Malala Yousefzai is the youngest Nobel laureate. Her prize is inspiring in that it recognizes her bravery and the importance of girls’ education.
However, Yousefzai’s story includes violence that cannot be understood without awareness of the politics of weak political institutions, poverty, the geopolitics of war and fragile economies. To improve girls’ access to education, politics needs to be connected to policy.
By making visible the connections between economic and political empowerment, it can be understood why the education of girls remains a problem as the millennium development goals come to an end.
Illustration: Yusha
Of all of the world’s parliaments, women represent more than 50 percent in just one of them — Rwanda. Young women are an even smaller percentage. Does it matter? It does: descriptively, substantively and symbolically.
DESCRIPTIVELY
Should representative systems — political parties, social movements and parliaments be representative? There are 1.8 billion young people in the world. Approximately half of them — 900 million — are adolescent girls and young women. So, should representative institutions at all levels not reflect this?
SUBSTANTIVELY
It is only when more young women enter political institutions that it can be assessed whether their presence translates into progressive education policies for girls.
SYMBOLICALLY
The greater the number of young women in politics, the more it can be an inspiration to others to join. However, how girls and young women are presented in public and political spheres also matters.
Making policies is not sufficient; progressive laws are also needed. In most countries, there are tensions between state laws and cultural practices, which can hinder implementation of laws and policies — laws against forced marriages, child marriage, dowry and bride price, violence against women, female genital mutilation — can be framed in ways that do not challenge gender inequality. They can also be undermined by cultural practices legitimized through parallel legal systems.
This negatively affects the education of girls and young women.
Holding politicians accountable is one way of ensuring that this does not happen, for which political participation is important. It means mobilizing in the public sphere — issues of mobility, violence against women, lack of political education and access to economic resources and cultural support are barriers to such political mobilization.
Access of young women to work and the right to education is often undermined by contexts where economic independence for women is not prioritized. The fact that care work within the home, largely done by girls and women, is not counted as work also undermines their status in society and their wellbeing. Women are then seen as recipients of welfare, rather than contributors to society.
Girls and young women can feel physically and mentally weak with long hours of unrecognized work, leading to a double burden, poor health and barriers to education.
BARRIERS TO EDUCATION
The male breadwinner model makes men feel that when jobs are scarce, men should have first access; state policies tend to reflect this. Laws are often inadequate to ensure that young women have equal opportunities for work. Economic crises result in higher rates of unemployment for young women, insecure and poor conditions of work and increased burdens of care as austerity measures hit women hard.
Class matters too — middle-class and rich women benefit from depressed wages during economic crises. Women are not a homogenous group. Moreover, focus on male employment has discriminatory effects on decisions about educating girls. If education does not translate into jobs, then why educate them at all?
So, can anything be done to challenge and remove these political and economic barriers to educational empowerment for girls and young women?
Solidarity and collective action is one way to address these critically important issues. In my work I have called this working in and against the state — participating in decisionmaking institutions, but also holding them accountable from the outside through democratic mobilization. This means that people’s ambivalence about powerful institutions can be addressed.
Collective action takes the focus away from individual strategies of advancement — the “lean in” strategy of Sheryl Sandberg that places the burden of change on individual women rather than on systemic analysis.
Does the individual matter? Of course she does — as an actor in her own right — but no individual stands alone. Everyone is part of a complex network — economic, political, social and cultural at different levels, from local to the global. To make change happen, this connectedness needs to be realized by all — as critics, as participants in organizations and social movements, through direct and indirect routes.
While today many girls are living better lives than their mothers and grandmothers, this is not true for many others — the challenges of a violent, unequal world remain.
Shirin Rai is codirector of the University of Warwick Global Research Priorities on International Development.
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