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Mothers and their daughters’ education: a comparison of global and local aspirations
Abstract
Through a comparative analysis of policy texts from UN organisations and scholarly work since the 1990s this paper examines how mothers are portrayed in simplistic terms, as educated thus beneficial for their daughters’ schooling, or deprived of education causing detriment to their daughters’ future prospects. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with mothers from rural Pakistan, these global comparisons are brought into conversation with local narratives showing how mothers’ aspirations facilitate daughters’ educational opportunities. It is argued that mothers’ subjectivities have a potential to inform global policy discourses for investigating the aspirational and transformational potential of mothers in contexts of material and social constraint. The paper proposes an informed approach to educational research and policy making which seeks to understand the processes surrounding mothers’ support for their daughters’ education.
... Besides, empowering mothers with cultural skills allows mothers to navigate cultural identity, societal integration, and digital media integration [39]. We can conclude that empowering mothers with cultural skills in the digital age is crucial, where mothers the role models within families and society, influencing future generations through their ambition, drive, and focus on education [40]. ...
Mothers have embraced and utilized digital access for nurturing and personal use to enhance their roles while balancing newfound demands. The Internet has provided mothers access to information on various topics, including pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care. Social media tools and platforms have also provided mothers with a space to connect with other mothers, share experiences, and seek support. This scoping review aims to identify the relationship of the focus skills among mothers in utilizing digital access. Four databases, including Scopus, web of science (WOS), education resources information centre (ERIC), and ScienceDirect, were used in this research, which found 36 articles for eligibility. Only 16 articles are eligible for analysis and reference after the exclusion and inclusion process for data collection. Based on the 16 publications examining mothers’ use of internet access, four essential skills have been identified. These included social, digital, cultural, and problem-solving skills and are acknowledged as being related to digital access mothering. The findings show these skills are offered to mothers through digital access, fostering diverse skill sets, contributing to their empowerment, and supporting sustainable development goal 5: gender equality, aiming to enhance women’s roles and ensure equal opportunities through digital inclusion.
... Government and Public Data: Data from UK government sources, such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which provide information on socioeconomic conditions, poverty levels, unemployment rates, and the economic status of Muslim communities (Husain, 2022;Khalid, 2023). ...
This study explores the role of Zakat in the socio-economic empowerment of Muslim communities in the UK. Using a descriptive research design based on secondary data from Zakat organizations, government statistics, and academic studies, the research assesses Zakat practices, identifies challenges, and proposes strategies for improvement. Key findings reveal that Zakat provides critical financial relief, with 70% of recipients achieving stability within six months. Additionally, Zakat-funded education and vocational training programs have reduced unemployment rates by 8% from 2018 to 2023. However, gaps remain in achieving long-term economic self-sufficiency due to a focus on short-term aid. Challenges include high administrative costs (20–25% of funds) and unequal distribution, particularly in rural areas. The study emphasizes the potential of Zakat as a tool for poverty alleviation and sustainable development when coupled with improved governance, strategic allocation, and technology integration. By framing the findings within the principles of Maqasid al-Shariah, the research highlights how Zakat aligns with broader goals of justice and equity in Islamic social finance. The study contributes to the growing discourse on Zakat’s modern applications and offers practical recommendations to enhance its impact on poverty reduction and socio-economic empowerment.
... Numerous studies (e.g. Desforges, 2003;Khalid, 2023) have demonstrated how parental involvement (especially mothers' aspirations) impacts children's education. Many focus on mothers' efforts and anxiety about rearing children and engaging in their education, especially in East Asian societies like China (Ma & Wright, 2021;Yang, 2018). ...
This study explores how and why mothers used social media to promote education policy agenda-setting in China, which discourages civic engagement and adopts strict media regulation. Data were drawn from mothers’ social media platforms, government documents and media reports. This article reveals that the mothers could promote outside-initiative agenda-setting by strategically positioning themselves and navigating diverse actors. It shows that social media and the mothers’ backgrounds, knowledge and competencies contextualize and facilitate policy agenda-setting. The study contributes to research on policy agenda-setting.
... Further, our study illuminated the pivotal role of participant's mothers as a driving force for education and work, a role also noted globally, especially in lower socioeconomic countries where mothers push their daughters to achieve goals that they could not acquire themselves. 22 The role that mentors play as role models and higher advocates for junior women in medicine cannot be emphasised enough. 23 Greater representation of women, especially those who are trying to balance motherhood with studies and work, seem to be highly motivational. ...
Objective
Our study aimed to explore the experience of attaining higher education among women in medicine at the largest national hospital in Fiji, focusing on barriers and enablers to completing training, and to explore women's perception of gender‐based discrimination in the world of medicine. Findings subsequently informed evidence‐based recommendations on enablers and barriers at the hospital and medical university to improve experiences of women in medicine.
Methods
We conducted a mixed‐method study, emphasising the phenomenological qualitative component. All women doctors working at the national hospital were invited to complete a survey, and those with past or present engagement in postgraduate specialty medical training participated in semi‐structured interviews. Survey data were analysed using descriptive statistics. Interviews were transcribed, coded then organised using thematic analysis. Reflexivity and triangulation were employed at all levels of the research to ensure rigour.
Results
Four distinct themes were found to illuminate women's enablers and barriers. Participants described work‐life stress, absence of advocacy, coercion‐control‐power and inflexible systems as barriers. For enablers, they described inner strength, social circles, work culture and mentors/role models/advocates. Participants had mixed perspectives on gender‐based discrimination in the workplace, with unanimity in calling for protected maternity leave entitlements.
Conclusions
Challenges only become true barriers when enablers are eclipsed by them. Institutional support helps mitigate these barriers especially for those women who lack social support. Gender based discrimination continues in the Pacific, commonly covertly, especially in terms of policy gaps regarding maternity leave during training.
... Since the 1990s, gender has been a focus of global and local education policy reform (Khalid, 2023). Unterhalter (2007; has identified three overlapping streams of gender equality in education. ...
This article presents a broad historical review of the European Union (EU)’s policies on gender equality in education. The review shows that the EU’s policies on gender equality in education have gone through four stages: germination, foundation, formation and deepening. Though the EU has sought to call for greater gender equality in education and made some progress and achievements, gender equality in education is still an unfinished business because its success largely depends on enforcement, regulation and a gender equality culture in society. In reality, the EU, as a supranational organization, does not have enough enforcement power or regulation of its policies, and the patriarchal culture still exists and has a hidden legitimacy in society.
The development of information and communication technology is a challenge for the millennial generation in terms of gender (men and women). The trend of gender balance and inequality has become an interesting issue in the era of globalization and industry 4.0 related to the gender intelligence of the millennial generation, which is formed through the role of mothers in the family. The aim of the research is to determine the relationship between the millennial generation’s perceptions of gender intelligence (men and/or women), which is moderated by the role of the mother. This research used purposive random sampling from the millennial generation in North Jakarta aged 17–34 years. The research sample consisted of 157 respondents with a Likert scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), which was distributed via Google Form. The data were processed using SPSS 24. The research results show that perceptions influence the gender intelligence of the millennial generation positively and significantly. The results of these two studies prove that the mother’s role is able to positively moderate and significantly strengthen the influence of perceptions influencing the gender intelligence of the millennial generation.
Juxtaposed against literature that views mothers’ role for their daughters’ education as a human capital this paper reimagines their role by foregrounding Pakistani mothers’ agency in contexts with limited opportunities. This is achieved by theorising negative capability (NC) as an analytical framework drawing on available theorisations of the concept and define it as an agentive passive refusal to be intellectually paralysed by disadvantage. We demonstrate how the concept can be applied for empirical analysis. The paper takes an ethical stance that researchers should acknowledge that regardless of contextual difficulties people’s agentive and intellectual faculties remain intact. Structural inequalities need to be challenged but their agentive potential also recognised. With a firm commitment that opportunities need to be made equal this paper builds on the second point to argue that even in the face of extreme disadvantage mothers’ intellectual capacities to progress towards goals remain functional. We challenge the objectification of the marginalised and propose an analytical approach to understand difficulties faced as well as agency exercised by mothers facing socio-economic constraints. This work has implications for the capability approach that falls short of addressing issues of power, and policy that fails to understand the context.
There has been a growing tendency to use humanistic and utopian goals in the naming and framing of education policies. The case of the Happiness Education Policy (HEP) in South Korea is illustrative and demonstrates the potential of such framing, combined with references to external authorities, to neutralise domestic opposition and generate support from diverse national stakeholders. The HEP focuses on nurturing ‘happy human capital’ for the future through education initiatives such as the Free Semester/Year Initiative, character education, STEAM-based curriculum, and software education. Through an analysis of a corpus of policy documents and press releases, this article demonstrates how happiness, as a floating signifier, has been redefined in ways that align and support the different sociotechnical imaginaries envisioned by political regimes over the past decade which depart from its humanistic focus.
Since 2000, girls’ education has been an increasingly high-profile concern in international development policy. At the same time, there has been a trend towards the greater production and reliance on quantitative data, indicators and targets in national and international education policy. Scholars have raised concerns about the rise of ‘performance-based’ approaches to accountability in education, and potential counterproductive effects of this for social justice and equality. However, few studies have explored how this trend plays out in practice within international organisations, particularly in relation to the heightened focus on girls’ education. This paper explores the implications of the increasing reliance on quantitative measures for policy actors and draws on a set of interviews with key stakeholders working in organisations concerned with gender and education to explore their divergent understandings of accountability processes. The paper concludes by reflecting on the prospects for a transformative approach to measuring gender equality and girls’ education.
Juxtaposed against literature that views mothers’ role for their daughters’ education as a human capital this paper reimagines their role by foregrounding Pakistani mothers’ agency in contexts with limited opportunities. This is achieved by theorising negative capability (NC) as an analytical framework drawing on available theorisations of the concept and define it as an agentive passive refusal to be intellectually paralysed by disadvantage. We demonstrate how the concept can be applied for empirical analysis. The paper takes an ethical stance that researchers should acknowledge that regardless of contextual difficulties people’s agentive and intellectual faculties remain intact. Structural inequalities need to be challenged but their agentive potential also recognised. With a firm commitment that opportunities need to be made equal this paper builds on the second point to argue that even in the face of extreme disadvantage mothers’ intellectual capacities to progress towards goals remain functional. We challenge the objectification of the marginalised and propose an analytical approach to understand difficulties faced as well as agency exercised by mothers facing socio-economic constraints. This work has implications for the capability approach that falls short of addressing issues of power, and policy that fails to understand the context.
Research shows that in Pakistan, daughters of educated mothers are likely to be enrolled in school, thus proposing a decontextualised relationship between mothers and their daughters’ education. This article draws on interview data to narratively analyse the situated experiences of Pakistani mothers for supporting their daughters’ education. When mothers’ life stories are analysed, a lifelong strategy of silences is revealed. Through the construct of silences, I challenge myself and other educational researchers to ‘unlearn’ the hegemonic epistemic cues that bind us to certain ways of knowing instead develop a critical openness to the perspectives of mothers and become ‘hearers’. This article situates itself within the debates on epistemic justice – proposing a practice of critical ‘hearing’ to understand the lifelong situated experiences of mothers in Pakistan.
In 2010, a whole-system reform was designed and launched in the Punjab province of Pakistan called the Punjab Schools Reform Roadmap (PSRR). This reform was a direct response to the challenges of education in the province at the time, which included scale, capacity to deliver, and political will. Further, 2010 was a time at which the political and administrative landscape of Pakistan was changing: the right to education act had just been formalized and education was simultaneously devolved from a federal matter to a provincial one.
This chapter studies the outcomes of the PSRR a decade after its implementation with an emphasis on three dimensions of the reform: management capacity, teacher capacity and monitoring & information systems. Specifically, we discuss the above with reference to increasing access to and quality of education in the province while also analyzing the outcomes and sustainability of the reform 10 years from its inception.
In Georgia, after 26 years of independence social background is still hard. Unemployment and percentage share of the people living under the poverty threshold are high. Pension and social aids are low. Social pension system in force, so called “Pay-as-you-go” (Women from 60 and man from 65) considers for all categories 180 GEL in a month that is more a social aid than a pension.
Ministry of economy and sustainable development, Ministry of finances and national bank of Georgia has prepared is in force from the 1st January of 2019 the model of pension reform, which implies creating the system of accumulative pension.
Pension system has two main goals: decreasing the poverty level of old people and satisfying the needs necessary for life by preserving at least half of the condition existed before the pension. Achieving the first goal, as a rule, government attempts by pension and for the second or for preserving higher living condition, so called accumulative pension is applied.
The bill “On the Accumulative Pension” does not imply abolishing existing basic pension. It will be attached to living wage, will be indexed according to the growth tendency of inflation and average salary.
Suggested pension system considers investing accumulated money; as a result, pensioner will receive investment income as well.
At first sight, denoted model is far fairer, because it considers individual factors – mite that the person has contributed to social life and economic development of the country. What is main thing here is that, in this case, old age life of the person is less dependent on the viewpoint and the estimation of one concrete government regarding the quantity of the pension. However, it is not an ideal one.
In the paper there is analyzed the negative sides of the reform, risks, presumable results.
There appears to be a globally unifying discourse that suggests Muslim communities are not supportive of girls’ education. This paper aims to destabilize such a discourse by inserting the narratives of Muslim parents pursuing girls’ education in Assam’s Nagaon district. By paying attention to the concepts of bhal suwali (good girlhood) and bhal ghor (good family) articulated by parents in my study, this paper connects the performances of certain types of gender practices with the pursuit of class aspirations. It shows that good girlhood works as symbolic capital that helps Muslim parents to culturally authorize their daughters as legitimate actors in the field of education, while legitimizing themselves as good family. This paper draws attention to three practices of respectable femininity through which good girlhoods are enacted in the field of education, namely: negotiating poverty respectably, prioritizing gendered discipline, and merging career aspirations with marital prospects.
This open access book analyses the interplay of sustainable development and human rights from different perspectives including fight against poverty, health, gender equality, working conditions, climate change and the role of private actors. Each aspect is addressed from a more human rights-focused angle and a development-policy angle. This allows comparisons between the different approaches but also seeks to close gaps which would remain if only one perspective would be at the center of the discussions.
Specifically, the book shows the strong connections between human rights and the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015. Already the preamble of this document explicitly states that “the 17 Sustainable Development Goals ... seek to realise the human rights of all”. Moreover, several goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda correspond to already existing individual human rights obligations. The contributions of this volume therefore also address how the implementation of human rights and SDGs can reinforce each other, but also point to critical shortcomings of the different approaches.
Kishwar Naheed (b. 1940) is one of Pakistan’s leading poets, a feminist, and activist in the women’s movement. Below is her well-known poem, translated from the original in Urdu.
This article focuses on contemporary interpretive knowledge projects that engage critically with Islamic religious sciences, and which are driven by the question of gender justice. These projects, which have been loosely termed as Islamic Feminism, are undertaken by Muslim women scholars from different countries who are committed to their religious faith and who are working towards the production of alternative, gender-sensitive religious knowledge. The paper has three aims: 1) to review the contestations about the definition, categorization, goals, and significance of what has been termed Islamic feminism, 2) to provide an alternative description of these knowledge projects and identify some hermeneutical characteristics that link them and which perhaps could be the basis for delineating them as a new field of knowledge, 3) to map out the trajectory of building new religion-based feminist knowledge in Egypt, shedding light on light on current knowledge projects that can be labelled as Islamic feminism.
How can scholars trace the global production and circulation of educational policies? The vertical case study incorporates three elements: “vertical” attention across micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, or scales; a “horizontal” comparison of how policies unfold in distinct locations; and a “transversal,” processual analysis of the creative appropriation of educational policies across time. The second half of the article draws upon an ethnographic study of learner-centered pedagogy in Tanzania to exemplify the vertical case study approach.
Agriculture is the most important sector of Pakistan’s economy. It provides food and fibre, source of scarce foreign exchange earning and a market for industrial goods. In 1960s various policy measures were taken for Agriculture development. The research tries to examine various issues related to this sector. Focus of the research, however, is to analyze the role of Green Revolution in the development process of Pakistan and its short and long term impact on the economy. The paper analyzes weaknesses due to which the Green Revolution remained a shortterm phenomena. The contributing factors of Green Revolution and other supporting institutions are also discussed. The findings of this study show that the Green Revolution increased agriculture production and employment level. It also had impact on distribution of income and the social and political environment in the country. However, there were certain policy gaps due to which the impact of Green Revolution remained a short-term phenomena.
This paper aimed to look at past educational developments in Pakistan through case study and its analysis with the present world. It primarily addressed the causes of illiteracy in Pakistan, and overcame the flaws of earlier works. Pakistani government claims that they have accomplished significantly in the educational development. Pakistani law requests government to provide free basic education system to every citizen of Pakistan. However, the enrollment rate has remained below 60%. Similarly, literacy rate has also remained below 60%. Therefore, the government and other stakeholders in education sector could not perform well enough to provide the impressive results so far.
This article argues that the Green Revolution in Pakistan has failed to live up to its promise of ending hunger, unemployment and poverty. An analysis of the time series data of the past four decades points to the worsening of inequalities in income and asset distribution, contributing to the poverty of one in every three Pakistanis [World Bank, 2002, 1992]. The article measures the distributional impact of the Green Revolution in three allied areas of tenurial security, rural employment and rural household income, which tended to decline correspondingly, worsening income and asset distribution. Based on this evidence, this article makes a case for equitable land distribution in rural Pakistan, where half of the population is landless [World Bank, 2002].
This article, based on a desk review of the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) and qualitative micro studies in six states - Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana and Tamil Nadu - attempts to capture the impact of primary education programmes on the ground. Introducing the emergent concept of 'hierarchies of access' to describe the new segregation occurring in primary education, the article focuses on the micro studies documenting the tangible and intangible dimensions of gender and social equity that frame the implementation of DPEP at the village and panchayat level. On the basis of the findings of the desk review and the micro studies, the authors discuss ways to reverse the trend of segregation so as to make universal primary education a substantive reality.
Evidence across regions in the world reveals patterns in school enrollment ratios and literacy that are divided along gender lines. In the developing world, apart from most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, enrollment ratios of girls lag behind those for boys at all levels of education. Worldwide literacy rates for adult men far exceed those for women. While educational progress has been enjoyed by both sexes, these advances have failed to eradicate the gender gap. Education enhances labor market productivity and income growth for all, yet educating women has beneficial effects on social well-being not always measured by the market. Rising levels of education improve women's productivity in the home which in turn can increase family health, child survival, and the investment in children's human capital. The social benefits from women's education range from fostering economic growth to extending the average life expectancy in the population, to improving the functioning of political processes. This paper reviews recent empirical research that analyzes the benefits of women's education, describes the importance of women's education for country-level measures of economic development, and examines the implications of a gender gap in education for aggregate social well-being.
Literature on gendered violence in education suggests that the perspectives of those most affected must inform knowledge generation and interventions. However, research with these populations is fraught with methodological and ethical challenges. This article reflects on photovoice as a method which privileges participants' perspectives. Drawing on a study of gendered violence on a university campus in South Africa, findings suggest gendered violence on campus is fuelled by and intersects with gender inequalities associated with space, social class, and gender identity. Gender violence limits the victim's ability to respond or seek health and justice services, with potentially dire consequences for continued participation and success in education. The article illustrates how photovoice enabled participants to identify critical issues and imagine strategies for change. This has implications for facilitating research that draws insights from marginal groups, such as girls and young women, enabling their activism in highlighting and addressing the challenges they encounter.
Over three decades ago, international donors declared that there was a learning crisis in developing countries. In the years since, large investments have been made towards education, yet there has been an apparent relative lack of progress in student learning. This book unpicks this disparity, and explores the implications of evidence-based donor programming for quality education. It undertakes an in-depth analysis of the interventions financed by the main donors in primary education, such as infrastructure development, provision of instructional material, teacher training and community mobilization, and argues that the research undertaken during this period was unable to provide answers. The author outlines an alternative model for evidence generation that can assist in the design of relevant and targeted interventions for learning, to ultimately inform and improve future education programmes. Timely and radical, this book is essential reading for researchers and students in the fields of education research and education reform.
Disasters are experienced by, and responded to, differently based on the gender of those experiencing these. The responsibilities of women, particularly mothers, are amplified during times of pressure. This study investigated the experiences of teaching-mothers in Pakistan during the Covid-19 pandemic to understand the challenges they faced as professionals and as mothers. The data were collected through in-depth interviews of 24 teaching-mothers. The study participants were identified through the snowball sampling technique. The data were collected until the point of data saturation and analysed through. The analysis indicates that teaching-mothers in Pakistan faced issues in terms of maintaining their work-life balance, managing space and resources for online teaching, and learning a new set of skills in order to teach online. These multiple challenges affected their mental health. The findings indicate a sharp division of gendered roles in Pakistan and their negative impact on the mental health of women during Covid-19. The study suggests devising organizational policies to support teaching-mothers generally and especially during crises.
Girls’ access to education in Pakistan is an ongoing challenge, with a greater percentage of girls currently not attending school than boys (ASER Pakistan, 2019b). Existing research, which is primarily quantitative, has highlighted the positive influence of mothers on their daughters’ school enrolment (Faize and Dhar, 2011; Khan and Ali, 2005). These findings, first, reveal the significant role mothers play in their daughters’ education. Second, they highlight the need to develop a deeper understanding about the underlying processes through which mothers are able to play this role. To achieve an in-depth understanding of these processes a qualitative perspective has been adopted drawing on Sen (1993, 1999) and Nussbaum’s (2001, 2011 a & b) notions of capability and agency. Capability in the focal context is defined as mothers’ freedom to acquire educational opportunities for their daughters, and agency as their capacity towards achieving these goals. These theoretical concepts are operationalised by evaluating mothers’ aspirations regarding their ambitions for their daughters’ education, and actions to demonstrate their capacity to fulfil these. By exploring mothers’ aspirations and their actions in support of their daughters, it can be elicited whether they have the capability (freedom to achieve) and agency (the capacity for action) to shape their education. By so doing, the conditions that enable mothers to help their daughters to pursue education effectively can be uncovered. Based on the abovementioned theoretical concepts, I developed and conducted semi-structured interviews with mothers and their family members from thirty households in three villages of rural Punjab, Pakistan. After conducting thematic and narrative analysis of the data, I discovered that mothers who demonstrated the capability and agency in supporting their daughters’ education are enabled to do so in two ways. Firstly, they utilise silences and voice (in a figurative sense) to realise their aims. That is, the narratives of some mothers show how silences and voice are strategically used to create a pathway towards their daughters’ education in a historically complex and gendered environment. Secondly, in order to stay focused on their goals, mothers develop an ability to shield themselves from the frustrations that accompany disadvantage, and consistently pursue their goals until they are successful. I also demonstrate that this shielding ability aligns with one of Unterhalter’s (2017 and 2018) theorisations, that of negative capability. In sum, the analysis of mothers’ aspirations and their actions reveals how some are able to gain the capability and agency to achieve their goals by using ‘silences and their voice’ as a resource, and through developing an ability to remain unaffected by disadvantageous conditions to pursue their goals consistently. In this thesis, the importance of mothers’ efforts for their daughters’ education from the perspective of their own attempts to support it is investigated. The outcomes reveal the unconventional ways in which mothers in the focal context gained capability and agency through silences and negative capability, thereby contributing to the emerging literature on the multiple methods women use to exercise agency.
Evidence-based policymaking (EBP) contends that policy decisions are successful when informed by evidence. However, where policy problems are “wicked” (systemic, ambiguous, complex, and conflictual), politics trumps evidence and solutions are never first best or permanent. Applying an EBP approach to solving wicked problems (WPs) therefore appears to be a daunting, impossible task. Despite the difficulties, we contend that blending insights from the EBP and WP literatures can provide actionable and practical policy advice to governments and MNEs for dealing with the WPs of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We support our thesis with a case study applying EBP to the WP of SDG 5 Gender Equality. We compare the statistical evidence from gender inequality indexes to SDG 5’s targets and indicators. We provide five insights from the EBP and WP literatures into why and how good evidence is necessary but not sufficient for progress on SDG 5. Building on these insights, we recommend that governments adopt an EBP approach employing public–private partnerships to address SDG 5. We also recommend that MNE executives use our new SDG Materiality Matrix, designed on EBP principles, to build SDG 5 into their global corporate social responsibility strategies.
Gene B. Sperling and Rebecca Winthrop, What Works in Girls’ Education: Evidence for the World’s Best Investment. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2016, 316 pp., US$22.00, ISBN: 978-081572860-3.
We analyze educational attainment over three generations in rural Punjab, Pakistan, to determine if the fruits of post-independence development have translated into comparable rates of educational and social opportunities for all strata in the village economy. We show that the differences in class status institutionalized at the time of colonial village settlement lead to a sustained divergence in the rate of intergenerational educational mobility, with limited mobility for nonproprietary and marginalized groups compared to proprietary groups. Inter-class differences in the rate of mobility are higher in proprietary landed estates where the colonial state had concentrated land rights and governance in the hands of landowners compared to crown estates that had a more egalitarian arrangement of land rights and governance. We find that the divergence in inter-class mobility is worrying, so much so that the current generation of marginalized households appears to have fallen a generation behind in terms of educational attainment, even though it resides in the same villages as the proprietary households.
Despite pervasive forms of racism on a global scale, the field of education and international development continues to fail to substantively engage with the production and effects of racial domination across its domains of research, policy and practice. Considerations of racism remain silent, or indeed, are erased, within teaching and research, often in favour of colour-blind and technocratic approaches to ‘development’. This not only ignores the sector’s historical links to systems of racial domination, but also the current ways in which the field is implicated in producing unequal outcomes along racial lines. The authors present a re-reading of the ‘global learning crisis’ – as the dominant discourse of contemporary educational development – to demonstrate how the framing of the ‘crisis’ and the responses it engenders and legitimises operate as a ‘racial project’. The paper offers theoretical and methodological resources with which to interrogate the field’s entanglements in systems of racial domination and challenge its erasures of racism.
Current literature on parent aspirations has not empirically explored the factors that may lead to differences in aspirations among similar types of parents. Additionally, little is known about the gendered nature of these differences. In this study, we seek to understand factors shaping mothers’ aspirations in regards to education, marriage, and careers of their daughters and sons, and to explore why differences may be found for mothers from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Using a case study approach, we conduct in-depth interviews with 28 mothers in the Indian town of Forbesganj, Bihar. We use a conceptual framework based on the capabilities approach, and draw on theories of social learning, or learning from one’s peers, through which to understand differences in aspirations. Findings suggest that mothers desire lives for their children that are different from their own, and that conceptions of such lives are influenced by exposure to role models in their communities.
The chance of a secondary education for young girls who might have otherwise been among many out-of-school youth cultivates aspirations for their future. While aspirations to be educated expand the possibilities of opportunities, they also go unfulfilled in an environment of low achievement rates, high unemployment and constraining gender norms that can leave many secondary graduates disempowered. This study examines how aspirations, agency and future well-being are linked through 4 years of longitudinal data from interviews with girls in a technical and vocational school in rural Tanzania. Conceptually, the paper puts forward a framework within a capability approach to consider how aspirations and agency are oriented toward valued well-being. It also draws inspiration from Appadurai’s use of aspirations as a cultural concept that is future and change oriented and socially embedded. Finally, the body of scholarship that frames Bourdieu’s notion of agency as productive is drawn upon to illuminate whether and how girls are agentic in acting toward their aspirations. Bringing these conceptualizations together, the empirical analysis shows how aspirations and agency are dialectically related and socially situated, allowing for openings in agency to occur even when faced with gendered constraints to aspirations.
In post-Jomtien phase, community participation in school education management has appeared as one of the most prominent features in all educational development programmes at global level. In line with this trend, India has also placed a significant focus on local communities in school management through various programmes such as LokJumbish, District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) and SarvaShikshaAbhiyaan, etc. All these programmes have been implemented with active involvement and financial assistance from international agencies such as UNICEF and World Bank. Considering community as a viable grass root institution, these community participation programmes have assigned some crucial aspects of school management, such as school mapping, social accountability, curriculum design, resources mobilization, etc. to local stakeholders. However, these programmes have failed to customize the global notion of community participation to meet the local circumstances in India. These programmes grossly undermine the local character of community served by the public schools. Since public schools in India are largely catering to the poor and marginalized section of the society, the capacity of local community vis-à-vis education remained very limited. Further, caste, gender, and social distance between teacher and stakeholders remain other unresolved issues. This paper tries to interrogate these concerns with the help of qualitative data collected through primary field survey based on semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders in a village in Haryana, India. The study argues that the current idealization of community participation can be problematic if we fail to imbibe the social and local ethos of specific region. While the role of community participation as strong viable grass root structure in effective school management remains a desirable goal for the future, given the present limitations, this is unlikely to bring about the required changes.
What role can aspirations play in small-scale human development interventions? In this paper, we contribute to answering that question with both conceptual and empirical work. Aspirations can play at least two roles in small-scale human development interventions: the capabilities-selecting role and the agency-unlocking role. While aspirations also face the challenge of adaptation to adverse circumstances and unjust social structures, we argue that this challenge can be met by embedding the formulation and expression of aspirations within a setting of public discussion and awareness-raising activities, and that adaptation can be further countered by including a commitment to action. We then report on field research done in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town, South Africa, where a group of women went through a process of voicing, examining, and then realizing their aspirations. The action research confirms our theoretical hypotheses. We also do not find any evidence of adaptation of the women's aspirations, and argue that the absence of such adaptation might be a result of active capability selection, reflection, deliberation, and the exercise of agency throughout the action research programme.
This paper argues that comparative education researchers – and education researchers generally – should pay more attention to how they conceptualize the Context(s) of schools and education systems. The construction of «the research context» is caught up in the mobilization of norms, power relations, regulative principles, technologies and strategies. Ascriptions of Context can operate as externally imposed categories that enclose, disable, and deny access to resources, opportunities, agency, and subject positions. In like measure, inscriptions of Context can sometimes enable, increase access and generally privilege particular cultural groups or particular social settings. This paper offers methodological strategies for analytically approaching the problem of Context in educational research. We propose that challenge is to understand how Context is part of an interweaving process with an object/objects within an assemblage that is ever changing. The «entangled analysis» approach (Sobe, forthcoming) advanced here attends to the constructed and constructing quality of Context. And it necessarily brings the researcher into the problematic, as she too is continually within the power/knowledge relations that make Contexts meaningful and consequential. We are argue that «contextualizing» a study should not be merely a preparatory activity but should carry across the entirety of a research project. Rather than beginning with standardized Contextual categories researchers should seek to understand the confluence of practices and objects that are coming together as well as constantly flowing and changing. (http://www.ledonline.it/ECPS-Journal/)
This paper moves beyond a conceptualization of globalization as a top-down imposition of policy directions 'from above' to focus on the active two-way dynamics between global, national and local levels of policy processes. Arguably, the particular 'case' examined here of 'quality' policy is especially appropriate as quality policy and golbalization rose to prominence in educational discourses at roughly the same time during the 1990s, suggesting that the two may be intimately interconnected. An analysis of new quality policy in Australian higher education for the 2000s is used as a vehicle to explore the dynamic reciprocity of global-national-local interactions in policy processes as revealed through empirical evidence collected during interviews with members of the national Australian Universities' Quality Agency. The concluding discussion highlights a key meta-level theme of education policy transfer between countries and the potential for global policy convergence.
This paper takes up Appadurai's suggestion that aspirations could be used as a key to unlock development for people who are economically marginalised, and that their capabilities could be increased by this approach. The notion of “aspirations” is theoretically and conceptually framed, and then Amartya Sen's use of the term capabilities as the space within which development should be assessed is explored. I subsequently describe a five-year programme in which economically marginalised women in Khayelitsha near Cape Town were assisted in voicing and attempting to realise their aspirations, while being assisted with access to some resources. Capability outcomes and constraints are described and analysed, and the question of adaptive preferences is addressed. I conclude that deliberate efforts to realise aspirations, accompanied by some facilitation, can increase capabilities, but that there are also structural constraints to capability expansion for these women that frustrate their aspiration of class mobility.
: This article reviews ten years of political and analytical discussions regarding the global development agenda on girls’ schooling and gender equity. It considers struggles over the purpose and realizability of the global agenda, and attempts to widen frameworks to go beyond gender parity in access and enrollment. Drawing on a case study of one global NGO that took a women’s rights approach, it shows how difficult it has been, even in the best kind of organizational environment, to realize a women’s rights agenda that linked education to other forms of empowerment. These difficulties are confirmed by critical reflections on participation in the conference convened to review ten years of the work of the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI). However, the conclusions, while acknowledging problems of multiple sites of action, silences, and the attenuation of transformatory agendas, nonetheless point to a richer conceptual vocabulary, a wider range of actors, and clearer strategic orientation than a decade ago.
This article focuses on girls and women perceived as deviant, difficult, or different by their communities in rural Punjab, even as it pluralizes and historicizes performances of rebellious, unruly selves. Specifically, the paper uses fieldwork interactions with girls who enjoyed wanderings in out-of-bound spaces, women who claimed a position of authority as headmistresses in village schools, and women who troubled the social imaginary through their acts of intimidation and involvement in local politics in order to examine defiance of gendered norms within the context of material, structural, and discursive realities framing individual lives. The analysis illustrates how regional differences among various parts of Punjab, and hierarchies based on class, kinship, and religion within regions, demarcated the contours, scope, and consequences of women's deviance and unruliness. While the research participants' agency remained constrained by the violence in and around their lives as well as, in certain cases, their own complicity with hierarchical relations and masculinist discourses, the accounts and performances of deviance highlight the heterogeneity of rural Punjabi women's experiences, debunking the myth of passive Muslim women, and asserting the imperative for nuanced, in-depth understandings of women's negotiations of power relations.
Private agricultural marketing systems in developing countries are sometimes considered incapable of handling rapid growth in farm produce with adequate reward to the producer. As such, they could discourage improvements in farm productivity. This paper shows that this is not necessarily so in Pakistan. During the Green Revolution of the Sixties, when, owing to cultivation of HYVs, total production of wheat and (coarse) rice increased significantly, the marketing system facilitated the farmer's search for a desired price. More traders entered the trade, and increased competition among them enabled the farmer to secure better prices for his wheat and rice crops. The trader's margin at different stages of marketing also went down during the Green Revolution period, signifying an improvement in the performance of agricultural markets.
This article analyses the green revolution from the perspective of the development and use of irrigation facilities between 1986 and 1989 in one village in West Bengal, India. It reviews recent debates concerning the green revolution in India, focusing on questions of equity and relative benefits to different sections of the rural population. It then presents evidence from a plot-to-plot survey of land farmed by the study villagers over three consecutive winter seasons, showing the ways in which socioeconomic village structures are imprinted on the surrounding landscape. The benefits of new irrigation facilities have been mediated by already existing village power structures and have flowed in a disproportionate fashion to the richer villagers. The poor have gained some absolute benefits, mainly through extra employment, but these appear quite marginal when compared to the increased revenue flows to their richer neighbours. In particular, the poorest villagers, mainly living in female-headed households, have gained least from the green revolution. The article concludes that in addition to the development of irrigation infrastructure, state intervention is necessary to support the livelihoods of the very poor if levels of poverty are to be reduced.
Quantitative impacts of the Green Revolution on food production in the Punjab of Pakistan are reviewed and the effects of different technologies on wheat yields over the past two decades decomposed. New quantitative evidence of sustainability problems in irrigated systems is presented. The yield increases expected in the post-Green Revolution period from the further spread of modern wheat varieties, a tripling of fertilizer dosage, and the release of newer higher yielding varieties have been cancelled by problems resulting from increased cropping intensity, use of poor quality groundwater, low fertilizer efficiency, and increased weed and disease losses. New directions in institutional policies and research and extension strategies are outlined to improve efficiency and sustainability in wheat production and prevent Pakistan from becoming a major food grain importer in the coming decades.
Advertisements for the international tourism market are examined using postcolonial discourse analysis to determine how tourism promoters represent New Caledonia. This article illustrates how the images used to promote New Caledonia on international markets continue to be a political statement that constructs the territory as a French enclave in the Pacific not shared with Kanak people and several minorities. The article demonstrates that these representations continue to translate unequal power relations that most of the French in New Caledonia (supported by tourism and its operators) wish to maintain with the Indigenous people. These representations also run counter to government decisions to restore the identity of Kanak people and to improve their economic well-being on the basis of tourism development.
Two copies kept. One at Call number EFA 92 (reference) and one at Call number EFA 26.1 (loanable)
This report focuses on the dimensions of poverty, and how to create a better world, free of poverty. The analysis explores the nature, and evolution of poverty, and its causes, to present a framework for action. The opportunity for expanding poor people's assets is addressed, arguing that major reductions in human deprivation are indeed possible, that economic growth, inequality, and poverty reduction, can be harnessed through economic integration, and technological change, dependent not only on the evolvement of markets, but on the choices for public action at the global, national, and local levels. Actions to facilitate empowerment include state institutional responsiveness in building social institutions which will improve well-being, and health, to allow increased income-earning potential, access to education, and eventual removal of social barriers. Security aspects are enhanced, by assessing risk management towards reducing vulnerability to economic crises, and natural disasters. The report expands on the dimensions of human deprivation, to include powerlessness and voicelessness, vulnerability and fear. International dimensions are explored, through global actions to fight poverty, analyzing global trade, capital flows, and how to reform development assistance to forge change in the livelihoods of the poor.
Previous ed. published in 1991 by the World Bank. Population and Human Resources Dept. Education and Employment Division, PHREE in his series PHREE background paper series, PHREE/91/040 Incl. index, bibliographical references
Education System Reform in Pakistan: Why, When, and How?
- M Aziz
- D E Bloom
- S Humair
- E Jimenez
- L Rosenberg
- Z Sathar