Education for women and girls
	Emergencies are times of catastrophe for women and girls. Some 70 to 80 per cent of displaced populations are typically women and their children. Women play a key role in helping communities survive conflict and in conflict transformation. Stressed or traumatised by fear, insecurity and loss of loved ones, women and girls may also suffer trauma from the humiliating experience of gender-based violence. Many endure in silence because of cultural taboos. Girls who have been raped in front of their parents or forced into sexual slavery with militias, for example, find reintegration into society particularly difficult. During times of crisis, girls may be pressured into prostitution to raise family income, and sometimes face higher levels of malnutrition than boys, when food is scarce. Sometimes food and other relief supplies intended for women and children end up with male fighters.

 

Emergency situations create special challenges to Education for All. Insecurity may discourage parents from permitting their children, especially girls, to attend school, since protective mechanisms which work in stable situations may fail in times of emergency and disruption.There may be reversion to older traditions. Poverty often directly limits girls’ participation in schooling, due to lack of adequate clothing, for example, or of sanitary materials. UNESCO will work to include the emergency dimension in the work of the United Nations Girls Education Initiative (UNGEI). Given the strong focus on girls’ primary education by sister agencies, UNESCO raise awareness on the need to promote access to post-primary education, so that girls can be prepared, inter alia, to work as teachers. ----- Photo Credit © Roger Dominique, UNESCO Women of Mananara, Madagascar, 1989

ADEA's Working Group on Female Participation (WGFP) The statistics paint a grim portrait of the education of African women and girls. Nineteen sub-Saharan countries have a literacy rate for females below 30 percent, while corresponding rates for males are twice as high. Less than half of 6-11 year-old girls are estimated to be in school. - More info   >> Visit the website

UNICEF - Girls education in emergencies Only 1 in 10 refugee girls of school age attends school. - More info   >> Visit the website

Articles

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Women's rights in Bosnia 2003 -The International Human Rights Law Group’s Women’s Rights Advocacy Project has just published a national report on women’s human rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The following is based on the Introduction to this report. - More

Behind the Scenes, UMBC’s Anne Brodsky Tells the Story of Afghan Women 16/09/2003 -Brodsky has traveled to underground girls’ schools, orphanages and refugee camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She has risked her life both from the dangers facing a Western woman in areas controlled by fundamentalist groups, and from the ongoing fighting and unexploded landmines and ordnance that litter the countryside. - More

Rural Women and Girls in the War in Sierra Leone -Because the war has been largely restricted to rural areas, it is rural people, particularly women and girls, who have been most effected. Rural females were particularly targeted as a tactic of war. Young girls were raped or abducted and made into either combatants, "wives" or camp slaves -- sexually and physically. - More