this strategy.<\/p>\n
For the past nine months, Leanne and her colleagues at the Gender Directorate have been busy; they collaborated with education stakeholders across the country to develop gender-mainstreaming guidelines for education institutions and to build a 60-hour gender responsive pedagogy module for teachers. They also just put the final touches on a revised Gender Equality and Girls\u2019 Education Strategy, to be release this summer.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the big problems with tackling gender equality in education institutions is that many institutions just don\u2019t know where to begin. What the Strategy does is it lays all that out for them and helps them understand why they should be doing planning and programming for gender equality, and how they can be doing it,\u201d says Leanne.<\/p>\n
After meeting Candice Vallantin, our Communications Officer, over coffee, Leanne was inspired to join imagine1day during one of our field visits to Oromiya.<\/p>\n
In three and a half days, we visited a total of nine different communities working with imagine1day, and interviewed nearly 60 people\u2014students, parents, teachers, principals, community elders, religious leaders and district government officials\u2014to discover how they\u2019ve been mobilizing their communities to ensure that all their children are educated.<\/p>\n
At the end of the trip Candice sat down with Leanne to get her perspective on imagine1day\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
i1d: Why did you join imagine1day on this trip?<\/p>\n
LB: I hadn\u2019t yet had an opportunity in my role as Gender Advisor in the ministry to see any projects on the ground. My previous experience in Ethiopia was not focused in education, it was focused on conflict and peace building, so I didn\u2019t have a first-hand experience with the education system as it\u2019s being implemented.<\/p>\n
I love getting out of the city and into the villages. I think there is so much incredibly inspiring that happens at the local level and not a lot of that experience comes back up through the [government] channels and so I was feeling the need to get a better picture.<\/p>\n
When we had had our discussion and you had been telling me about some of the successes and some of the challenges that imagine1day had been facing through their projects, I was really struck by how much of the work that you had already been doing was aligned with the strategic directions that we had been working on in the ministry.<\/p>\n
For example: the training around sensitizing community leaders, religious leaders around the importance of girls\u2019 education, and the kind of commitments and actions that you have gotten from those trainings. That\u2019s the kind of strategy we\u2019re promoting on a national level so I was really interested to see a more nuanced picture of how that might actually work on the ground.<\/p>\n
We need to learn from these successes and we need to learn from the challenges as well. And what the community members have told us, what the PTA members, the students, the principals have told us; we need that information in the ministry. We need that in order to help us say and do the right things and to help us help everybody else, so there\u2019s a lot to be learned going both ways.<\/p>\n
i1d: What was the take away? What did you take from this experience?<\/p>\n
LB: One was the reality that it takes a community to not only build a school, but to build the success of a school and to ensure that boys and girls are receiving quality education and enjoying equal educational outcomes.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not something that the local government can do alone. It\u2019s not something that school administrators can do alone, and it\u2019s not even something that parents can do alone. It\u2019s something that really takes the equal participation of every individual in a given community.<\/p>\n
A couple other things: the importance of female teachers. It is clear that there is more work to be done in order to increase the number of female teachers and females in education leadership. This is one of the crosscutting themes in the national Strategy.<\/p>\n
It really hit home for me during the interview we had in Betele how important female teachers and women\u2019s leadership in education really are \u2013 the interview with the young girl who is very close to her female teacher, who had essentially helped convince her parents not to force her into marriage.<\/p>\n