Women and Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Power, Opportunities, and Constraints 9781685859176

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Women and Education in Sub-Saharan Africa

Women and Change in the Developing World Series Editor Mary H. Moran, Colgate University Editorial Board Iris Berger, SUNY-Albany Lucy Creevey, University of Connecticut Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelley, Johns Hopkins University Ni.iket Kardam, Monterey Institute of International Studies Louis Lamphere, University of New Mexico Linda Lim, University of Michigan Kathleen A. Staudt, University of Texas-El Paso Kay B. Warren, Princeton University

Women and Education in Sub-Saharan Africa Power, Opportunities, and Constraints edited by

Marianne Bloch Josephine A. Beoku-Betts B. Robert Tabachnick

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RIENNER PUBLISHERS

BOULDER LONDON

Published in the United States of America by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 1998 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women and education in Sub-Saharan Africa : Power, Opportunities, and Constraints / Marianne Bloch, Josephine A. Beoku-Betts, B. Robert Tabachnick, editors. p. cm. — (Women and change in the developing world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55587-704-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-58826-290-5 (paperback : alk. paper) 1. Women—Education—Africa, Sub-Saharan. 2. Women—Education— Social aspects—Africa, Sub-Saharan. 3. Sex differences in education—Africa, Sub-Saharan. 4. Education and state—Africa, Sub-Saharan. 5. Educational change—Africa, Sub-Saharan. I. Bloch, Marianne N. II. Beoku-Betts, Josephine A., 1951– III. Tabachnick, B. Robert. IV. Series. LC2417.W65 1998 370'.82'096—dc21 98-9498 CIP British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

List of Tables Foreword, Lioba Moshi Preface

vn ix xiii

Gender and Educational Research, Policy, and Practice in Sub-Saharan Africa: Theoretical and Empirical Problems and Prospects Marianne Bloch and Frances Vavrus 2

Part 1 3

4

5

Part 2 6

Agents in Women's Education: Some Trends in the African Context Nelly Stromquist

1

25

Nonformal Education Rites and Reason: Precolonial Education and Its Relevance to the Current Production and Transmission of Knowledge Lynda R. Day

49

Beyond the Three Food Groups: Nutrition Education for Women in Africa Joanne Csete

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Women and Nonformal Education in West Africa: Policy and Practice Polly Diven

83

Formal Education Inside Classrooms in Guinea: Girls' Experiences Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt, Marianne Bloch, and Aminata Maiga Soumare v

99

vi

7 8

9

10

Part 3 11

12

13

Part 4

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Contents

Gender and Classroom Interactions in Liberia Mary B. Brenner

131

Gender and Formal Education in Africa: An Exploration of the Opportunity Structure at the Secondary and Tertiary Levels Josephine A. Beoku-Betts

157

"Education Is My Husband": Marriage, Gender, and Reproduction in Northern Tanzania Amy Stambach

185

Single-Sex Schooling and Its Effects on Nigerian Adolescents Valerie E. Lee and Marlaine E. Lockheed

201

Politics, Economics, and Education Gender and Education in Rural South Africa Adele Gordon, Doris Nkwe, and Mellony Graven

229

The Status of Women in Southern Nigeria: Is Education a Help or a Hindrance? Marida Hollos

247

Searching for Utopia: The Politics of Gender and Education in Tanzania Marjorie Mbilinyi

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Epilogue Using the Past to Fashion an Expanding Future B. Robert Tabachnick and Josephine A. Beoku-Betts

The Contributors Index About the Book

299

312 316 320

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Tables

2.1 2.2

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8.2 8.3 8.4

Estimated Mean Years of Schooling by Age and Region Educational Attainment of Men and Women Across the Main Three Levels of Education Enrollment in Public and Private Schools in Africa, 1993 Primary School Enrollment Rates for Girls and Boys in Guinea, by Region, 1992-1993 Primary Teachers' Attitudes About Boys and Girls College Teachers' Attitudes About Boys and Girls Girls' Attitudes About Boys and Girls, by Grade Level Boys' Attitudes About Boys and Girls, by Grade Level Classroom Interaction Matrix Test Scores by Gender in Primer Comparison of Boys' and Girls' Test Scores and Grades, by School in First Grade Comparison of Boys' and Girls' Test Scores and Grades, by School in Fourth Grade Total Public Expenditures as a Percentage of Government Expenditures Secondary Enrollment Growth Rate Gross Secondary-Level Enrollment Ratio, 1990 Repetition and Completion Rate for Secondary Schools,

8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8

Distribution of Secondary Education by Type of Education Tertiary Enrollment Gross Tertiary Enrollment Ratio, 1990 Distribution of Tertiary Enrollment by Field of Study,

1990

169

8.9

Women as a Percentage of All Students Enrolled in Various Fields at the College Level in Sub-Saharan Africa Enrollment in Sciences at the Tertiary Level

170 171

2.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1

1990

8.10

vii

30 31 100 106 106 117 118 136 144 148 151 161 162 163 164 165 168 169

viii 8.11 8.12 8.13 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5

Tables

Percentage of Women Teachers in Primary- and Secondary-Level Education Women's Labor Force Participation, 1990 Occupational Distribution of Women in Wage Employment, ~elected Countries and Years Number of Students and Schools in the Analytical Sample Descriptive Characteristics of Girls and Boys in Single-Sex and Coeducational Schools in Nigeria Estimated Effect of Attending a Single-Sex School on Math Achievement in Nigeria, 1981-1982 Effect of Attending a Single-Sex School in Nigeria on Having a Stereotypical View of Mathematics, 1981-1982 Sample Characteristics Bivariate Regressions of the Decision Variable Multiple Regressions of the Decision Variable Bivariate Regressions of the Contribution Variable Multiple Regressions of the Contribution Variable

172 173 174 209 212 215 216 255 266 267 268 268

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Foreword

The chapters in this volume force us to look at the whole question of education as a liberating force behind women's struggle for equity and economic independence. The publication of the book is timely as scholars, both in Africa and the West, debate the role of women in the new millennium. The contributors, whose extensive field-research experience is clearly represented in the various regions and topics covered, have thoughtfully dealt with education in a broad sense. They have provided us with a detailed discussion of both formal and nonformal education and how nongovernmental organizations can contribute to the needed changes in women's education in sub-Saharan Africa. They clearly describe the current trends in sub-Saharan Africa, where formal and nonformal education for women are a concern for those of us who had hoped to see major changes in favor of women's education by the turn of the century. For those of us who believed that the foundations for women's education that were laid down in the 1950s and 1960s were going to produce a platform for gender equity in education, we are indeed dismayed by the patterns in girls' education described in the various chapters. The contributors reiterate the fact that gendered experiences in the educational process are still shaped by a configuration of state policies, social institutions, and cultural as well as traditional socioeconomic systems. Thus, women continue to be disadvantaged and discriminated against at various educational and social levels. Parity and quality of education are the major focuses in the research presented in this volume. It is obvious from the research findings that the overall quality of education offered to date disadvantages girls, even though enrollment parity with their male counterparts may have been achieved in certain regions in sub-Saharan Africa. Several factors are brought to light, ranging from low investment in education; stagnating economies, which is reflected in shortages of books; outdated resources; and "brain drain." Several of the chapters point out that an automatic male ix

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priority exists in education at all levels, most apparently in tertiary education in both country and overseas study. There seems to be a systematic discrimination with regard to quality education for women. To alleviate the current situation, the contributors to this volume advocate a working partnership among policymakers, educational institutions, and local communities. Such collaboration, it is believed, will provide a speedy resolution of problems facing women's education. It is also indicated that such a partnership would only work when the state's perception of the role of education in society interacts with the struggle for gender equality. Certain aspects of culture and traditional values that are embedded in both formal and nonformal education have to be reviewed and evaluated to determine the weaknesses that continue to foster gender discrimination in African societies. Current as well as future policymakers have to show a willingness to disengage from those trends that apparently affect women more than men. Foundations for women's education in Africa have to be thoroughly addressed before the proposed partnership based on dialogue and concrete initiatives for a radical change can be expected to yield theresults envisaged in this volume. Many of the present-day policymakers, educators, and community leaders remain wrapped up in the old legacy in which education, capital, and social valuation are controlled by men. With economic control in the hands of men, women's education remains determined by men, from the home base to the institutional base. An indicator of the continuing gravity of the situation is the increase in women-headed households. A few of these women claim educational and economic independence from their male counterparts. Educational achievements are described as a precursor to social and cultural independence in which marriage is relegated to a secondary tier of women's priorities, even though having children remains central in the ultimate accomplishments in a woman's life. The decision to have children without the benefits of marriage appears to be an option for only a few educated women. This growing trend seems to explain the ambiguities women face at both the personal and cultural levels. On the one hand, they assert their acquired independence through education; on the other hand, the ability to attain personal as well as cultural status is diminished when women remain unmarried and childless. This trend, though involving only a minority of sub-Saharan women, has given rise to the concept of a "new African woman" who is expressing new ideas of personhood, has become very politically and economically aware of her environment, and has learned how to manipulate both sociocultural and economic structures for maximum personal gain. Certainly, for a radical change in women's education to occur, such a trend is not what one would hope to be the ultimate result of a successful partnership between policymakers, educational institutions, and local communities. Rather, the goal will be for the establishment of true parity and

Foreword

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quality of education for women. The educational system sought will be one that eliminates the discrimination and disregard still suffered by girls and women in the current system, and one that creates parity at all levels without regard to the social partnership between men and women. The contributors in this volume clearly advocate a change that has to come in teaching methodology and resource materials used in schools; such methodology and materials currently play a role in reinforcing both stereotypical views about women and gender-based division of labor. Both male and female teachers have to change their approach to formal and nonformal education for boys and girls, distinguishing between educating and schooling the twenty-first-century generation of leaders. There has to be a national as well as an international dialogue addressing goals. Are we educating them for the twenty-first century or are we schooling them for specific social and cultural roles? There is the assumption that formal education is the ultimate liberator of women in Africa. However, we need to bear in mind that much of what is taught in formal education is like a double-edged sword-for the most part it is foreign and sometimes has affected societal values for the worse. Although formal education can be used to raise women from the shackles of poverty and inequality, it can also make the same women victims of continuous criticism for abandoning cultural and traditional values. The "new African woman" must, therefore, learn to cope with the contradictions that come with education. So far, African women have been unable to do so, let alone define their goals for liberation through education. They allow traditional values to coexist with values acquired through formal education, despite their awareness of the contradictions that are clearly reflected in the contrast between what they say about parity and quality of women's education and what they do that in effect reinforces stereotypical views of women's lives. Some of the research findings in this volume point out this apparent contradiction. To achieve total parity and quality of education for women, these contradictions have to be clearly and candidly addressed both in formal and nonformal settings. Women's education must include education in the home, where their role in society is defined. Currently, the home remains the source of the acquisition of social and cultural values, including gender identity and division of labor based on gender. In addition, the school environment is not much different from the home. The school has become an extension of social values imparted in the home, thus allowing the roles, activities, and goals that have been shaped by the home social order to reign. Consequently, the female child does not experience the institutional change expected to result from the introduction of formal education. The "new African woman" must come from home and school environments that will collaboratively orient her toward a new understanding of her role in the technologically oriented world, one whose division of labor

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will be based on ability, skill, and interest and not solely on gender. The social order in school must cease to perpetuate a division of labor that is similar to that of the home, which, although vital to various functions of the home, legitimates inequality between girls and boys, and later women and men.

Lioba Moshi Associate Professor and Director African Studies University of Georgia

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Preface

This volume highlights stories about girls' /boys', women 's/men 's education in sub-Saharan Africa. While it emphasizes girls' and women's multiple experiences and identities over boys' and men's, the gendered relations are crucial to our understanding and interpretation throughout the book. We look within a variety of countries and historical and cultural traditions to underline the importance of local, culturally contextualized, historicized understandings. At the same time, we look at cross-country statistics to emphasize the importance of thinking globally and cross-nationally. Within the context of sub-Saharan Africa, a volume that looks at education must examine the strengths and varieties of children's and adults' educational experiences both in and out of school settings. Women's health and nutrition training programs, adult literacy programs, and agricultural education and training are all important components of education within the African context. Similarly, apprenticeships within the home, community settings, religious schooling, and in-community rites that involve initiation ceremonies for adulthood all involve forms of education and training for a gendered division of labor and experience. Thus, education within the context of formal Western public or private schooling, while critical to the exploration of issues in this volume, is only one form of education that needs to be considered. The chapters in the book-on theories and policy of informal, nonformal, and formal education-all illustrate the terrain of important debates, the need for research and policy, and our call for more intensive discussion and action in the future. How are educational opportunities for children and adults in subSaharan Africa framed? To what extent do feminist theories that look for equitable policies of school access and outcomes for children omit discussion of patriarchal ideologies and oppression implicit in international as well as national policy? Similarly, to what extent do well-intentioned indictments of oppression create an image of women's helplessness and despair by omitting the achievements of women's assertiveness and accomxiii

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Preface

plishments? To what extent does poverty or international structural adjustment policies force countries to ignore schooling, educational, and training opportunities for many children and adults? In this volume we debate the role that international and global discourses play in decreasing or maintaining inequalities. We look at the way different feminist theories frame our questions and understanding of the answers. How can we reframe the way postcolonial women and men in sub-Saharan Africa gain opportunities in the twenty-first century, while also reducing the forces that limit identities and possibilities? While trying not to fall into the dangerous zone of "essentializing" African girls or women in this volume, it is important nonetheless to focus an entire volume on schooling, education, and training of girls and women within the African context. In addition, plans for action and their implementation will be the eventual key to whether the volume's ideas facilitate empowerment and equal opportunities, and affect some of the constraining influences facing women and education in sub-Saharan Africa today.

* * * This volume began with a conference held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sponsored by the university's African Studies Program. In addition, the School of Education, the International Agricultural Program, the Women's Studies Program, and the Anonymous Fund provided time and support for the conference and for the volume. While two of us (Bloch and Beoku-Betts) helped to organize the original conference and went on to develop this book, we want to acknowledge the collaboration at the conference of Jane Knowles, from the International Agricultural Program, who helped to provide the foundation for this book. JoAnn Foss, Chris Kruger, and Diane Falkner at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as the staff of the Women's Studies Center at Florida-Atlantic University, helped with preparing the final manuscript; we appreciate their work, technical skill, and patience. We would also like to thank Martha Peacock of Lynne Rienner Publishers and the Women and Change in the Developing World series editor, Mary Moran, for their encouragement, help, and critical reviews of the volume as we moved toward publication. Bridget Julian and Lesli Brooks Athanasoulis of Lynne Rienner Publishers were helpful in the latter stages of publication, and we would like to acknowledge the importance of their contributions. We have some individual thanks to give. First, we thank all the contributors for sticking with this project. In addition, Josephine Beoku-Betts would like to thank her family in Sierra Leone and England, for all their love, encouragement, and support over the years. She especially wishes to acknowledge her two mothers, Milly and Sophie, and her brother, Garvas,

Preface

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for his unconditional support and inspiration in the pursuit of her career goals. Marianne Bloch wants to acknowledge the support of Peter Bloch, her husband and occasional collaborator in research in Africa; Emilie Bloch, who was with her mom in Senegal when she was only five months of age, for her interest in her mom's work on this project; and Ben Bloch, born in Senegal and with her on research projects at the ages of 1, 5, and 16. Marianne would also like to acknowledge the collaborations with Beth Blue Swadener over many years in and out of Africa for many of the ideas expressed here. Bob Tabachnick thanks Jeanne Tabachnick for her help in research in Africa over his professional career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And, finally, we all would like to thank Fran Vavrus for her technical assistance with the book as well as her intellectual contributions to the volume. -Marianne Bloch -Josephine A. Beoku-Betts -B. Robert Tabachnick

1~ Gender and Educational Research, Policy, and Practice in Sub-Saharan Africa: Theoretical and Empirical Problems and Prospects Marianne Bloch and Frances Vavrus

The topic of gender and education in sub-Saharan Africa has received a significant amount of attention since the early 1990s in international and national policy debates related to formal and nonformal education. On the one hand, reports show that female enrollment in primary schooling has achieved parity with male enrollment in many countries on the African continent, and that girls' enrollment has increased significantly since the 1960s (DAE, 1994; Kelly, 1989; United Nations, 1995). There are even some countries or regions within countries where girls' enrollment exceeds that of boys, for instance, at the primary-school level in Botswana and Namibia (United Nations, 1995) and in private secondary schools in the Arusha and Kilimanjaro regions of Tanzania (Vavrus, 1997b ). On the other hand, reports also show that female enrollment at the primary level in most African countries does not equal male enrollment yet, and at the secondary and tertiary levels in most sub-Saharan African countries, female enrollment lags far behind male enrollment (UNESCO, 1995; United Nations, 1995). Moreover, as a number of the researchers in this book demonstrate, parents, teachers, and students themselves often have lower expectations for female pupils and treat them differently in the classroom and at home (see Chapters 2, 6, and 7). In the area of nonformal education in subSaharan Africa, contributors to this collection suggest that training programs alone will not alleviate the gender disparity that already exists in skills such as adult literacy or numeracy. It is also clear that we must continue to question whether training alone can alter broader gender relations and opportunities within economic and domestic spheres (see Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 14). The contributors to this book examine a number of the educational opportunities and constraints for women in different parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Although they hold different theoretical perspectives, each one makes a significant contribution to the study of how education affects women on the African continent. Our goal is to bring together scholars

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Gender & Educational Research, Policy & Practice

from different theoretical traditions who address some of the most important educational issues for women in sub-Saharan Africa today. We also hope that this book raises questions and highlights debates about the meanings of the terms women, education, and sub-Saharan Africa as they are often used in the field of education and in the related disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and women's studies. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to present some of the important theoretical issues raised by the contributors to this book and by other scholars whose work might inform future research on gender and education in sub-Saharan Africa. We begin with a discussion of the contentious nature of such categories as women, education, and Africa in light of scholarship on language, power, and representation. We then consider the different ways in which various paradigms frame the study of women's education in sub-Saharan Africa and explore how these paradigms affect the questions asked by the authors of these chapters. Finally, we invite readers to consider the chapters that follow in light of the issues we raise in this chapter and to reflect with us in Chapter 14 on the significance of this book for educational research, policy, and practice in the future.

Language, Power, and Representation Our approach to the study of women and education in sub-Saharan Africa is premised on the belief that language both shapes and describes social life. On this basis, we understand that terms are constructed and imbued with meaning through historical circumstances. This means that a term may carry a certain meaning and wield power in a certain way in one historical period, while at another time the same term may convey a different idea and play a different role in shaping the power dynamics of policy and action. We can then say that the commonsense meaning of terms like development, education, gender, and even sub-Saharan Africa change in different historical and regional contexts (Appiah, 1992, 1995; Said, 1978). The terms women, education, and sub-Saharan Africa carry certain meanings that together shape our commonsense beliefs about social life in the so-called third world. These beliefs form a body of doxa, a belief system that one takes for granted as being the natural order of things (Bourdieu, 1977a). The doxa surrounding the term third world has played a central role in shaping educational policy and practice for women in Africa. Taking the term women first, we can see how women, when linked to third world, carries with it an entire constellation of assumptions. Chandra Mohanty's description of the "average" woman in the third world illustrates this point: [The] average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being "third

Gender & Educational Research, Policy & Practice

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world" (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions. (Mohanty, 1995, p. 56)

The term African women, then, too often assumes poor, powerless, and ignorant persons whose lives are vastly different from those of their putatively empowered Western sisters. The term treats women and girls with very different histories and cultures as though they were a homogeneous group in need of a uniform program for development. These representations of African women form part of the doxa affecting policymaking in the field of education in sub-Saharan Africa. However, alternative readings of the term African women exist whereby women's multiple representations and identities are emphasized. African women are powerful in certain contexts, especially as the group that contributes most to agricultural production on the continent. They also have high status in many communities because of their role in spiritual and ritual events; many aspects of commerce; and their family's maintenance, health, and cultural and biological reproduction. At the same time as we use the term African women in this book, we want to deconstruct it to allow for the possibility of heterogeneous experience and fluid identities. For example, in Chapter 12, Marida Hollos illustrates the significance of the debates and the heterogeneity of experience related to women's status and power in the African research context. The chapters in this book look at issues of power and status in the context of urban and rural, highly educated and unschooled African women's lives; unravel common assumptions about women's lack of agency; and propose a more nuanced and complex view of their role. Readers should continually ask whether a particular statement, conclusion, or policy suggestion is appropriate for all women (and men), ethnic groups, and countries, so as to appreciate the need for context-specific policies for women's education. This conclusion is echoed in Chapter 2, in which Nelly Stromquist provides a detailed review of the effectiveness of different groups in policy and change in African education in general, as well as in Chapter 13, in which Marjorie Mbilinyi focuses on effective change strategies in Tanzania and East Africa. The second term in our triad, education, is also fraught with assumptions that are rarely scrutinized in a book on women in Africa. Many of the contributors to this book question some of the beliefs about education and educational policy and policymaking in sub-Saharan Africa (again, see Chapters 2 and 13 for challenges to traditional policymakers). Elizabeth King and M. Ann Hill's 1993 publication for the World Bank, for example, presents a common assumption about girls' education in the third world:

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Gender & Educational Research, Policy & Practice

Recent research and concrete calculations show that educating females yields far-reaching benefits for girls and women themselves, their families, and the societies in which they live ... once all the benefits are recognized, investment in the education of girls may well be the highestreturn investment available in the developing world. (p. v)

Arturo Escobar (1995) and many of the authors herein challenge the presumed neutrality behind claims like the above, which are based solely on research and so-called concrete calculations. We suggest that claims often mask the contested nature of educational policymaking and the power wielded by development institutions like the World Bank (Escobar, 1995; Johnson-Odim, 1991; Marchand and Parpart, 1995; Mohanty, 1995; Scott, 1994; Vavrus, 1997a). In this book, we are interested in how female education is construed under the changing circumstances of both globalization and regionalism: Whose voices contest what should happen, and whose discourse gains control? Education is not a benign "good" at every moment of its historical path, but rather it is a set of practices that have been used differently by individuals, groups, governments, and international agencies, depending on their intention, power, and conceptions of gender. If education is a way to promote certain individual, group, and national or international interests, which is what we propose in this collection, then how has education for women been used within the context of sub-Saharan Africa to govern, empower, disempower, and regulate the lives of women? When the term education is linked discursively to sub-Saharan Africa and women, it often connotes a need for the development of the individual woman, her society, or both. The work of Escobar, much like that of Chandra Mohanty presented previously, examines how the body of doxa he calls "developmentalism" shapes academic and popular beliefs about the third world. We can draw parallels between Escobar's analysis of development projects to alleviate hunger in Latin America and programs designed to provide education for women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa. Without losing sight of the visceral experience of chronic malnutrition, Escobar concentrates his critique on the doxa formed by the professionalization of development. In his words, development is a discourse, "a series of political technologies intended to manage and give shape to the reality of the Third World" (1984-1985, p. 384). The "reality" of the third world presented by development institutions is one familiar to most people in Western countries. Escobar contends that hunger is expected by Westerners to be a normal part of life for the "helpless and formless (dark) masses" in Latin America, Asia, and especially in Africa (1995, p. 103). But how did this representation of the third world come to be seen as normal? In Chapter 4, Joanne Csete asks just this type of question when she discusses the omission of structural and international

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factors that might account for poverty and hunger in typical nutrition education programs taking place in Africa today. Although education, like hunger prevention programs, can contribute positively to women's lives, we want to discuss education in a way that does not contribute to developmentalism as described by Escobar. Therefore, we examine education as a way to create new ideas and opportunities, while at the same time we see it as restricting other possibilities. Education can be thought of as a relationship between power and knowledge that governs our understandings, our constructs of self and others, and our actions. Education, both within and outside schools, can operate as a form of governance by the state, by a colonial power, or by a religious group or leader over those who are constructed as being in need of education. Although the effects of schooling or education are often beneficial, they are also constricting, forming certain possibilities and excluding others. At the same time, students are active in the ways they learn and construct "knowledge"; students accept, resist, reconstruct, and reject the material they are taught formally and informally in all kinds of educational settings. Thus, although education is often associated with terms like development, modernity, independence, and status, one can debate whether the educational development strategies, imposed most often from above, have had more positive or negative effects in Africa. Several chapters in this book (see Chapters 2, 13, and 14), for example, address the important question of whether development, as measured as access to education for women and girls, fosters independence or whether it contributes to an ongoing relationship of dependency on the international donors who provide many of the resources for expanding schooling in many sub-Saharan African countries. In addition, various contributors focus on what seem to be the most promising forms of "intervention," for example, through local women's networks, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), feminist groups, and certain actors in government ministries. At the end of the book, Chapter 14 highlights and integrates some of the important questions raised by the contributors about the links between education and development. Finally, as we speak of the term sub-Saharan Africa, the third term in the title of this book, we need to consider the body of doxa surrounding this geographic region today. Popular and scholarly discourses in the West too often describe Africa as a continent riddled with the tribalism, poverty, warfare, and disease that are believed to plague the entire third world. Although the term third world was first used by representatives of the nonaligned countries meeting at the Bandung Conference in 1955, third world, like Africa, today signals social and economic crisis on a grand scale (Young, 1990). Unfortunately, a homogenizing term like third world too often glosses over the regional and national variations in the countries that make up parts of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Such a term also reduces

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the complicated relationship between global and local interests to the level of a struggle between the powerful "modem" countries of the West and the disempowered "traditional" ones throughout regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa today is caught up in the globalization of economics, social reform, and educational policy. This makes the study of relationships between countries extremely complicated. For example, it is clear that not all sub-Saharan African countries are fully "developed" if one compares them with industrialized nations in the areas of formal schooling and nonformal training. However, it is also clear that development as a construct and form of praxis must be critiqued and understood to include the old as well as the new wisdom and practices of people within the myriad cultural contexts of Africa. We acknowledge that there is some degree of similarity in the experiences with colonialism and with neo-colonial economic relations shared by the countries of Africa and those in the broader third world. However, this book seeks to highlight the great heterogeneity of cultures and experiences in sub-Saharan Africa, stressing the fact that we are writing about a diverse region. We have used the term sub-Saharan Africa to locate geographically a number of important issues related to education for women and girls. Other recent collections have opted for a broader approach. For example, Jill Conway and Susan Bourque's The Politics of Women's Education (1993) is divided into sections on Asia, Africa, and Latin America. King and Hill, in their book entitled Women's Education in Developing Countries: Barriers, Benefits, and Policies (1993), also emphasize similarities across dissimilar geographic spaces. Although these books make interesting comparisons, we believe that this broad-based approach bolsters the doxa about third world homogeneity. Instead, we take the lead from Nelly Stromquist in her 1992 book on education for women in the regional context of Latin America, and we hope that by focusing on sub-Saharan African countries, we can examine the political, cultural, and historical situation of schooling and education more closely. In sum, the terms women, education, and sub-Saharan Africa are part of the doxa surrounding academic and popular discourses of development, yet we have placed them alongside the terms power, opportunities, and constraints in the title of this book. Our intention is to use familiar terms in the framing of questions that might challenge assumptions about education for women and girls in this region. Looking at education in this way, we can shed light on how colonial and postcolonial discourses relate to what girls and boys in sub-Saharan Africa should know, how schools are constructed to create future citizens, how education is used outside of the school, and how relations of power have affected opportunities related to education and to the formation of students' identities. In this book we also look at the ways in which discourses, past and present, shape both African self-representations and representations of Africans as the "other."

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Author and Reader: Identity and Questions Asked The authors in this book present a broad spectrum of perspectives on the role of education and development, allowing readers to decide for themselves where they position themselves (and are positioned) in diverse debates related to schooling and education. The contributors present a variety of cogent and theoretically challenging models for looking at arguments related to children's and adults' education and schooling in Africa. These diverse perspectives raise important questions about women and education and propose theoretical frameworks for exploring these and other areas. In order to frame the varying positions and issues, we ask readers to consider the following questions as they read: • Is schooling or training for females seen as a critical strategy of development or as an institution that disempowers sub-Saharan African communities and individuals? • How does one evaluate "good" or "poor" female education within a country or for a region? Whose evaluations count, and how are evaluations put to use? • How do the various participants in female education in sub-Saharan Africa-international donors, NGOs, feminist organizations, government officials, local community members, teachers, and male and female students-define the issues and interpret the possibilities that formal and nonformal education present? • At what level and with which actors is change located? How is change conceived? The contributors to this book respond to these questions as they look at the varied sociocultural contexts in which women are educated throughout rural and urban Africa. Even though the contributors share a geographic focus, they are varied both in their regions of specialization and in their theoretical perspectives. These perspectives range from human capital and liberal feminism to feminist postmodernism, framings we discuss further later. The writers' biographies and positions are different, though all have lived in or done extensive research in sub-Saharan Africa. Some are researchers and policymakers in first world countries, whereas others do research and policymaking from an institution in Africa. Some contributors have anthropological, sociological, or educational research training; others have specific training in policy analysis. All of the authors have had at least some of their university or graduate training in Western (i.e., Northern) countries; therefore, all of them bring to their work in this book the lens of an outsider as well as, for some, an insider. Despite the authors' differences in origin and current location, however, Kirin Narayan's (1993) question, "How native is a 'native' anthropologist?" pushes us to remember

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our multiple identities and the complexity of the power/knowledge systems that guide our writing.

JJDevelopment" Through Education: Paradigms of Analysis The diversity of perspectives found herein reflects the different paradigms in the social sciences that frame authors' ideas about the topic of women's education in sub-Saharan Africa and their approach to research. Our purpose in this section is to raise questions about how one's theoretical location affects one's research and to familiarize readers with the paradigms that inform the chapters that follow. Readers may want to consider the following questions as they move through the chapters: • What is the guiding paradigm of research that has framed the ideas expressed in each chapter? • What does each paradigm assume about women, education, and sub-Saharan Africa, and what does it overlook? • Do contributors see the identities, needs, and experiences of women and girls as uniform or diverse? • What knowledge base are they drawing from as they examine issues in their particular field? • What methodologies are used to gain perspectives, and whose voices are included and excluded when these methodologies are used? • Which positions, discourses, and practices are associated with power, and how does power affect policy formation and implementation (Foucault, 1980)? The descriptions of different research paradigms that follow are meant to serve as a heuristic device for readers rather than as a definitive categorization of each author's work. We realize that the boundaries between these paradigms are porous and that some of the contributors might disagree with the way we locate their work in this framework. Still, we believe it is important to examine the factors that frame their research questions, methodology, and interpretation of results. The Human Capital Paradigm

Several recent books have analyzed the history of development as it began to emerge at the end of World War II, when it appeared that industrialization and education could help poor countries and regions to modernize (Escobar, 1995; Marchand and Parpart, 1995; Scott, 1994). From the perspective of development as modernization, education is a tool that provides

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the skills necessary to charge the "engine" of development. People from "developing" countries are seen as needing to be trained in the basics of health care, nutrition, family planning, school-related skills, agriculture, technology, and commerce to help reduce population growth and illness. It is believed that through the modernization process many of these social and economic problems will be solved. According to the human capital paradigm, schooling and other training programs are supposed to develop the mind and body to work in modernized industries with modern technologies (Schultz, 1961). This paradigm operates on the functionalist assumption that education, especially formal schooling, serves to maintain harmonious social relations and to direct social change in a positive direction. This perspective tends not to critique capitalism because its objective is to use schooling as a means of creating effective and efficient skilled workers for a market economy. According to Michael Apple (1982), the notion of human capital suggests that schools (and other training programs) "will maximize the distribution of technical and administrative knowledge among the population. As students learn this knowledge, they can 'invest' their acquired skills and expertise and will climb the ladder to better occupations" (pp. 42-43). To develop the human capital needed for the modernization of societies, workers must be healthy and educated so as to become useful "human resources." Thus, reducing fertility, increasing the health of the children, and improving the health and education level of the population in general become important goals for the modernization project. Research on how to implement Western schooling, decrease adult illiteracy, and increase health and nutrition of children in the service of productivity and efficiency have been hallmarks of the human capital paradigm for over thirty years. Stromquist ( 1989) suggests that in the paradigm of human capital, education is treated as a resource open equally to everyone. However, she argues that "family influences and personal characteristics (particularly individual values and intellectual ability) determine differences in the types and levels of education people attain" (p. 167). Yet from a human capital perspective, individuals attain as much as they are inherently capable of on the basis of their merit, without considering such factors as race, class, or gender. Researchers operating within this paradigm may recognize that school practices play a role in maintaining social inequalities, but this is usually considered a problem of not taking sufficient account of children's initial differences in the ways schools remediate or equalize opportunity. Liberal feminism is based on many of the principles found in the human capital paradigm. A liberal feminist perspective, which is the dominant form of feminism within the human capital paradigm, holds that equality of access and opportunities for males and females is an attainable goal if the shortcomings in the system are eliminated. Analyses of the

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ways to move toward greater equity of access in schooling, training programs, development opportunities and projects, and outcomes (jobs, wages, products) are chief research and policy objectives for many liberal feminists in the field of education. Liberal feminists tend to argue that greater knowledge of how inequities occur will lead toward improved quality and quantity of delivery of schooling or training. Many of the reports and projects geared toward "improving" female education in Africa funded through international donors like the World Bank operate on the assumptions outlined previously (see King and Hill, 1993; Hartnett and Heneveld, 1993; Hyde, 1989, 1993; Odaga and Heneveld, 1995; Scott, 1994). From these studies, like those in Chapters 6, 7, and 10, one gains an understanding of where gender inequities lie in the educational sector and what policies have been proposed to rectify this situation.

The Marxist/Neo-Marxist Paradigm One of the main features of this second paradigm is the attention it pays to the role of the state in maintaining capitalist relations through education, especially through the schools. Catherine Scott (1994) suggests that theories of dependency developed as radical, Marxist critiques of the human capital paradigm found in the field of development studies. Dependency theory, as this branch of the neo-Marxist paradigm has come to be known, examines the role of the state in creating and maintaining capitalism and of education as an institution that helps to reproduce class differences in the service of capitalism. In addition, dependency theory examines poverty in the third world as a function of the dependence of third world "periphery" countries on first world "core" countries and on the market economies of the first world. Calls for empowerment, self-reliance, transition to a socialist or communist state, and, at times, revolutionary transformations are associated with dependency theory analyses. This neo-Marxist perspective views schools and other forms of education and training as critically important. Schools, especially in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, help to service dependency relationships by reproducing international and intranational class relationships. The formation of workers and elites services the needs of international capitalism and helps to maintain capitalist relations within the dependent state, as well as to maintain the (African) state in a dependent relationship with richer countries. The notion of dependency on an international level parallels the work of critical theory at a national level. This Marxist-derived perspective on schooling makes the assumption that schooling is but one aspect of a much larger social system and is in large part dependent on this totality for its form (see Apple, 1982; Popkewitz, 1984). Knowledge, from this perspective, is not value-free, but is riddled with historical and ideological forces.

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School, for example, is a place where one sees the logic of the totality of capitalism operating through the way students are sorted, according to the needs of capital at any particular historical moment and not according to students' merit alone. This paradigm seeks both to explain how a totalizing system like capitalism operates to oppress certain actors in the schools and to challenge the dominant relations of power (in which power is located in selected individuals and institutions) by transforming economic structures, empowering individuals and oppressed groups, and uncovering hegemonic relationships and knowledge systems. Both human capital and Marxist/neo-Marxist paradigms, including dependency theory and critical theory, have traditionally failed to take adequate account of women's positions in economic and social relations. Critiques of Marxist class-based theories by socialist feminists have analyzed the continuing subjugation of women within class analyses critical of capitalism and the influence of capitalist countries and agents on African countries. Socialist feminist theory emphasizes how patriarchal as well as class relations subjugate men and women differently and interactively. This contrasts to mainstream dependency theory, which explicitly analyzes class relationships and first world-third world dependencies but pays little attention to the patriarchial ideologies and practices that relegate women to household work, differentiate wages, and maintain the lack of opportunities for women. Moreover, critical theory has tended to look more closely at the state-school relationship than at the state-school-patriarchy relationship. According to Stromquist (1989): The notion of the state as key arbiter in the school-society relationship is helpful because it allows the analysis and subsequent testing of the state as a coalition of male forces committed to preserving a patriarchal ideology. If this is the case, the state will use schooling as a mechanism (a) to serve the advancement mainly of men and (b) to provide women with minimum levels of education-those necessary to be efficient mothers or to join the labor force at lower levels of financial reward .... If the dominant mode of production needs a special institution-such as the current model of the family-to ensure the efficient and inexpensive reproduction of the labor force, there will be a limit to the levels and types of education that women can obtain from the state. These limits emerge from the fact that, as long as women are needed to operate critical but unremunerated subsystems, they cannot be given absolute equality with men. (p. 169)

In summary, while dependency theorists called for self-reliance and autonomous development in the 1970s and 1980s (Tanzania's Education for Self-Reliance campaign is a prime example), they paid relatively little attention to the separate but related issue of gender. Emphases on the equality of women in the workforce, common in socialist or communist government platforms, took little account of inequalities in burdens at

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home. Therefore, although such programs made some strides in including girls and women in schools, they also maintained stereotypical gender segregation in work in and out of the home (see Stromquist, 1989, and Chapter 2 for more detailed discussions). Socialist feminist analyses, however, call for us to look at the combination of class and gender relationships, focusing on the differing needs of poor and rich women and men, for example, within the context of Africa. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 13, socialist feminism sees an interconnection between ideological and economic forces, with patriarchy and capitalism reinforcing each other. The Postmodern Paradigm Researchers in a number of fields have begun to question some of the basic tenets of modernism upon which the human capital and Marxist paradigms are founded. Modernity, a term associated with the growth of nation-states, the study of cultural, economic, political, and patriarchal structures, and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, has come under attack from postmodern researchers. Postmodernism assumes a critical stance toward metanarratives or grand structural explanations of modernity and capitalism (whether liberal, Marxist, or feminist); toward positivism as a way of determining truth and falsity; and toward development as a linear progression from irrationality to rationality. The work described earlier by Chandra Mohanty and Arturo Escobar, both of whom critique the representations of the third world in the metanarratives of development, would fit into this paradigm. Postmodern feminist theory, as exemplified by Mohanty, Linda Nicholson (1990), and Lila Abu-Lughod (1993), to name only a few writers, deconstructs the notion of fixed boundaries, identities, and representations of groups that is assumed in a term such as African women. From a postmodern perspective, such boundaries, both within Africa and between Africa and other world regions, are viewed as constructed and fluid rather than fixed. Moreover, the identities of women are treated as contingent rather than preordained, and any representation of "the" African woman is viewed as a partial one at best. Postmodern critiques of metanarratives have pushed researchers to rethink assumptions about power as emanating from a single source, such as the state, and to consider the ways that power operates through the practices of everyday life (see Chapters 6, 7, 9, 11, and 12). The postmodern paradigm is certainly not without its critics. Some feminist scholars find disturbing the rejection of all metanarratives, including that of patriarchial oppression, and of a subject, like African women, with no fixed identity. Josephine Donovan charges that if all metanarratives are suspect, then so too is feminism. This, she argues, creates a "relativist pluralism ... [that] blocks the possibility of generic political

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identity" (1992, p. 202). Hartsock (and Stromquist in Chapter 2) objects to both the timing of the critique of the subject and the lack of emancipatory guidance in postmodern notions of power. Nancy Hartsock asks, "Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than as objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?" (1990, p. 163). Clearly, there is no paradigm free from shortcomings and contradictions, and no one theoretical framework is appropriate for all researchers interested in women and education in sub-Saharan Africa. In editing this book, we have tried to remain sensitive to the postmodern critiques of representation, the neo-Marxist attention to class and patriarchal relations of power, and the liberal feminist calls for greater gender equity through education. We focus on the specific context of education within sub-Saharan Africa, with its unique features; historical patterns; politics of colonial influence; economic and demographic trends; and patterns of education, training, and schooling. Although they understand that global trends and relationships are important, the contributors also assume there are tensions between regional and cultural specificities and international frames, discourses, and power relations. Some writers (e.g., see Chapter 9) explicitly examine the power of global discourses about schooling, educational reform, and development to frame definitions of knowledge and truth, whereas others achieve this in more subtle ways (e.g., see Chapters 6 and 11). Because the writers represent various feminist perspectives, one can see how the topics of development, education, and theory continue to be contested terrains in studies about women in sub-Saharan Africa. This book maintains these tensions by presenting authors with varying theoretical perspectives. We leave to the reader the consideration of how different paradigms may privilege certain types of knowledge and in the process construct differently the identities of women and men in Africa and other regions of the third world (see, for more discussion, Escobar, 1995; Johnson-Odim, 1991; Marchand and Parpart, 1995; Nicholson, 1990; Minh-ha, 1989; Mohanty, 1995).

Patterns of Gendered Schooling in Africa: An Overview Over the past thirty years, the renewed attention toward the role of education, training, and schooling for children and adults throughout the world has emerged as a product of many influences, which include modernization theories and dependency theories mentioned previously, mechanisms of control through education by international agencies, and vestigial colonial and postcolonial socioeconomic relations. However, today the call for

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more education for women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa comes from both international and local communities, although what form that education should take is often contested. Since the 1960s and the shift toward political independence in most African countries, there has been a parallel shift in attention by international donors and governments toward the provision of basic education as a principle of economic and political development. Special attention has been given to promoting child and adult literacy, making primary schooling universally available, and increasing the availability of secondary and tertiary education as strategies of development. Although information about gender inequities in economic development training programs and in schooling has been available since the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., see Boserup, 1970), it has only been in the past decade that international donors and the majority of governments within Africa have paid much attention to reports on gender equity in education and schooling as an important focus for "efficient" development. As Stromquist suggests in Chapter 2, donors and governments are still focused on efficiency in their rationales for programs related to girls, not on the philosophy or value of equity. Thus, international research has highlighted the impact of schooling, at least through fourth grade, on reductions in female fertility, improvements in nutrition and health, increased agricultural productivity, and more general indices of economic development. Research and policies have focused less on access of girls and women to training programs, schools, higher-paying jobs, or political positions that might help to equalize power, status, or income for women (see Chapters 4, 12, and 13). Although the writers in this book try to provide greater information about processes that undermine or help achievement within school settings, for example (see Part 2 of this book), they agree that simply providing greater information about gender inequities in schooling and training programs will not result in the eradication of inequities. Rather, there is a push to look harder at the local, national, and international influences that help to maintain gendered discourses or ideologies instead of concentrating solely on how to reduce oppression and inequities. The chapters in this book illustrate that increasing access even to basic education (adult literacy, primary education) is not always a simple task, given that in many sub-Saharan African countries structural adjustment programs (SAPs) have sapped budgets set aside to support social services, including schools. In Chapter 4, Joanne Csete illustrates the effect of SAPs on the growth of hunger and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. In Chapters 9 and 13, Amy Stambach and Marjorie Mbilinyi also touch on the problems of SAPs when they speak of the growth of private schools in Tanzania. And in Chapter 11, Adele Gordon, Doris Nkwe, and Mellony Graven illustrate the conflict between economic pressures and the the enactment of equity-oriented policies in postapartheid South Africa.

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As previously suggested, recent reports and research studies have emphasized the relationship among female schooling, literacy, training about fertility, child and family nutrition, health indicators and practices, and female participation in agriculturally productive labor. These reports have turned international attention not only toward improving schooling and training for all but particularly toward girls' and women's schooling and other forms of education (e.g., see King and Hill, 1993; Odaga and Heneveld, 1995). The contributors to this book (especially in Part 1, on nonformal education, and Part 2 on formal education) focus on ways in which training and schooling programs have succeeded in their goals while questioning some of the assumptions implicit within training programs and school curricula that reinforce traditional gender-based divisions of labor and constructions of sex and sexuality. Following this introductory chapter, Nelly Stromquist, in Chapter 2, focuses on recent theoretical issues and policy initiatives regarding education and schooling in Africa. She provides a fairly comprehensive statistical description of gendered differences in school-based enrollment and completion rates for different African countries, as well as a series of theoretically guided questions about the causes for remaining differences in enrollment and completion at different levels of schooling. She argues that for many women (and men) in Southern countries, liberal feminist and postmodern feminist perspectives are less useful in changing and transforming ideas, policies, and knowledge than is a socialist feminist perspective. She describes four different groups who she feels have had varying types of influence in Africa recently: international donors, national governments, NGOs, and feminist groups. Stromquist emphasizes the negative influence on Africa of internationally imposed structural adjustment policies from the north resulting in cutbacks in public social spending and increases in private programs only available to the more affluent. Stromquist suggests that international agencies, in collusion with the governments in most countries, have little real interest in strongly pushing girls' schooling, whereas NGOs and local feminist networks and groups have had more success in increasing girls' enrollment. The next three chapters (in Part 1) focus on nonformal education, including traditional and some religious education in communities, and training programs outside school. In Chapter 3, Lynda R. Day focuses on the importance of young adolescent girls' initiation into adult roles, attitudes, cultural beliefs, and behavior through the Bundu society in Sierra Leone. Her chapter and the debates she includes serve as "markers" signaling the importance of a variety of educational experiences that take place at home, in informal and formal apprenticeship activities, in religious community-based schools, and through other economic and cultural activities in communities. In addition, even though informal education can include education through popular culture (dance, theater, music, radio, news), Day focuses on traditional schooling, political groups for men and

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women, and sex education for local and traditional sexual divisions of labor and sexuality, and she also reviews many debates related to the types of educational lessons learned in such settings. We see that most experiences teach and reinforce gendered divisions of labor and traditional ideas about accepting and valuing female circumcision. At the same time, they also provide opportunities for training in the economic and political work and power for which African women are well-identified. Day leads us to revisit the fact that most African children spend the majority of their educational lives outside formal school settings and reinforces the call in Chapters 2 and 13 for local decisionmaking through a collective alliance of different voices. Day raises questions about female circumcision within the Bundu initiation rites that some readers may find controversial because she suggests that the possible future decisions about eradication of the practice must come out of the Sierra Leonean context. In Chapter 4, Joanne Csete reviews a traditional topic-nutrition education aimed largely at women-through a critical socialist feminist theoretical lens that asks why most nutrition education programs ignore what African women already do and know, and why programs rarely mention the relation between structural poverty and nutrition/malnutrition. As with Chapter 3, Csete's chapter can be used as a marker for many issues related to nonformal educational activities and lessons targeting girls and women, whether they are agricultural training programs; literacy activities; or health, nutrition, and family planning "classes." Csete, an expert on nutrition, gender, and "development," criticizes most nutrition education programs in and for Africa because of their irrelevance to women's and children's experiences, needs, and interests. She describes one program that may provide a better model for nutrition education in Africa, and she suggests that current programs directing attention toward the three food groups rarely take account of women's/families' traditional food possibilities. Moreover, Csete argues that most programs direct attention away from international and structural issues that relate to food scarcity and poverty in Africa. She says that the "underestimation of African women's intellectual and managerial resources implicit in the current system" of delivering nutrition education (and most other nonformal training programs, according to Polly Diven in the following chapter) is an "impediment to an empowering education on hunger and food insecurity." Some of the issues raised by Csete are examined directly in the third and last chapter in Part 1, by Polly Diven. Diven, formerly with Oxfam America, uses her experience with that NGO to examine priorities and strategies used by international NGOs working in African nonformal education programs. Diven's work does not address work by other international NGOs or most domestic NGOs (as Chapters 2 and 13 do), but she raises general questions about donor aid and activities within the international donor community. She helps us to appreciate the important roles and

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unique opportunities offered through NGOs, especially those that reflect local activism, empowerment strategies, and local knowledge, and suggests that by using "modest sums of money to facilitate community development meetings and promote self-examination," external NGOs can have a positive influence in development. Diven believes that a political orientation toward social justice, equity, and empowerment will push policy toward funding health, literacy, and agricultural projects that are initiated at the grassroots level by local women. She argues that both formal and nonformal education should allow women and men to gain more control over their resources and their daily activities, a concept she calls "empowerment." Thus education for women can provide them with numeracy and literacy skills so that they can open bank accounts, apply for agricultural credit, read their children's health and school records, and organize grain storage banks and small industries. In summary, the contributors to Part 1 mark the importance of nonformal education, the most dominant form of education African children, adolescents, and adults experience, given that the average number of years of primary schooling is a little over two. The contributors question the common messages that reinforce a traditional sexual division of labor and that determine who goes to school and who does not and achievement in and beyond schooling. Diven, Day, and Csete also strengthen Stromquist's (in Chapter 2) and Mbilinyi's (in Chapter 13) message on the power of local adult women and their networking for change. Although none of the chapters in Part 1 presents fundamental and lengthy critiques of "development" from a poststructural perspective, all three illustrate the knowledge, status, and power of rural women, who are often caught in a web of increasing poverty due to structural rather than individual factors. Diven's suggestion that nonformal education must not be seen as the cornerstone of development, but rather as one fundamental element in the long development process, shows again the contestation over the definition of "development." Divan emphasizes self-reliant, internally determined development, but "development" nonetheless. The question of what development is and whose structural and ideological discourses and terms will be used to define "progress" is raised forcefully in Part 1. Day's emphasis on "classic education" and indigenous knowledge systems presents a positive perspective on the traditional ways in which the majority of women in Africa are still educated. If women are in school only an average of about two years, most are still educated through traditional socialization and classic educational practices. Day suggests we acknowledge the importance of traditional education, and Diven and Csete also consistently emphasize the need to treat nonformal ways of knowing with respect by acknowledging indigenous knowledge systems, giving adult women relevant information, and promoting local activism. These three authors recognize the contested terrain of "women's new needs" for

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"modern" literacy, knowledge of Western foods, medications, and financial support for market-oriented schemes for agricultural and commerce. Part 2 looks at formal education in primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling. The five chapters here lend support to Stromquist's argument that both the material and ideological components of schooling work to the disadvantage of female students. The contributors provide examples of gendered schooling practices and of instances in which some teachers and students use strategies to combat negative stereotypes. In Chapter 6, Katherine M. Anderson-Levitt, Marianne Bloch, and Aminata Maiga Soumare discuss the situation in Guinea, where young boys are more often sent to either quranic or "Western" primary schools than are girls. The authors then move inside classrooms at the primary and college (middle school) levels to show how even well-intentioned teachers engage in practices that put girls at a disadvantage relative to boys. The authors present a summary of a large national study of the variety of ways in which gendered differences occur within rural and urban communities and, especially, within and across primary and middle schools in Guinea, one of the poorest countries in the world and one of the countries with the biggest gender disparities in enrollment and achievement in school. Although the contributors assume, to a certain extent, that there is some value to schooling for girls, the quantitative and qualitative methods used provide insight into many of the processes and possible negative or positive outcomes of schooling for girls. In one of the rare studies that include children's perspectives, the results suggest that teacher and parent beliefs, expectations, and interactions, with girls and boys, as well as peer beliefs, expectations, and interactions, affect the way children view themselves and success in school. The study also documents how Western schooling can lead to a differentiation of children from their nonschooled peers, despite the fact that most stay in rural settings after leaving primary school. Finally, the study includes a discussion of a topic seldom discussed in the literature on schooling in Africa, that is, sexual abuse and its effects on girls' chances and wishes to stay in school. Chapter 6 is followed by Mary B. Brenner's study of primary school teachers' interactions with boys and girls in Liberia. Brenner describes a number of classroom practices that embody the patriarchial ideology elaborated in Chapter 2. For instance, Brenner discusses differences between the role of class president-always a boy-and class queen. Brenner also draws the reader's attention to the subtle ways in which student participation in the classroom works to the detriment of girls, who are less likely to volunteer answers as they progress through the primary school sequence. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, Brenner details numerous instances of boys' greater interaction with their teachers and greater participation in their classrooms. This chapter illustrates the benefits of microanalysis in discerning the forms of interaction that promote or discourage

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girls' classroom participation. Brenner's work provides a model for future research on the effects of teachers' practices on the local context of schooling. In Chapter 8, Josephine A. Beoku-Betts begins the analysis of schooling at the secondary and tertiary levels in Africa. She presents a statistical portrait of postprimary schooling in six representative countries and follows this with a consideration of the factors responsible for the bleak picture of higher-level schooling for women in Africa. Beoku-Betts's argument is consistent with those of others, such as Karen Hyde (1989, 1993), Gail Kelly (1989), and especially Stromquist in Chapter 2, who also contend that SAPs and patriarchial attitudes block women's achievement in school. Beoku-Betts analyzes the gendered nature of subject matter and fields that most females choose or are allowed into in secondary and university programs. She highlights the importance of traditional subjects, most often directed toward and taken by adolescent girls, but also calls attention to their gendered nature and the limits these fields place on girls' future possibilities. Based upon her specific research on science and technology, Beoku-Betts makes proposals directed toward greater inclusion of girls in science, math, and technology subjects at all levels of higher education. As is Stromquist, Beoku-Betts is hopeful about the prospect for educational reform through local nongovernmental organizations such as the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE). The final two chapters in Part 2, by Amy Stambach on Chagga girls' schooling in Tanzania and by Valerie E. Lee and Marlaine E. Lockheed on Nigerian single-sex versus coeducational schooling, are both directed toward secondary school education for girls and boys. Chapter 9, by Amy Stambach, pulls together many of the issues raised by other contributors to this book. Like Beoku-Betts, Stromquist, and Marjorie Mbilinyi, Stambach is concerned about the effects of SAPs on the privatization of education, a phenomenon particularly evident in the case of Tanzania. Stambach examines how growing debt, coupled with the experience of socialism in Tanzania, has resulted in the growth of private schooling. Privatization, she argues, has had a marked effect on girls' schooling to the extent that some young women see education as more valuable than marriage-thus her chapter title "Education Is My Husband." Stambach uses poststructural theory and qualitative analysis to study changes in cultural values, landholdings, and attitudes toward women's education among the Chagga of northern Tanzania. Although she discusses the national political and economic climate, Stambach's thorough attention to local conditions illustrates the importance of not generalizing across groups of women, ethnic groups, or national contexts. Lee and Lockheed expand the argument of the preceding chapters that ideological factors affect girls' enrollment and attainment in school. Their analysis in Chapter 10 suggests that one of the reasons girls perform better in single-sex secondary schools in Nigeria is that the environment in

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these schools focuses less on women's traditional gender roles. In addition, their findings, which focus on math achievement, point to the importance of socioeconomic class as a factor in the better performance of girls at single-sex schools. The authors found that more girls at these schools had fathers who were professionals than did the girls at the coeducational schools they studied. The issue of class and access to different types of schools is also examined by Mbilinyi, Stromquist, and Stambach in their discussions of private schooling. In sum, the five contributors in Part 2 share a concern with the effects of patriarchal ideologies on the practices and policies of schooling for girls and women at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. The authors also pay considerable attention to the many ways in which gendered relations are maintained, in part through school policies and practices. Several of the authors explicitly express their dismay at the spread of SAPs and the widening gap between those who are the beneficiaries of economic privatization and those whose material conditions appear to be worsening. These chapters (especially Chapter 9) point us to the need to combine details of local contexts and conditions with global discourses or structural relations. With the authors' questions and suggestions in mind, we turn to the third part of this book, which continues to illustrate the necessity of interweaving local and broader analyses, to address educational issues in the contexts of local, national, and international policymaking and politics. Part 3 looks most directly at the political, economic, and broader macrocultural contexts in which girls' and women's education in subSaharan Africa is formed and regulated. The first chapter in Part 3 is written by Adele Gordon and her colleagues in South Africa, Doris Nkwe and Mellony Graven. Together, with Chapter 13 about Tanzania by Marjorie Mbilinyi, they consider the political impact of international and national donors and governments on the provision of schooling for girls and boys. In Chapter 11, Gordon, Nkwe, and Graven use a case study of one rural South African farming settlement situated near Johannesburg to illustrate the relationships between new laws in postapartheid South Africa and the conditions of living, working, and schooling in rural South African farms, where the majority of South Africans still live. The authors describe the conditions of men's and women's work in farm settlements, demonstrating the poor conditions and wages for both men and women, perhaps worse in many ways since the end of apartheid. They go beyond a class- or gender-based explanation of poverty and oppression to one that looks toward local action and inactions as well as to the national and international influences that maintain a society segregated along racial, class, and gender lines. They describe the Women's National Coalition (WNC), formed in 1992 to "acquire and disseminate information on women's needs and aspirations and to unify women in formulating and adopting a charter and to entrench equality in

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the Constitution of South Africa." Although the authors suggest that the WNC is one of the first organizations to coalesce different ideologies, classes, and races and women representing "different locations," they admit that even this type of coalition fails to counter prevailing patriarchial ideologies. In Chapter 12, Marida Hollos questions the value of schooling for African women's independence and status. By using data from rural and urban Nigerian nonschooled and schooled women, she illustrates the various meanings of "status," "power," and "independence" within different African contexts. She questions whether highly educated urban women indeed have greater status or independence than their less educated urban or rural counterparts. She revisits a long-standing question of African researchers who look at how power is defined, who holds power, who has status, and who is construed as dependent or independent. Hollos uses her decade-long case study of Nigerian women to illustrate these issues and to question the broad generalization that schooling gives "power" or status in all situations or that it results in independence, modernity, or economic development. Hollos shows that the impact of schooling has to be examined in a very culturally, politically, and economically situated manner. As does Lynda Day in Chapter 3, Hollos forces us to question discourses suggesting that Western schooling is an unqualified "good." At the same time, she takes up the theme of earlier chapters on the power of gendered discourses, ideologies, and practices to regulate the microsocial and macrosocial interactions of African men and women in broader society. The authors push toward further local and collective networking-a call we see echoed strongly in Chapter 13 by Marjorie Mbilinyi, a longterm schorar-activist based in Tanzania. Mbilinyi highlights the negative effects of international policies and the importance of locally self-determined curricula in formal and nonformal education. Through her work with the Tanzania Gender Networking Programme as well as her support of other grassroots feminist groups, Mbilinyi illustrates the opportunities, constraints, and power involved in ways of legitimating knowledge systems by those in control of policy and practice. She depicts the interaction of international and feminist groups trying to change long-term patriarchial policies and practices but emphasizes the work of local NGOs and women working collectively across class lines as the practice of greatest impact in Africa currently. Mbilinyi's analyses coincide strongly with those of Stromquist and most of the other contributors in this book by highlighting the maintenance of gendered practices in and out of schools and the need for multiple, collective international and local strategies for change. The Epilogue by Robert Tabachnick and Josephine Beoku-Betts revisits the issues of power, opportunities, and constraints by "using the past to fashion an expanding future." Tabachnick and Beoku-Betts show how

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the authors in this book, through case studies of education and schooling in selected sub-Saharan African countries, answer in different ways the questions we presented earlier in this introductory chapter. As Tabachnick and Beoku-Betts point out, the authors discuss the ways in which different forms of education-informal, nonformal, and traditional, as well as "formal"-come to have value through different international and local discourses. Moreover, Tabachnick and Beoku-Betts consider how the authors treat the topics of power, opportunities, and constraints in training and schooling programs. We urge readers to use this introductory chapter as a guide to finding their own answers to the questions we have raised about how educational policy for women is formulated and evaluated in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, we hope the paradigms described in this chapter will help readers understand how the contributors to this book have framed their studies and analyzed their conclusions. The major themes from the chapters that follow and some of our conclusions will be revisited in the editors' Epilogue.

References Abu-Lughod, L. (1993). Writing women's worlds: Bedouin stories. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Appiah, K. (1992). In my father's house: Africa in the philosophy of culture. New York: Oxford University Press. - - - . (1995). African identities. In L. Nicholson and S. Seidman. Social postmodernism: Beyond identity politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Apple, M. (1982). Education and power. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bloch, M. N., and S. M. Adler. (1994). African children's play and the emergence of the sexual division of labor. In J. L. Roopnarine, J. E. Johnson, and F. H. Hooper (eds.), Children's play in diverse cultures. Albany: State University of New York Press. Boserup, E. (1970). Women's role in economic development. New York: St. Martin's Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977a). Symbolic power. In D. Gleeson (ed.), Identity and structure: Issues in the sociology of education, pp. 112-119. Driffield: Nafferton Books. - - - . ( 1977b ). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conway, J. K., and S. C. Bourque (eds.). (1993). Introduction. In The politics of women's education, pp. 1-11. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. DAE. (Donors to African Education). (1994). A statistical profile of education in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s. Paris: UNESCO. Donovan, J. (1992). Feminist theory: The intellectual traditions of American feminism. New York: Continuum. Escobar, A. (1984-1985). Discourse and power in development: Michel Foucault and the relevance of his work to the third world. Alternatives 10 (winter), 377-400. - - - . (1995). Encountering development: The making and unmaking of the third world. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Foucault, M. (1980). Truth and Power. Ed. by M. Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. Hartnett, T., and W. Heneveld. (1993). Why female participation is important in SSA. Statistical indicators of female participation in education in subSaharan Africa, sec. 2. Washington, D.C.: World Bank, Technical Department African Region. Hartsock, N. (1990). Foucault on power: A theory for women? In L. J. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, pp. 157-175. New York: Routledge. Hyde, K. A. L. (1989). Improving women's education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Areview of the literature. PHREE Background Paper Series. Washington, D.C.: World Bank Education and Employment Division, Population and Human Resources Department, May. - - - . (1993). Sub-Saharan Africa. In E. M. King and M.A. Hill, Women's education in developing countries. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Johnson-Odim, C. (1991). Common themes, different contexts: Third world women and feminism. In C. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres (eds.), Third world women and the politics of feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kelly, G. (1989). Achieving equality in education-Prospects and realities. In G. Kelly (ed.), International handbook of women's education. New York: Greenwood Press. King, E. M., and M.A. Hill. (1993). Women's education in developing countries: Barriers, benefits, and policies. Published for the World Bank. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lockheed, M. E., and A.M. Verspoor. (1991). Improving primary education in developing countries. New York: Oxford University Press. Marchand, M. H., and J. L. Parpart. (1995). Feminism/Postmodernism/ Development. New York: Routledge. Minh-ha, T. T. (1989). Difference: "A special third world women issue." InT. T. Minh-ha, Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mohanty, C. T. (1995). Feminist encounters: Locating the politics of experience. In L. Nicholson and S. Seidman (eds.), Social postmodernism: Beyond identity politics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Narayan, K. (1993). How native is a "native" anthropologist? American Anthropologist 95, 671-686. Nicholson, L. J. (1990). Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Odaga, A., and W. Heneveld. (1995). Girls and schools in sub-Saharan Africa: From analysis to action. World Bank Technical Paper no. 298. World Bank: Africa Technical Department Series. Popkewitz, T. S. (1984). Paradigm and ideology in educational research: Social functions of the intellectual. London and New York: Falmer Press. Said, E. (1978). Orienta/ism. New York: Vintage Books. - - - . (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Schultz, T. W. (1961). Investment in human capital. American Economic Review 51, 1-17. Scott, C. V. (1994). Gender and development. Boulder, Colo: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Scott, J. W. (1991). Experience. In J. Butler and J. W. Scott (eds.), Feminists theorize the political. New York: Routledge. Serpell, R. (1993). The significance of schooling: Life-journeys in an African society. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Stromquist, N. P. (1989). Determinants of educational participation and achievement of women in the third world: A review of the evidence and a theoretical critique. Review of Educational Research 59, no. 2, 143-183. - - - . (1992). Women and education in Latin America: Knowledge, power, and change. Boulder, Colo: Lynne Rienner Publishers. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). (1995). UNESCO statistical yearbook 1995. Paris: UNESCO. United Nations. (1995). Human development report 1995. New York: Oxford University Press. Vavrus, F. (1997a). Legislating empowerment: Policy and practice in an African setting. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, Ill., March. - - - . (1997b). Schooling, empowerment, and the politics of population: A case study from the Kilimanjaro Region of Tanzania. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Columbus, Ohio, November. World Bank. (1994). World development report 1994. New York: Oxford University Press. Young, R. (1990). White mythologies: Writing history and the West. London and New York: Routledge.

Agents in Women's Education: Some Trends in the African Context Nelly Stromquist

A discussion of the condition of women's education in developing countries-and Africa in particular-must take into account policies of the state. Despite the increased emergence of the private sector in the provision of formal schooling, most educational systems in developing countries are funded primarily by the state. In addition, this discussion must include policies of bilateral and multilateral agencies, not only because they are important mechanisms for increasing the consideration of women's role in society, but because they constitute significant sources of funding in these days of pervasive economic crisis in the third world. Such a discussion would also be incomplete if no attention were given to the growing presence of grassroots groups and nonprofit organizations committed to the social and economic improvement of men and women in their communities. Finally, proper recognition must be given to the writings of feminist scholars from various disciplines who, through their empirical data and theoretical analyses, have illuminated the forces that account for the subordinate position that women continue to occupy as well as the spaces that can be used to alter gender relations. In this chapter I concentrate on the evolution of four of the most significant agents of national development as that development affects women today: feminist scholars (both in and outside Africa), the state, international development agencies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). I seek to explai11 what positions tend to characterize each of these agents and to identify areas of convergence and divergence.

The Evolution of Feminist Scholars Among feminist scholars working in the area of development in the third world, the understanding of women's subordination has progressed from documenting their inferior status across various social classes and cultural

25

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contexts to providing coherent and complete explanations for this condition. This shift has been characterized by convergence, whereby explanations of women's subordination, exploitation, and oppression tend to consider the combined forces of (1) the labor market under capitalism and (2) patriarchal ideology in the shaping of women's identities and conditions.! In its beginnings, feminist scholarship in the third world seemed obsessed with explaining the economic conditions of women, particularly the nature of their participation and remuneration in the labor force. Those efforts concentrated on demonstrating that women did work and that they were exploited both in the private and public work spheres. The emphasis on economic conditions was also accompanied by discussions of women's sexual oppression in the family and society, factors that were found to produce among women a low level of participation in politics and a tendency to accept the private sphere as their only legitimate world. Although feminism has always been interested in education-in the sense of raising people's, and especially women's, awareness of existing social and economic conditions-feminist interest in schooling (the institutionalized form of education) occurred relatively late, and much of its impetus was provided through analyses by British and, to a lesser degree, U.S. feminists. These scholars looked at women's participation in schooling at different levels and in different disciplines but went beyond enrollment issues. They questioned the notion that the only problem facing women was that of access to schooling and concentrated instead on examining processes within schools and classrooms to show how the dynamics of teacher-student interaction, the messages and images in textbooks, and several aspects of the "hidden curricula" produced a negative and cumulative impact on the development of women's social identities. In the 1970s feminists saw the problem of women basically as a product of sexual discrimination and concentrated on using laws to improve working and educational conditions (the liberal feminist perspective), to promote sexual liberation of women (the radical feminist perspective), and to change the exploitative economic system (the Marxist feminist perspective). Today it is increasingly rare to find a feminist analysis that does not pay attention to questions related to both the material conditions (mainly the question of remunerated and unremunerated work) of women's oppression and the role of patriarchal ideology (especially norms about sexuality) in supporting the sexual division of labor. This convergence has not been accidental. As time went by, liberal feminists realized that the state did not always act on "relevant" information and that the legislation that was passed was not always properly funded or otherwise failed to enforce women's educational equity in the United States.2 Put differently, it became clear that knowledge and power are intertwined and that when alternative forms of knowledge threaten established power, the latter will ignore them. Marxist feminists, for their

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part, found that the expectation that changing the mode of production (from capitalist to socialist) would produce profound alterations in the condition of women was contradicted by empirical evidence. A number of studies of socialist regimes have shown economic and concomitant educational differences by gender, indicating that women's subordination is a phenomenon with certain autonomous features (for a discussion of the Soviet Union, see Ratliff, 1988; for China, see Wolf, 1985, Stacey, 1983, and Robinson, 1991 ).3 As our understanding of gender asymmetries continues to grow, it is accompanied by a feeling of skepticism about the power of information (knowledge) to change the world and by an increased awareness of how economic and ideological forces support each other to create the chronic disadvantage of women. Linked to this is a deeper understanding of the state's role in maintaining the status quo while allowing marginal changes in order to preserve legitimacy. It appears that a significant synthesis is occurring within feminist theory, manifested by convergence toward comprehensive and complex explanations in which the contributions of material and ideological factors are being recognized, and in which additional social markers such as class and ethnic differences are receiving increasingly greater attention in both theoretical and empirical work. The theoretical framework may not always be explicit in these writings, but the identification of ideological and economic factors is invariably present (see, for instance, Barrett, 1980; Etienne and Leacock, 1980; Mies, 1986; Beneria and Roldan, 1987; Saffioti, 1988; Beall, Hassim, and Todes, 1989). Another positive development within feminist theory is the growing consensus that women face subordinate conditions across most societies. For some time, it was contended that feminism did not apply to Africa because the predominance of agriculture for subsistence had created a precapitalist mode of production that was less exploitative and hierarchical in nature than the capitalist mode of production. Some writers asserted that African women in precolonial times had enjoyed levels of status and prestige similar to those of men and engaged in a sexual division of labor based primarily on complementarity rather than values of inferiority/superiority between women and men. Today, there is agreement that colonialism brought negative consequences for women, but the picture of a much rosier past is less accepted. Another important development concerns recognition by African women of the violence inherent in female genital mutilation practices. This custom was defended as a cultural preference as late as 1985, but a few years later it was being identified for dismissal in the agenda of feminists in most African countries. Colonialism did introduce new patterns in the sexual division of labor. When it replaced collective property by individual ownership and market

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production, strong patriarchal ideologies brought by the colonizers affected women unfavorably in that their customary rights were not recognized and areas of traditional freedom, such as autonomy in certain aspects of decisionmaking and the ability to travel, were curtailed (Boserup, 1970; Wipper, 1982; Duley and Edwards, 1986; Hunt, 1990). The restriction of urban employment to men that prevailed in East Africa forced women to become dependent on men for access to the cash economy and increased their work in the rural areas as they became entirely responsible for the subsistence economy (Duley and Edwards, 1986). These beliefs have been confirmed over time by the realization that capitalism is slowly invading Africa and the incorporation of women under disadvantaged conditions in the remunerated labor force is already in place. It is undeniable that the existing sexual division of labor in that part of the world means much longer hours of heavy and intense work by women inside and outside the family. Further, the role of Islamic religion in many sub-Saharan countries in support of widespread polygyny (which translates into women being subordinate to a male partner, who in turn is usually recognized as the head of the household and the owner of farm property by many contemporary national laws) is increasingly acknowledged as detrimental to women. Specifically in the area of education, research on women has shown that textbooks used in developing countries persistently portray strong negative sexual stereotypes about women (Anderson and Herencia, 1983; Tembo, 1984) and that teachers hold greater expectations of boys than of girls and treat them differently in class, with boys receiving more attention and intellectual challenge (Weis, 1980; Biraimah, 1982; see also Chapter 6). We also know that parents still prefer to educate sons rather than daughters and that girls are particularly vulnerable to changing conditions in the health and economic well-being of other household members since they are expected to provide a variety of domestic services (for a review of some of the factors affecting female educational participation, see Stromquist, 1989). Further, we know that educated women-at all levelstend to command lower remuneration in the labor force than do educated men. In short, ideological and material causes of the subordination of women have been systematically and substantially identified in the research on women's education.

Evolution Within States A significant expansion has occurred in the access of women to schooling and in their educational attainment. As can be seen in Table 2.1, women all over the world have been increasing their levels of education over time, and there is a tendency toward parity between men and women.

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Table 2.1

Estimated Mean Years of Schooling by Age and Region

Region"

Ages 45--49

Ages 35-39

Ages 25-29

Ages 15-19

------

East Africa Men Women West Africa Men Women Middle East and North Africa Men Women South Asia Men Women East Asia/Pacific Men Women Latin America/Caribbean Men Women

2.9 2.2

4.2 3.1

4.8 3.9

5.2 5.1

1.4 0.5

1.8 0.7

2.5 1.0

3.5 2.0

1.7 0.4

3.6 1.0

5.7 3.0

5.1 3.7

2.5 1.3

3.1 1.8

3.6 2.4

3.2 2.7

5.7 3.7

6.9 5.4

7.9 6.9

8.3 8.0

4.6 4.0

5.5 5.0

6.6 6.4

7.0 7.1

--------------------

Source: Adapted from R. Horn and A. Arriagada (1986), The Educational Attainment of the World's Population: Three Decades of Progress. (Washington, D.C.: World Bank), p. 14. Note: a. These regional averages are to be taken cautiously because Horn and Arriagada arrived at the regional percentages by averaging the percentages of all countries within a region rather than by recalculating them after totaling the raw data. This procedure is erroneous because it gives equal weight to all countries regardless of size of the population. The region of South Asia does not include India. These data, although somewhat outdated, are the few that present educational levels across age groups and more specific regional areas.

Women in Africa have fewer years of education than those in East Asia/Pacific and the Caribbean, but significant differences exist between West and East Africa (Table 2.1). In East Africa today, the average woman ages 15-19 has 5.1 years of education compared with 2.2 for her mother (women ages 45-49). In West Africa, the educational levels are much lower: a young woman today has 2.0 years of education, whereas her mother is likely to have only 0.5 year of schooling. In other words, a young woman in West Africa has the average years of education that an East African woman attained thirty years ago. Serious educational gaps between men and women remain across all levels of education, with the disparity in access being the greatest at the tertiary level of education. This gap can be observed in Table 2.2, where the equality attainment index (with 1.0 being equal attainment) shows a persistent gender gap against women that reaches 0.29 in sub-Saharan African. Despite clear evidence of educational inequality, the factors that prevent girls from participating (both enrolling and continuing) in schooling have received scant research and policy attention.

30 Table 2.2

Agents in Women's Education

Educational Attainment of Men and Women Across the Main Three Levels of Education

Region

Males

Females

EAindex

Proportion of Population with Completed Primary Education 3 Middle East/North Africa 30.1 35.5 South Asia 43.6 Sub-Saharan Africa Latin America/Caribbean 50.8 East Asia/Pacific 68.9 95.2 Eastern European economies Industrial market economies 90.6

14.3 26.0 35.0 48.5 59.6 92.1 90.1

0.48 0.73 0.80 0.95 0.86 0.97 0.99

Population with Complete Secondary Educationb Middle East/North Africa South Asia Sub-Saharan Africa Latin America/Caribbean East Asia/Pacific Eastern European economies Industrial market economies

12.5 5.4 6.0 15.8 21.3 40.8 45.0

5.7 1.8 3.3 15.2 15.7 28.8 39.6

0.46 0.44 0.55 0.96 0.74 0.71 0.88

2.7 1.7 0.7 3.8 3.5 7.8 8.6

0.7 0.7 0.2 2.8 2.2 4.8 4.8

0.26 0.41 0.29 0.74 0.63 0.62 0.56

--------------------

Population with Complete Tertiary Educationc Middle East/North Africa South Asia Sub-Saharan Africa Latin America/Cabibbean East Asia/Pacific Eastern European economies Industrial market economies - - - - - - - - - -

-·-

-- -

- - - - - -

Source: M. Kaneko. (1987). The educational composition of the world's population: A database. Rev. ed. Washington, D.C.: World Bank, May, p. 26. This document contains the most complete (having the most precise age and educational classifications) and recent database on educational attainment for individuals 15 years of age and over. It is based on country censuses covering the years 1975-1984 and covers seventy-eight countries. Unfortunately, incomplete data entries did not make it possible to include India in this database. Notes: The equality attainment (EA) index represents the access of women compared with that of men. It assumes that complete gender parity equals 1.0 and takes the proportion of men at any given point as the standard against which to judge the condition of women. The data, though pertaining to ten years ago, offer regional comparisons by level of schooling and gender not available for more current data. a. Refers to completed upper-primary education, meaning five years of education or more. b. Refers to completed upper-secondary education, meaning eleven years of education or more. c. Refers to completed upper-tertiary education, meaning fifteen years of education or more.

In sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, there is a steeper pyramidal distribution of education than in other regions of the world. Given the young age of its population and the difficulties in gaining access to high schools and universities, the majority of women attain at most only primary levels of education and see their participation significantly diminished by the

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time they reach the university level. Table 2.3 shows the proportion of women in the three main levels of education for the sub-Saharan region. Even though some African nations could be differentiated into those having a strong socialist ethos (e.g., Tanzania several years ago and Mozambique) and those that are market-oriented (e.g., Kenya and Malawi), national gross enrollment rates for women at all levels of education do not show a very different pattern; moreover, none of these countries seem to have elaborated public policies focusing on women's education.4 Notable exceptions seem to be Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa; in all these countries international development assistance has financed such efforts. It is of particular interest to observe that the number of women in higher education for 1993 (35 percent) is rather high in aregion where the average number of illiterate women is 54 percent (1995 data). This suggests that Africa-in ways similar to Latin America-is undergoing a process of educational polarization in which extremes at both ends of the educational spectrum coexist, which augurs polarized economic and social conditions. High numbers of repeaters and dropouts characterize many educational systems in Africa. Repeaters account for 16 percent of primary enrollment (23 percent in Francophone and 8 percent in Anglophone countries), and only 61 percent of those who enter the first grade are estimated to reach the final primary grade (World Bank, 1988; p. 50). Unfortunately, the interest most African governments have shown in the high rates of repetition and dropping out has been manifested in a concern for general educational inefficiencies rather than for their possible impacts along ethnic, social class, and gender lines. As a result, although in African countries dropout rates are higher for females, the determinants of these differentials have not been examined. The expansion of education has occurred without anyone examining content (what is learned in school) and process (how it is learned). The patriarchal ideology that produces differential expectations among parents and teachers regarding girls and boys has not been questioned. Sexual stereotypes in textbooks remain in most countries. A subject matter that

Table 2.3

Enrollment in Public and Private Schools in Africa, 1993

Level of Schooling Primary Secondary Tertiary

Student Enrollment 88,615,000 28,340,000 3,456,000

Women as % Total (mean) 45 44 35

Source: UNESCO. (1995). UNESCO statistical yearbook 1995. Paris: UNESCO.

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Agents in Women's Education

could have a particularly positive effect on both boys and girls is sex education. Although courses are being offered under the labels of "sex education" and "population education" in several developing countries, their curricula concentrate on biological rather than social aspects of sexuality and avoid discussion of abortion, the practice that involves at least 10 percent ::>f the world's female population, particularly the young. In Africa as a whole there is a serious literacy problem, with close to half of the countries in that region having literacy rates lower than 40 percent. On average, 21 percent more women than men are illiterate (UNESCO, 1988), which means that many women are being left out of the economic and technical changes affecting their respective societies. Regarding higher education, not only is this level accessible to very few women, but female enrollment at universities is significantly skewed toward conventional fields of study: there is a high concentration of female students in the arts as opposed to the sciences. Data for 1983 indicate that 74 percent of female university students in sub-Saharan Africa were enrolled in the arts (education, social sciences, and commerce and business), whereas only 24 percent were enrolled in the sciences (natural science, medical science, math and engineering, and agriculture) (World Bank, 1988; p. 129). More recent data indicate that this pattern of field-ofstudy distribution continues (UNESCO, 1991). Again, these distributions have not been the object of state policies to correct them. Possible strategies to change this situation were outlined in the international document (the Forward-Looking Strategies, or FLS) prepared by various governments in Nairobi at the end of the UN Decade for Women (United Nations, 1985). Identifying critical aspects in the education of women, it called for the examination of textbooks for sexual stereotypes, the expansion of women's studies programs, better counseling services, research on the causes of absenteeism and dropping out among girls, the development of training programs with linkages to employment, and the implementation of educational programs to inculcate among men and women alike the need to share duties in the upbringing of children and maintenance of households (United Nations, 1985). The FLS received very limited attention because only a handful of countries reported activities responsive to the proposed areas for intervention. In fact, the new document drafted at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (in 1995) reiterated 69 percent of the same objectives (Stromquist, 1997). The Platform for Action, as the new document is called, denotes an even richer understanding of the areas that must be changed to make schooling and education in general more gendersensitive, and it is also much more specific in identifying institutions responsible for implementing the identified strategic actions and in calling for monitoring mechanisms. Declarations enacted at international forums are not legally binding; however, they do represent a formal commitment

Agents in Women's Education

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by nation-states and can be used as a leverage to induce them into some compliance. In contrast to the developments among feminist academicians and activists, there is very little evidence that this improved understanding has permeated to governments in developing nations. The official discourse has changed somewhat from one that focused exclusively on the reproductive roles of women to one that recognizes the need to incorporate women into the labor force (under the assumption that women were not "productive" before and need to be integrated into the rest of the economy). Yet, very little is said and done regarding the need to modify the current sexual division of labor in society. From the preceding review of educational conditions in Africa, it is evident that feminist theories have not affected the state's understanding of women's conditions either in society or in education, nor have they affected the priority that should be given to the education of women. The character of the state continues to be patriarchal, and it is thus likely that new information on the conditions of women will not be collected by the state and, if collected, will not be used by it.

Evolution Within International Development Agencies In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, international assistance is very important. This region receives annually (through concessions and loans) the equivalent of U.S.$19 per inhabitant, compared with U.S.$8 per inhabitant in other developing regions. Foreign aid represented over 10 percent of the 1984 gross national product (GNP) in sixteen of thirty-six countries for which these data were available (World Bank, 1988, p. 164). Up to a few years ago, Western foreign aid flows to African education and training averaged U.S.$1.3 billion a year, the equivalent of about 15 percent of African domestic public expenditures in education. The former Eastern bloc support used to amount to $300 million per year (World Bank, 1988, p. 102). Today, only Western aid flows into Africa. It cannot be said that feminist theories have affected international assistance. In most cases, donor agencies have developed statements that recognize the importance of women as "beneficiaries" and "actors" in development. Yet the level of funding for gender issues is very small. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the largest bilateral agencies, assigns less than 2 percent of its nonmilitary assistance to basic education (which includes literacy programs that could benefit women). It supports forty-four African countries, but in fiscal year (FY) 1989 it funded basic education projects in only nine, and of these only two countries had literacy rates lower than 40 percent (Lindblom, 1990). The type of assistance often given for education leaves the problem of gender

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Agents in Women's Education

inequalities untouched, and in fact presupposes strong reproductive roles for women. International assistance for the production of textbooks has been on the increase, yet seldom is new production accompanied by a concern for removing sexual stereotypes and adding content that might serve the constitution of altered gendered identities. Donor agencies are increasingly aware of the need to support girls' education through multiple mechanisms such as providing scholarships, increasing the number of female teachers, and building boarding facilities. Unfortunately, there is simultaneous pressure on recipient countries to reduce their budgets, which often translates into reductions in educational and other social services. In nonformal education programs for women, the largest allocations go to areas such as health, nutrition, child care, family planning, and domestic technologies-areas that maintain the current sexual division of labor. The provision of this knowledge not only imposes an idealized vision of the role of women in society but also ignores the everyday economic contribution of low-income women to family survival. The UN Regional Economic Commission for Africa estimated in 1978 that women in that region provided between 60 and 80 percent of the agricultural labor (Lewis, 1982). Despite this fact-still true today-agricultural extension services continue to serve mostly men (Lewis, 1982; Stromquist, 1986a, 1994). The largest and most influential agencies have developed assistance for women predicated on erroneous assumptions that do not acknowledge increasingly sophisticated feminist analyses of either the confluence of factors that impinge upon women's improvement or the ways in which effective measures can be put into place. Discussion of patriarchal ideology, for instance, is absent in most project planning. Not surprisingly, serious obstacles to the participation of women in the design, implementation, and evaluation of development projects are not properly identified, and the story of weak and ineffectual state-run programs for women repeats itself time after time in development assistance. The United Nations is actively pursuing ratification by all nation-states of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; it is also asking member states to accelerate women's participation in literacy programs. At the same time, however, the UN has formulated the concept of "vulnerable women," which includes young women, elderly women, disabled women, migrant women, and women heads of household (United Nations, 1991). This concept may fragment the problems women face in society by focusing on a few concrete instances rather than by analyzing gender in its multiple and integrated manifestations. A recent document from the World Bank, an organization that exerts considerable influence in the conduct of educational research and the execution

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of educational projects in developing countries, is a good example of the bias among development agencies toward reproductive roles for women. Entitled Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (1988), the document offers 120 pages of text, of which only two pages are devoted to women. Although this section calls for gender equity for women, its arguments for doing so are stereotypical: "the proven links between mothers' education and the health and educability of their children, and the connection between education and reduced fertility" (p. 61). The document notices matter-offactly that African parents usually prefer to send sons to schools and remarks that women with more education may command a higher brideprice. "This is an example," the authors conclude, "of how families try to capture for themselves the returns to their educational investments" (p. 62). As solutions to these problems, the World Bank document indicates that "there are policy measures that will increase the willingness of families to allow daughters to attend school" (p. 62), but it makes no reference to the existence of patriarchal ideologies supporting differential gender treatments. Among the solutions, the World Bank proposes setting up small community-based schools, which reportedly tend to be more appealing to girls; providing girls with free books; charging them lower tuition fees; offering school meal programs for girls; and charging families less for boarding and welfare services for girls than for boys. In the absence of an explicit recognition of patriarchal ideologies shaping the sexual division of labor, it remains unclear why these "solutions" should work, let alone be implemented. The identification of women simultaneously as mothers and new members of the labor force is also present in the policy papers of several bilateral and multilateral development agencies, and these policies do not seem to have changed markedly from those detected earlier by Rogers (1980) and subsequently by Stromquist (1986a; 1994). The neglect of women is also evident at progressive donor agencies. At a recent symposium organized by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the specific purpose of identifying "new directions" in international development assistance, attention to social service sectors was dwarfed by discussions of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and import support. Although the latter two programs are serious attempts to solve the current financial crisis that is forcing third world countries to allocate substantial portions of their national income to pay their external debt, it is also clear that one cannot attempt to implement them in a way that is gender-blind. Africa is the developing region most affected by the world financial crisis-as it carries the highest per capita debt burden.s It has been estimated that the price of the commodities exported from Africa would have to increase by a factor of four in order for African countries to be able to pay their debt in ten years. The consequences of SAPs on the

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everyday life of women in subsistence economies can be predicted to be devastating, and yet they have not been fully considered. To do so, I now turn to two issues influencing the behavior of donor agencies toward women's education today.

Concern with Efficiency Before Equity A current concern of many donor agencies, with the World Bank playing a leading role, is educational efficiency. This concept is appealing, but the discussion of efficiency is both inaccurate and misleading. On the one hand, when the defense for attention to women is based on the principle of efficiency, such an argument downplays the fact that women are productive but exploited under current conditions. The call for "utilizing women's resources in development" often translates into giving them double and triple working duties. On the other hand, the indicators of educational efficiency in use tend to ignore gender. According to the World Bank (1988), these indicators include the proportion of a given cohort reaching its final grade, the cost per completer, and repeaters as a percentage of the total enrollment. A closer reading of these indicators reveals that no concern is being expressed as to whether these indicators show differential rates by gender and class. Practices such as the one just described have not gone unnoticed by feminist scholars. In consequence, they view the call by development agencies to include "women in development" with suspicion. Gail Kelly thus argues that "women in development," far from being a useful concept to transform the condition of women, is a model that pushes the Western patriarchal nuclear family and the sexual division of labor appropriate to it. The women in development paradigm directs study away from patriarchy since it looks at women and their education as divorced from patriarchal structures that oppress women. Education and development become vehicles to incorporate women into male-dominated status hierarchies and institutions; education has not become a vehicle to liberate women from them. (Kelly, 1987, p. 4)

Given the steep pyramidal distribution of education in sub-Saharan Africa (see Table 2.3), which has 82 percent of the total school age population in primary schooling, and where gender disparities are considerable even at this level, primary schooling would seem to be an appropriate vehicle for favoring women through international assistance. Yet according to the World Bank, only 7 percent of all direct aid to African education is used to finance primary education, whereas 34 percent goes to the tertiary sector, which costs "well over 500 times the amount per primary pupil" (World Bank, 1988, p. 103). Following the 1990 Education for All (EFA) conference in Jomtien, Thailand, four key international agencies (the

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United Nations Children's Fund [UNICEF], the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization [UNESCO]) made a pledge to increase substantially the support for primary education and even recognized the principles of both equality and equity. Following Jomtien, several countries have developed national plans of action regarding EFA, but very few have been able to implement them. Lack of funds is a commonly invoked reason. Whether historical patterns of educational investment will be drastically modified remains to be seen.

The Current Economic Crisis Given the conditions of economic crisis in which sub-Saharan Africa finds itself-produced to a great extent by its high per capita external debt-the solutions being proposed by donor agencies through SAPs assign priority to strategies that will enable the African countries to pay back their debt. This concern invariably has led to the reduction of social services. The main consequence of the economic crisis upon the education of African countries is that national budget allocations to education have been reduced substantially. Fernando Reimers and Luis Tiburcio (1993) estimate that African countries undergoing SAPs evinced an annual growth rate of 1.5 percent in their educational budgets between 1980 and 1988 compared with an annual growth of 4.9 percent in countries without SAPs (p. 39). Further worsening the situation, support by international agencies of education in Africa is decreasing. The Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA), one of the most progressive agencies in support of women, admits: "In relative terms, [SIDA] allocations to education and other social sectors have been decreasing during the last few years to the benefit of a growing import support, especially to countries in acute economic crisis" (SIDA, 1987, p. 4). The decrease in educational budgets and the increased economic hardship in many low-income homes has resulted in lower enrollments for boys and girls. Reimers and Tiburcio found that boys' enrollment in primary schooling in Africa decreased from 76 percent in 1980 to 66 percent in 1988; girls' enrollment for the same period shifted from 74 percent to 60 percent ( 1993, p. 52). These statistics reveal a more negative impact upon girls. Other consequences for women's education are those derived from current pressures toward cost reduction in education, which advocate two strategies: privatization, or the increased role of private enterprise in the provision of schooling; and the use of users' fees, particularly in higher education. The cost of schooling has also gone up due to the introduction of more textbooks and learning materials in the schools (see World Bank, 1988, pp. 3-4).

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Most of these measures will affect men and women unequally. First, the introduction of privatization will tend to increase the class differences among women because the increased costs will limit the education of girls even more to those from wealthy families. Subsequent class division will, in the long term, reduce the possibility of a widespread feminist movement. Second, the advocacy of users' fees is going to produce greater expenses for parents, which will force more of them to make school/noschool choices for their children. Such decisions can be expected to be particularly detrimental to the education of women from low-income families, who generally bear the brunt of domestic duties in the household. Third, the belief that the educational system can be "revitalized" by adding more textbooks and learning materials without first looking into their content, messages, and images promises to foster the reproduction of conventional roles of women in society. The evidence shows that stereotypes exist in textbooks, and until these are corrected, women will continue to receive images that support patriarchal ideology and asymmetrical divisions of labor.

Development Projects for African Women Today Several interventions predominate in development projects for women: 1. Appropriate technology initiatives. These initiatives to develop efficient and inexpensive water pipes, cooking stoves, and grain grinders and storage techniques that will help reduce women's labor are ubiquitous in Africa, as documented in the literature covering projects in new and renewable sources of energy (NRSE) promoted by the UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW). These efforts are undoubtedly important in reducing women's physical labor in the provision of water and food and are being advocated as a means to ensure that women can adequately participate in the process of technology change taking place in the technology sector (INSTRAW, 1988). Yet, the danger with these projects is that they do not question social, especially household, relations. They take as a given that women conduct these tasks and, by finding solutions that cast women as central domestic actors, tend to solidify the traditional roles of women. 2. Greater expansion of schooling. Although the expectation is that building more schools will enable the incorporation of more girls, particularly into primary and secondary levels, research indicates that the incorporation of girls is predicated on their value for domestic work. If this value increases, as is likely in an economic crisis, fewer girls will be able to take advantage of the increased school offerings. Moreover, if attention is given only to school expansion but not to school content, women will suffer. Women need to understand how gender conditions oppress them, which means that both the content and the practice of education have to

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change. The content of schooling, amply recognized as the central nerve of the system, remains untouched. SIDA, which gives much attention to primary and adult education and is quite sensitive to women's needs, nonetheless spends most of its funds on stationery and building infrastructure, not on questioning the content of education. We must also realize that education does not guarantee equal financial rewards for women and men. Many poor women with several years of education fail to capture attractive jobs and face limited occupational mobility. Experience from Latin America does offer glimpses of the future for Africa. In Central America, women with three or more years of education are found in the informal sector of the economy in greater numbers than men. Yet, at all levels of schooling, whether in the formal or informal sector in Central America, women earn less than men (Catanzarite, 1992). Very few agencies fund research to learn about the teaching and learning processes within classrooms and schools. As noted, the limited available research shows that teachers in Africa do hold lower expectations for female students and that textbooks are rife with stereotypes. Further, many teachers have biased career expectations for students that favor men over women (see Chapter 6). 3. Nonformal educational programs focusing on knowledge for child care and home management. These programs offer skills in sanitation, food, nutrition, child care, and family planning. Again, it must be recognized that these skills are important: if women can do a more efficient job regarding children and family, they will reduce their physical and psychological burdens. But to become full citizens, women must learn to serve their own needs, develop more self-centered attitudes, and reject values that lead them to see themselves primarily at the service of others. If not, women will continue to be socialized for reproduction. 4. Income-generating projects for women. These positive measures increase women's autonomy by easing their access to independent income; they also promote organizational abilities and cooperation. Such skills are welcome because they can be extended later to other social arenas. However, the impact of these projects is limited in two ways: First, they are in a clear minority; they exist in large part because they enable agencies and governments to play with the label and claim they are providing such services. Second, income generation as a means of social change implies a trickle-upward effect that will take years to be multiplied and felt in the absence of accompanying supportive social reforms. In all, development agencies have still a very traditional view of women, as do nation-states. Only a handful of industrialized countries, notably the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, are willing to challenge the perspectives and practices of developing nations toward women in their societies.

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Evolution Within NGOs NGOs are the indisputable new actors in the educational scene on developing countries. They have emerged as agencies capable of providing services the state cannot or will not provide. Many of them offer better outreach and commitment to disadvantaged groups than do states, and many are efficient. NGOs, however, are not simply alternative delivery agencies. They also have different conceptions of what development should be; often they uphold a view of social change in which more attention is paid to rural areas and less emphasis is placed on industrialization. (For a more extensive discussion of NGOs and their objectives, strengths, and limitations, see Stromquist, 1986b.) The NGOs run by women tend to distinguish themselves by their ability to address women's problems in a multifaceted way, combining not only needs in the reproductive sphere but also in the productive and emancipatory dimensions. Important work that comes to mind is that carried out by female-run NGOs in Brazil, Peru, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and India. The success of these NGOs-success measured not by carefully controlled evaluations but by the satisfaction of the participants themselves and the continued existence of the NGO in question-indicates that the positive results attained by these groups derive less from resources and efficient management features than from patience, commitment to serve women, and considerable sensitivity to local needs and power. The work of many of these women-run NGOs reflects the contributions of feminist thought to program design and implementation, for they consider ideological and material factors and emphasize participatory methodologies that foster consciousness raising and empowerment among the participants. Aware of the positive role NGOs can play in the identification and implementation of projects to benefit women, some development agencies are increasing their funding of NGOs. Agencies that have considerably increased their support of NGOs include UNICEF, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), SIDA, and the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) (Stromquist, 1986b, 1994). Nonetheless, financial support for NGOs in both absolute and relative terms represents only a minuscule portion of donor agency allocations. The work of these NGOs has been consistently positive, and they are transmitting useful information to and providing valuable services for women. The problematic, or rather incomplete, aspect of the work of these NGOs is that they concentrate on adult women and thus leave undisturbed the formal educational system, which in the meantime continues to process thousands of boys and girls according to gender models that should be questioned. Two major developments related to the evolution of NGOs have occurred in recent years. The first concerns the enactment of the African Charier for Popular Participation in Development (1990). This document,

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drafted in Arusha at a meeting of some 360 participants, many representing NGOs, recognized the extreme subordination and discrimination suffered by African women and saw the attainment of equal rights by women in social, economic, and political spheres as the necessary means to change these conditions. It also explicitly acknowledged that women must become a "central feature of a democratic and participatory pattern of government" (p. 19). The African Charter was very specific in its identification of fundamental policies for women: "access to land, credit, technology, mass literacy, and skills training" (p. 23). These recommendations were brought to the attention of the Organization for African Unity; their influence on the behavior of the various governments, however, remains to be assessed. The second event concerns the creation of the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE). This group, formed at the initiative of Fay Chung, a former minister of education of Zimbabwe, aims at mainstreaming gender concerns into national education programs; convincing society, governments, donors, and NGOs of the need to invest more resources in girls' education, supporting women administrators, researchers and teachers so that they in turn can impact positively on female education, and integrating gender studies into tertiary research, curriculum, and policy decisions. (FAWE newsletter, November 1993, p. 2)

FAWE includes some thirty high-level women officials (e.g., former and current ministers of education, university professors) with substantial access to public decisionmaking spheres. It is currently paying attention to such issues as girls' access to schooling, the academic performance of girls in math, student sexual harassment, and the presence of women in scientific and technological fields. Its actions have been so productive that the group was honored by UNESCO in 1994 for its efforts in the area of women's education. It is increasingly clear that NGOs have become a major actor in development politics. The prospects for the continued strength of the NGOs are excellent, and they provide fruitful spaces for women to engage in educational efforts. Increased support for NGOs from bilateral agencies and from philanthropic sources in industrialized countries is likely to continue. Yet, because the NGOs tend to be under the close observation of the state, they provide limited space for important actions.

Conclusion All too often we forget that national development implies tangible intervention into someone else's life and society in general. Modernization has come with a great amount of intervention in cultural life. Today, institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank practice high

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degrees of intervention in the economic life of third world countries. Paradoxically, although intervention is seen as legitimate in economic life, there is reluctance to intervene in the cultural or ideological fields. Women's conditions are seen as an internal affair and dependent on "cultural" and "religious" factors beyond the legitimate concern of external agencies. Therefore, little interference is still considered to be appropriate in this area, despite recent world declarations (in Cairo at the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, and Beijing at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995) that state that women's rights are human rights and thus universally applicable. The solutions to problems in the development of sub-Saharan Africa are seen by the dominant powers as those promoting capital formation and economic productivity, not social equity of men and women. Some of the solutions proposed for women by either the state or many of the development agencies are not necessarily harmful, but simply incomplete, and that is what makes them so deceiving. Some may not be hurting women, but neither are they helping them. It is extremely difficult for the states to engage in redistributive policies. Education receives attention because the provision of increased access to, and the attainment of greater years of, schooling increases the competition for social and economic rewards, but it does not take away resources from others. Education has the potential, however, to become redistributive at the higher education levels, when competition is keen for a few important positions. And it is at this level that the gains of women are the smallest so far. The four key actors in the education of women-feminist scholars, the state, international agencies, and NGOs-are showing signs of convergence and divergence and thus creating different spheres. Feminist scholars are moving toward convergence, which is to be welcomed because greater energies can now be devoted to working on problem solving rather than to criticizing erroneous interpretations. The work of feminists is also converging with that of some NGOs in that both are seeking to provide knowledge that questions the mere incorporation of women into development. But this convergence is being threatened by the divergence between the feminist scholars on the one hand, and the national and international state agencies on the other hand. Although feminists are attaining more consensus about their understanding of women's oppression, their views have not affected high-powered state circles, and it is unlikely that they will in the near future because those in power determine what constitutes valid knowledge and what knowledge is to be used. Obviously, they will have no need for knowledge that can be disruptive of the existing power structure. The prospects for significant changes in the conditions of women in sub-Saharan Africa cannot be very optimistic. Of the four sets of actors examined in this chapter, the NGOs are the most productive in the provision

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of emancipatory education for women. They are developing among women increased gender awareness as well as empowerment. Yet their work has important limitations. First, they do not often work to create women's coalitions across social classes. Second, they concentrate on adult women and leave untouched the persistent work of the formal school system, which continues to inculcate conventional gender identities in a large group of individuals (the millions enrolled in K-12 programs) that greatly surpasses those enrolled in nonformal educational programs. The UN Decade for Women (1975-1985) encouraged many research and development efforts, and numerous grassroots groups and NGOs emerged during this period. The consensual document signed by all governments at the close of the UN Decade for Women in Nairobi in 1985, the Forward-Looking Strategies, identified a large set of policies needed to improve women's education. The governments committed themselves to the implementation of these policies; unfortunately, the national reports after ten years evince little follow-up. Implementation of the Platform for Action recommendations seems more likely today because many womenoriented NGOs are stronger and a solid core of feminist researchers have become more politically involved. In the last decade the number of least developed countries in Africa increased from seventeen to twenty-eight (Reimers and Tiburcio, 1993). The external debt and its repayment, internal ethnic and governance conflicts, and rule by laissez-faire governments in many African countries place severe constraints on the expansion of attention to women's issues. The feminist movement in developing countries is becoming more cohesive and is carrying out small-scale but powerful steps toward the redefinition of women's conditions in society. But a major problematic situation exists: women activists are conducting their efforts with little financial support and limited coverage; in the meantime, few states are designing and implementing programs that explicitly challenge women's traditional roles. The distance between these two actors must be bridged. An important mediator in this situation will be progressive donor agencies. An even more important step will be the greater participation of women in political arenas.

Notes 1. By contrast, feminists working in the humanities, particularly those in the United States and Europe, have moved into a more epistemological debate, highly influenced by postmodernism and poststructuralism, with an emphasis on how meanings and institutions are created. At the same time, these feminists have also become trapped by the fear of building new meanings that may represent a new, but unavoidably arbitrary (from the point of view of being a social construction), social order. In developing countries there is less concern with this debate and

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more attention given to the political economy explanations of women's subordination and to the improvement of women's objective conditions. 2. Assessments of this legislation and its implementation in the United States show not only that the letter of the law was weak in its social objectives vis-a-vis the condition of women, but that the implementation of this legislation has been characterized by poor funding, modest enforcement, and serious questioning by the judicial branch (for an examination of key educational equity laws, see Stromquist, 1993). 3. In the case of the Soviet Union, there is parity of access at all levels of education; the problematic situation resides in the concentration of women in conventional (feminine) fields of study. In China and most other socialist countries, the problem is one of basic gender gaps in secondary and tertiary education. 4. This is reflected in two recent compilations of national case studies focusing on states in transition toward socialism (a book edited by Carnoy and Sarnoff [1990], and an entire issue of the Comparative Education Review [1991]) on this topic. Both works discuss educational policy and practice in eight countries. Although in socialist countries education is seen as a great social equalizer, no specific policies to address women's conditions were identified in these case studies. The editors of these collections asserted that these transitional countries invested heavily in equalizing access to schooling for males and females. Yet what appears to be more correct is that these countries intensively promote mass education (notably through literacy campaigns) and that women benefit from the expansion of schooling. 5. Specifically, eighteen African countries have more than 30 percent of their exports preempted by debt service, according to the World Bank (cited in Mistry, 1988). The debt to gross domestic product ratio for developing Africa has been estimated at about 70 percent, whereas the debt to export ratio is approximately 300 percent (Kalderen, 1988).

References African charter for popular participation in development (1990). Addis Ababa: United National Economic Commission for Africa, March. Anderson, J., and C. Herencia. (1983). L' image de Ia femme et de !' homme dans les livres sea/aires peruviens. Paris: UNESCO, August. Barrett, M. (1980). Women's oppression today: The marxist feminist encounter. London: Verso. Beall, J., S. Hassim, and A. Todes. (1989). "A bit on the side"? Gender struggles in the politics of transformation in South Africa, Feminist Review 33, 30-56. Beneria, L., and M. Roldan. (1987). The crossroads of class and gender: Industrial homework, subcontracting and household dynamics in Mexico City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Biraimah, K. (1982). The impact of western schools in girls' expectations: A togolese case. In G. Kelly and C. Elliott (eds.), Women's education in the third world. Comparative perspectives, pp. 188-200. Albany: State University of New York Press. Boserup, E. (1970). Woman's role in economic development. New York: St. Martin's Press. Bourque, S. (1970). Women, techno~·ogy, and education: Conceptual insights from the U.N. Decade 1975-1985. Northamphton, Mass.: Smith College, mimeo.

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Carnoy, M., and J. Sarnoff. (1990). Education and social transition in the third world. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Catanzarite, L. (1992). Gender, education and employment in Central America. In N. Stromquist (ed.), Women and education in Latin America. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Charlton, S. (1984). Women in third world development. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Comparative Education Review 35, no. 1 (1991). Duley, M., and M. Edwards (eds.). (1986). The cross-cultural study of women. New York: Feminist Press. Etienne, M., and E. Leacock. (1980). Women and colonization: Anthropological perspectives. New York: Praeger. FAWE Newsletter. November 1993. Kenya: FAWE. Horn, R., and A. Arriagada. (1986). The educational attainment of the world's population: Three decades of progress. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Hunt, N. (1990). Domesticity and colonialism in Belgian Africa. In J. O'Barr, D. Pope, and M. Wyer (eds.), Ties that bind: Essays on mothering and patriarchy, pp. 149-176. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. INSTRAW (International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women). (1988). INSTRAW News. Santo Domingo: INSTRAW, summer. Kalderen, L. (1988). How to improve debt management. In Recovery in Africa: A challenge for development cooperation in the 90s. Stockholm: Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Kaneko, M. (1987). The educational composition of the world's population: A database. Rev. ed. Washington, D.C.: World Bank, May. Kelly, G. (1987). Liberating women's education from development: A critique of the women in development literature. Buffalo: State University of New York, mimeo. Lewis, B. (1982). Women in development planning: Advocacy, institutionalization, and implementation. In J. O'Barr (ed.), Perspectives on power: Women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, pp. 102-118. Durham, N.C.: Duke University. Lindblom, E. (1990). Building on basics. Washington, D.C.: RESULTS Educational Fund. Mies, M. (1986). Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale. London: Zed Books. Mistry, P. ( 1988). Sub-Saharan Africa's external debt: The case for relief. Paper presented at the Symposium on Swedish Development Cooperation with subSaharan Africa in the 1990s. Saltsjobaden. Ratliff, P. (1988). The Scholarly pursuit of women in the Soviet Union. Paper presented at the American Education Research Education (AERA) annual meeting, New Orleans, April 1. Reimers, F., and L. Tiburcio. (1993). Education, ajustement et reconstruction: Options pour un changement. Paris: UNESCO. Robinson, J. (1991). Stumbling on two legs: Education and reform in China. Comparative and International Education Review 35, no. 1, 177-189. Rogers, B. (1980). The domestication of women: Discrimination in developing societies. New York: St. Martin's Press. Sacks, K. (1982). An overview of women and power in Africa. In J. O'Barr (ed.), Perspectives on power: Women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, pp. 1-10. Durham, N.C.: Duke University. Saffioti, H. (1988). Women in class society. New York: Monthly Review Press.

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SIDA (Swedish International Development Authority). (1987). Swedish support to nonformal adult education programmes. Stockholm: SIDA, February. Stacey, J. (1983). Patriarchy and socialist revolution in China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stromquist, N. (1986a). Empowering women through knowledge: Policies and practices in international cooperation in basic education. Report prepared for UNICEF. Stanford: SIDEC. - - - . (1986b). Empowering women through knowledge: Lessons from international cooperation. Paper prepared for the seminar on the Role of International Aid in Adult Education in Developing Countries, organized by the International Council on Adult Education, Kungalv, Sweden. - - - . (1989). Determinants of educational participation and achievement of women in the third world: A review of the evidence and a theoretical critique. Review of Educational Research 59, no. 2, 143-183. - - - . (1993). Sex-equity legislation in education: The state as promoter of women's rights. Review of Educational Research 63, no. 4, 379-407. - - - . (1994). Gender and basic education in international development cooperation. New York: UNICEF. - - - . (1997). Gender sensitive educational strategies and their implementation. Compare 17, no. 2, 205-214. Tembo, L. P. (1984) Men and women in school textbooks. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization). (1988). Compendium of statistics on literacy. No. 30. Paris: UNESCO, Office of Statistics. - - - . (1991). Sixieme conference de ministres de !'education et des ministres charges de la planification economique des etats membres d' Afrique. Dakar: UNESCO. - - - . (1995). UNESCO statistical yearbook 1995. Paris: UNESCO. United Nations (1985). Report of the World Conference to review and appraise the achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, development, and peace. Nairobi, July 15-26. - - - . (1991). Women news, no. 1. Vienna: Division for the Advancement for Women, UN. Weis, L. (1980). Women and education in Ghana: Some problems of assessing change. International Journal of Women's Studies 3, no. 5, 431-453. Wipper, A. (1982). Riot and rebellion among African women: Three examples of women's political clout. In J. O'Barr (ed.), Perspectives on power: Women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, pp. 50-72. Durham, N.C.: Duke University. Wolf, M. (1985). Revolution postponed: Women in contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. World Bank. (1988). Education in sub-Saharan Africa: Policies for adjustment, revitalization, and expansion. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.

3~ Rites and Reason: Precolonial Education and Its Relevance to the Current Production and Transmission of Knowledge Lynda R. Day

In the midst of debates over who or what bears responsibility for the high rates of illiteracy, waste, and lack of educational opportunity for African women, one source of institutionalized knowledge transmission to women has been consistently ignored or misrepresented. Women's associations that predate colonial intervention feature successfully completed courses and nearly 100 percent graduation rates. The so-called "bush schools" have long existed but have been mostly overlooked in the quest for answers to the educational needs of African women. In this chapter I consider the benefits as well as the drawbacks of the Bundu cultural association of Sierra Leone for educating girls and empowering women in the contemporary world. Emphasizing the society's role in transmitting skills, culture, and values to generation after generation of girls, I briefly compare the "Bush School" with formal and nonformal education for women and girls; present an overview of the association's history and current organizational structure; discuss its past and present "curriculum"; and critique the campaign against its central rite of passage, clitoral excision. This chapter is grounded in an epistemological approach with claims to legitimacy that may or may not be shared by the reader. As an African American woman, I share the viewpoints of Chandra Mohanty (1991), Cheryl Johnson-Odim (1991), Philomena Okeke (1996), and others who seek to construct feminist agendas out of specific historical and cultural locations that involve struggle against poverty and racism as well as gender oppression. Okeke's recent commentary on knowledge production by postmodern feminists suggests that privileged forums still do not give voice to the multiple realities of womanhood in Africa and the diaspora. She points out that in spite of recent efforts to move African women's viewpoints from the margins to the center of the discourse on African women, "the diversity of our lived experiences is largely unexplored" (Okeke, 1996, p. 231). 49

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I seek to provide a platform for the representation of a different knowledge base and hope that in spite of the usual power differential in privileging one knowledge base over another, my contribution to feminist scholarship can offer "a platform that affirms, even as it contests, particular knowledge claims" (Okeke, 1996, p. 229).1 I pose the question, Does Bundu education offer the women of the region a different knowledge base that supports different yet widely accepted knowledge claims? Though not an African woman, I seek to validate African women's perspectives by moving their experiences, their values, and their history to the center of the current dialogue on women's education. By no means do I claim to have all the answers, but I do claim the right to seek answers from within existing African frameworks and not from without. I developed an appreciation for the "secret societies" of this region during the months I spent in rural towns in Sierra Leone conducting research for my dissertation. As a graduate student preparing a thesis on women paramount chiefs in southern and eastern Sierra Leone, I visited the country briefly in 1979 and then returned for fourteen months of research in 1981-1982. Though my area of interest was chieftancy and the careers of several specific paramount chiefs, the "secret societies," or cultural associations, as they are called, were an essential corollary to my work. In 1995, with the help of a faculty research grant, I made two trips to Sierra Leone to explore a new topic, feminism and democratization. The entire thrust of my work has been an effort to understand the history of a people from a culture previously unfamiliar to me. Though a person from outside the nexus of this history/culture/language may usefully critique it, such critiques should be mindful that that there is more to every aspect of it than meets the eye. The intricate social arrangements that prevail there may never conform to any explanatory constructs I bring to my analysis of them, thus revealing the "poverty of theory" Western scholars bring to their study of many African women's lived experiences.z The same may be true for educational policy as well. African feminists now and African American feminists for more than twenty years have argued that the terms of the discourse on women's lives are often cast in ways that are irrelevant to them. The debates on educational policy are sometimes far removed from the value systems that shape African women's lives. Making a living, becoming a mother, raising healthy children, and strengthening familial ties are among the aspirations of many African women, which educational policy and formal schooling may or may not address. In some countries, value systems promoting these aspirations are taught not only by the family, where one would naturally expect them to be passed on, but also by indigenous women's associations. A few recent studies have discussed the potential transformation of female consciousness through their precolonial associations (Drew, 1995; Robertson,

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1996; Geisler, 1995). In this chapter I consider how to improve the transmission of knowledge to women by examining the goals, methods, and historical and current roles of one indigenous educational association.

Formal and Nonformal Education Policymakers and educators attempting to improve the level of education for women in Africa have identified numerous reasons for their absence from school or their failure rates when they attend. Among these are economic constraints such as lack of money for fees, books, and uniforms as well as the family's need for girls' domestic and farm labor at home. Aside from economic considerations, other societal factors limit female participation and success in school. These determinants include parental attitudes against "foreign" influence on their daughters, value placed on early marriage and numerous children, time spent in initiation rites, and the desire for girls to learn traditional skills (Hyde, 1989b; Bledsoe, 1990). Recommendations for improving women's educational participation properly address both economic and attitudinal influences. Numerous practical and workable suggestions have been made, including increasing the number of places for schooling; increasing the number of female teachers; widening curriculum offerings, especially the sciences; offering laborsaving devices to households to reduce the need for girls' labor at home; and using nongovernmental institutions to provide education (Hyde, 1989a, 1989b; Shifferaw, 1989; Stromquist, 1986). Though these policy recommendations refer to familial and societal constraints on female education, they tend to view attitudinal factors as antiquated holdovers slowing progress along the path to modernization. But rather than merely condemning traditional attitudes, efforts to promote women's education in African societies should build on and incorporate them, especially since projects and policies planned without indigenous attitudes in mind are doomed to failure. Perhaps we should take another look at these attitudes, in view of their tenacious hold on real-life decisionmaking. Ultimately, any educational process, whether formal, nonformal, or informal, must prepare people to function as productive members of society. The University of Ibadan's director of African Studies, Bolanle Awe, asserted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Symposium on African Women and Education in 1988 that to be effective, education must be lifelong, community-based, and oriented to the real-life experiences of the students.3 She pointed out that fundamentally, any educational system must transmit an empowering value system and a vocational component to the next generation. Unfortunately, the formal education of government and mission schools has succeeded in meeting neither of these ideals for the vast majority of Africa's people. One analysis of Sierra Leone's educational

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system points out that its secondary schools since the colonial period have been skewed too much to the "classic" liberal arts and have included too little in the way of skills or values. Sierra Leonean educator Francis Nicol writes, "Neither the core curriculum, nor the electives made ample provision for instruction in a unified system of values-moral, civic, or patriotic-that were considered essential to a productive work force" (Nicol, 1991, p. 204). Education needs to be developed in context and remain relevant to the aspirations of those it aims to serve. Currently, the curriculum in formal schools neither equips girls for success in the modern labor market nor trains them in the traditional income-generating and productive tasks they will use as adult women. Those who go to primary school are likely to attend school for only a few years between ages 8 and 9 and the onset of puberty at age 14 or 15 (Shifferaw, 1989; Bledsoe, 1990). After their short years in school, they have neither the expertise in a European language to function well in the civil service, nor enough exposure to the sciences to enter technical fields where labor demand is high. Furthermore, their studies in the "domestic arts" of home economics, cooking, and sewing do not prepare them for their traditional work as farmers, traders, and food processors. In other words, the formal education they currently receive is often inappropriate for generating future income and therefore largely irrelevant to their lives (Hyde, 1989b). Given the shortcomings of formal education, the nonformal education sponsored by government or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that offers adult literacy, agricultural extension, health and nutrition, and income-generating activities might be expected to fill the void. But these programs also have built-in constraints that typically lead to failure. First of all, women have little extra time, given the burdens of their domestic and productive responsibilities, to regularly attend or complete a training course. Second, literacy programs are not taught in the local languages, nor do they lead to any greater employability. Third, the extension courses in agriculture are typically taught by and geared toward men, effectively leaving out the female farmer. And fourth, in the area of health and nutrition, what women are taught in training courses cannot be implemented because they lack the resources to buy the requisite items. Also, they encounter resistance from husbands or other family members who have not been trained (Shifferaw, 1989).

Africa's Classical Preparatory Schools Unlike missionary and government schools in place since the colonial era, traditional educational institutions trained women to act as central players in their communities. Sodalities such as parallel sex organizations, age-grade

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societies, secret societies, and market associations transmitted skills and values for generations and formed the basis for stable economies and social systems for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years (Leis, 1974; Richards, 1975; Okonjo, 1976; D'Azevedo, 1980). Even now these "schools" continue to function in many countries, the most famous of which, the Bundu society of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, is the focus of this chapter. Perhaps I should coin a new phrase to refer to such institutions. One possibility would be "classical African preparatory schools," signifying institutions where classical African education is taught under the guidance of traditional educators in traditional or "classical" settings. Indeed, many of these training institutions could be considered "formal" education in the sense that they were compulsory and had a planned, structured curriculum (Dennis, 1972). These schools were charged not only with transmitting vocational skills but with transforming children or youth into adults. Most important, these educational "academies" accomplished this by teaching social values as well as skills. In the past, women's associations were corporate groups that exercised legitimate authority in African societies and empowered women in political, economic, religious, and family life. Women as collective groups, as well as individual women backed by their corporate groups, exercised leadership in the community. For example, the umu okpu, or "daughters of the patrilineage" in Iboland, settled disputes between the men of the patrilineage (Amadiume, 1987). In Kenya, the high-ranking women of the ndunda ya atumia, the women's advisory council in Kikuyuland, dealt with everything concerning the training of girls as well as other religious matters (Kenyatta, 1938). The Ibo Women's War of 1929, in which thousands of women in eastern Nigeria marched on British police posts to protest the imposition of new taxes, was coordinated by the women's organization, the mikiri. The mikiri made rules about markets, crops, and livestock that applied to men as well as women (Van Allen, 1975). The anlu uprising of Kom women in Cameroon grew out of a precolonial pattern of female organization and responsibility for public affairs (Sacks, 1982). But with the advent of colonial rule, these women's associations were undermined all over Africa. Several factors combined to reduce the influence of female associations. Victorian British colonial officials "failed to see" the political role of women and made no effort to incorporate them into the emerging colonial administration (Van Allen, 1972, 1975; Okonjo, 1976; Lebeuf, 1963). For example, they gave salaries to the male obi and dismissed the female omu, thus destroying the dual sex organization of earlier Ibo community politics (Strobel, 1982). Women's associations had often grown out of patrilineal or matrilineal corporate groups. As earlier systems of lineage-based landholding and political organization were

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replaced by individual ownership a'ld market production, lineage/kinship structures were weakened, thus undercutting the women's associations that grew out of them. Furthermore, colonial laws and policies gave men greater access to the cash economy and formal education, thus eroding women's power and autonomy even more than they eroded men's (Sacks, 1982).

The Bundu Society: Historical Background and Organizational Structure One notable example of a precolonial female association that still actively functions in contemporary life is the Bundu society of the Central West Atlantic region. Among many ethnic groups and especially in rural areas, the Bundu society and its parallel male counterpart, the Poro society, are in effect even today. In more than a dozen ethnic groups in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast, male and female societies regularly initiate most boys and girls. Although anthropologist Caroline Bledsoe, as a result of her work on the Kpelle of Liberia and the Mende of Sierra Leone, contends that the Bundu society is increasingly less central to women's lives and is losing ground to formal education, she reports that 90 percent of women in Sierra Leone outside the capital are initiated into Bundu sometime before marriage (Bledsoe, 1990). Although the need for formal schooling is keenly felt by many families, it has not diminished their close ties to the Bundu society; the two systems run parallel to each other. They have been and still are vigorous and extremely influential (Bledsoe, 1984; Boone, 1986; Davies et al., 1992). One reason for the continued strength of the Bundu and other associations is that, except for the Creole of Sierra Leone's western area, the ethnic or national identity of the people of this region has long been shaped by these societies. Most authors who have discussed the Bundu and Poro societies agree that the two have provided cohesion and cultural continuity among the various people of the region for generations. Poro was the political institution that made it possible for various peoples brought together in the close proximity of the forest to successfully adapt to intense social, political, and economic pressure. The societies have successfully mediated ranked lineages and other forms of precolonial hierarchy (Little, 1951; D' Azevedo, 1962, 1980; Richards, 1973, 1975). As late as the last decade of the nineteenth century, the societies were the primary arbiters of social and political life. The Poro could allot land to farmers, fix the price of goods and labor, plan war, make laws, and impose fines (Wallis, 1905; Great Britain, 1899). The Bundu guarded fundamental traditions venerating ancestors and nature spirits. These institutions have been so essential as organizing corporate structures that the region surrounding the Mano River has been defined as a "Poro cluster" (D' Azevedo, 1962).

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Most important, these two societies functioned as the key educational institutions for boys and girls before the colonial era. Sometimes under different names, dual sex organizations with separate training for boys and girls have existed in the region for at least four hundred years. Furthermore, they have always played and still do play a part in defining each person's relationship to his or her world and that person's responsibilities as a mature adult. Indeed, these have been the primary structures through which the culture has been transmitted (Little, 1951; Jedrej, 1976; MacCormack, 1977; Bledsoe, 1984). The women's society, though normally not given as much attention in colonial documents as the Poro because it did not make war or restrain trade, was equally influential in community life and could also fix fines, make arrests, and issue pronouncements. Its sphere of influence extended to the protection of women, family life, reproductive health, streams and waterways, and the fertility of the land. Female officials tended major shrines, regulated sexual behavior, and enforced incest taboos (Foday Kai, "Cultural Heritage," n.d.; Alldridge, 1894; Little, 1951). Indeed, the Bundu society was so influential in social, political, and religious life in the mid-nineteenth century that missionaries went to considerable trouble to discredit and destroy it when they could. The society instilled in its members a level of pride and self-confidence that went against all the values of female deference and domestic confinement of the Victorian mind. The missionary George Thompson, writing in the 1840s, was thoroughly disgusted by the "self-importance" of the women who had gone through the Bundu ritual (known as Sande among the Mende). "They seem to feel themselves better than other people and will not bear a saucy, insulting word, or even a contradiction from an 'unsandied' woman. They must be regarded and treated with peculiar respect!" (Thompson, 1852, p. 315). Reverend William Vivian, in an 1896 account of Mendiland, wrote that a woman in possession of Bundu "medicine," that is, sacred paraphernalia, was a "very important person" who held "one of the most enviable female distinctions" (Vivian, 1896, p. 31). The indispensable participation of Bundu officials in grassroots women's activism in contemporary Sierra Leone, and the fear and respect they are accorded, attest to the society's relevance and influence even today. The Bundu society's organizational structure is localized, and each village or town has its own chapter. The specific names of the chapter officials vary according to the language group, but each group is hierarchically structured, with a chapter head and lower-level officials with specific duties. In Mende, the woman of highest rank is called the majo, who may have several chapters under her. The sowei heads an individual chapter. Next is the ligba, whose specific responsibility is the circumcision of girls, and finally the klawa, who nurse and counsel the initiates. Taking higher

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titles in the society requires years of training beyond that given to ordinary initiates as well as the payment of fees and is thus an investment by a woman or her family. Some of the official titles are passed down through lineages, and the chapter head is normally a member of the ruling chiefly family. The majo is elected by a council of soweisia (plural of sowei) (Richards, 1975, pp. 109-110).

Bundu Education The aim of education for girls under the auspices of the Bundu society has always been to transform girls into women. This process has normally included circumcision, service to society officials, instruction in a variety of subjects, cleansing rituals, singing, feasting, and prestation (gift-giving). Though these elements are always mentioned by those who write about it, in fact the overall outline and specific components of Bundu education have responded to changes in the world outside the Bundu bush. Modernization and its many imperatives, as well as the spread of Islam, are among the outside forces that have influenced what goes on in the bush school. Descriptions of Bundu education over the last fifty years demonstrate its sensitivity to external influences.

Skills and Crafts In the past, when girls remained in the Bundu school for up to three years or more, they learned how to fish, cook, weave, spin cotton, dress hair, and make baskets, musical instruments, pots, and fishing nets. They learned special songs and dances as well as how to behave within the associational structure of Bundu and the other corporate groups that comprised the community. The medicinal use of herbs was another traditional skill taught to Bundu initiates (Richards, 1973, p. 76; Pearce, 1952, p. 231). In general, girls in the Bundu school were taught a variety of skills considered essential for a woman. One Mende writer points out that the society trained them to become "good and useful citizens" (Foday Kai, "Cultural Heritage," n.d.) As early as the 1940s, efforts were made to introduce Western-style concepts and techniques to young women through the Bundu. In 1943 and for several years thereafter, the colonial government made a concerted effort through the education department to introduce an entire curriculum of "hygiene and child welfare" to the women of Sierra Leone through the Bundu society camps. After the secret part of the Bundu initiation session was completed, specially selected teachers instructed the initiates in anatomy and physiology, venereal diseases, village sanitation, nutrition, hygiene, first aid, and child care (so-called "mothercraft"). Furthermore, a

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"domestic science" course, consisting of needlework, cooking, and laundry, was introduced. An income-generating handicraft component included instruction in making baskets, handbags, and trays. During its first year of operation, the department worked through nine camps. In January 1945, seventeen camps were run with a total enrollment of 840. In 1946, fourteen camps were run in one district alone (Margai, 1948). The training in the special camps was widely accepted and approved by chiefs and society officials alike because the female government workers respected and did not intrude on the rules and proscriptions of the society (Sierra Leone Government Education Department, 1944). The organizers envisioned that this scheme would cater to the masses not going to school and would in no way supersede formal, school-based education. Also, they explained that many of the subjects presented in the camps would only have been introduced in the formal education curriculum in the higher grades most schoolgirls did not reach: "The camps therefore come in handy to supply girls with what they have not been able to get in schools" (Margai, 1948, p. 230).

Reproduction and Fertility Besides practical skills, girls in the Bundu school were trained in matters related to sexuality and reproduction, including birth control and responsible sexual behavior. They were taught about successful childbirth and nutrition for new mothers and nursing babies. They would often observe actual childbirth since women normally went to the Bundu bush to give birth with the help of society midwives (MacCormack, 1977, 1981; Boone, 1986). Much of the above has been labeled "how to be a good wife," and indeed, Bundu initiation has usually been described as a training period for women to learn their roles as wives and mothers. "The teaching of all aspects of marital responsibility" is how one author describes it (Koroma, 1965, p. 14). Ideologically, the Bundu society assumes full responsibility for fertility and sexual health. Even male fertility is subject to its control. Male transgressors could traditionally expect castration at the order of high Bundu officials if they broke the laws of the society. Even an ordinary wife or her mother could use Bundu "medicine" (i.e., herbal preparations) to bring on genital diseases or impotence. By extension, this society is responsible for preserving the chain of life and promoting increase in the community. Theoretically, therefore, Bundu education empowers women in the area of reproduction (MacCormack, 1977).4 Women are expected to protect their childbearing function and the health of pregnant women and newborn babies by following the laws of the Bundu society. In a traditional Mende village, there are no male maternity specialists; birth is strictly a female affair. Specialized medical

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knowledge about reproduction and fertility is retained by specially trained practioners and passed along under the auspices of the Bundu society. These traditional birth attendants demonstrate considerable expertise in the use of herbs and medicines to cause or prevent abortions, to expel a retained placenta, to stop postpartum bleeding, to increase or decrease uterine contractions, and to manage many other aspects of pregnancy. Bundu midwives may also perform surgical removal of fetuses (Kargbo, 1975, pp. 9-11). Another viewpoint suggests that information regarding reproduction is not shared with young initiates. Caroline Bledsoe contends that young women are purposely kept ignorant of matters concerning childbirth and pregnancy to enhance the power and mystery of the soweisia (Bledsoe, 1980). Certainly, the shorter period girls now spend in seclusion and under the exclusive control of the Bundu officials minimizes their opportunities to learn about childbirth by observation or instruction. However, advanced training by society officials is available to specially chosen women or to those who decide to request it, pay the fees, and go through the necessary rituals (Bledsoe, 1980, pp. 73-74). Even in the jealously guarded domain of reproduction, Bundu officials have been open to outside influences. By the 1970s, Bundu society midwives were enrolled in government-sponsored training programs for traditional birth attendants (TBAs) and readily cooperated in public health programs aimed at women. They have used the scientific information and tools given to them to enhance their ability to provide good health care to mothers and babies (MacCormack, 1981). In an interview with two TBAs conducted by members of Sierra Leone's Women's Commission in 1989, the women talked with pride about the childbirth training they had received at the local hospital. They freely discussed how they had blended the modern or "white man's methods" with their "traditional" methods. For example, they continued to use their local leaves to hasten contractions and ease stomachaches, but since their training, they had begun to sterilize their scissors and other implements and carry them in a "box" supplied by the medical team at the hospital (Davies et al., 1992, pp. 65-72). It would seem that Bundu education can embrace modern subject matters, including science. The argument has been raised that control over female fertility by Bundu officials demonstrates the power of elderly women of the ruling patrilineage and not of women in general (Bledsoe, 1980, pp. 68-80). Nevertheless, this woman-centered approach may offer more for women's empowerment than gynecological and obstetrical services in the West dominated by highly trained, emotionally removed, and extremely wellpaid male doctors. The exclusive control over reproduction, childbirth, and fertility exercised by women of the Bundu society has yet to be won by Western

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women still fighting for the right to have abortions and contraception free of state restrictions. For decades now, the length of time young women spend in formal Bundu training has steadily declined. First of all, Bundu education must compete with time spent in primary school and secondary school for those girls whose families are able to send them. Furthermore, most parents cannot afford the fees necessary to support their daughters through more than a few weeks in the bush. Parents are required to supply cooked food, staples, and clothing for their daughters while they are in seclusion, and the difficulty of making a living simply does not allow the luxury of long retreats to the bush. One society official describes the current situation in the following way. Tremendous changes have taken place because of economic trends. Parents have limited the number of days for this kind of ceremony.... In those days gone by girls stayed longer in the bush than now, because there were not many schools and parents did not approve of sending girls to school. ... The other reason is the high cost of feeding and materials. The high cost of living does not permit keeping a crowd of people together for too long. The dresses and shoes are very expensive and the payment for the Digba's [ligba in Mende] services is high. (Davies et al., 1992, p. 118)

In spite of the shorter period of seclusion, the Bundu bush is still an important educational milestone for girls in rural areas. Most girls are initiated at about age 14 or 15, though some are initiated as young as 9 or 10. Girls who are in school may only be formally secluded for a few weeks, but the fact of initiation means that they will enjoy access to any of the benefits and training the society can offer. Though some girls go on to secondary school about this time in their lives, the vast majority of young women go on to married life. Thus the education provided by the Bundu school looms larger than the structured education of those young women not continuing on in secondary school. What does this education now entail? Bledsoe's research demonstrates that, since the time in the Bundu school is now severely abbreviated, perhaps no more than a few weeks or months, most girls learn many of their practical household and crafts skills before or after initiation. However, the long-standing method of passing on useful skills through apprenticeships with prominent Bundu elders is still a common practice. In their capacity as Bundu officials, women of independent means in towns and rural areas still sponsor young unmarried women as wards, though the girls are not secluded. The busy households of up-country traders and businesswomen may shelter several young women who are their apprentices in a business, trade, or marketable skill and who have come to them through the Bundu society. These "big

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women" may have paid their fees, that is, sponsored them through society, and are now expected to train them, protect them, control their labor, and arrange their marriages. One shop owner in the town of Blama where I stayed in 1981 had sponsored four teenage girls in that year's initiation season, and they assisted in running her provisions store at the lorry park. A Temne woman with a large fish-smoking and marketing business in the Port Loko district oversaw twenty-five young apprentices who had come to her from the bush school and to whom she was teaching the techniques of drying and marketing fish. These young women worked in her household, in the smoking and drying sheds, and in the markets on her behalf. When business was good, she gave the girls a little money, but otherwise they were not paid (Davies et al., 1992, pp. 39-59). As wards in the Bundu tradition, they were fed, clothed, and trained in a vocational skill. Where formal education is either not available or too expensive, the continuation of such precolonial methods of transmitting knowledge is filling the gap.

Music, Song, and Dance Another critical component of Bundu education is the element of cultural transmission through songs and dances. Mende history and values are conceptualized, celebrated, and passed on to the next generation through the songs and dances learned and performed by Bundu initiates. To Sande members, dancing is a symbolic language in which significance, lucidity, and beauty are perfectly blended. Dancing is used for entertainment and instruction of members .... Initiates were taught the art of extracting significance and meaning from such rites. (Richards, 1975, pp. 112-113)

Thomas J. Alldridge, a British explorer of the late nineteenth century, describes the skill and grace of Bundu dancers he saw in his travels through Mende country. The enthusiasm and support of older women for the young initiates demonstrates the sense of female pride and accomplishment these performances evoked. The girls not only dance together in a miniature ballet, but execute very excellent pas seuls in the most creditable and pretty manner; and after an unusually well-performed and difficult dance, some of the elderly ladies present will rush excitedly into the arena, [and] embrace the successful dancer.... (Alldridge, 1894, p. 135)

The songs and dances form a significant part of the corpus of know ledge that older women pass on to younger women and that helps shape

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women's consciousness of themselves as a corporate group. Though the time in the bush school is now relatively short, women build on their knowledge of songs and dances as they join the singing and dancing during visits to other villages or when their own children go to the bush schools and all initiated women gather to support them. The women who have gone on to form semiprofessional "folk-singing" groups started to develop their skills as girls in the bush school (Davies et al., 1992, p. 95). These songs and dances constitute the core of the national folk culture and help shape national self-consciousness and cohesion. Indeed, Bundu dances from the various Sierra Leonean ethnic groups comprise the largest number of selections of the Sierra Leone National Dance Troupe.

Values There is no question that the principal goal of Bundu education is the preservation and transmission of cultural values. By this I mean the generally accepted principles whereby conduct is directed and regulated and the system of criteria by which behavior is evaluated and the social group is guided. The Liberian sociologist Benjamin Dennis has posited that of these values, the most critical is the fostering of reciprocal social obligations. Other values that the Bundu society inculcates and that it believes are required for a "civilized" society are respect for others and their property; respect for one's husband; and love for children, one's co-wives, and the elderly (Dennis, 1972, p. 147).5 But is this schema of mutual cooperation the prevailing ideology? Bledsoe and others have argued that instruction in the Bundu society and other secret initiation societies in fact reinforces the hierarchies of the precapitalist system, including those of gender and age. Bledsoe (1980) has stressed the ways in which the ideology of women's power has been used by society elders to control the labor and sexuality of young initiates. Indeed, society officials can compel and have compelled initiates to work on their farms, to dance at public events for which the officials are paid, and to marry men chosen for them. All the authors who have discussed the lessons of the Bundu mention obedience to elders as a paramount value. Richards acknowledges that girls are punished severely for disrespect to elders or even older initiates (Richards, 1975, p. 112). Such a strong emphasis on obedience to elders (including husbands, who may be ten to fifteen years older than wives) probably does mitigate against the self-oriented attitudes that lead to individual success. Freedom from the gerontocracy may be a necessary precondition for freedom of choice, but such a fundamental social value should be and probably will be transformed rather than eradicated. Such values transformation could most effectively grow out of the transformation of the Bundu society, not its decline.

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The Bundu Society and Political Power Thus far, we have considered the Bundu society as an educational institution transmitting skills and traditional values. In addition, the society has long served as a vehicle for the expression of female corporate power. It has buttressed the political power of female paramount chiefs from Madam Yoko at the end of the nineteenth century to Madam Benya in the mid1980s. In Sierra Leone, it is the quintessential seat of female consciousness and female political action. The society grows out of the same impetus for female collective consciousness described most recently by Allison Drew. Drew points out that female consciousness arises from precapitalist social formations, including the sexual division of labor, but can have radical and transformative potential since above all it values human life and social needs (Drew, 1995). The Bundu society, like other female societies around the world, grows out of a shared sense of female responsibility for the fertility of the land and for bearing children. Though such a concept supports the sexual division of labor, it also supports an implied social contract defining for women their own sphere of legitimate public authority.6 In the past, Bundu officials carried tremendous prestige and exercised power in the public domain. One reason was their knowledge of magic and medicine. Alldridge describes the Bundu "devil," or masked figure, as a '"medicine' woman who is believed capable of casting spells for good or evil, over the destinies of men" (Alldridge, 1894, p. 135). He goes on to note that he had often observed "this remarkable personage, who naturally inspires her people with much awe and commands the greatest respect from all classes." Benjamin Dennis relates his experience of watching a sowei send herself and a young man into a trance and purportedly communicate with ancestral spirits in an unknown language regarding the health of a desperately ill man. When the sowei came out of the trance, she said it was too late for her to help the man, who indeed died the next day (Dennis, 1972, p. 173). As noted earlier, officials of the society could make arrests and set fines and penalties. In another narrative, Alldridge describes an arrest by a masked Bundu figure (Alldridge, 1901, p. 142). Bundu officials were symbolically equated with male warriors and male paramount chiefs. Their funerals were like those of paramount chiefs, as their female followers brandished swords and seized property at will. The majo of a chapter was the only person other than a chief who could be buried inside a town (Phillips, 1979; Foday Kai, "Cultural Heritage," n.d.). The political authority of female paramount chiefs in the nineteenth century and even up to now has been, to a large extent, rooted in the legitimacy conferred by secret societies such as the Bundu society. Carol MacCormack's history of Madam Yoko, the most influential paramount chief of the early colonial period, demonstrates how she used her position

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as majo in the Bundu society to achieve her political objectives (MacCormack, 1974). Paramount Chief Madam Ella Gulama, of Kaiyamba Chiefdom in the Southern Province, consolidated her power as paramount chief after her election in 1954 by calling a mahajandeh (the chief's Sande) adjacent to her own compound, to which all that year's eligible initiates were summoned (Wilson, 1981). Her election to parliament in 1967 was ensured by the organized action of Bundu women who rose en masse at political rallies to drown out the speeches of the uninitiated rival candidate with Bundu songs (MacCormack, 1972). Even today, Bundu officials enjoy prestige and much decisionmaking authority in the public life of the village. Their counsel is sought on matters of concern for the entire community, for example, where and when to dig wells or start other building projects. Though unschooled, society officials are feared and respected by both men and women (Foday Kai, "Cultural Dances," n.d.; MacCormack, 1977). All the soweisia I met in Sierra Leone were forceful and commanding personalities. To illustrate the society's inviolable position in Sierra Leone, one observer in 1981 pointed out that even the president of the country, absolute dictator though he was, would never dare to break the rules of the society. And though most of the important officials are elderly, leadership in the society is exercised by adults of all ages. A young woman may either inherit a high title or have a special gift that raises her to the level of a sowei or society official. One woman of perhaps 25 whom I met in 1981 was the majo of the society chapter in Jaiama-Bangor Chiefdom. The paramount chief explained that a sowei mask had been revealed to her while she was still a teenager. In spite of her youth, her vision and thus her special gift meant that she was immediately granted a leadership role. The Bundu society has often served as a vehicle for coordinated action by women. In 1972, Kono women, frustrated by increased economic pressures, took to the streets in public Bundu demonstrations that included beatings and abuse of specific male transgressors (Rosen, 1971 ). In 1981, I witnessed an angry protest by hundreds of impassioned women in Kenema, capital of Sierra Leone's Eastern Province. A huge crowd of dancing, chanting, and abusive young women had chased a court official into his office, where he had barricaded himself for his own safety. He had been accused of insulting women, and the male onlookers all remarked that if the women caught him, he would be carried off to the Bundu bush and castrated unless someone could intercede on his behalf with the Bundu officials and save him from this fate.? These women had been called away from home and farm by the leaders of the society to demonstrate unified female power. Female unity and power might also be strengthened by imagery in the workplace that enhances the positive self-consciousness of women. Currently, the classrooms, businesses, and government offices of the developing

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world are replete with symbols of male power as obvious as gun-toting bodyguards and as subtle as suits, ties, and briefcases. Androcentric environments in which male supervisors in spacious, air-conditioned inner offices are served by legions of female clerical workers in cramped and stuffy outer offices lend themselves to continued expectations of female subordination. How can women create an institutional culture that selfconsciously supports rather than undermines positive female egos? In the area of cultural symbolism, the Bundu society provides a deep well of iconographic constructs defining women's power from which to draw. For example, Bundu society masks and carvings symbolize and communicate concepts of female authority, efficacy, strength, and pride. The society's famous helmet mask, called sowei, represents the corporate body of women and the authority of society officials. Motifs carved on the masks represent wealth, secular and spiritual power, and fertility and the regenerative power of women (Hommel, 1974; Hinckley, 1980; MacCormack, 1981). The names of the masks codify the theme of female responsibility for community affairs and refer either to prominent ancestors or highly valued principles and attributes such as bondei (family) and muma (family harmony). The assertive spirit of the mask is signified by names like gbango (loud), yonga (proud), tumba (annoyed), and pujeh (pepper) (Phillips, 1979). Rather than being admired only by art historians and anthropologists, the creative art forms of the traditional women's society could be incorporated into contemporary efforts to mobilize and educate young women. The songs and dances of the Bundu girls all reflect a pride in womanhood and an appreciation of female control over sexuality and fertility. These symbols and concepts could be borrowed and promoted in girls' activities sponsored by training programs, NGOs, and cooperatives. If the traditional values of female corporate power were embraced by contemporary institutions, the Western values of individual competition and state-supported male dominance that put women at such a distinct disadvantage in many areas of modern life might be neutralized. Allison Drew's study of the Kom and Igbo women's movements of the colonial period demonstrates the potential for the cultural symbols of preexisting ideologies to be "restructured and incorporated into new belief systems." She makes a compelling case that under conditions of great economic or social disjunction, "female consciousness and feminism can develop in an articulated manner with each other" and thus advance a socially progressive ideology (Drew, 1995, pp. 7, 26). A final political aspect of Bundu initiation is that it serves as a tool of national consciousness and national cohesion. All Sierra Leonean women, whether Temne, Mende, Sherbro, Kono, or Limba, join the Bundu society and accept its basic teachings. Some Creole women trading up-country in the last century also joined the Bundu society as a strategy for gaining

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influence and protection in their long-distance trading ventures (White, 1987). Much of the Bundu vocabulary is shared by all Sierra Leonean language groups (Turay, 1978). Going through the Bundu experience is an important common denominator for the women of the country, binding them together in spite of language or so-called tribal differences.

Female Circumcision and Bundu Education Sierra Leone is within that broad band of West, North, and East Africa that has practiced female circumcision from earliest known times. Among the ethnic groups who practice it (the Creole do not) there and in most of West Africa, the procedure is limited to the so-called sunna procedure of removing all or most of the extruding part of the clitoris and labia minora. By all accounts, clitoral excision is the central ritual element of the Bundu initiation process. The operation of circumcision begins the process of separation from the old status known in Mende as kpowa, a term also signifying "fool, or stupid one," into the new status of responsible, informed adult. Like other initiation societies, the Bundu society has come under increasing attack in recent years because of its principal rite of initiation. Human rights activists all over the world have condemned the ritual practice of clitoridectomy, even when it is carried out and supported by traditional women's associations, as part of the structure of female subordination. Female excision is usually viewed by scholars and women's advocates as a weapon of patriarchy. Much of the criticism aimed at this practice is so culturally biased and so out of context as to render the valid arguments against it meaningless. For example, most outside observers assume that the operation robs women of sexual enjoyment and keeps them chaste, when in fact it does neither. Most attempts to assess female sexual responsiveness postcircumcision have shown that most women still enjoy sex, though they are not as easily aroused as uncircumcised women. Even studies that condemn the practice have to acknowledge that most women enjoy sex after the operation. For example, Olayinka Kosso-Thomas's important study of Sierra Leonean women reveals that previous sexual experience correlated to female sexual pleasure more than circumcision. Though her findings show that circumcised women did not usually achieve orgasm, neither did the women who were not circumcised (Kosso-Thomas, 1987).8 Most of the more severely cut women who have undergone "pharoanic" circumcision, where all the external genital tissue has been removed and the opening sutured together, reported that they enjoy sex. In one study, for example, women in Egypt claimed that they achieved orgasm and enjoyed their sex life just as much as their husbands (Dorkenoo and Elworthy, 1992, p. 27).

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Twenty-three out of twenty-seven women in another study of pharoanically circumcised women in the Sudan claimed to enjoy sex and to have orgasms at least 20 percent of the time and usually more often than that (Lightfoot-Klein, 1989, pp. 247-277). Women to whom I posed this question at a Sierra Leone Labor Congress workshop in 1995 replied in a surprised tone that of course they enjoyed sex with their husbands. One might conclude from these statements that sexual gratification is more a matter of psychological and physiological conditioning than of the presence or absence of the clitoris and labia. Another assumption about female circumcision is that it makes women passive, docile, and dependent on their husbands. In fact, the operation does not stop women from leaving their husbands for men they find more appealing. Local courts in Sierra Leone have always been and still are filled with complaints of adultery or so-called woman damage claims by husbands whose wives have strayed. Women of the Central West Atlantic region where the "sunna" method is performed are not usually characterized as passive. Indeed, the adult women of this region are almost legendary for their assertive public personas. Trading centers in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria bustle with out-spoken market women who may have been excised but are still economically independent and may in fact be supporting their husbands. Nevertheless, it seems clear that female genital surgery has arisen from social interests in controlling female fertility. Though female circumcision does not eliminate female desire or the ability to enjoy sex, it does seem to blunt the female sex drive. Female excision may have been a logical outgrowth of societies where female fertility is highly valued, indeed socially demanded, and where personal pleasure is not the primary aim of sexuality. But clearly, expectations of a woman's social obligation to husband and family are being eroded in favor of expectations of her personal freedom. Furthermore, though most women do not suffer medical complications as a result of the "sunna" form of surgery practiced in a Bundu initiation, some women do. Indeed, there have always been the occasional cases of girls who died from hemorrhage, toxemia, or tetanus infection following the operation. A Bundu initiation with numerous cases of severe bleeding is common enough to have its own term, "Bundu heavy," and it causes panic and worry among the mothers of the initiates and the society officials responsible for their health (Davies et al., 1992, pp. 106-107). The untreated infections or heavy scarring that do occur can result in life-long problems, including miscarriage and difficult deliveries. These health risks to young girls and expectant mothers led the World Health Organization in 1979 to call for the eradication of all forms of female genital surgery (Davies et al., 1992, pp. 79-80; Kosso-Thomas, 1987, pp. 93-105).

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For several years now in Freetown, and with growing intensity, a debate on the continuation of clitoral excision as part of Bundu initiation has been in process. As long ago as 1984, the Sierra Leone Association on Women's Welfare (SLAWW) began to sensitize medical professionals, teachers, journalists, and students to the problems of genital surgery and the need to eradicate it (Dorkenoo, 1994). Planned Parenthood has secured promises from Bundu soweisia to stop cutting girls, though this will certainly take away an important source of income for them. The pressure has grown so much that Haja Sasso, a religious leader and women's rights activist, took the unprecedented step of publically addressing a women's conference on Female Circumcision and Mutilation to defend the practice. The February 1997 issue of the African Sierra Leone Progress newspaper printed her passionate plea to maintain "our sacred culture." Political pressure is growing, however; in the same issue, the president's wife was forced to deny accusations that she had given permission for the circumcision of 600 girls in a huge refugee camp near the capital, Freetown. In that same article, however, the country's president and his wife reiterated their support for the practice because it is part of the culture. Whatever the functional or symbolic role of the practice, it is part of a particular cultural and historical context out of which will come its future eradication. Only a continuing dialogue, one perhaps carried out in a much less public way, will begin to reshape thinking on this issue. In addition, improved economic conditions that release young women from social and familial obligations will determine whether the women of the region maintain female circumcision as a key component of Bundu initiation. Zainab Bangura, a prominent Sierra Leonean women's rights activist, has suggested strengthening and reemphasizing the educational aspects of the society in a bid to downplay the ritual of excision. "We could begin by telling women that Bondo has been trivialized by reducing it to a circumcision ceremony. Instead the institution could be modernized by teaching abstinence or sexual education to young girls" (quoted in French, 1997). In this way, the values of sisterhood, skills training, and responsible sexual behavior could be maintained while quietly eliminating the bloody ritual of genital cutting.

Conclusion In Sierra Leone, there is much tacit support for the Bundu "school." Most girls, even those in secondary school who may only go to the Bundu school for a matter of a few weeks in the break between school sessions, regard their time in the Bundu bush as an essential part of growing up. Most university-educated women have been initiated into the society and

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have undergone female circumcision. Many of them expressed to me their great pride in the society and the sense of achievement and accomplishment they feel from being a part of it. Many teachers in girls' schools, whether Sierra Leonean or European, express appreciation for the practical and artistic lore passed on through the Bundu schools. In their classes and during recess, girls sing Bundu songs and play games learned in the Bundu bush. Given the fact that nearly every girl learns the lessons of the Bundu school, but that only a select few achieve great success in the formal school setting, perhaps more emphasis needs to be placed on the Bundu lessons and how they can be shaped or modified to empower women in the world they will face. Furthermore, Africa's future planners for economic and human development can ill afford to ignore the basic values that have created social cohesion in the past. The values transmitted to young women must form the foundation of their future success in the worlds of work and family. Women's precolonial educational institutions were community-based and oriented to the real-life experiences of women. They helped train women to exercise power in a lineage-based precapitalist society. Claire Robertson recently discussed how several admirably effective contemporary Kenyan women's organizations evolved from precolonial age-sets, sodalities of women initiated into adulthood at the same time, who also share common responsibilities and expectations throughout the remainder of their lives. Though they have retained the value of cooperation and mutual support, they are gradually letting go of clitoridectomy and the "gerontocratic authority that upheld it." Furthermore, they have displayed remarkable success in adapting their organizations to militantly defend their interests and those of their families (Robertson, 1996). Instead of looking to Europe and the United States for models of behavior or strategies to gain equal access, women should take a close look at their own precolonial institutions and breathe life into those that can support them in their struggles.

Notes 1. For a fuller exposition of this position, see Okeke (1996), 223-233. 2. Here Okeke borrows a phrase from Tiyambe Zeleza's 1993 article. 3. In her presentation at the Symposium on Women and Education in Africa sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988, Bolanle Awe outlined three stages of women's education in Africa: the precolonial stage, which stressed the complementarity of men and women; the colonial stage, which was set up to consolidate imperialist aims and reflected the Victorian bourgeois ideals of female domesticity; and the postcolonial stage, which has yet to make school attractive and accessible to girls. She emphasized the need to find answers within the community to the questions of what will be taught, who will go to school, and who will teach, rather than having them imposed by distant policymakers.

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4. Carol Hoffer MacCormack has thoroughly analyzed this concept in several articles, including "Biological Events and Social Control," and has been the most eloquent spokesperson for this viewpoint. 5. See Dennis, The Gbandes: A People of the Liberian Hinterland, pp. 127-147, for a revealing discussion of how the people of the region regard the values imparted by Poro and Bundu. 6. See Drew (1995); see also Nelson (1976) for an interesting theoretical discussion of the impetus for founding women's secret societies. 7. I witnessed this demonstration quite accidentally because I happened to have business in Kenema that day. The scene of outraged young women venting their fury through songs, dancing, and abuse while dignified Bundu officials quietly watched from the shade around the court ban·i was a most convincing example of the society's ability to mobilize women even in contemporary life. 8. See Kosso-Thomas (1987) for a detailed look at female genital surgery in Sierra Leone. Her study is based on an extensive survey carried out between 1982 and 1986 and is the only book of its kind for Anglophone West Africa.

References African Sierra Leone Progress. First Lady denies ordering circumcision of 600 girls in Grafton, Sierra Leone. February 1997. - - - . Prominent Sierra Leonean blows mind on female circumcision. February 1997. Alldridge, T. J. (1894). Wanderings in the hinterland of Sierra Leone. The Geographical Journal 4, 123-140. - - - . (1901). The Sherbro and its hinterland. London: Macmillan. Amadiume, I. (1987). Male daughters, female husbands: Gender and sex in African society. London and New Jersey: Zed Books. Awe, B. (1977). The Iyalode in the traditional Yoruba political system. In A. Schlegel (ed.), Sexual stratification: A cross-cultural view. New York: Columbia University Press. Bartels, F. L. (1975). Indigenous education in Sierra Leone. In G. Brown and M. Hiskett (eds.), Conflict and harmony in education in tropical Africa. London: Allen and Unwin. Bledsoe, C. (1980). Women and marriage in Kpelle society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. - - - . (1984). The political use of Sande ideology and symbolism. American Ethnologist 11, no. 3, 455-4 72. - - - . (I 990). School fees and the marriage process for Mende girls in Sierra Leone. In P.R. Sanday and R. G. Goodenough (eds.), Beyond the second sex: New directions in the anthropology of gender. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Boone, S. (1986). Radiance from the waters: Ideals of feminine beauty in Mende art. New Haven: Yale University Press. Callaway, H. (1975). Akan indigenous education. In G. Brown and M. Hiskett (eds.), Conflict and harmony in education in tropical Africa. London: Allen and Unwin. Davies, C., A. Davies, A. Gyorgy, and C. Kayser (eds.). (1992). Women of Sierra Leone: Traditional voices. Freetown: Partners in Adult Education Women's Commission. D 'Azevedo, W. (1962). Some historical problems in the delineation of a Central West Atlantic region. New York Academy of Sciences 96, 512-538.

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- - - . (1980). Gola Poro and Sande: Primal tasks in social guardianship. Ethnologische Zeitschrift Zuerich 1, 13-22. Dennis, B. (1972). The Gbandes: A people of the Liberian hinterland. Chicago: Nelson Hall. Dorkenoo, E. (1994). Cutting the rose: Female genital mutilation, the practice and its prevention. London: Minority Rights Publications. Dorkenoo, E., and S. Elworthy. (1992). Female genital mutilation: Proposals for change. 3d rev. ed. London: Minority Rights Group. Drew, A. (1995). Female consciousness and feminism in Africa. Theory and Society 24, no. 1, 1-33. Dzobo, N. K. (1975). Values in indigenous African education. In G. Brown and M. Hislett (eds.), Conflict and harmony in education in tropical Africa. London: Allen and Unwin. Erny, P. (1981). The child and his environment in black Africa: An essay on traditional education. Trans., abridged, and adapted by G. J. Wanhoji. Nairobi, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. (First published in French. Paris: Payot, 1972.) Foday Kai (Paramount Chief B.A.). (n.d.) "Cultural heritage of Sierra Leone with special reference to the Mende tribe." Typescript. - - - . (n.d.). "Mende cultural dances." Typescript. French, H. (1997). Africa's culture war: Old customs, new values. New York Times, February 2. Geisler, G. (1995). Troubled Sisterhood: Women and Politics in Southern Africa. African Affairs 94, 545-578. Great Britain. (1899). Parliamentary Papers (Commons). Report of Her Majesty's commission and correspondence on the subject of insurrection in the Sierra Leone protectorate: 1898. Chalmers Report, Vol. 60, c. 9388, 9391. Harrell-Bond, B. (1980). Women's attitudes to circumcision debate. West Africa (September 22). Hinckley, P. (1980). The Sowo mask: Symbol of sisterhood. African Studies Center Working Paper no. 40. Hommel, W. L. (1974). The art of the Mende. Exhibit catalogue. University of Maryland Art Gallery. Hyde, K. (1989a). Improving women's education in sub-Saharan Africa: A review of the literature. Washington, D.C.: World Bank, Education and Employment Division, Population and Human Resources Department, March. - - - . (1989b). Improving girls' school attendance and achievement in developing countries: A guide to research tools. Washington, D.C.: Office of Education, Bureau for Science and Technology, U.S. Agency for International Development, October. Jedrej, M. C. (1976). Structural aspects of a West African secret society. Journal of Anthropological Research 32, 234-245. Johnson-Odim, C. (1991). Common themes, different contexts: Third world women and feminism. In C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres (eds.), Third world women and the politics of feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Kargbo, T. K. (1975). Traditional midwifery amongst the Mende of the southern province of Sierra Leone: Its values, relevance, and limitations in the contemporary context. Unpublished paper presented at the Second World and African Festival of Arts and Culture, University of Sierra Leone, March 14-15. Kenyatta, J. (1938). Facing Mount Kenya. New York: Vintage Books.

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Koroma, M. A. (1965). The effect of western education on secret societies in the southern area. Bachelor's thesis, no. 119, University of Sierra Leone-Fourah Bay College. Kosso-Thomas, 0. (1987). The circumcision of women: A strategy for eradication. London: Zed Books. Lebeuf, A. M. D. (1963). The role of women in the political organization of African societies. Trans. by H. M. Wright. In D. Paulme (ed.), Women of tropical Africa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Leis, N. B. (1974). Women in groups: Ijaw women's associations. In M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds.), Women, culture, and society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lightfoot-Klein, H. (1989). Prisoners of ritual: An odyssey into female circumcision in Africa. New York: Harrington Park Press. Little, K. (1951). The Mende of Sierra Leone. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. MacCormack, C. P. H. (1972). Mende and Sherbro women in high office. Canadian Journal of African Studies 6, no. 2, 151-164. - - - . (1974). Madam Yoko: Ruler of the Kpa Mende confederacy. In M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds.), Women, culture, and society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. - - - . (1977). Biological events and social control. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (autumn), 93-100. - - - . (1981). Health, fertility and birth in Moyamba District, Sierra Leone. In C. MacCormack (ed.), The ethnography of fertility and birth. London: Academic Press. Margai, Sir M. (1948). Welfare work in a secret society. African Affairs 48, no. 3, 223-233. Mohanty, C. (1991). Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo, and L. Torres (eds.), Third world women and the politics offeminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Nelson, A. T. (1976). Women in groups: Women's ritual sodalities in native North America. Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology 6, no. 3, 29-67. Nicol, F. S. (1991). The secondary school curriculum and its relevance to the manpower needs of Sierra Leone. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland. Okeke, P. (1996). Postmodern feminism and knowledge production: The African context. Africa Today 43, no. 3 (July-September), 223-233. Okonjo, K. (1976). The dual sex political system in operation. In N. Hafkin and E. Bay (eds.), Women in Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pearce, G. (1952). Sierra Leone story. London: Cassell. Phillips, R. (1979). The Sande society masks of the Mende of Sierra Leone. Ph.D. dissertation, University of London-SOAS. Richards, J. V. 0. (1975). The Sande and some of the forces that inspired its creation or adoption with some references to the Poro. Journal of Asian and African Studies 8, nos. 1-2 (January-April), 69-77. - - - . (1975). Some aspects of the multivariant socio-cultural roles of the Sande of the Mende. Canadian Journal of African Studies 9, no. 1, 103-113. Robertson, C. (1996). Grassroots in Kenya: Women, genital mutilation, and collective action, 1920-1990. Signs 21, 615-641. Rosen, D. N. (1971). Some aspects of the status of women in Kono society. Africana Research Bulletin 2, no. 1, 3-16. Sacks, K. (1982). An overview of women and power in Africa. In J. F. O'Barr (ed.), Perspectives on power: Women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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Shifferaw, M. (1989). Nonformal education and training programs for women in African countries. Washington, D.C.: World Bank, Education and Employment Division, Population and Human Resources Department, March. Sierra Leone Government Education Department. (1944). Welfare work among women in the Sierra Leone Protectorate: Dry season courses held for Bundu initiates. Mass education pamphlet no. 2. Strobel, M. (1976). From lelemama to lobbying: Women's associations in Mombassa, Kenya. In N. Hafkin and E. Bay (eds.), Women in Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press. - - - . (1982). African women. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8 (autumn), 109-131. Stromquist, N. (1986). Empowering women through knowledge: Policies and practices in international cooperation in basic education. Stanford University. Report prepared for UNICEF. Thompson, G. (1852). Thompson in Africa. 2d ed. New York: Printed for the author. Turay, A. K. (1978). Language contact: Mende amd Temne, a case study. Africana Marburgensia 11, no. 1, 56-60. Van Allen, J. (1972). Sitting on a man: Colonialism and the lost political institutions of Igbo women. Canadian Journal of African Studies 6, no. 2, 165-181. - - - . (1975). Aba riots or the Igbo women's war? Ideology, stratification and the invisibility of Women. Ufahamu 6, no. 1, 11-39. Van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. Trans. by M. Vizedom and G. Caffee. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vandi, B. F. (1975). The impact of missionary education on the early peoples of Rotifunk. Bachelor's thesis, University of Sierra Leone, Njala College. Vivian, W. (1896). The Mende country and some of the customs and characteristics of its people. Journal of the Manchester Geographical Society 12, 1-34. Wallis, C. B. (1905). The Poro of the Mendi. Journal of the African Society 4, no. 14, 183-189. White, F. (1987). Sierra Leone's women traders: Women on the Afro-European frontier. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wilson, J. (1981). Women paramount chiefs in national politics: Madam Ella Koblo-Gulama of Kaiyamba Chiefdom, a case study. Bachelor's thesis, University of Sierra Leone-Fourah Bay College. Zeleza, T. (1993). Gendering African history. African Development 18, no. 1, 116-117.

4~ Beyond the Three Food Groups: Nutrition Education for Women in Africa Joanne Csete

Malnutrition of young children has been a more intransigent problem in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region of the world. On a regional level, Latin America, the Near East, South and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific have enjoyed significant declines in the past two decades in the proportion of young children classified as chronically undernourished. In contrast, Africa's proportion has remained constant, at about one-third of children (FAO/WHO, 1992). Considerable resources have been spent on a wide range of interventions to improve this situation, most of which are directly aimed at mothers of young children and many of which include nonformal education of mothers. The nature and track record of this education for African women, however, are such that these activities may be as much a part of the problem as the solution. In Africa, nonformal nutrition education rarely has an audience other than women. This education holds enormous potential for the empowerment of women and the improvement of the environment in which they exercise their essential roles as guardians of household food security, principal caretakers of young children, and key players in the use of health services by household members, all of which represent key determinants of children's nutritional status. In practice, however, a great deal of nutrition education for women in Africa is anything but emancipating and enabling. In this chapter I examine some existing problems with nutrition education as a tool of empowerment for women and suggest new directions toward this end. The traditional goal of nutrition education is to alter food behaviors such that consumers make optimal nutritional use of the resources at their disposal (Hornik, 1985). The very nature of the malnutrition problem in Africa begs the question of whether the problem is susceptible to solution through nutrition education. The underlying causes of malnutrition-inadequate food security, inadequate care and feeding of young children, and inadequate access to health services and a healthy environment-all are in

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turn affected by structural social, economic, and political factors that constrain or expand the capacity of households and women to control resources and engage in "optimal" behaviors (UNICEF, 1990). Addressing the degree to which poverty and political disenfranchisement impede improving behaviors through nutrition education is beyond the scope of this chapter; this point remains a matter of some discussion in international nutrition circles (see, e.g., Berg, 1993a). There is good reason to believe, however, that it is possible to reduce malnutrition to a certain degree through improved child-care and feeding practices, which may be influenced by nutrition education. As with other areas of nonformal education of women, planners of nutrition education in developing countries have been urged to find ways to make their activities more participatory and more mindful of the realities of African women's daily work and decisionmaking (e.g., Drummond, 1977; Kent, 1988; Rogers and Youssef, 1988; Hornik, 1985; Mosio and Eide, 1985; Praun, 1982) as well as to base nutrition education more solidly in the context of the basic social and economic factors mentioned above (Pratt and Pratt, 1987). It is difficult, however, to find evidence of these new visions in the daily reality of nutrition education in Africa. According to the published literature (e.g., Kamwenubusa, 1992; Andrien and Beghin, 1993, esp. pp. 17-25) and the author's recent observations, nutrition education for African women, at least in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, has changed relatively little in the past decade or two. The content of nonformal educational curricula in nutrition continues to be dominated by notions of food groups, balanced diets, and nutrient content of foods, with some attention to the special food needs of very young children. In most African countries, health ministries oversee nutrition education for women in Africa, and most such nutrition education focuses on education for women attending programs at health facilities of some kind. Health center-based education has, with rare exceptions, tended to be delivered in lecture form to women who bring their children or themselves to the health facility for other curative or preventive services. In addition to nutrition education in health centers, Africa has in recent years seen the rise of social marketing as an approach to nutrition education. Social marketing is defined by Berg (1993a) as the use of commercial marketing techniques to understand and address a social problem. Social marketing for nutrition improvement is in fairly wide use all over the world, even in wealthy countries for the promotion of low-fat diets. "Socially marketed" nutrition education is generally based on some degree of marketing or behavioral study of the target audience and has tended in Africa to be used for mass-media campaigns of relatively short duration (Andrien and Beghin, 1993). It is difficult to find a full accounting of social marketing activities in nutrition in Africa, but themes have included the conventional food groups and nutrient composition of foods as well as

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improved breast-feeding and feeding practices during illness (see, e.g., Piwoz, 1994).

Problems and Impediments to Change

Removal of Nutritional Problems from Their Socioeconomic and Political Context As already suggested above, the traditional themes of much of the nonformal nutrition education in Africa remove nutrition education from an understanding of the political economy of malnutrition and such factors as women's social and economic status. Nutrition education seems to focus on the question of how meager resources can best be used to produce good nutrition rather than, as George Kent (1988) puts it, on the question of why resources are so meager in the first place. This approach is undoubtedly driven by policymak:ers in many African countries who know the potential political cost of encouraging women to explore the real causes of food deprivation. Education about which foods are rich in vitamin A is politically much safer than education about the relationship among such factors as income distribution, ruralurban inequities, social deprivation of women, and child malnutrition. For both health workers and policymakers, a focus on dietetic or biomedical aspects of nutrition is a convenient solution: women can be treated as needing scientific knowledge of the nutritional composition of diets, and the inequities and deprivations behind undernutrition in their families can be ignored.

Absence of Real Participation of Women Hand in hand with the depoliticization of malnutrition is the continued widespread absence of participatory approaches that would incorporate women's knowledge of basic causes of child malnutrition and meet their needs for education or other support. Health workers who are instructors in health centers often enjoy a certain prestige in the community and may be from a higher class than their "students" or may themselves perceive their training and government connection as conferring upon them a higher status than that of the women they teach (e.g., Sauerborn, Nougtara, and Diesfeld, 1989; Matomora, 1989). The health center setting allows these workers to maintain a nonparticipatory and even patronizing or accusatory tone in their lectures and advice. Delivering nutrition education in a health center encourages its use as part of a system that points out to women their inadequacies as mothers or homemakers, especially if their children are ill or underweight. The health center may thus become a proving ground for African women as wives and mothers in a way that makes participatory exchanges highly unlikely.

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Social marketing is, by definition, not participatory but rather topdown (Andrien and Beghin, 1993). Although some practitioners of this method seem to have incorporated more participatory background studies into their activities, women cannot "talk back" to social marketing campaigns, and many mass-marketed messages are inappropriate for the same reasons that traditional lecture-style education can be. Unrealistic Views of Food and Food Availability Even within the confines of a technical biomedical or politically neutral approach to nutrition education, much of the education to which women are exposed in Africa is unsuited to their needs and based on idealizations of food availability and use. Too frequently, the local cultural, economic, and agricultural context of food is not reflected in the curricula used in health centers in Africa (Savage-King and Burgess, 1993, chap. 28). For example, a dominant pedagogical tool in nutrition education for African women is the concept of the three food groups: (1) foods for body-building and growth (protein foods), (2) sources of energy (carbohydrates and fats), and (3) "protective" foods (sources of vitamins and minerals). As in food group-based lessons in wealthy countries, women are advised to balance the diets of their families by ensuring that each group is represented at virtually every meal. The use of food groups contributes to the formulation of nutrition messages that account inadequately for the real constraints on food availability faced by African women. For example, most visual aids on the three food groups in Africa feature animal products as the principal, if not the only, elements of the protein group. L. Abrahamsson and N. Velarde ( 1977) suggested some years ago that this emphasis on animal products is a result of lingering Western influence in the formulation of the curricula used in these centers, and this influence still seems powerful. In many locations, this emphasis ignores what may be a limited capacity of households to acquire meat and milk products regularly. In addition, as Ann Burgess (1994, p. 90) notes, some important foods in the African diet are important for their energy, protein, and vitamin/mineral content and thus defy classification in the three-group scheme, and information on food sources of key nutrients such as iron and vitamin A is not provided in this grouping. Moreover, such causes of malnutrition as infrequent feeding of young children and the feeding of bulky foods are not addressed by the food group approach. The seasonal unavailability or prohibitive price of foods is often not taken into account in the instructor's recommendations, as though foods did not spring from agricultural systems. Foods are sometimes recommended in spite of local taboos or food habits that exclude them. Nutrition education may thus put women in a quandary, when the "ideal"

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food recommended by the health worker is something women do not believe their families should consume. When food taboos are taken into account, it is often with the objective of eradicating them because they represent an "ignorance" that clashes with the scientific wisdom of the lessons. Breastmilk, moreover, which may be the most important food for the children of some of the women who receive nutrition education, is frequently not mentioned as part of any of the three food groups or even treated as a food. Ironically, an aspect of health center-based nutrition education that is generally poorly developed in Africa is the connection between nutrition and disease or health. Growth monitoring, for instance, which consists of weighing young children and noting their weight progress on growth cards, provides an unusually good opportunity for effective nutrition education. Unfortunately, one often observes lessons about "ideal" foods in which no reference is made to the growth path of children, the reasons growing children have special food needs, or what causes growth to falter. The counseling of women at the time of noting the child's weight on the growth chart, which should also be an important element of the nutrition education program, is often lacking (Gerein and Ross, 1991). Nutrition education done as part of a vaccination session will often not include mention of the connection between nutritional status and disease resistance or the immunological importance of breast-feeding.

Influence of Outside Donors The economic and fiscal crises suffered by many African countries during the 1980s hit the health and nutrition sectors very hard. According to World Bank figures, the average contribution of national governments in sub-Saharan Africa in 1990 was about $1 per capita of the national budgets (World Bank, 1993, p. 66), of which nutrition activities generally represent a tiny proportion and nutrition education even less. As a result, health and nutrition activities are largely funded and, not surprisingly, planned or at least heavily influenced by outside donors. In some countries, this includes the financing by donors of schools that exist to train health and nutrition educators, Since these donors-private, bilateral, and multilateral-often themselves have scarce resources for nutrition programs, they frequently standardize programs as much as possible, following certain formulae and well-worn themes in their health and nutrition education activities. More important, donors are frequently under pressure to support activities whose effectiveness can be quantified. The effectiveness of health and nutrition education is notoriously difficult to demonstrate under the best of circumstances (see, e.g., Klein et al., 1983). Given the choice between support for a vaccination program or for development and testing of a more appropriate nutrition education curriculum, many donors would

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choose the former because of the apparent ease of proving its worth.

Recommendations for Improvement Attention to the Socioeconomic, Policy, and Agricultural Context of Food Nutrition education in Africa will surely not contribute to improved nutrition without being better grounded in the reality of its target population. Although this better grounding would to some degree follow automatically from giving women more control over nutrition education (see the next section), an explicit, systematic, and participatory effort is needed to identify determinants of food availability in low-income communities and to include these factors in educational activities. Only then will communities be able to use nutrition education to help overcome the limits that poverty imposes on food decisionmaking in Africa (Kent, 1988). Solving nutritional problems in all their multidisciplinary complexity should be at the center of nutrition education. A good example of a book that guides health workers and other educators in leading women in a participatory assessment of problems related to childhood malnutrition is Community Nutrition for East Africa, recently prepared by Ann Burgess and colleagues with support from the African Medical Research Foundation. Increased involvement of the agricultural sector and use of agricultural knowledge are also essential to more realistic nutrition education. In what ways do women's duties as agricultural laborers and food preparers contribute to nutritional problems or their resolution? How are seasonal food problems exacerbated by agricultural labor demands on women? How might sparing women's time in food preparation, fuel and water gathering, food processing and storage activities, and field labor enable them to improve infant-feeding activities and household food security? Such questions should be central to nonformal nutrition curricula in Africa. Inclusion of an agricultural focus in nutrition education might inspire better training of agricultural extension agents (Baron, 1984) and, further, might lead to an understanding of nutrition education as a concern of more than the ministry of health. Even if African communities are able to take more control of nutrition education activities, health workers are likely to continue to play an important role in this area for some time. More and better training of health and nutrition educators is needed in Africa, along with more resources for the development of appropriate educational materials. Private voluntary organizations and other donors active in this area can help by encouraging local development of materials rather than promoting standard curricula designed for use across an entire country or several countries.

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Better Attention to Women's Knowledge and Situations Women's own views of possibilities for escaping the entrapment of poverty and hunger must be the key to shaping adult nutrition education in Africa (Corbett, 1988). The underestimation of African women's intellectual and managerial resources implicit in the current system is an impediment to an empowering education on hunger and food insecurity. Giving women a role in nutrition education in which they are not talked down to or accused of malpractice is an important first step. Subsequent steps should allow women or women's groups to exercise significant control over the content and operation of nutrition education, although some elements of the traditional approach of pointing out the "right" foods to satisfy various nutritional needs may be retained. A number of recent efforts to combine participatory women's education with small credit and incomegenerating activities for women in Africa warrant attention and careful evaluation (see, e.g., Freedom from Hunger, 1993). Social marketing of educational messages should be done only after women's perceptions of problems are expressed and understood.

Improved Allocation of Resources In spite of questions about the potential effectiveness of nutrition education, there are many examples of the appropriate use of health and nutrition education in other parts of the world to improve nutritional status and child survival (see, e.g., Hornik, 1985). Moreover, although it is too early for a formal evaluation, approaches to nutrition education such as those outlined in the Burgess (1994) book clearly hold enormous potential for effectiveness. Again and again, experience has shown that the participation and engagement of communities and women's groups are essential elements in any effort's success. In many African countries, such participation would require a significant decentralization of authority in these programs and a fundamental rethinking of approaches to and settings for nutrition education for women. These changes would, in turn, demand significant funds and human resources. Outside donors are likely to continue to be the major funders of nutrition education activities for women, at least in the near term, and are therefore likely to enjoy a certain influence in shaping any such changes (or retaining the inertia of current approaches). They should use their influence to put more resources in the hands of communities and to formulate strategies that will allow for more appropriate and useful nutrition education (see also Berg, 1993a). In particular, donors should be interested in putting themselves out of the job of supervising nutrition education in Africa and in finding ways to assist communities in establishing low-cost, self-sustaining, realistic education on food and nutrition topics of vital interest to low-income women.

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Conclusion There is a profound need for creative approaches to the intransigent problem of undernutrition in Africa. Discussions among donor groups continue to focus on the relative merit of poverty alleviation approaches and "technical" approaches such as fortification and supplementation in addressing various kinds of nutritional deficiencies (Levinson, 1991; Berg, 1993b ). Nutrition education is rarely central to these discussions, yet it is often assumed to be essential to nutrition programs in Africa. It is time to see nonformal nutrition education for African women not as a means of telling women what to do but as a means of understanding women's experience, and to gain an appreciation of the nature of African nutritional problems as they are felt and grappled with by women and their families. In this way, nutrition education can help identify appropriate ways to address the undernutrition problem that threatens the well-being and survival of African children, families, and communities.

Note The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not represent the views of the United Nations Children's Fund.

References Abrahamsson, L., and N. Velarde. (1977). Food classification system for developing countries. InK. W. Shack (ed.), Teaching nutrition in developing countries, or the joys of eating dark green leaves (Meals for Millions), pp. 113-123. Quarterly Reports of Nutrition Communication Project. Unpublished manuscripts. Washington, D.C.: Academy for Educational Development. Andrien, M., and I. Beghin. (1993). Nutrition et communication: De I' education nutrition elle conventionelle a Ia communication sociale en nutrition. Paris: Editions l'Harmattan. Baron, P. (1984 ). Introducing nutrition into agricultural training: Experiences from two regions: Africa: New lessons for the teachers. Food and Nutrition 10, no. 2, 28-35. Berg, A. (1993a). More resources for nutrition education: Strengthening the case. Journal of Nutrition Education 25, no. 5, 278-282. - - - . (1993b). Sliding toward nutrition malpractice: Time to reconsider andredeploy. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 57, no. 1, 3-7. Burgess, A. (1994). Community nutrition for Eastern Africa. Nairobi: AMREF. Corbett, J. (1988). Famine and household coping strategies. World Development 16, no. 9, 1099-1112. Drummond, T. (1977). Rethinking nutrition education. In K. W. Shack (ed.), Teaching nutrition in developing countries, or the joys of eating dark green

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leaves (Meals for Millions), pp. 2-11. Quarterly Reports of Nutrition Communication Project. Unpublished manuscripts. Washington, D.C.: Academy for Educational Development. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) and WHO (World Health Organization). (1992). Nutrition and development-A global assessment. Rome: FAO and WHO. Freedom from Hunger. (1993). Credit with education for women: Launching a selfhelp breakthrough against chronic hunger. Unpublished report, Davis, Calif. Gerein, N. M., and D. A. Ross. (1991). Is growth monitoring worthwhile? An evaluation of its use in three child health programmes in Zaire. Social Science and Medicine 32, no. 6, 667-675. Hornik, R. C. (1985). Nutrition education: A state-of-the-art review. United Nations Administrative Committee on Coordination, subcommittee on Nutrition, Nutrition Policy Discussion Paper no. 1 (Geneva). International Union of Nutritional Sciences (IUNS) Workshop Report. (1981). Who is ignorant? Rethinking food and nutrition education under changing socioeconomic conditions. !FDA Dossier 25, 32-40. Kamwenubusa, M. (1992). Quelques difficultes reliees a !'application des acquis nutritionnels chez des burundaises de centre de sante Musaga. Convergence 25, no. 3, 25-30. Kent, G. (1988). Nutrition education as an instrument of empowerment. Journal of Nutrition Education 20, no. 4, 193-195. Klein, R. E., J. Townsend, A. Praun, and M. Fischer. (1983). The practice of impact evaluation of nutrition education programs. In B. Schurch (ed.), Evaluation of nutrition education in third world communities. Bern: Hans Huber Publishers. Levinson, F. J. (1991). Addressing malnutrition in Africa: Low-cost program possibilities for government agencies and donors. World Bank Social Dimensions of Adjustment in Sub-Saharan Africa Working Paper no. 13. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Matomora, M. K. S. (1989). Mass produced village health workers and the promise of primary health care. Social Science and Medicine 28, no. 10, 1081-1084. Mosio, M., and W. B. Bide. (1985). Broadening the scope of nutrition education. Journal of Nutrition Education 17, no. 5, 173-174. Piwoz, E. (1994). Improving feeding practices during childhood illness and convalescence: Lessons learned in Africa. Paper published by SARA project, US AID. Pratt, C. A., and C. B. Pratt. (1987). A model for communicating nutrition information in sub-Saharan Africa. Journal of Nutrition Education 19, no. 2, 55-59. Praun, A. (1982). Nutrition education: Development or alienation? Human Nutrition: Applied Nutrition 36A, 28-34. Rogers, B. L., and N. Youssef. (1988). The importance of women's involvement in economic activities in the improvement of child nutrition and health. Food and Nutrition Bulletin 10, no. 3, 33-41. Sauerborn, R., A. Nougtara, and H. J. Diesfeld. (1989). Low utilization of community health workers: Results from a household interview survey in Burkina Faso. Social Science and Medicine 29, no. 10, 1163-1174. Savage-King, F., and A. Burgess. (1993). Chapter 28 in Nutrition for Developing Countries. 2d ed., pp. 396-381. Oxford: Oxford University Press. UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund). (1990). Strategy for improved nutrition of children and women in developing countries. UNICEF Policy Review, no. 1. New York: UNICEF.

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Vemury, M. (1977). Nutrition education-An important aspect of CARE's programming efforts. In K. W. Shack (ed.), Teaching nutrition in developing countries, or the joys of eating dark green leaves (Meals for Millions), pp. 142-149. Quarterly Reports of Nutrition Communication Project. Unpublished manuscripts. Washington, D.C.: Academy for Educational Development. Weaver, F. J. (1984). Food supply, nutritional status and nutrition education in Malawi. Ecology of Food and Nutrition 15, 341-347. World Bank. (1993). World Development Report 1993: Investing in Health. New York: Oxford University Press.

5~ Women and Nonformal Education in West Africa: Policy and Practice Polly Diven

Private, nonprofit development agencies have been instrumental supporters of nonformal education projects for women in Africa. Several aid agencies operating in Africa provide funding and technical assistance to facilitate community organization and skills training. Before the term "nonformal" became popular in academic and development circles, some nongovernmental aid organizations had recognized the value of including training and community development components in the projects they chose to fund. Oxfam America is one of these nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with experience developing policy and implementing projects that involve nonformal education. It is a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization that funds self-help development projects and disaster relief in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. 1 Foreign assistance in the OXFAM model is to be judged by its long-term contribution to economic and social development. In OXFAM's view, genuine development enables people to meet their essential needs; extends beyond food aid and emergency relief; reverses the process of impoverishment; enhances democracy; makes possible a balance between populations and resources; improves the well-being and status of women; respects local cultures; sustains the natural environment; measures progress in human, not just monetary terms; involves change, not just charity; requires the empowerment of the poor; and promotes the interests of the majority of people worldwide, in the global North as well as the South (Oxfam America News, 1994-1995). As a rule, the agency is not involved in the day-to-day implementation of projects. Typically there are only one or two Oxfam America staff members living in each region. These field staff fill administrative functions, provide some technical assistance, and regularly monitor project activities. Oxfam America is one of very few U.S. nonprofit agencies that neither seeks nor accepts U.S. government funds. In fiscal year 1993, 80 percent

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of the agency's $14.7 million in revenues was contributed by private individuals and families. Oxfam America's independence from U.S. government financing is important for two reasons. First, the project locations and activities are not restricted by the U.S. government. Second, the agency is smaller and poorer than many of its nonprofit counterparts, and is forced to devote a larger proportion of its budget to administration and fund-raising than nonprofit organizations that accept U.S. government funds. The fortuitous consequence of limited project funding is that OXFAM's strategy is small-scale, which is appropriate because community development problems cannot be solved by large inflows of funds. In a few cases, Oxfam America uses modest sums of money to facilitate community development meetings and promote self-examination among villagers. In this chapter, I use the agency's project funding in West Africa as a vehicle to explore the concept and principles of nonformal education. Projects funded by Oxfam America in Cape Verde, The Gambia, Mali, and Burkina Faso are used to illustrate the practical applications of these principles of nonformal education. The agency's experience in funding and monitoring development projects at the village level demonstrates both the benefits and difficulties encountered in promoting learning outside the constraints of the traditional classroom.

Reasons for Nonformal Education Aid agencies refer to a wide range of education and training projects as "nonformal." All these projects involve learning outside the bounds of the official educational system. Widely defined, then, nonformal education is for all ages and groups in society. Instructors may have little or no formal training, and classes may take place in a classroom or under a tree. As defined here, nonformal education includes literacy and numeracy classes, community education and consciousness raising, and vocational and skillstraining programs ranging from midwifery to pump repair to bookkeeping. Formal or nonformal education should allow both women and men to gain more control over their resources and their daily activities. Some describe this as "empowerment"; concretely, it means that through education, people gain the necessary skills to, for example, handle their finances and the finances of their group activities. Education for women can provide numeracy and literacy skills so that they can open bank accounts, apply for agricultural credit, read their children's health and school records, and be able to organize grain storage banks and small industries. For the increasing number of female heads of household in Africa, acquiring these skills becomes essential for survival. Nonformal education can both replace and enhance formal education. As a substitute for school, nonformal education can provide basic literacy and numeracy skills. Rural African women commonly lack these skills

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because they did not attend school or attended irregularly for only a few years. A decade ago, when many women would have received their formal education, about 20-30 percent of girls attended elementary school, and about 5-10 percent went on to secondary school. The percentage of boys attending primary and secondary school was almost double the rate for girls (UNICEF, 1986). Today, in the West African Sahel, only about 20 percent of adult women are literate, whereas approximately 43 percent of adult men are literate (Student Atlas of World Politics, 1994). Schooling can seem irrelevant to rural African women, and a colonialbased education that focused on French geography and literature may have discouraged many students who felt little connection to the Pyrenees or Voltaire. More often, however, practical concerns such as lack of money and time contribute to the dearth of formal education among African women. Both formal and nonformal education can be costly and reduce the time available for important subsistence tasks. Students may be forced to drop out of school for the planting season or the harvest. Young girls may have to care for younger siblings. Low secondary education rates are a result of both practical and motivational considerations. Nonformal education in fundamental skills like arithmetic, writing, and reading can help bridge this gap for women. Indeed, nonformal education can be much more than a substitute for school. Programs that provide training in a variety of skills can be very valuable. Without learning how to read and write, students can profit from learning such things as new agricultural methods, health care lessons, and alternative marketing techniques. However, formal education and skills training alone will not solve the difficulties faced by poor women in West Africa, especially some of the less visible barriers to their development. Nonformal education can be used to promote self-evaluation of the community and its problems. Women must understand the social, cultural, and institutional barriers that inhibit change in their lives, including their own perceptions of their abilities, families, communities, and governments. Nonformal education for women can also train women to act as "animators" or community development workers. These agents encourage local women to meet and discuss their situation and foster the formation of women's groups. Simply providing the costs of transporting one more experienced women's group to meet with another nascent group and share a meal together can be an important first step in the development process. Yet donors and others are justifiably skeptical about success measured in attitudes and empowerment. Aid agencies, including Oxfam America, have not been able to develop criteria to indicate the value of money spent on empowerment. In many cases (including those detailed in this chapter), the rhetoric about changing attitudes is not matched by evaluations that indicate improvement in these areas. Frequently, there is a disjuncture between these nonquantifiable goals and evaluation reports that emphasize the number of latrines built or the number of women achieving literacy.

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Principles for Women's Nonformal Education Projects In The Field Director's Handbook: An OXFAM Manual, Brian Pratt and J. Boyden (1985) establish several guiding principles for the selection of nonformal education projects. In addition, a consultant for Oxfam America has identified several key principles to guide the agency in its selection and implementation of nonformal education projects (Miller, 1988). These principles are synthesized in the following section, with examples added from the West African program where appropriate.

Work with Women in Planning Education of women must not add another burden to the already overworked West African woman. Most African women lack the time to invest in learning irrelevant or inappropriate skills; thus, educational activity must be carefully chosen in full consultation with women. Class content and timing must be at the discretion of the women, not the trainer or the project financier (Miller, 1988). Training is time-consuming and should be organized during parts of the day and seasons of the year when women have more leisure time. In addition, organizing training for women is likely to be successful only when it introduces labor-saving technologies and occurs in conjunction with organized child care (Pratt and Boyden, 1985).

Go Beyond Handicrafts In the past, too many women's projects have emphasized handicraft production and home economics, while minimizing West African women's traditional role as primary producer of the family's food. Nonformal education programs for women have too often focused on nonmarketable skills such as sewing, knitting, and embroidery (Pratt and Boyden, 1985). Assumptions about the marketability of handicrafts must be carefully scrutinized, and donors must be cautious not to impose Western notions of women's work. Unless a tourist market exists, women are left trying to sell their handicrafts to other poor villagers. Women producing locally marketable commodities that are normally difficult to find or produce have met with more success. For instance, women's soap-making and sesame oil production cooperatives in Gambia funded by Oxfam America and Save the Children were more successful. In these cases, there was a local market for the goods.

Treat Adults with Respect Adult education is fundamentally different from the education of children. Even when teaching basic skills, instructors must be careful to acknowledge

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that the education of women is adult education and that there are specific and important differences between teaching children and working with adults (Miller, 1988). Because adults and children have very different concepts of self, adults will be more motivated if their relationship with the instructor is a partnership (Srinivasan, 1983). Children perceive themselves as dependent and can, therefore, accept a certain paternalistic relationship with an instructor. However, adults need to take responsibility and to participate in decisions that affect their learning.

Teach Across, Not Down A successful nonformal education program also respects the fact that adults have a greater life experience than do children (Miller, 1988). In many cases in West Africa, students are older and more experienced than their teachers. Therefore, it is important that a teacber understand the importance of teaching "horizontally" instead of "vertically." Teachers can demonstrate unconscious attitudes of superiority and distance that undermine adult learners. Coupled with the feelings of inferiority that can exist among groups of uneducated, low-income women, this sort of paternalism can provide a poor climate for learning. Teachers must be trained in methods that foster self-esteem.

Make Adult Education Relevant The education of children is oriented to the future. Education of adults, especially impoverished and overworked women, must focus on the present (Miller, 1988). The high dropout rates that characterize many training programs for women are often the result of a failure to address the immediacy of the women's needs. Furthermore, adult education instructors need to recognize that although children can easily adapt to the division of subjects typically employed in formal education systems, adults do not neatly divide their world into math, spelling, history, and English. There is a mistaken tendency to separate education from other factors of development, which limits both the scope of education and its ability to contribute to the development process. A woman may acquire knowledge through training, but this does not guarantee the adoption of a desired behavior. Training must be integrated into a woman's day-to-day experience.

Show Some Humility Most training (formal and nonformal) is offered on the assumption that there is a correct answer to a problem, or that what the instructor knows is more correct than what the student knows. As instructors are usually outsiders to a given community and context, this assumption that the teacher knows best can be erroneous. Such assumptions are especially

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dangerous when foreigners making short, periodic visits to a region assume they can easily solve problems that have plagued African women for generations.

Do Not Impose a Western Agenda Nonformal education should be a new way of approaching learning, not simply a new way to teach the same old thing. Many organizations accept the concept of education outside the formal system and recognize that tools for training adults are different from those used in teaching children. Yet few programs truly accept the fact that to be successful, training of adults must establish a partnership and encourage an equal exchange of ideas. Outsiders should not view nonformal education as a more direct way of imposing their understanding of the problem and their solution.

Oxfam America Project Experience in West Africa Establishing principles for support of nonformal education is easy; implementing model projects is difficult. Oxfam America has funded several projects that emphasize nonformal education of women in West Africa, ranging from literacy programs to community consciousness raising to instruction sessions for traditional birth attendants. In the past, Oxfam America has funded legal aid for women and has provided training to help integrate them into agricultural credit systems. Several projects are described in this section, beginning with the most traditional type of nonformal education and ending with the least formal.2 The strengths and shortcomings of these specific Oxfam America projects are discussed in light of the principles of nonformal education previously outlined.

The Cape Verde Adult Literacy Program Oxfam America funded a portion of the adult literacy program in Cape Verde from 1984 to 1989. The program was managed by the Division of Extra-Curricular Education in the Ministry of Education of the Government of Cape Verde. Although Oxfam America generally prefers to work with NGOs, in this case an exception was made based on the grassroots nature of the literacy program. The program has attracted many participants. Between 1984 and 1987, more than 11,000 students successfully passed a nationwide exam and received literacy certificates. Since the program began in 1980, the illiteracy rate in Cape Verde has fallen from 50 percent to 43 percent of all adults. About 75 percent of the participants in the literacy program are women.3 Class scheduling is managed by the Ministry of Education, which considers

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both the teachers' and the women's schedules. The course is eight months long, and it ends just before the busiest agricultural season. A second year of advanced study is offered. Following three years of funding, Oxfam America commissioned a full-scale evaluation of the literacy program. The evaluation took place in March 1988. A consultant found that most participants were motivated to become literate in order to qualify for better jobs, to participate in government benefit programs, and to understand children's school and health records. Because of the high emigration rate among men, some women mentioned their desire to read their husbands' letters and to open bank accounts to cash remittance checks as additional incentives for enrolling in the literacy program. The evaluation report noted that the Cape Verde literacy program functioned well despite poor odds. The instructors and students were provided with excellent course materials that neatly integrated students' daily lives into the literacy training. Lessons included scenes from village life and incorporated simple lessons on sanitation, health, and local government. These subjects were interesting to the participants and were designed to encourage class discussion. Though positive overall, the evaluation report did find some weaknesses with the Cape Verde literacy program. Its two greatest weaknesses were the lack of training for the instructors and the need to provide literacy graduates with continued stimulation and practice. The investigator also found that the dropout rate for the program was high and that most of the dropouts were women. One reason for this problem seemed to be the pedagogical styles of the instructors, who were not promoting class discussion. The instructors, frequently schoolteachers who were moonlighting as adult educators, employed teaching techniques that were inappropriate for adults. Oxfam America staff also hypothesized that the dropout rate was a result of inadequate consultation with women. Although the agricultural cycle was considered when the courses were planned, it seemed that many women still could not find enough time for such rigorous training. In addition, some women appeared to "drop out" when they felt they had achieved a high enough skill level to meet their needs. Apparently, some of the women students defined "literacy" less rigorously than did the government. Many felt they had learned enough before completing the established course of study. It is also interesting to note that the advanced course was pursued by relatively few women. Following the evaluation and discussions with the project staff, Oxfam America agreed to fund a project for training the literacy instructors. The objective of this new project was to work with the teachers to make them more effective in capturing and keeping the attention of the students. Over the course of two years, 120 instructors were scheduled to be taught new techniques and to be observed using these techniques with their classes.

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Instructors would also be encouraged to pursue postliteracy activities with their groups. The consultant confirmed reports by the Ministry of Education that students who did not use their literacy skills after the training quickly lost them. With little access to reading materials, literacy skills gained over a short period began to fade. Thus, the second stage of this program included funds for helping organizers and instructors to devise a strategy for postliteracy training. The Ministry of Education resisted shortening its course and redefining completion of the literacy program. It was argued that if students felt they did not want to continue to improve their skills, they should be able to stop at any time and that additional training should remain available to those who chose to continue. This project was somewhat unusual for Oxfam America in that it involved direct funding to a governmental body. Nonetheless, staff found the Ministry of Education partners to be responsive and helpful and felt they had an important opportunity to encourage the training of a large number of participants. Although decisionmaking for the literacy program was highly centralized, instruction was at the village level, and instructors were local. Oxfam America acknowledged that the centralized nature of the project meant it was less responsive to individual community needs, but instructors were asked to use their discretion in adapting course materials to fit the local context. In addition, Oxfam America funds were not destined to build expensive new classrooms or pay the salaries of government employees4 but were earmarked for the travel and lodging costs of instructors and the purchase of their training materials. A Swiss organization and a Portuguese nonprofit agency also contributed money for the literacy program. The positive elements of this project include the sheer number of people trained, excellent course materials, and a clear sense among participants of the reasons they participate. The most important shortcoming of the program is the fact that prior to 1988, trainers were ill-prepared to instruct, which resulted in high dropout rates. Oxfam America ceased funding this project in 1990.

Women's Literacy and Numeracy Training in the Gambia In 1985, Oxfam America began to finance a revolving loan scheme in the Upper Baddibu district of the Gambia. Money was used to fund a variety of productive activities, including bread baking, fishing, soap making, and blacksmithing. Because rural women in the Gambia rarely have access to credit, the staff set out to actively solicit participation of women's groups in the project. However, by 1987, the implementing organization was forced to admit that women's participation in the project was unsatisfactory, for several reasons: women's groups were less likely to receive loans because they lacked basic numeracy and literacy skills; women's groups

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that did receive loans could not operate independently and used men to keep group records; and the inability of women's groups to act independently caused difficulties in maintaining their momentum and cohesion. Many of the female participants noted that they would be very interested in receiving literacy and especially numeracy training. Indeed, current data show that fewer than 10 percent of all Gambian women are literate. It is estimated that in the Upper Baddibu area, less than 1 percent of women are literate in their native language.5 A numeracy and literacy program was established specifically to encourage participation in the credit scheme. A pilot project was funded by the implementing agency and carried out in ten villages during 1986-1987. Literacy materials in Mandinka were developed by the nonformal education service of the Ministry of Education, and employees of the service trained five literacy and numeracy facilitators. The service observed their classes periodically and conducted an evaluation at the end of the year. The evaluation showed that the women were enthusiastic and learned quickly. A total of 250 women spent four hours per week attending the training. A questionnaire distributed by the evaluators showed that 87 percent of the women were married and had children; 67 percent had children in school. Almost every participant said she found the program useful, and 85 percent rated the program "very good." The women mentioned that the program was useful because it helped them to transact business on market days, recognize names and read messages, and understand the health records of their children. The evaluators noted that numeracy skills improved faster than literacy skills. Of all women, 52 percent passed the numeracy skills test. For literacy, 17 percent scored "well done," 35 percent scored "good," and 48 percent scored "weak." The evaluation recommended that the program be extended to include more women and that it provide training in Wolof and Fula as well. Oxfam America agreed to fund two years of skills training for about 500 women in twenty-four villages. In the first year, functional literacy and numeracy classes were organized and offered in Mandinka, Wolof, and Fula. Production of teaching materials and teacher training were subcontracted to the Gambian government division of nonformal education. This government service was also contracted to regularly evaluate the program. In the second year, the focus shifted to the promotion of small enterprises. Women explored alternatives for income-generating projects through regional resource-sharing visits with active women's production groups in the region. Using a technique often funded by Oxfam America, the women were transported to another village to observe and discuss the possibilities associated with the revolving credit scheme. These visits are not structured or terribly formal because participants seem to learn more when left to establish their own rapport and line of discussion.

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The integration of skills training with the actual development activity seemed appropriate, given Oxfam America's experience in Cape Verde. The Cape Verde women received little postliteracy stimulation, whereas women in Gambia could see an immediate use for their new skills. The greater success of numeracy training in the pilot project may be the result of the women's perception of what skills they would need to manage their small enterprises. The literacy and numeracy project design was "bottom-up" from the start. Logistics were the responsibility of the women who wished to participate. Because many women in the area have virtually no leisure time, scheduling was a challenge. The women determined that classes would be held for two hours twice a week, just after the midday meal. Classes would be held from November to May, when women were less occupied with their rice fields. Classes could be held either in a spare room or outdoors, with women bringing stools and hard writing surfaces to approximate desks and make writing practice easier. The women also agreed to organize child care at the village level to maximize participation. The Gambia women's training program was still active in 1993; more than 800 women in twenty-two villages were participating in the second phase of the training program. After Oxfam America established a West Africa office in 1990, the agency withdrew its funding from all projects sponsored by U.S. NGOs. The agency made a decision to support only national and local community development organizations. Since the Gambia literacy and numeracy project was organized by Save the Children, Oxfam America did not renew its funding for the program.

Assessment Workshops in Mali and Village Development in Burkina Faso As already noted, nonformal education can do more than take the place of schooling and provide skills training; it can also be more loosely interpreted to include activities that raise people's awareness of issues in their communities and help them organize their responses. In some cases, the process of group formation and needs assessment proves more valuable than the actual outcomes of the development activity. In recent years, OXFAM's West Africa program funded several workshops in Mali to allow villages to come together to discuss a common problem or assess the potential for change. Workshops are usually organized by a trained facilitator or community development worker. They take place in the rural communities and are conducted in the local language. Workshops are inexpensive; in the past Oxfam America has provided $500 to $1,000 for transportation, meals, and facilitator's fees.

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For example, eight villages in the Tarabe region of northern Mali met to discuss their situation and explore avenues for change. The primary concerns in these villages included the diminishing area available for pasture land, the increasing problem of food security, and the lack of veterinary care. The villagers in this region decided to hold additional meetings to examine these problems in greater detail and to discuss possible remedies. The people of the Tarabe are uncomfortable with the idea of men and women meeting together, and therefore, separate workshops were planned. Participants agreed that representatives of the women's and the men's groups could meet together at a later date. Local animators were used to help plan the days and to help structure the discussions. This type of approach leaves outcomes entirely unclear and is thus the type of project most development agencies are loath to fund. Yet the type of dialogue and community cohesion that can result are essential elements of long-term change. Because Oxfam America typically funds Malian NGOs to conduct these sessions, the agency may not have a great deal of information about the dynamics and outcomes of these sessions. Nonetheless, the low cost and the potential for engendering community development seem to merit continued funding. Oxfam America has funded similar efforts to mobilize villagers and help them organize themselves in Burkina Faso. In 1985, the agency began cofunding (with European partner agencies) a program in the droughtstricken, northeast region of that country, with the aim of increasing village-level capacity for designing and implementing project activities. The project targeted community development agents who were employed by the coordination and planning unit of the regional development organization of the Sahel. The unit developed a training program for villagers that involves the entire community and provides the necessary skills to run village activities and to initiate viable projects based on priorities identified by villagers themselves . . Community development agents learned to conduct a group exercise that helps villagers visualize their needs. Using this method, the village chose the mango tree as a symbol, and participants were asked to help create a model mango tree to symbolize the situation in the villagescrawny, leafless, and unhealthy; lush, green, and full; or something in between. The mango tree became a stepping stone for larger discussions of activities and potentialities in the village. Following the village consciousness raising, Oxfam America and other agencies have continued to fund activities organized by local groups, including dry-season vegetable gardening and grain banks. The unstructured and indefinite nature of projects like these in Mali and Burkina Faso makes them harder to grasp and, of course, less attractive to donors. Yet good community development workers can play a vital

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role in motivating and organizing village activities. This sort of nonformal education is essential to the success of sustainable development activities.

Conclusion Nonformal education plays a vital role in the development process and can be viewed both as a substitute for formal schooling and as a complement to ongoing development activities at the village level. Projects that the village undertakes as a result of this kind of self-examination are often more sustainable in the long term. In addition, nonformal education projects for women in Africa will be most likely to contribute to community wellbeing when these projects respect the differences between educating children and educating adults. To be successful, nonformal education projects must recognize the need for women to participate as equals and to integrate training into their daily lives. Finally, nonformal education must not be seen as the cornerstone of development, but rather as one fundamental element in the long development process. Oxfam America uses nonformal education as a tool for promoting self-reliant development among poor West African women. Adult education programs and skills training have their places in the development process-Oxfam America funds these types of projects in Cape Verde and the Gambia. The organization also funds less goal-oriented nonformal education projects in West Africa. These projects help villagers come together to discuss common issues and possible solutions. Although the rationale for these projects is clear, selection and evaluation of nonformal education initiatives can be problematic. Clearly, it is easier to evaluate the success of an immunization campaign than an effort to promote community development. Nonetheless, Oxfam America's experience implementing literacy training and community development projects for women in West Africa provides important insights about the potential for applying theories of nonformal education to tangible development work.

Notes 1. The acronym "OXFAM" comes from the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, founded in England in 1942. There are nine autonomous OXFAMs today, but the original organization, OXFAM UK, is by far the largest organization. 2. Descriptions of projects derive from Oxfam America project files. These are unpublished materials. 3. These data are provided by the Ministry of Education, Government of Cape Verde. 4. Nonetheless, aid funding is highly fungible. Funds provided to the ministry by OXFAM for one category of expenditures made more ministry funds available for constructing classrooms.

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5. These data are derived from unpublished Save the Children and Oxfam America project documents.

References Miller, V. (1988). Women, health and education: Problems and conceptual framework. Unpublished manuscript. Oxfam America News (winter 1994-1995). Pratt, B., and J. Boyden (eds.). (1985). The field directors' handbook: An Oxfam manual for development workers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Srinivasan, L. (1983). Perspectives on nonformal adult learning. Boston: World Education. Student atlas of world politics. 3rd ed. (1994). Guilford, Conn.: Dushkin Publishing Groups. UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund). (1986). The state of the world's children. Oxfordshire, UK: Oxford University Press. What Is Oxfam America? (winter 1991). Oxfam America News.

6~ Inside Classrooms in Guinea: GirIs' Experiences Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt, Marianne Bloch, and Aminata Maiga Soumare

In this chapter we examine life inside schools, especially as experienced by girls, in one African nation. Our goal is to complement what is already known about the obstacles to girls' participation, such as pressure to work at home and gender stereotypes in the family, by reporting on a less studied factor, namely, the various kinds of obstacles and support that girls encounter in and around classrooms.

Girls' Schooling in Guinea, in Context The Republic of Guinea has one of the lowest rates of girls' enrollment in the world, a fact that must be placed within a national and international framework. Statistics from throughout the third world suggest that girls are less likely to attend schools at every level than boys are, although there have been significant improvements in girls' access to schooling, particularly at the primary level, over the past twenty years (e.g., Kelly, 1989). By 1990, girls made up 47 percent of primary students enrolled in school in sub-Saharan Africa, 33 percent of secondary students, and 4 percent of tertiary-level students (United Nations, 1995, p. 71). African enrollment rates must be understood within the context of the extreme poverty of many nations on the continent. Of the fortytwo countries listed as low-income economies in the world, twenty-seven of those nations are in Africa, and Guinea is among them (World Bank, 1994). Moreover, any analysis of schooling must be situated within a broad international framework that recognizes not only the increasingly difficult economic conditions of most African countries but the complex reasons that maintain or increase poverty within the African context. With growing populations, expanding poverty, and tighter structural adjustment programs (SAPs) under the control of international donors, African nations find it increasingly difficult to allocate money toward improving the quantity and quality of schooling (see, for example, Sarnoff, 1993; Chapter 2 in this book). 99

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Formal Education

There is considerable variation in girls' enrollment rates throughout Africa; a few countries like Botswana and Namibia even show higher enrollment rates for girls than boys at the primary level (see Kelly, 1989; Chapters 2 and 13 in this volume; United Nations, 1995, pp. 52-53). However, the five nations with the lowest total enrollment rates and the lowest girls' enrollment rates in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa. One is Ethiopia, where girls' enrollment rose from 10 percent in 1970 to 21 percent in 1991. The other four are in Francophone West Africa: Burkina Faso, where girls' enrollment rose from 10 percent in 1970 to 14 percent in 1991; Niger, where it rose from I 0 percent to 21 percent over the same period; Mali, where it increased from 15 percent to 19 percent; and Guinea, the site of this study, where girls' enrollment rose from 21 percent in 1970 to 24 percent in I 991 (World Bank, 1994 ). Guinea is an economically poor nation of seven million people, an ethnically diverse country with a Muslim majority but substantial minorities of Christians and animists. The primary enrollment rate for girls for 1992-1993 was only 23 percent, compared with 51 percent for boys (see Table 6.1 ). In 1991, the latest year for which we have secondary school data, the primary enrollment rate was 37 percent (24 percent for girls), the secondary enrollment rate (college and lycee combined) was 10 percent (5 percent for girls), and the postsecondary enrollment rate was 1 percent (no figures given for females) (World Bank, 1994). Girls, who make up about 51 percent of their age cohort in the population, make up only 32.7 percent of the students in primary school and only 24.8 percent of the students in college (Anderson-Levitt, Bloch, and Soumare, 1994, p. l). Recently, girls' participation has begun to rise a little after years of stagnation and some decline during the 1980s (Anderson-Levitt, Bloch, and Soumare, 1994, p. 40; Long, 1990). Enrollment is only part of the picture, as differences in school completion rates for boys and girls make clear. As Nelly Stromquist (1989) has

Table 6.1

Primary School Enrollment Rates for Girls and Boys in Guinea, by Region, 1992-1993

Region

Total

Girls

Boys

Conakry Lower Guinea Middle Guinea Upper Guinea Forest Region Total

72.77 32.77 26.71 27.98 41.20 36.70

59.0 19.0 15.0 15.0 22.0 22.8

85.7 46.8 38.6 41.2 61.3 51.0

Source: Calculated from Ministere de J'Enseignement Pre-Universitaire et de Ia Formation Professionelle. (1993a). Annuaire Statistique 1992-93: Enseignement primaire. Conakry: Service Statistique et Planification, Table 33. Note: Primary enrollment rate is the total number of students (or girls, or boys) divided by the total population of children (or girls, or boys) between the ages of 7 and 12.

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101

pointed out, only 35 percent of females in Africa completed primary education (four to seven years) compared with 44 percent of males. Similarly, only 3.3 percent of females completed three or more years of high school, compared with 6.2 percent of males. I Indeed, the average years of schooling for girls in West Africa is only 2.0 years, compared with 3.5 years for boys (see Table 6.1). In Guinea, the proportion of girls declines from one grade level to the next, particularly during primary school (AndersonLevitt, Bloch, and Soumare, 1994, p. 38-39). In the schools we studied, girls were more likely than boys to drop out of school during primary school and more likely to fail the entrance examination for college (Anderson, Bloch, and Soumare, 1994, pp. 55-56). (College is the first cycle of secondary school.2) Hence the focus in this chapter on some of the factors affecting girls' persistence. In this chapter we examine the gender-related experiences of children in and around classrooms in primary school and in college in the Republic of Guinea. While recognizing the broader national and international factors previously noted, we focus on experiences inside schools and on children's and teachers' accounts of and perspectives on those experiences. We seek to identify experiences that encourage girls (as well as boys) to stay in school and those that discourage them from persisting.

Theoretical Perspective

The Construction of Gender in Social Interaction This analysis of classroom experience should be understood in the light of certain assumptions. First, we do not attribute differences between boys' and girls' experiences and behaviors to innate biological differences, nor do we assume that children have already been socialized once and for all into fixed gender roles during their early years in the family. Gender differences are socially constructed (Kessler and McKenna, 1978; Thorne, 1993; West and Zimmerman, 1993; cf. Levinson and Holland, 1996, on the "cultural production" of identities). For instance, we show that the children's attitudes about gender changed dramatically from first to fifth grade; something happened to the children during their first few years of schooling. While acknowledging the importance of children's prior and continuing experiences outside school, we assume that gender roles and gender identities are continually reconstructed in the process of social interaction in new settings, including classrooms (Thorne, 1993; Wilkinson and Marrett, 1985). We also assume and illustrate in this chapter that all the participantsnot just the teachers, but the girls themselves and, notably, the boys-are involved in the social construction of gender (cf. Goodenough, 1987; Thorne, 1993). Teachers, girls, and boys form environments for one another

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(cf. McDermott, Gospodinoff, and Aron, 1981). Like all participants in social interaction, they make "moves" in the classroom in response to prior moves already made by the other persons present and in anticipation of moves they expect others will make (Goffman, 1981). These moves made in response to one another's behavior are "interactional work," and the interactional work that teachers, girls, and boys do in and around classrooms "structures the educational facts of school" (Mehan, 1978, p. 59)-in this case, "facts" such as the idea that girls are "timid" or that they do not learn as well as boys. For example, as the authors in Louise Cherry Wilkinson and Cora B. Marrett's seminal volume (1985) demonstrated, we point out that teachers' expectations affected their behaviors, which affected in turn what girls did in the classroom. However, we also acknowledge that teachers' expectations, although sometimes founded on false stereotypes, also sometimes reflected girls' actual behaviors. In other words, what girls did fed their teachers' behavior, while what their teachers did fed the girls' behavior, whether in a "vicious circle" or in a positive feedback loop. At the same time, and again like L. C. Wilkinson and C. B. Marrett (1985), we point out the important role of peer interaction. However, we go beyond that rather innocuous concept to show how boys' treatment of girls in class, however innocent or jocular it may appear, works toward containing the girls and discouraging them from shining in class (cf. Goodenough, 1987; Thorne, 1993). Although we cite situations in which a teacher's negative expectations overruled girls' attempts to achieve (as in Case 1 below), we do not argue that girls are passive victims. Rather, like others who have looked at African girls' behavior in classrooms (notably, Davison and Kanyuka, 1992), we cite many examples of girls who acted counter to stereotype, insisting that they be heard and fighting for the right to learn. Many of our examples illustrate girls' deliberate strategies, their "agency," in the face of structures that tended to discourage their participation (cf. Levinson and Holland, 1996). Teachers are neither the villains nor the heroes in our story. In the classrooms we studied, girls met both encouragement and disparagement from teachers, sometimes from the same teacher. Sometimes teachers acted consciously and deliberately to get girls involved; sometimes they sabotaged girls' involvement, occasionally without realizing they did so. In short, we focus on ways in which teachers, girls, and boys played off one another either to reaffirm a second-class status for girls or, in some cases, to create a space within which girls could come closer to equal status with boys. We describe classrooms as arenas in which gender continually gets negotiated as teachers, girls, and boys each make moves and respond to the others' moves in not-always-predictable ways. We show classroom actors busy making and sometimes breaking gender stereotypes.

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Background Assumptions As the Introduction to this book points out, the value of Western-style schooling cannot be taken for granted in every setting. In the cities and villages where this study took place, public schooling ought to be considered in the context of the valuable educational alternatives that competed for children's time, namely, traditional nonformal education by the community and, in Muslim areas, quranic schooling. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this chapter, we make the assumptions that the larger the number of girls entering public school the better, and the longer girls stay in school the better, both for the girls themselves and for the Republic of Guinea.3 Despite a decade of low employment in Guinea, even for university graduates, the Ministry of Pre-University Education and Vocational Training as well as every schooled woman we met in the country shared these two assumptions. As most readers well know, girls' enrollment, persistence, and success in school depend on many factors beyond the classroom and the school itself. Studies in Guinea (Kourouma, 1991; Long, 1990; Sow, 1994) and in other African nations (e.g., Biraimah, 1980, 1987, 1989; Clignet and Foster, 1966; Jarousse and Mingat, 1993; McSweeney and Freedman, 1980; Prouty, 1991; Soumare, 1995) demonstrate the critical importance of factors such as the local functions of marriage, mothers' and daughters' workloads, distance from home to school, and discrimination against women in the job market for workers with diplomas. However, with the exception of this book, relatively little research has asked how classroom experience matters to girls.

Prior Classroom Studies Our study was, to the best of our knowledge, the first in Guinea to be based on classroom observation and one of relatively few readily available classroom observation studies conducted to date in sub-Saharan Africa.4 We relied on the few prior studies to guide our expectations for gender patterns. Karen Biraimah's work in Nigeria (1989) and in Togo (1980) led us to expect that girls, as a small minority in many Guinean classrooms, would be "invisible spectators" in many classes, hesitating to raise their hands and only infrequently called on (see also Bloch, 1993; Davison and Kanyuka, 1992; Tietjen, 1991).5 However, we also expected from Mary Brenner's close analysis of classroom interaction in Liberia (see Chapter 7) that the ways in which teachers and students interact (e.g., recitation, teacher lecture, group work) would vary from one moment to another over the course of a day as well as from one classroom to another, and that some ways of interacting might encourage girls' participation more than others. We also anticipated finding that most teachers would hold lower expectations for girls' academic performance than for boys' (Davison and

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Kanyuka, 1992; Tietjen, 1991; although Peshkin, 1972, disagrees) and that they would assign girls all the housekeeping tasks around the school (Biraimah, 1980, 1987; Peshkin, 1972). Our study of Guinean schools bore out many of these expectations but also uncovered complex and sometimes surprising phenomena with respect to teachers' treatment of girls. As already mentioned, we also gained insight on boys' treatment of girls, which had been relatively little documented by other researchers.

Research Methods Our study was designed to develop a qualitative description of life in a variety of schools throughout Guinea. We sought to balance breadth with depth, combining observation of varied kinds of primary schools and colleges throughout the country with more detailed case studies in just a few of these schools. Thus, although we report primarily on the case studies here, this chapter is informed by field notes and interviews from a larger and more diverse sample of schools. The larger sample consisted of seventeen schools-eleven primary schools and six colleges-scattered across five regions of the country: the capital city, Lower Guinea, Middle Guinea, Upper Guinea, and the Forest Region. During the first phase of the study, in March 1994, ten Guinean field researchers were divided into five research teams consisting of one man and one woman, and each team worked in one of the regions, where they visited three or four schools, one week per school.6 During the second phase of the study, from March through May 1994, the three principal researchers (the authors) spent an additional two to three weeks in four of the schools that had already been studied, conducting further participant observation and interviews in collaboration with a Guinean field researcher. We selected the seventeen schools in consultation with the Ministry's Office of Statistics and Planning to maximize regional and urban-rural diversity. The sample included at least two primary schools and one college per region. We included three urban primary schools and three urban colleges, but because of the predominance of rural schools in Guinea, we balanced the sample with eight rural primary schools and two rural colleges. The four schools selected for more intensive observation by the principal investigators were chosen to reflect some of the diversity in the sample: one urban and one rural primary school, one urban and one rural college. In each primary school in their region, the team of field researchers wrote narrative observation notes on two classrooms-the oldest and youngest grades, when feasible. In each college, they observed math and French classes in the highest and lowest grades. They interviewed the teachers observed as well as a sample of students, asking a broad range of semistructured questions focusing on student and teacher attitudes and

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expectations. Small-group interviews were done with first-grade children, and individual interviews were done with children at other grade levels. In general, the female team member interviewed female students and the male team member male students. The researchers also collected student grades and rank in class for the first trimester of the school year. During the second phase of the study, the principal researchers and their Guinean colleagues used an ethnographic framework to the extent possible within the limited time available. We focused attention on schools and classrooms as "cultural communities," continuing classroom observation and expanding it to a larger number of classrooms within the school, videotaping classroom interaction when possible, and conducting formal and informal interviews with female and male students, administrators and teachers, female and male adult community members, a small sample of school-leavers, and children who had never attended school. Although most of the research was conducted in French, the Guinean researchers and Aminata Maiga Soumare used regional languages when appropriate.

Teachers' Attitudes and Behaviors Although teachers did not, by themselves, create a school's atmosphere, their attitudes and behaviors contributed heavily to it. When asked directly in an oral questionnaire inspired by Biraimah (1980), the forty-five teachers in our cross-country sample tended to express familiar stereotypes: they believed that boys typically learned lessons well, raised their hands, gave good responses, and manifested ambition, whereas they saw girls as wellbehaved but timid and not as hard-working as boys (Tables 6.2 and 6.3). Teachers revealed other stereotypes in their behavior. For example, like teachers studied by other observers of African schools (Biraimah, 1980, 1989; Peshkin, 1972), the teachers in Guinea expected that girls and only girls would handle the daily cleaning of the school property, especially sweeping classrooms and verandas. Boys, too, did manual labor, especially in rural schools, but they did not do it every day. Significantly, in every school, raking the school yard, cleaning the latrines, and other maintenance jobs were often assigned to both boys and girls as punishment. As the observer noted in one primary school, the punishment for misbehavior was to stay after school, but meanwhile all the first-grade girls stayed after school to sweep. Such situations implied symbolically that schools punished girls simply for being girls. A few teachers acted on another stereotype, namely, the assumption that it was normal to pressure female students for sexual favors. Only a tiny minority of teachers did so, but the possibility, however remote, created consternation among parents (Sow, 1994). Although many teachers we talked with disparaged this practice, there were some who treated it as normal. For instance, we overheard one staff member at an urban college teasing

106 Table 6.2

Formal Education Primary Teachers' Attitudes About Boys and Girls Urban Teachers (n = 5)

Are girls, boys, or both girls and boys more likely to I. Learn lessons well 2. Raise hand often 3. Give good responses 4. Rarely give good responses 5. Get quiet when asked question 6. Use good French expression 7. Understand math well 8. Have ambition 9. Like competition 10. Like to help peers 11. Be smart 12. Work hard, make an effort 13. Make little effort 14. Show little interest in school 15. Be well behaved 16. Behave badly 17. Be timid

-----

Rural Teachers (n = 16) - - - - -

Total (n = 21) ------

Girls

Boys

Girls

Boys

Girls

Boys

4 5 2 3 5 3 3 3 5 2 2 4 3 1 5 2 5

4 5 4 2 3 3 5 4 4 5 5 4 3 3 2 4 3

3 5 1 15 3 9 6

15 14 15 5 7 14 15 15

7 10 3 18 16 6 12 9

19 19 19 7 10 17 20 19

6 8

11 13

4 6 14 12 16 3 14

14 14 4 5 6 15 43

11

II

15

10 6 10 17

18 19 18 7

13

8

21 5 19

8 19 7

--------- --------Note: We scored a I in the girls' column when a respondent said the behavior was typical of girls, a 1 in the boys' column when typical of boys, and a 1 in both columns when typical of both. Bolded numbers represent a gender difference of more than 5 responses, an arbitrary cutoff point. ------

Table 6.3

College Teachers' Attitudes About Boys and Girls

------

-------

---------

Urban Teachers (n = 16) Are girls, boys, or both girls and boys more likely to

Rural Teachers (n = 8)

Total (n = 24) ----

-----

Girls

Boys

Boys

Girls

Boys

8 7 5 16 15 6 4

15 16 15 4 6

1 1 1

8 8 8

13

8 7 3

3 4 8

14

0

8

9 8 6 24 22 9 4

23 24 23 7 10 21 22

8

12

7 3 4

7

8 8 6

1 2

8 8

7 7 5 4

4 3 4 5

Girls

----

1. Learn lessons well 2. Raise hand often 3. Give good responses 4. Rarely give good responses 5. Get quiet when asked question 6. Use good French expression 7. Understand math well 8. Have ambition 9. Like competition 10. Like to help peers 11. Be smart 12. Work hard, make an effort 13. Make little effort 14. Show little interest in school 15. Be well behaved 16. Behave badly 17. Be timid --

---

--

8

13 13

3

14

7

11

14

8

11

9

15 5 15

6 14 4

-- - - - - - - -

7

-----

1 -- - -

15

20

10 12 4 9 21 18 20 9 22

21 19 22 19 12 12 10 19 5

-- - - - - -

Note: We scored a 1 in the girls' column when a respondent said the behavior was typical of girls, a I in the boys' column when typical of boys, and a 1 in both columns when typical of both. Bolded numbers represent a gender difference of more than 5 responses, an arbitrary cutoff point.

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his colleague for not finding a girlfriend among the student body: "This man has been here for 25 years and still cannot make up his mind and pick one. I wonder what you are waiting for." Inside classrooms, many teachers displayed complex behavior that was not overtly biased or not biased at all. Some deliberately encouraged girls' participation, with varying degrees of success. However, we also witnessed cases of overt discrimination, even hostility, against girls from teachers-and this in spite of the fact that most of the teachers we observed recognized our research interest in gender. For instance, one sixthgrade teacher who often insulted both boys and girls offered a derogatory challenge in the local language to his female students: "Since women claim to be equal to men, they have to do what men do instead of watching us." The following case study illustrates overt bias against female students as well as subtler messages.

Case 1: Negative Messages in an Urban Primary School Setting This primary school sat on a busy street in a heavily populated area of a large city. The three-story building was divided into two blocks facing each. other across a narrow gravel yard. The school counted more than 2,200 students, 43 percent of them girls. There were thirty-six instructors, including twenty-one female instructors, teaching thirty-four different classes, from first through sixth grade, in the twenty-four available classrooms. The school ran on the double-shift system (classes a double vacation), with most classes running from 8 A.M. to 1 P.M. and others running from 1 P.M. to 6 P.M., to accommodate the huge student population. Observations and interviews conducted by the original pair of field researchers during the first week of March 1994 focused on one of the first grades and one of the sixth grades. During May, Soumare conducted further fieldwork over a fifteen-day period, aided by Fatoumata Binta Bokoum. They expanded observations to include several additional classes.

Teacher Attitude Observations in the first-grade classroom showed how important a teacher's attitude could be for a girl's success. A student could succeed under one instructor and fail under another. A case in point here was a brilliant female student who excelled from October to April under her first teacher, a woman observed by the first research team. When the girl's class changed instructors in April, she suddenly found herself being ridiculed for the remainder of the school year. Under her first teacher, this girl had ranked fourth in her class of 80, with an average grade of 7.16 out of 10. (The top

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student's grade was 8.0.) During our observations in May, under the new, male instructor, the girl displayed obvious interest in participating all the time in both math and French classes. She would raise her hand and move out of her place or stand up to make sure the instructor saw her hand up. Each time, however, the new teacher told her, "Tu aimes lever Ia main, tu ne dis rien de bon" [You like to raise your hand [but] you say nothing good], "Tu ne peux pas le faire, tu ne comprends rien" [You can't do it; you don't understand anything], and so on. During our research visit in May, less than five minutes after the teacher had dismissed the girl's participation, the following exchange took place: The teacher asked, "Who can read?" The girl raised her hand. "You raise your hand; you cannot read, can you?" said the teacher. "Let's see." The girl read one word in a very low voice. "Sit down; that is it. You do not know how to read." After designating a boy who read the text, the teacher continued, "Who else?" The same girl raised her hand again. "You, you cannot read, you know nothing ... ," he said, but she still held up her hand. "You can?" She said, "Yes," and started reading. She made a mistake, and the teacher yelled and made her sit down. He then designated a boy to read and corrected the boy's mistakes as he read. Afterwards, the instructor went so far as to have a boy who spoke the same language as this girl ask her what she had learned, because the teacher thought she was not understanding him. Other teachers in this school displayed more benevolence. Nonetheless, some transmitted in subtler ways the belief that school is not for girls. For example, a sixth-grade instructor spent some time listening to girls and sending them to the board, but then apologized to the boys in the class: "Les gan;;ons, ne vous fachez pas, hein ... "meaning "Don't get upset, boys ... " as if it were abnormal that girls, who made up one-third of the class, had held the floor. This was all the more striking because the instructor never apologized to girls for giving boys the floor. It is true that boys had to put up with insults, too, but given the extra stereotyping of girls and the pressures they faced outside school, we believe that girls found insults more discouraging than the boys did. We have in mind, for example, the solitary girl in a class of fifteen fourth graders in the rural primary school described in Case 2. She told us that she hated it when the teacher insulted her and called her an idiot in front of all the

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boys, causing them to giggle at her. When we probed, she said, "After he insults me, I leave the classroom and go home at night and never want to come back. Then I think about the things I want to do later [if I complete school], and I remember why I come to school, and I come back the next day and go through it again." Not all girls who felt as she did about the insults would have had the fortitude to return to school.

Did Teacher's Gender Matter? In Case 1, a female teacher had treated a girl much better than a male teacher. Researchers (e.g., Tietjen, 1991) sometimes argue that female teachers make schools more hospitable to girls and, therefore, that their numbers should be increased. Certainly, women teachers are relatively scarce in Guinea; they make up only 23 percent of the primary school teachers (47 percent in urban zones and only 6 percent in rural zones) and only 15 percent of secondary school teachers (19 percent in urban zones and 4 percent in rural zones) (Ministere, 1993a, 1993b). In the seventeen schools in our sample, women made up nearly 50 percent of the urban teaching staff, but only three of the fifty-seven teachers (5 percent) in the rural schools were female. However, the few female teachers we observed did not, in general, give more attention to girls in the classroom. In fact, some of them seemed to be less attentive to girls. Nevertheless, the female teachers in our sample did offer rare role models of women who had completed school to girl students. Indeed, our female fieldworkers, with their degrees from the University of Conakry, created a minor sensation as role models for girls in some of the villages we visited. Likewise, teachers and villagers cited the female Minister of Education as an example of what a highly schooled woman might attain. As more women take up assignments as teachers in rural schools, there will be more role models for female students. Case 2 illustrates the impact of a female teacher on girls and their mothers in one village. However, it also notes that just because a teacher is a woman does not guarantee an increase in girls' participation inside the classroom. Finally, the case illustrates serious problems caused by the gender expectations of one of the teacher's male colleagues.

Case 2: A Female Teacher in a Rural Primary School

Setting This rural primary school in Middle Guinea was characteristic of many rural schools in that it did not offer all grade levels for want of enough

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classrooms and teachers; it lacked a third, fifth, and sixth grade. There were thirty-eight children in a first-grade class (eleven girls), thirty-six in a second-grade class (eight girls), and fifteen in a fourth-grade class (one girl); thus, girls made up 22.5 percent of the eighty-nine students. At the time of the research, there were three teachers. The male director, who taught the fourth grade, had been there from the beginning of the year. A second male, who taught the first grade, and one female who taught the second grade had just been posted to the school in March to replace a male teacher who had been transferred elsewhere in late winter. Although all three teachers had had previous experience, the new teachers were both considered probationary. The students lived in six villages and walked up to 7 kilometers each day to get to the school. There was one other rural school in the subprefecture, and one college in a town 5 kilometers away. Families engaged in subsistence agriculture, also raising some cash crops of millet, vegetables, and corn, and there was considerable out-migration, particularly by men who sent wages back to families. Two fieldworkers spent a week in March 1994 studying this primary school. Then Marianne Bloch and Boubacar Bayero Diallo spent a total of three additional weeks in the school and village, split between two visits in March and in May.

Female Teachers as a Remedy The new female teacher in the primary school came as part of a new government initiative to encourage women to teach in rural areas. When she arrived at the school with her new male colleague, there was general excitement. She was the first woman to teach in the region, let alone at the school; indeed, several women told us that they decided to send their daughters to school because there was a female teacher. Village women and men felt the school would be a safer place for their daughters with a female teacher on-site; in addition, they believed she would provide incentives for girls to stay in school and learn. Some of the girls we interviewed said that they liked the female teacher and thought that she dressed well. When we asked what they would like to do when they finished school, many girls said they'd like to become a teacher-to make money, to be able to wear pretty clothes like their new teacher, or because they liked to work with children. Several girls also said they did not want to work as hard as their mothers did. The teacher herself explained one day, when she came to school dressed in high heels and a well-tailored dress: "I often wear special clothes because I want the girls, particularly, to know that if they work hard, and succeed in school, they, too, can get a job and buy pretty clothes." This was the kind of incentive the parents had hoped to see.

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Inside the Classroom One might have expected the female teacher to favor calling on or interacting with girls. However, in this particular case, the new young male teacher was more likely to favor girls, especially his two star female pupils, whereas the female teacher was more likely to call on boys.

Tension Between Colleagues When Bloch and Diallo first arrived in the village in March, the female teacher had only recently arrived. She was happy to talk to the female researcher, and discussed the difficulty of moving to a remote village where she was the only well-educated woman. She also suggested it was sometimes difficult to be the lone female in a school with the other two male teachers. Later, when we returned for our second and longer visit to the school in May, we found that the female teacher was absent, and had been at home "ill" for two weeks in a nearby city. During her absence, the male director taught her second-grade class as well as his fourth-grade class, which caused him considerable distress. Not long after the female teacher returned and took over her class, she and the male director began a verbal and physical fight in front of the children and in front of some parents who came after hearing a commotion. The first-grade teacher broke up the fight. After village leaders spoke with the director and female teacher, we gradually learned that the close domestic living arrangement, with both teachers in a multiroomed house supplied by the village, had produced a variety of strains. The female teacher claimed that the director (whose wife and family lived in another region of the country) had attempted to develop a personal relationship with her as soon as she had arrived in the village and had also asked her to help him with domestic chores such as doing laundry, doing dishes, and fetching water. To discourage this, she had left the village for a brief illness but had stayed away longer because of the discomfort she felt. The director denied that there was any attempt at a personal relationship but suggested that the female teacher was bossy and did not respect his leadership, obey his "requests" (or commands), or honor his interpretation of school rules. Although this case may be seen as unusual, it illustrates particular difficulties female teachers in rural areas may face. Gender-based expectations held by traditional village members as well as the largely male teaching staff create a difficult living and working climate for a female teacher in rural African villages. Although the teacher in question was strong in character and better liked by the village members than the director, it was not clear whether she would choose to stay, particularly after the incident just described, even though her new job depended on her staying.

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Classroom Interaction Calling on Girls Inside classrooms, teachers devoted a great deal of class time to questioning students, whether quizzing them orally about past lessons, having them read aloud from the board, having them come to the board to work out a problem, or probing their knowledge of a new topic. Both teachers and students saw individual classroom performances in response to the teacher's questioning as an activity of critical importance to students' learning, and both girls and boys interviewed in the case studies said they liked to be questioned. In not all but in many of the classrooms our teams visited, both primary and secondary, teachers called on girls fairly regularly. Rough counts from the field notes in twenty-one primary classrooms show that in most classes girls were called on in frequencies proportional to their numbers. In one eighth-grade French class, for instance, girls made up less than 17 percent of the students but were called on 38 percent of the time during the sessions we observed. In only two classrooms, both in the same rural school, girls were clearly ignored; however, they were called on disproportionately often in two urban classrooms. Since field notes might reflect a tendency of the observers to pay special attention to girls, we also examined videotapes of fourteen lessons in eight different classrooms in two different schools. The videotaped lessons do not represent a perfect sample, since most of them were made in the same urban school; since the videotaped lessons varied greatly in length, from a few minutes to more than an hour; and since they also varied in amount of student recitation, from only eight to sixty-two student turns at talking. Given those caveats, the findings paint a slightly more negative picture than our field notes. Our video sample contains six lessons in which girls tended to be ignored, five lessons in which girls recited roughly in proportion to their numbers, and three lessons in which girls took proportionately more turns than their numbers would have predicted. The number of girls reciting sometimes varied dramatically during different lessons in the same classroom. Yet, at the same time, there was no pattern by subject matter, such as math versus reading. Nor was there a pattern by gender of the teacher; the female teacher of classroom 1B tended to slight girls in the lessons recorded, whereas the female teacher of classroom SA tended to give girls equal or extra attention. Readers may legitimately ask whether the presence of our researchers, especially when videotaping, may have exaggerated teachers' attention to girls, for it proved difficult to conceal our interest in gender. However, in more than one school girls assured us that teachers always called on girls frequently, and teachers told us that it was a deliberate strategy to help girls learn.

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Of course, since girls were usually a minority and sometimes a very small minority, to say that they were called on fairly regularly is not to say that they dominated classroom talk. In the eighth grade cited above where girls recited 38 percent of the time during one observed lesson, for example, boys still answered 62 percent of the questions, and, of course, the male teacher often held the floor. Moreover, in some classes we noted that a teacher would call on many boys before calling on a single girl, as if he had belatedly recalled that he owed the girls "equal time."

Calling on Volunteers and Star Students In some classrooms, teachers deliberately called on students who were not raising their hands or who had not been heard from for a while. However, our classroom observations suggest that most teachers usually called on children who volunteered by raising their hands or calling out-a pedagogical practice that was not too surprising, since class size ranged up to ninety-five in the classrooms studied, with a median of fifty-eight students. Thus there were plenty of nonparticipating boys as well as nonparticipating girls. Calling on volunteers probably limited girls' participation because we had the impression, in line with reports by other observers (Biraimah, 1980; Chapter 7 in this volume; Davison and Kanyuka, 1992), that boys were more likely than girls to volunteer in many of the classrooms we visited. For example, in our sample of videotaped lessons (in those instances where we could determine with certainty whether a student had been volunteering when called on), girls were underrepresented among voluntary reciters in seven lessons, proportionately represented in four, and overrepresented in only three. In other words, when teachers called on volunteers and thereby tended to ignore girls, the teachers' behavior was playing on girls' classroom behavior. As we will explain later, though, there was considerable variation in girls' classroom behavior, and there were also some gender-specific reasons that girls hesitated to take the floor. In the videotaped lessons, we did see an interesting compensatory strategy on the part of certain teachers when girls hesitated to volunteer. In one first-grade classroom where almost half the students were girls, girls made up only 20 percent of the students who had volunteered and had been picked to recite during the reading lesson we videotaped. However, girls made up 60 percent of the nonvolunteers, that is, children the teacher called on even though they were not raising their hands. It looked as though the female teacher in this classroom deliberately called on girls to make up for the smaller numbers who volunteered. We saw what seemed to be the same strategy used by a male third-grade teacher during a reading lesson, by a male sixth-grade teacher, and by a male eighth-grade math teacher in a rural college. Teachers tended to call not only on students who volunteered but on the best students, even when they were not raising their hands or calling

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out. The teachers probably hoped that the best students would provide the right answer and thus allow the lesson to move forward. Therefore, even in classrooms where simple counts showed that the teachers called on girls disproportionately often, it was sometimes only one or two top girls who participated. For example, in one rural first grade (described in Case 2), when the teacher relied on volunteers, he often nominated two female students who constantly raised their hands and who consistently gave good answers. He called much less often on the remaining ten girls and the twenty-four boys in this class. Calling frequently on a few "stars" limited the participation of the majority of girls-and boys (compare Biraimah, 1989). It also reduced girls' participation in general since, in a very large class, girls were unlikely by virtue of their numbers to be among the top three or four students. Incidentally, sometimes during a particular exercise teachers would designate a student to call on other students, but students showed even more bias toward calling on volunteers and on star students than most teachers showed.

Participating in Group Work A few teachers occasionally divided the class into groups that were responsible for completing an assignment as a team. In principle, this technique encouraged all students to participate in discussions, but in practice-at least in the few cases we observed-girls tended to remain peripheral. Where we witnessed group work, the teachers had dispersed girls equally among the groups, probably according to a concept of equity as equal distribution. However, when girls found themselves a minority of one or two among four or five boys, they tended to defer to the male students, particularly to the stronger male students. Even an academically strong female student whom the teacher appointed head of her group during a ninth-grade French lesson ceded the floor to one or two of the boys in her group most of the time during our observations. The dispersal of girls among groups provides an example of unintended consequences of a teacher's well-intentioned intervention. It also illustrates the way teachers', girls', and boys' behaviors interact: the teacher isolated each girl, the out-numbered girls tended to defer, and the boys did not hesitate to take charge even when a girl was supposed to head their group. All three parties unwittingly worked together to reduce girls' participation.

Singling Out Girls in Well-Meaning and in Derogatory Ways Some teachers on some occasions went beyond calling on girls to singling out the girls as a group. For example, at one rural school, when the fifth-grade

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girls were not volunteering, their teacher called on them, saying, "The girls need to talk, too." Sometimes the special attention had a positive effect. For example, a sixth-grade teacher at an urban primary school set up a competition between the twenty-two girls in the class and the forty-two boys by saying, "Oh, girls say they do not know [i.e., they are not raising their hands]; let's move on to boys and see." This remark inspired the girls to raise their hand eagerly. However, teachers' special attention to girls sometimes took a derogatory tone. For example, a college teacher turned the attention to the girls by saying, "Et les mamans, hein" [And the mamas, eh?]. Any kind of singling out the girls in a manner that marked them as a "special case" or a "problem case" could have negative effects. Case 3 below illustrates how boys laughed at a girl who could not answer correctly after the teacher pointed out with mock amazement that a girl had actually raised her hand.

Case 3: Singling Out Girls at a Rural College Setting This rural school served about two hundred students, 11 percent of whom were girls. It was the only college in the rural subprefecture, where most of the population were subsistence farmers who grew rice and manioc or "planters" who raised a few acres of coffee or oil palms. The college consisted of one seventh-grade class, one eighth-grade class, and one ninthgrade class, taught by seven instructors and administered by a nonteaching principal. There was no tenth grade. Two field workers spent a week in March 1994 studying this college. Kathryn Anderson-Levitt and Marie Chimene Blemou conducted another three weeks of study in and around the college in May.

Singling Out Girls Sometimes instead of simply calling on girls from time to time, the teachers made an explicit point of involving girls. Although it gave the message that girls should be participating as well as boys, this strategy could backfire. One morning in French class, the teacher pointed to a girl to come to the board to underline words that "replaced a noun." When she hesitated, other students raised their hands, but he told them, "Laissez-la se debrouiller. Des que vous levez le doigt, vous allez l'embrouiller" [Let her figure it out. As soon as you raise your hand you mess her up]. She underlined appropriate words silently. The teacher called on a second girl to explain why the word elle had been underlined, but she did not respond. Students volunteered, but the

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teacher called on a boy who had his head down. When the boy did not answer, students volunteered again. The teacher noticed a girl in the first row and said, "Ah! Une fille !eve le doigt !a-bas" [Ah! A girl is raising her hand over there]. He sent a girl (either her or a different girl-the observer could not tell) to the board, but she hesitated, and the students laughed. "Pourquoi vous l'embrouillez" [Why are you messing her up]? said the teacher, calling on another sleeping boy. In Case 3, the teacher's sanctions against students who interfered with girls' turns to talks suggest that he had the best of intentions. Nonetheless, his efforts to get girls involved had mixed results. His first sanction seemed to give the first girl the support she needed to underline pronouns, although she did not explain aloud what she was underlining, as was the usual practice in this class. However, after the second girl's silence the teacher's exaggerated recognition that a girl had raised her hand implied that he did not expect girls to volunteer-although, in fact, in this particular class two or three girls out of the fourteen volunteered fairly often. The teacher's comment set the stage for the students' laughter, which seemed to mean, "Here you celebrate a girl's volunteering and she can't even come up with an answer!" Notice again how teacher, girls, and boys unwittingly cooperated to produce the girl's failure at the board. The teacher signaled to the class that they should be surprised if a girl even volunteered, let alone performed well; the girl at the board took her cue, so to speak, and did nothing; the rest of the class likewise took their cue, laughing instead of sitting and waiting. Although the teacher chided the class, he confirmed the girls' momentary failure by calling on another student instead of pressing her to give an answer. Of course, the two boys called on during this episode performed no better. One could ask, though, whether calling on two sleeping boys in conjunction with three alert girls gave a further symbolic message about the teacher's expectations for the girls' performances.

Girls' Attitudes and Behaviors Girls themselves were, or course, key players in constructing their own participation in the classroom. In Case 3, as just noted, the first girl's silence as she worked and the second girl's hesitance were behaviors on which the teacher and the boys structured their subsequent behavior. Sometimes girls inserted themselves forcefully, even against resistance from the teacher or from male students; on other occasions they hesitated to participate fully. When we asked boys and girls the same questions we asked teachers about gender stereotypes, we found that negative attitudes about girls

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developed at some point between first and fifth grade (Tables 6.4 and 6.5). In general, neither first-grade girls nor first-grade boys stereotyped what boys and girls are like or can do in school. In contrast, by fifth or sixth grade and also in seventh grade, both boys and girls perceived strong differences between the sexes. Among the older children, both boys and girls believed that boys were more likely than girls to learn lessons well, raise their hands often, respond well, understand math well, show ambition, like competition, and be smart. They also saw boys as more typically undisciplined and girls as timid. Not only had boys developed gender stereotypes, but girls had internalized negative perceptions of their own capabilities and behaviors. Nonetheless, girls did not always shrink from classroom participation or always sell themselves short.

Seating Patterns The very first thing we noticed on entering classrooms was that, in contrast to findings from some other African countries (Tietjen, 1991, p. 29), girls did not sit in the back of the class.7 In most of the classrooms we

Table 6.4

Girls' Attitudes About Boys and Girls, by Grade Level

--------------------------------------------

First/second grade (n = 85) Are girls, boys, or both girls and boys more likely to ---

-

-- -

-

-

--

-

-

-

Boys

Girls

Boys

Girls

Boys

-----------------------

I. Learn lessons well 2. Raise hand often 3. Give good responses 4. Rarely give good responses 5. Get quiet when asked question 6. Use good French expression 7. Understand math well 8. Have ambition 9. Like competition 10. Like to help peers 11. Be smart 12. Work hard, make an effort 13. Make little effort 14. Show little interest in school 15. Be well behaved 16. Behave badly 17. Be timid ------

Girls

Fifth/sixth grade Seventh grade (n =50) (n =59)

II 12 11 11

12 8 10 8 8 11 9

II 11 8 12 8 14 11

10

11 12 7 9 12

13

11

11

13

14

3

6

13

16

4

------------

42 44 38 25 23 36 40 36 32 37 35

32 31 21 31 40 29 27 28 21 26 13 29

32

19 15 37 10 42 -

-

51 52 51 31 34

36 31 31 47 47 40

45

20 34 32

56 45 47

39

43

12

55

28 33 21 38

37 39

43 37

29 58

13

54

41 17 56 18

-

13 -

-

-

-

-

-

-

--

Note: We scored a l in the girls' column when a respondent said the behavior was typical of girls, a 1 in the boys' column when typical of boys, and a l in both columns when typical of both. First- and second-grade data were based on group interviews (four children of the same gender per group); fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-grade interviews were individual. Bolded numbers represent a gender difference of at least 10 percent of the total number of responses possible at a given grade level. For example, where n = 85, a difference of 9 points or more is bolded.

118 Table 6.5

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Boys' Attitudes About Boys and Girls, by Grade Level First/second grade (n = 84)

Are girls, boys, or both girls and boys more likely to

-------

Girls

Boys

Fifth/sixth grade Seventh grade (n =54) (n =59) -~---

Girls

---

Boys

-------

Girls

Boys

------------------------

I. Learn lessons well 2. Raise hand often 3. Give good responses 4. Rarely give good responses 5. Get quiet when asked question 6. Use good French expression 7. Understand math well 8. Have ambition 9. Like competition 10. Like to help peers 1!. Be smart 12. Work hard, make an effort 13. Make little effort 14. Show little interest in school 15. Be well behaved 16. Behave badly 17. Be timid

9 8

11 11

5

14

12 14 8 9 4 9 8 6 8 11 12 13

6 12 13 9 8 9 13 12 9 8 7

5

15

II

18 25 14 36

47 50 46 27

30

27

20 13 20 19 21 18 19

48 49 40 37 42 36 40

30

29

21 39 19 37

28 27 43 16

17

13 52

56 59 48 14 23 56 59 58 52 52 55 54 27

41 41

39 39

34

42

11

10 56 55 17 17 25 28 34 13

47 31 11 9 - - - - - - - --- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Note: We scored a 1 in the girls' column when a respondent said the behavior was typical of girls, a 1 in the boys' column when typical of boys, and a 1 in both columns when typical of both. First- and second-grade data were based on group interviews (four children of the same gender per group); fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-grade interviews were individual. Bolded numbers represent a gender difference of at least 10 percent of the total number of responses possible at a given grade level. For example, where n = 85, a difference of 9 points or more is bolded.

studied, girls sat dispersed around the classroom, either in little clusters (for example, three girls at one bench) or isolated among boys. We saw only two classrooms out of thirty-four where girls tended to sit toward the back (curiously, an urban first grade and an urban sixth grade with many girls). In three classrooms they sat clustered near the front and in two others were conspicuously absent from the back row. Teachers had assigned seats in various ways-for example, to indicate academic rank, to place smaller children in front, or to separate children who fought. In some classes, students chose their own seats, and even in some classes where they had assigned places, students moved to seats they preferred. Therefore, we infer that at least some of the girls we observed had located themselves toward the front on their initiative.

Were Girls Timid? Most students and teachers believed that girls were timid and had a "complex" about talking in front of boys. However, sometimes girls clearly

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violated the stereotype. For example, at an urban college, when a tenthgrade boy was unable to complete a response in math class, a girl spoke up, saying, "Monsieur, if he can't finish it, I can come do it." In the same school a seventh-grade girl raised a question, and when the teacher said, "We haven't come to that point yet," she persisted, "But, Monsieur, you still have to tell me." On other occasions, however, girls seemed to confirm the stereotype by standing mute, speaking very haltingly, or speaking in a very soft voice even when giving the correct answer. "Parle fort" [Speak up!] became the teacher's routine response when certain girls recited. Even though some girls spoke as loudly as any boy and boys sometimes stood silent or sputtered, it was girls' hesitance that was treated as the norm. When boys mumbled, their teacher or other boys were heard, on a couple of occasions, to say, "Speak up! You talk like a woman!" Likewise, when girls volunteered, our initial observations indicated that the majority tended to raise their hands only halfway, with the elbow still resting on the desk, whereas the volunteering boys around them waved their hands high. A half-raised hand seemed calculated to avoid the teacher's attention while nonetheless making the claim that one knew the answer.

Boys' Controlling Strategies Hesitant girls were not timid by nature; rather, they were reacting to the classroom environment, including the behavior of their male classmates. Our team witnessed plenty of friendly interaction (for example, sharing pens) and friendly mutual teasing among girls and boys, and we also occasionally saw a girl hit a boy among the youngest children. However, consciously or not, male students also behaved in ways that tended to "keep girls in their place." Physical Control

During the group and individual interviews, the fieldworkers had asked students at all grade levels whether a girl could be the responsable or chef of a class (the head student who aided the teacher with roll call, discipline, and other duties). Most said no, even though girls actually were the head student in a few classes we visited. The students' reasons were revealing; most commonly they said that "boys would not listen to girls," "girls are afraid of boys," and "the boys would hit the girl" (our emphasis). Children in at least six of the schools in our sample, both primary and secondary, independently volunteered the last comment.

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These responses suggest that boys made implicit if not explicit threats of physical violence. Did boys ever act out the threat? We recorded only a few instances of boys actually hitting girls, such as a first-grade boy who hit a girl's bottom. In these cases, which took place among the younger children, girls often fought back; for instance, in a rural first grade, a boy hit a girl in the face with his fist and she responded by hitting him in the back with a slate. However, we witnessed a larger number of incidents across all grade levels in which boys used physical force to restrict girls' participation. For instance, a boy blocked a girl's path as she tried to move through the classroom; a first-grade boy would not make space for a girl coming in late to sit beside him on the bench until she shoved him aside. In contrast, we did not see girls blocking boys' movements in these ways. The most dramatic case of physical interference took place in a rural college classroom where the teacher had initiated a discussion of the pros and cons of excision (female circumcision, which is widely practiced in Guinea). The sole girl in the classroom-who might have been expected to make a contribution on this of all topics-raised her hand and held it up as the teacher continued to call on boys. Eventually the boy sitting behind her pulled her arm down. She persisted, however, raising her arm again and rising in her place. At last the teacher called on her, and she succeeded in making her comment. Although the boy's intervention did not actually prevent the girl from participating, its symbolic message was clear. In combination with the teacher's delay in calling on her, it signaled that the members of the class discouraged her participation. In at least one school, boys also interfered with girls by invading their toilet space. Although there was no latrine, students in the rural college had built a small enclosure of palm fronds as a toilet area. However, girls complained that when they used it, boys sometimes came and "sat next to it." The girls didn't say so, but their behavior made clear that they were most concerned about handling menstruation in private. Even after additional, supposedly sex-segregated enclosures were built, girls still complained about boys' interference, and they used only "the bush." In this rural area where "bush" was available, then, it was boys' behavior as much as lack of a latrine that caused a problem for girls. Verbal Control Boys also tried to control girls verbally. Case 4 illustrates striking incidents in which seventh-grade boys yelled at girls in their class to "sit down" and to "get out" when the girls were participating in class work and to "hurry up" when the girls were sweeping the classroom.

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Case 4: Ordering Girls Around in an Urban College Setting One of three colleges in this regional capital, this college had ten classes taught by eight male instructors and two female instructors. The college sat between a national highway and the railroad line, in a run-down condition that seemed to constitute a discouraging factor for both teachers and students. The school had no surrounding fence, and there was no gate on the entrance to the schoolyard. Women going to market, men, animals, and sometimes vehicles crossed the entrance. Near the entrance sat two unfinished buildings, where male students could usually be seen playing before classes started, during break, or after being expelled by an instructor. Classes were held in the eight usable rooms from 8 A.M. to 2 P.M. for grades eight through ten; the seventh grades were in double-shift classrooms from 8 A.M. to l P.M. and then from l P.M. to 5 or 6 P.M. Seventh through ninth grades were located in very old rooms in former warehouses. The rooms had no ceiling other than the tin roof, and since the walls did not reach all the way to the roof, sound traveled very easily from one room to another. In mid-March, the first research team observed twenty hours of classes and interviewed seventh and tenth graders. One team member, Fatoumata Conde, returned with Aminata Soumare to continue the case study for another week in mid-April.

Cleaning Housecleaning practices revealed both the teachers' and the boys' attitudes toward girls. In the college, girls were supposed to take turns cleaning the classrooms daily, and teachers punished them for failing to clean. The punishment consisted of having all the girls in the class clean first the classroom and then the yard and the offices before they were permitted to return to class. The punishment took at least two hours. (As we noted in other schools, boys did such chores only as a punishment and to a lesser degree than girls did. For instance, if a number of boys were punished at the same time as girls, they collected the garbage after girls swept the yard.) Girls resisted cleaning on a regular basis throughout the school year, for they did not like doing it. One of the boys interviewed claimed that there had been one girl who continually refused to sweep and, when the principal tried to hit her for her refusal, had tried to stab the principal. Teachers complained about how dirty the classroom was every morning and frequently sent out all the girls in the class because one or two had

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failed to do the cleaning. For instance, one of the tenth-grade teachers walked out of class one day because he said it had not been properly cleaned. This time, rather than resist, girls began to sweep, arguing over whose turn it had been and blaming the (male) head student for messing up the rotation chart. Eventually the teacher returned, saying, "If the tenth grade doesn't try to act a little more serious, everyone will fail the exam because there are students who don't want to make it to the next level." At this point, the male students said, "Sweep well and quickly because you are slackers." Girls replied in the local language, "Leave us in peace," but the boys continued in the local language, "Just sweep," "You're too lazy," "They are good-for-nothings," and "Hurry up, good-for-nothings." Other Instances of Boys' Behavior

Boys expressed their attitude of superiority in other ways, too, and without hesitation. In many instances boys yelled at girls even more than the instructor did. It was obvious to the researchers that boys felt more comfortable in class and tended to believe they could take over for the instructor at any point when it came to taking or recommending action against girls. • On one occasion, when a girl stood up and claimed she had lost her notebook, the head student stood up and said to the instructor, "Madame, don't solve any such problems anymore." Another boy added, "These lies about theft occur only when you are here, Madame." Notice the implicit challenge to the female teacher's authority embedded in the explicit challenge to the girl with the lost notebook. • In a seventh-grade math class, a girl stood near the math instructor to ask a question, and boys could be heard saying, "Get out of there, get out of there," in the local language. • On another occasion in the same classroom, when two girls failed to answer a question the female teacher asked during a French class, boys started saying as a group, "Get out, get out, get out." • In another case, when the female instructor declared, "I will give 14 [points] to anyone who does this right," two girls stood up at the same time as a few boys. Because the girls remained standing long after the teacher had designated a boy, a group of boys yelled to them, "Sit down, sit down!" Now, the boys' behavior in Case 4 and at other schools might appear to some readers as "harmless" teasing. Many students and teachers said that girls were simply more sensitive (by implication, "too" sensitive), whereas boys had "thicker skins." Besides, we observed girls as well as boys occasionally laughing at and teasing fellow students. However, certain evidence

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suggests that boys' teasing of girls sometimes took the form of a personal attack rather than innocent teasing. A college teacher explained that when a girl refused a boy's amorous advances, the boy would systematically make fun of her in class, whereas a girl who had been rejected by a boy would never retaliate against him at school. Female dropouts confirmed that this was true. We submit that the boys' "containment" of girls and the asymmetrical joking patterns were not harmless, particularly considering what a small minority girls were in some of these classrooms. It is difficult to imagine that girls did not "hear" the cumulative message of the teasing, which could wear away at the girls' self-confidence and make school a less comfortable place for them. Nonetheless, not all girls submitted passively to the verbal and physical containment. In the housecleaning case above, the girls talked back just as some of the girls we cited earlier hit or shoved back or persisted in spite of physical restraint.

Conclusion A Climate of Discouragement What is life like inside classrooms in Guinea? Our observations and interviews convince us that both girls and boys face a climate discouraging their participation, their active learning, and their persistence and ability to continue. On top of that, girls face classroom barriers unique to their gender. Crowded classrooms in which up to one hundred students must compete for the teacher's attention, scarcity if not complete absence of books, required manual labor, insults from some teachers, and physical punishments combine to create a climate of discouragement for many students of both sexes. The adversity of classroom life cannot, by itself, explain girls' higher school-leaving rate, for Guinean students and Guinean teachers told us that one must suffer in order to learn (cf. Bledsoe, 1992). However, to be willing to suffer, a person must believe she will, in the end, learn and succeed. Burdened by a heavier workload at home, lacking role models of successful schooled women, hearing people disparage women and their intelligence, girls have less reason than boys to hold an image of future success that can steel them against present classroom difficulties. Moreover, as we have shown in this chapter, girls alone face additional discouraging factors inside the classroom that boys do not contend with. We found cases of overt sexism and even hostility toward girls on the part of some teachers, and lower expectations for girls were widespread among urban middle school teachers and among rural teachers at all levels. We also found gender stereotypes built into school practices, such

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as the expectation that girls should do daily housekeeping, which symbolically punished girls for being girls. To be fair, we also found something positive in many Guinean classrooms. In contrast to reports from other African countries (Biraimah, 1980; Tietjen, 1991) and to parents' perceptions in Guinea (Sow, 1994), our observations showed that many teachers were calling on girls regularly and encouraging them to participate. However, the positive news must be tempered on two accounts. First, teachers tended to call on volunteers or star students. Therefore, it was not all girls who got to participate, but more likely the few star pupils. In many overcrowded classrooms, the majority of girls-and boys-got left out. Second, the act of singling out girls could backfire, ultimately discouraging rather than encouraging girls, as Case 3 illustrated. And that is because teachers do not act alone to affect girls' participation.

The Joint Construction of Gender Stereotypes Girls' successful participation or any other phenomenon in the classroom depends not simply on the teacher's behavior but on the subtle interplay among teacher, girls, and boys. Although some of the climate of discouragement, for girls more than boys, comes from forces outside the school, inside the school teachers, boys, and even girls interact to create the climate themselves. Teachers do not act alone. Many of the girls themselves have learned, over the years, to devalue their own abilities, and therefore they hesitate to participate in class, thus losing opportunities to learn and to display success. It is their hesitance that prompts teachers to single them out. Once called on, the girls who hesitate or stand silent make it awkward for the teacher to call on them again and reinforce his or her expectation that girls will perform more poorly than boys. However, the girls do not act alone either. Their self-confidence has declined from first to fifth grade partly in response to earlier teachers' low expectations. Their male classmates play a continuing role, too. Some girls stand mute or hold their hands up only halfway, even if the teacher encourages them, because they know that reciting in class will open them to personal teasing by a boy who has a grudge against them. Others have succumbed to the boys' persistent verbal and physical efforts to contain them. Thus, as teachers, boys, and girls respond to one another's behaviors, they inadvertently work together to reproduce gender differences and to maintain a subtle, persistent climate of discouragement for girls. However, the construction of gendered expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes does not begin at the classroom door; rather it begins beyond the classroom, indeed beyond national boundaries, as the discourse surrounding boys' and girls' differences and identities resonate in internationally provided

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textbooks, in the leaders they see, in the people who hold and get different types of jobs, and in media images. These images are simply added to in school when teachers reinforce stereotypes, when boys taunt girls without rebuke, or when girls come to see boys as smarter. The Teacher's Role Because a climate of discouragement is jointly constructed, efforts to change teachers' attitudes without acknowledging the roles of girls' and boys' behaviors cannot eliminate the classroom problems that inhibit girls' participation and learning. For the same reason, recruiting female teachers will not solve the problem entirely. We observed that female teachers, although they clearly serve as influential role models for girls, were no more likely than male teachers to engage girls in the classroom. No less than male teachers, female teachers face the problem of eliciting successful participation from girls who may have already learned to hesitate and doubt themselves. Moreover, female teachers have to "play to" the boys who make up the majority-sometimes a vocal majority, as we saw in Case 4-in their classrooms. Nonetheless, within those limits, the teacher is still the single most powerful player in the classroom. The teacher's behavior, although it cannot make all the difference, does make an important difference. The teachers we observed varied in their effectiveness at encouraging male and female students to learn. Many teaching strategies highlighted differences between boys and girls. For example, teachers attributed more academic competence to boys than girls, modeled different attitudes toward boys than girls, and held stereotypical beliefs about girls' and boys' futures. Although some teachers were observed insulting and demeaning both boys and girls, as noted previously, insults for girls may have had greater impact because girls were often in the minority within classrooms and had fewer supports to bolster their sense of achievement, abilities, or reasons for staying in school. Even inadvertent or well-intentioned behavior on the teacher's part sometimes contributed to girls' hesitance and boys' dominance in the classroom. For example, involving more students through group work is an excellent strategy for both boys and girls, but it can isolate girls if they become a minority of one in a small group. Calling on girls regularly is importantbut doing it in a way that marks girls as a "special case," symbolically equivalent to sleeping boys, sends the message of low expectations and sets girls up for mockery. Apologizing to boys for calling on girls reinforces the idea that the classroom really belongs to boys. Making little jokes to keep students interested and participating is a good strategy-except that jokes are speech forms that often let ambivalence leak out, and girls' achievement is a subject about which many teachers appear to feel ambivalent.

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Yet, some teachers developed teaching strategies that seemed to encourage learning. In general, the best strategies for engaging girls were those that engaged the largest number of students, including the silent majority among the boys. One of these was group work, despite its potential drawbacks for girls; another was to deliberately call on nonvolunteers. Like the strategy of singling out the girls, this technique could backfire, discouraging participation by humiliating an ill-prepared child before mocking peers. However, it could also give the floor to children who would otherwise never have spoken. Some teachers used other systems we have not yet mentioned, such as calling on every single student in turn, up and down the aisles. A few teachers commented that they saw benefits in setting up competitions of girls against boys, although we see dangers in that kind of competition, given the boys' attitude of superiority. Finally, one of the best strategies was the simplest. When a student hesitated and classmates began to call, "Moi, Monsieur!" [Me, Sir!], we sometimes heard teachers say, "Let her finish" or "Let him do it himself." Willingness to wait a few seconds longer (for most turns during question-and-answer went by very quickly) could convert a stumbler into a successful student and an intimidating classroom atmosphere into one that provided spaces for quieter or less confident students to recite. These were all ways in which teachers could make a difference, even when boys entered the classroom assuming their "ownership" of it and girls came in already imbued with self-doubt. Although teachers did not act alone, they could act in ways that supported girls' success. Girls' Persistence Despite the weight of multiple layers of gender construction, then, some teachers exercised agency, moving proactively to give girls the floor and to forestall boys who would demean girls. Likewise, not all girls succumbed to taking on attitudes, actions, and images constructed by others. We saw some children resist the cultural reproduction of gender differences, persisting against discouragement in its multiple forms. We saw some take positive action, participating in the construction of new images of what girls (or boys) could do, with few models of these futures in front of them. The girls who persist in Guinean schools do so against great odds. Recall the girls who have extra domestic work at home after they return from school, where they also were responsible for sweeping and cleaning. Recall the girls who persist in late primary school or middle school despite mocking or abuse from some of their teachers. In spite of these burdens, some girls persist. Those who do enjoy learning or the social aspects of school. They want something different for their lives than the difficult work of their mothers that rural girls see. In urban areas, they believe they

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need to continue in school in order to get better jobs, or to have status (see, for example, Chapter 9). In short, they choose to continue. Although acknowledging the heroic efforts of some girls, we cannot conclude with that point, as though individual effort is the answer. We began this chapter by couching what we saw and what teachers and children experience in Guinea in terms of international relationships and the continuing relative poverty of Guinea. We suggested that gender and education in Guinea necessarily have to be seen as nested within a broader framework of these relationships. How can children persist when jobs are scarce, when family need for children to do work in rural farmlands supersedes anything they might expect to learn in school, when parents support teachers' harshness because they believe children need to learn to survive in difficult circumstances, when textbooks are virtually nonexistent, when schools are 7 kilometers distant from homes? In the face of these odds, we must continue to ask what policies, discourses, and practices maintain the difficult circumstances all children and teachers face in schools.

Notes The research reported here was funded by a grant administered by the World Bank. We thank Catherine Laurent for commenting on a draft of the manuscript. However, the analysis is the authors' alone and does not necessarily represent the World Bank's position. We owe a debt of gratitude to the Ministry of Pre-University and Vocational Education of the Republic of Guinea, particularly its Statistical and Planning Service and the National Institute of Pedagogy; to Professor Alhassan Sow; to the Bureau of Human Resources, USAID/Guinea; and to the World Bank Resident Mission in Guinea for facilitating the research reported here. Thanks also to Benita Blessing, Monica Miller Marsh, and David Tabachnick of the University of Wisconsin for help with analysis of the field notes, and to Lisa Blackburn, Maimouna Diakite, and Michelle Howe of the University of Michigan-Dearborn for coding and transcribing videotapes. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the annual meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society, Boston, March 30, 1995. 1. Admittedly, statistics on completion rates are difficult to come by, and therefore the numbers must be taken as estimates. 2. The Guinean school system is organized into six years of primary school, four years of college, and three years of lycee, the second cycle of secondary school. We have avoided translating the term college as "middle school" or "junior high school" because the Guinean schools differ markedly from U.S. schools that bear those names. 3. From the individual girl's perspective, schooling, particularly in a lingua franca like English or French, is presumed to enhance her future economic stability (although see Moran, 1990, and Schuster, 1979, for less optimistic views). From the national perspective, policymakers now generally agree that increased schooling for girls leads to lower fertility rates and lower child mortality (Herz, Subbarao, Habib, and Raney, 1991; however, see Bledsoe, 1990, for a counterargument to the first point and Serpell, 1993, for a more general critique of the value of schooling).

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4. It may be that Guinean students have written memoires (master's theses) based on classroom observation; see Maclure, 1997. 5. Indeed, classroom studies in the United States and France have shown that even where girls make up the majority, teachers pay less attention to them than to boys (Duru-Bellat, 1990; Sadker and Sadker, 1994; Wilkinson and Marrett, 1985). 6. The Guinean field researchers during the first phase of the research were Fatoumata Binta Bokoum, Thierno Sow, Fatoumata Binta Dieng, Mohamed Campel Camara, Kadiatou Bah, Boubacar Bayero Diallo, Fatoumata Conde, Sonah Mady Camara, Henri Kolie, and Victor Haba. Selected on the basis of their prior research experience and their knowledge of regional languages, they received two weeks of training in qualitative observation methodologies from the three principal researchers. 7. A student's location in the classroom can signal how much the child is likely to participate. In general, teachers we observed seemed more likely to "neglect" the back rows, although a few teachers seemed to neglect one side of the room, either left or right, rather than the back. This interclassroom variation suggests the need to further examine norms and patterns of interaction in specific classrooms.

References Anderson-Levitt, K. M., M. Bloch, and A.M. Soumare. (1994).Inside classrooms in Guinea: Girls' experiences. Final Report to the Ministry of Pre-University Education and Vocational Training, Republic of Guinea, and to the World Bank. Biraimah, K. C. (1980). The impact of western schools on girls' expectations: A Togolese case. Comparative Education Review 24, no. 2, Sl96-S208. - - - . (1987). Class, gender, and life chances: A Nigerian university case study. Comparative Education Review 31, 570-582. - - - . (1989). The process and outcomes of gender bias in elementary schools: A Nigerian case. Journal of Negro Education 58, no. 7, 50-67. Bledsoe, C. (1990). School girls and school fees among the Mende of Sierra Leone. In P. Sanday and R. Goodenough (eds.), Beyond the second sex, pp. 293-309. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. - - - . (1992). The cultural transformation of western education in Sierra Leone. Africa 62, 182-202. Bloch, M. (1993). The uses of schooling and literacy in a Zafimaniry village. In B. Street (ed.), Cross-cultural approaches to literacy, pp. 87-109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clignet, R., and P. Foster. (1966). The fortunate few: A study of secondary schools in the Ivory Coast. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Davison, J., and M. Kanyuka. (1992). Girls' participation in basic education in Southern Malawi. Comparative Education Review 36, 446-466. Duru-Bellat, M. (1990). L' ecole des filles. Paris: L'Harmattan. Goffman, E. (1981). Replies and responses. In Forms of talk, pp. 5-77. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goodenough, R. G. (1987). Small group culture and the emergence of sexist behavior: A comparative study of four children's groups. In G. Spindler and L. Spindler (eds.), Interpretive ethnography of education at home and abroad, pp. 409-444. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Herz, B., K. Subbarao, M. Habib, and L. Raney. (1991). Letting girls learn: Promising approaches in primary and secondary education. World Bank Discussion Papers, no. 133. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Jarousse, J. P., and A. Mingat. (1993). L' ecole primaire en Afrique: Analyse pedagogique et economique-Le cas du Togo. Paris: L'Harmattan. Kelly, G. (1989). International handbook of women's education. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Kessler, S. J., and W. McKenna. (1978). Gender: An ethnomethodological approach. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Kourouma, P. (1991). Etude portant sur les aspects socio-culturels et socioeconomiques de Ia scolarisation des filles au niveau du primaire: Cas de la Guinee. Conakry: Ministere de !'Education Nationale, Secretariat d'Etat a l'Enseignement Pre-Universitaire. Levinson, B. A., and D. C. Holland. (1996). The cultural production of the educated person: An introduction. In B. A. Levinson, D. C. Holland, and D. E. Foley (eds.), The cultural production of the educated person: Critical ethnographies of schooling and local practice (pp. 1-54). Albany: State University of New York Press. Long, L. D., with H. Fofanah. (1990). Study of girls' access to primary schooling in Guinea. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Maclure, R. (1997). Overlooked and undervalued: A synthesis of ERNWACA reviews on the state of educational research in West and Central Africa. Bamako: Educational Research Network for West and Central Africa; and Washington, D.C.: U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). McDermott, R. P., K. Gospodinoff, and J. Aron. (1981). Criteria for an ethnographically adequate description of concerted activities and their contexts. In R. W. Casson (ed.), Language, culture and cognition: Anthropological perspectives, pp. 377-399. New York: Macmillan. McSweeney, B. G., and M. Freedman. (1980). Lack of time as an obstacle to women's education: The case of Upper Volta. Comparative Education Review 24,no. 2, S124-S139. Mehan, H. (1978). Structuring school structure. Harvard Educational Review 48, 32-64. Ministere de l'Enseignement Pre-Universitaire et de Ia Formation Professionelle. (l993a). Annuaire statistique 1992-93: Enseignement primaire. Conakry: Service Statistique et Planification. - - - . (1993b). Annuaire statistique 1992-93: Enseignement secondaire. Conakry: Service Statistique et Planification. Moran, M. (1990). "Civilized women": Gender and prestige in southeastern Liberia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Peshkin, A. (1972). Kanuri schoolchildren: Education and social mobilization in Nigeria. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Prouty, D. (1991). From the outside looking in: Women and education in Francophone Central Africa. Ph.D. doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University. Sadker, M., and D. Sadker. (1994). Failing at fairness: How America's schools cheat girls. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Sarnoff, J. (1993). The reconstruction of schooling in Africa: Essay review. Comparative Education Review 37, 181-222. Schuster, I. M.G. (1979). New women of Lusaka. Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing Company.

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Serpell, R. (1993). The significance of schooling: Life-journeys in an African society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soumare, A.M. (1995). Factors that affect girls' access to and retention in school in Mali, 1965-1993. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of IllinoisUrbana/Champaign. Sow, A. (1994 ). Enquete sur la scolarisation des filles en milieu rural: Rapport de synthese. Conakry: Republique de Guinee, Ministere de l'Enseignement PreUniversitaire et de Ia Formation Professionnelle. Stromquist, N. P. (1989). Determinants of educational participation and achievement of women in the third world: A review of the evidence and a theoretical critique. Review of Educational Research 59, 143-183. Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play: Girls and boys in school. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Tietjen, K. (1991). Educating girls: Strategies to increase access, persistence, and achievement. A report for the Advancing Basic Education and Literacy Project. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Agency for International Development. United Nations. (1995). Human development report 1995. New York: Oxford University Press. West, C., and D. H. Zimmerman. (1993). Doing gender. In J. Lorber and S. A. Farrell (eds.), The social construction of gender, pp. 13-37. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications. Wilkinson, L. C., and C. B. Marrett (eds.). (1985). Gender influences in classroom interaction. New York: Academic Press. World Bank. (1994). World Bank development report. Washington, D.C.: World Bank/Oxford University Press.

7~ Gender and Classroom Interactions in Liberia Mary B. Brenner

Innovations to improve schooling in third world countries typically have two goals: to raise the level of learning and to increase the equity of the school system. The rapid expansion in educational systems in postcolonial Africa reflects a push toward more accessible education and thus more equity. During this period, female enrollment in formal schooling increased proportionally more than male enrollment throughout much of Africa (Robertson, 1985). A contraction of financial resources in the 1980s has resulted in lower school enrollments (World Bank, 1988) and more emphasis upon improving achievement through more effective usage of dwindling resources (Fuller, 1990). The impact of this change upon female students has not been widely documented, but a report from Liberia raises some disturbing issues (Boothroyd and Chapman, 1987). The Improved Efficiency of Learning (IEL) Project raised achievement in mathematics and reading in boys and girls when compared with conventional schools and schools in a World Bank textbook project. At the same time, the disparity in achievement between girls and boys increased in IEL classrooms relative to the other classrooms. Since the differences between boys and girls increased with grade level, the authors suggested that an unexpected consequence of an effective innovation might be a long-term decrease in educational equity by gender. However, no classroom observation data were reported for any of the school sites, and the authors were unable to determine what led to the test score disparity. More disturbingly, there is no research base in general that examines gender differences in classrooms in Africa to guide future evaluations. In fact, there is almost no analytical work describing what happens in African classrooms at all. In this chapter I attempt to develop a framework for examining gender differences in classroom settings. The chapter's theoretical grounding comes from three distinct traditions of classroom research-studies of gender differences in U.S. and European classrooms, ethnographic studies of classrooms in the United States, and sociological studies of discourse 131

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structures. The database for this chapter comes from an ethnographic study of four elementary schools in Western Liberia, which was conducted in 1980. The original analysis (Brenner, 1984, 1985) sought to characterize those aspects of classroom lessons that seemed to be most effective for increasing student involvement. This secondary analysis extends the original analysis to look at gender differences. Since this is an ethnographic study and there is so little work on what happens during lessons in African schools, the approach taken is very descriptive and the results are suggestive rather than definitive.

Gender Differences in African Schools Disparities in male and female school achievement have long been documented in Africa. Girls are less likely to attend school than boys, they drop out earlier, and they tend to have lower grades and test scores (Robertson, 1985; Robitaille and Garden, 1989; Stromquist, 1989). Most frequently, the reasons given for lower female achievement focus on factors from outside the school such as parental attitudes, the demand for female labor, and early pregnancy. But factors under school control are more amenable to change and warrant careful attention. Although patterns of classroom interaction in Africa have not been studied much, they have been implicated as a major factor in the creation of differential achievement rates between males and females in Western countries. The studies cited in this chapter were conducted in the United States and Europe and cannot be automatically generalized to African classrooms, although there are several reasons to extend research interest to the African context. Substantial evidence suggests that there might be important gender differences in classroom behavior in Liberian classrooms. Formal education in Liberia is based upon the U.S. education system (Sherman, 1982), and thus students are exposed to similar classroom environments as those described in the U.S. research that demonstrated gender differences. As in many other parts of Africa, girls have lower academic achievement than boys in Liberia, indicated by high dropout rates (Republic of Liberia, 1979) and lower rates of literacy for women. At the same time, there are also important differences between the Liberian situation and that of countries where most of the gender research has been done. Traditional gender roles are quite different for men and women in Liberia than in the United States, with male dominance accepted in many ways, but with separate spheres of influence clearly delineated in everyday life (Moran, 1990). How much this carries over into classroom dynamics is an open question. Another difference is that almost all elementary teachers in Liberia are male, whereas they are mostly female in both the United States and Europe. Thus, there is reason to expect gender differences in Liberian classrooms

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but also reason to expect that they might be constituted quite differently than those found in Western classrooms. Given the goal of increasing equity in African classrooms, it is necessary to conduct research that acknowledges the unique characteristics of African schools and cultures. Many studies of classroom interaction have focused on the teacher as the most important agent in setting up a classroom climate that is more favorable toward promoting academic skills in male students. Myra Sadker and David Sadker (1984) found that in language arts, math, and social studies at three different grade levels, teachers had a greater number of interactions with male than female students. A review of the literature noted that this trend has been documented from the beginning of preschool through postsecondary education (Sadker, Sadker, and Klein, 1991). A more detailed look at the content of teachers' comments found that teachers focus more behavioral comments at boys, particularly criticism (Eccles and Blumenfeld, 1985; Weinekamp, et al., 1987). Although in some cases this means that girls receive proportionately more academic comments than boys, in some circumstances many girls are virtually ignored during class. Elizabeth F. Fennema and Penelope F. Peterson (1986) found that in math classes teachers initiated different amounts of interaction with male and female students but evaluated their academic responses in similar ways. Some studies have focused on student behavior and have found that the increased teacher attention paid to boys is due in part to differences in male and female behavior (Brophy, 1985). In math and science classes, boys ask more questions (Good and Slavings, 1988), volunteer to speak more (Weinekemp et al., 1987), and are more likely to focus on academic topics (Grant, 1985). One study found that girls are relatively more active in asking questions during language arts but become less and less active in math as grade level increases (Good and Slavings, 1988). Fennema and Peterson (1986) found that girls and boys react differently to similar teacher behaviors. Praise was more important for increasing female achievement, and girls needed to have their responses prompted rather than corrected. They suggested that girls need more social encouragement for engaging in mathematical behavior and thus need more support for their answers. Helga Jungwirth ( 1991) stressed the interactive nature of the apparently less competent classroom interactions of girls. She found that even when girls gave correct answers, teacher reactions tended to undermine the girls' competence. At the same time, girls appeared less skilled at directly answering teacher questions and receiving feedback. Girls and boys also have quite different peer relations in the classroom. Boys seem to be more peer-oriented, whereas girls focus more on the teacher (Grant, 1985). Girls and boys both focus more upon peers of their own gender (Morine-Dershimer, 1985) and make less differentiated judgments of peers of the opposite gender. Within small-group interactions,

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girls seem to be disadvantaged in the way they are treated by both male and female peers. Both boys and girls direct more questions to boys (Webb, 1984; Wilkinson, Lindow, and Chang, 1985). This effect is even stronger when girls are in a majority and individual girls in groups are essentially ignored. Although females tend to help both boys and girls, boys are much more likely to ignore female requests for help or explanations (Webb, 1984; Webb and Kenderski, 1985). When there is a disagreement between a boy and a girl, the boy's response is more likely to prevail (Wilkinson, Lindow, and Chang, 1985). Although peer interactions by gender have not been studied much in the context of large group lessons, Jean Lave (1990) reported a study in which peer help and collaboration were much more influential in student achievement in an elementary math class than any instruction given by the teacher. In summary, it appears that although teacher behavior plays some role in creating differential classroom climates for boys and girls, the students themselves play a major role. They do this through their reactions to teacher questions and evaluations and in the ways they treat each other. Thus in addition to examining whether there are differences between boys' and girls' classroom participation, I also seek to describe the circumstances that are most and least likely to generate these differences. A construct used by anthropologists to describe the classroom participation of minority students in the United States holds promise as a way of also describing gender differences in the classroom interaction.

Participant Structure and Interaction in the Classroom Susan Philips ( 1972) introduced the first analytical concept I use in this chapter, the idea of a participant structure, which she defined as the way in which interactions are organized. Participant structures determine how many students participate, who has the right to set the topic, who has the right to determine the speaker, who the audience is, and so on. When the participant structures at home and at school differ substantially, students become reluctant to participate at school. In Philips's study, Native American students were uncomfortable in situations in which they had to speak alone in front of their peers and in which the teacher designated whose turn it was to speak. Native Hawaiian children were also reluctant to participate in large group lessons and were more apt to participate when the teacher shared control of small group discussion (Au and Mason, 1981) or when they were allowed to work with peers (Jordan, 1985). The changes in educational theory deriving from this work have altered forms of classroom participant structures to be more congruent with home participant structures, although they are not necessarily identical (e.g., Heath, 1983; Jordan, 1985).

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Interactions between teachers and students in Liberian schools were often marked by the same types of problems described for minority students in the United States (Brenner, 1985). Because the Liberian school system was modeled upon the U.S. school system, classroom modes of interaction were somewhat alien to both teachers and students (Sherman, 1982). In the observed classrooms, student dissatisfaction was expressed by withdrawal from interactions, refusal to answer teacher questions, whispered answers, or open verbal protest at specific assignments. The teachers in turn reacted by abruptly changing a classroom activity, berating a class, or punitively giving a surprise quiz. However, some teachers were regularly able to maintain an enthusiastic and high level of studentteacher interaction, and others were able to stimulate good interactions for part of the time. The contrasts between the successful and unsuccessful lessons underscored the need for effortful and collaborative lessons. The earlier analyses of classroom interactions in the four Liberian schools found that the participant structures could be described by looking at who the actor was during any interaction and who authorized the actor to take a turn (Brenner, 1984, 1985). These two aspects varied across classrooms and across time within an individual teacher's classroom. Three classes of actors were identified: the teacher, individual students, and the class as a whole. Unlike U.S. teachers, the teachers in Liberian classrooms often expected choral responses to their questions from groups of students rather than from individual students. As in other studies, it was also found that teachers had to manage how the class acted as an audience to the classroom interactions. As will be shown later, some effective teachers also explicitly shared some control over who would have a turn as actor during classroom interactions. The second unit of analysis used in this chapter, the interaction sequence, has been widely used to describe recitation lessons, which are the primary form of interaction in Liberia classrooms and in classrooms throughout much of the world (Ryan, 1986; Stodolsky, 1988). Teacher questioning was the single most common classroom activity and took up 57 percent of the observed classroom time in the Liberian fourth-grade classrooms. Individual assignments, in contrast, comprised only 10 percent of class time. The lack of instructional materials such as textbooks, manipulatives, and instructional aids precluded activities that might be common in U.S. classrooms. Liberian teachers also expressed a clear preference for verbal activities. For many teachers, the difference between a good and bad student lay in how actively he or she participated in classroom discussions. Interaction sequences are organized patterns of statements made during social discourse. Utterances are often seen as related to one another in culturally meaningful ways such that there are expectations about the forms and content of sequentially produced talk (Philips, 1976). The interaction sequence that typifies recitations is a question-answer-evaluation sequence

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(Mehan, 1979, 1980). In U.S. classrooms, some of the teacher expectations about this interaction sequence include factual accuracy and appropriate structural form in student replies, norms that do not always apply in students' homes. For instance, amusing or creative replies are typically rejected as inappropriate in U.S. schools, whereas among southern African American children, such responses are encouraged at home (Heath, 1983). The expected form of an answer in school often specifies that it be in a complete sentence (Mehan, 1980) or in the preferred dialect of the school (Piestrup, 1974 ). Student expectations include the completion of the evaluation phase such that the nonevaluation of a student response is taken to be a positive evaluation. Because recitations involve public performances by students, the evaluation phase can have high significance to students. In U.S. classrooms, teachers often extend the evaluation phase by rephrasing questions until a student is able to provide an acceptable answer. Combining the interaction sequence and the participant structure of a lesson produces a three-by-three matrix of possible roles during classroom lessons, as shown in Table 7.1. The idealized form of interaction sequence described by Hugh Mehan (1979, 1980) and desired by Liberian teachers as well follows the sequence of numbers in Table 7 .1. The teacher asks a question, an individual student answers, and then the teacher delivers an evaluation. As the studies on cultural variations in participant structures have shown (Erickson and Mohatt, 1982; Philips, 1972), students are acutely aware that, in addition to the teacher, their classmates are also evaluating their performance (designated by "A-student preferred"). In this chapter I use the classroom interaction matrix to describe the variety of classroom lessons observed in Liberian classrooms, with particular reference to which variations were most common and seemingly most successful. After describing major types of classroom lessons, I compare how boys and girls reacted to each major lesson type. As my brief literature review of research on gender differences in U.S. classrooms indicated, girls and boys typically have a different status vis-a-vis the different participant structures that can be described using the classroom interaction matrix. Girls typically receive fewer questions from teachers and fewer responses from classmates and either receive different evaluations or react differently to ones that are seemingly not gender-biased. I conclude the

Table 7.1

Classroom Interaction Matrix Stages of Interaction Sequence

Actors Teacher Individual student Class as a whole

Question

Answer

Evaluation 3-teacher ideal

2

A-student preferred

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chapter with a brief comparison of the classroom interactions observed in conventional Liberian classrooms and described in this research with the ones that were instituted through the ILE project in order to demonstrate how a good educational innovation can have a differential impact on boys and girls.

Methods The data in this chapter were based upon a year's ethnographic study of education in Liberia. The classroom data were collected in four elementary schools in the southwestern region of Liberia. Two of the schools were located in a town of about three thousand people; one school was run by the government, whereas the other was a private, church-affiliated school. About half the population of this town came from the dominant ethnic group in this area, the Vai, and half came from various ethnic groups from other parts of Liberia and West Africa. The other two schools were in large rural villages in two different districts in the Vai area. The rural schools were government-run and were chosen because of their large size and accessibility even during the rainy season. In addition to the work done at the schools, observations were made in homes and other settings where children were learning skills for adult life through apprenticeships and quranic schooling. Classroom observations were done at three grade levels-primer (also known as ABC or kindergarten), first grade, and fourth grade. An effort was made to observe each classroom for two full weeks, but teacher absences, holidays, and other factors precluded obtaining the same number of observations in each classroom. Data were collected through a coding scheme and field notes taken during all days of observation and from audiotape recordings of two days of lessons. On each day of observation, the teacher and one or two children were the focal point of note taking. Seventy-three days of classroom lessons were observed. In addition, every teacher as well as every child was interviewed individually. One class of primer students and all other children were also administered individual reading and math tests by local research assistants. A total of thirty-one primer children, ninety-nine first-grade children, and eighty-one fourthgrade children were interviewed and tested.

Results

Ethnographic Background The dominant ethnic group in this region of Liberia is the Vai. Almost all of the rural children and slightly more than half of the town children were

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from the Vai group. A majority of the teachers in the study were Vai, and except for a few expatriate teachers, all the teachers were fluent in both English and Vai. Thus most of the ethnographic information used in this paper refers to the Vai people. However, a substantial minority of the children in the town schools were from ten other ethnic groups. Although for most of them the pattern of home interactions was probably similar to that described for the Vai, the diversity created some problems for teachers. English was the only common language spoken, and most children came to school not knowing much English. Most children entered primer regardless of their age and were not promoted to first grade until they mastered some English. Thus the average age of first-grade children was 9, and the average age of fourth graders was 13. The implications of this for classroom interaction were several. Almost all students had to do their class work in a foreign language, and this heightened the anxiety felt by many. The advanced age of the students in fourth grade meant that the majority of students were adolescents. The U.S. data for classroom interactions found that gender differences became accentuated as children entered adolescence. In many respects, Liberian schools were relatively egalitarian toward boys and girls. Most schools were coeducational, and boys and girls had the same academic curriculum. The primary difference in curriculum was that boys studied agriculture and girls studied home arts, but these were relatively deemphasized subjects. Nonetheless, the school environment posed special challenges to the girls in terms of their general adjustment, relations with teachers, and relations with peers. Although classroom interactions in Liberia are quite different from home interactions for all participants, the social organization of the schools required a larger amount of adjustment on the part of the girls. In Vai culture, the men and women occupied separate social spheres. Although the Vai were Muslim, this separation was not related to the isolation of purdah found in many Muslim countries. Rather, men and women had a division of labor common to many other swidden agriculture countries in Africa (White, Burton, and Dow, 1981), as well as the separate socialization and political organizations of Poro for males and Sande for females. In everyday life, men and women ate, socialized, and played in same-sex groups. In some ways the schools reflected this social arrangement. Boys and girls sat in separate parts of the classroom and played in separate groups at recess. Even the male and female teachers tended to aggregate into separate groups at recess, lunch, and assembly. However, from first grade in the rural areas and from second grade in town, girls were a minority among the students. The vast majority of teachers were men as well. The discomfort of the girls was often manifest in their reluctance to speak in class (as described later) and in their general isolation in the higher grades.

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The norms for appropriate behavior in school also made larger demands upon the girls than the boys. Vai women were more traditional than Vai men-fewer spoke English, traditional clothing styles still predominated, and fewer had traveled to urban areas. The problems with school clothing exemplify this conflict. The physical education uniform was shorts and a T-shirt for both boys and girls. In traditional Vai culture, women's thighs were always covered out of modesty. Thus the physical education uniform violated a very basic norm. On physical education day once a week, the girls had a much higher rate of absenteeism. Most girls who did attend violated the rules and wore their everyday uniforms. The few girls who wore shorts tried to cover their legs with sweaters, pieces of cloth, or their textbooks. The net result of a policy such as this was that about half the girls missed an extra day of class each week, and those who attended were even more reluctant to participate on those days. Peer relations may also have created a disadvantage for girls in Liberian classrooms (Brenner, 1985). Boys believed males were smarter and received better grades than girls; the girls were more likely to think that boys and girls could get the same grades (84 percent versus 54 percent). When naming the smartest students, boys were very reluctant to mention girls. Only 10 percent of the fourth-grade boys nominated a girl, whereas 41 percent of the girls nominated a girl. Girls were also disproportionately likely to be named as the worst student in a class. At the same time, boys felt that girls had an easier time in school-receiving lighter punishments and being treated with more patience by teachers (55 percent), whereas most girls felt they were treated equally (75 percent). There was also evidence that the students maintained some amount of social segregation by sex. In one class, when asked to identify the best student, 77 percent of the girls named another girl, whereas 78 percent of the boys named another boy, indicating that students were probably most aware of their own gender's behavior. A pattern of segregation of peers by sex can have large implications in the African context. Children were very dependent upon other children in learning to cope with the new experience of school. Since most parents, particularly mothers, had never attended school, other children had to serve as models of appropriate school behavior. This dependence upon other children began in primer. The teachers probably seemed very remote since they gave directions in a foreign language for tasks whose purposes were not always clear. However, peers were more accessible. Since most children attended primer for several years, there were ample numbers of experienced role models for beginning students. As children advanced in school, they became dependent upon each other in other ways. Schoolbooks were rare and had to be shared. Sixty-nine percent of the fourth graders in the town schools reported sharing schoolbooks with an average of three other children. Even books supplied by the school were in short

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supply and used by groups of children. Children, primarily classmates or other children in the household, were also sources of help with homework for about 80 percent of the fourth graders. Given the separation of the sexes in everyday life and the evidence from U.S. studies that boys are reluctant to answer academic questions from girls in school, it can be seen the Liberian girls were likely to receive substantially less help with schoolwork in and out of school. Although teachers were never overtly negative toward girls during observed class lessons, the teachers (who were mostly male) tended to think the same as their male students. Thirty-four percent felt boys made better students, 8 percent thought girls made better students, 18 percent thought there was no difference, and 14 percent made qualified or ambiguous statements. For instance, there was some consensus that boys were better students, but many teachers also acknowledged that there were some very competitive girls who were at the top with the boys. The girls were also credited with doing equal or better in most subjects except math. Although the male teachers made overt attempts to include girls in classroom discussions, they were not always comfortable interacting with the girls. Although some of the teachers criticized the girls for being too quiet, others complained that the girls tried to get too close to the teacher. This was a more prevalent criticism at higher grade levels when girls were entering adolescence. One other differentiation of roles by gender in Liberian classrooms reflected the differences in the way boys and girls were regarded there. Each class had a president and a queen. The president was always a boy who was appointed by the teacher at the lower grade levels and elected by the students at the higher grade levels. He tended to act as the teacher proxy for helping to keep order in the class. At the lower grade levels the president helped the teacher with tasks such as cutting a new switch or calling students back into the classroom after they have been ejected for misbehavior. By the fourth grade, the president was delegated the role of keeping the class in line when the teacher was out of the room. The president did this by writing the names of misbehaving students on the board and by trying to call the class to order when the noise level got too high. The president was also called upon to speak for the class at assemblies. In contrast, the queen position was much more passive. The queen represented the class during fund-raising events. This entailed sitting on a stage and graciously smiling as funds were donated to the class during interclass competitions. The queens were never called upon to speak in public. However, ambitious queens and their cohort of female friends did at times actively solicit funds from public personages before the fund-raising event. In this way, the actions of the queen and her supporters had a definite effect upon the outcomes of fund-raisers, and this was recognized by many people. In the upper elementary grades, there were often other class officers in addition to

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the class president, and girls were sometimes elected to these positions. Although these persons were seldom the public spokesperson for a class, they used their position's authority to act on behalf of the class through private interactions with people such as visiting observers. Primer: Classroom Interactions and Achievement Primer was intended to socialize students in their role as a a students, with academic goals being secondary. The main lessons to be learned were to pay attention to the teacher, to always bring the proper school materials, to wear the school uniform with appropriate grooming, and not to talk to the other students. The academic goals included learning English, practicing basic handwriting, reading the alphabet and simple words, counting, and memorizing basic number facts. Paradoxically, the primer classes tended to have the strictest behavioral standards but the least demanding interactional demands. In several classes, the switch was liberally used to curtail student talking, to promote good posture, and to punish infractions of the uniform code. Primer classes were taught by one teacher for all subjects, so very clear routines were typically set up and few procedural directions were given during the period of observations that took place in the second half of the school year. Only two participant structures were observed in primer. The first one engaged the teacher with the whole class, which answered questions as a unitary body in a chorus, and the second participant structure involved the teacher in one-on-one interactions with individual students. The first participant structure required a simplified form of response that could be done by the entire class at once. As is shown in the following example, the teacher questions and student responses had a clear alternating pattern. In most instances the students merely had to affirm that they had heard the teacher (line 2) or else to exactly repeat what the teacher said (last line). Occasionally, the teacher asked the students to supply a piece of information, almost always something that had been covered in a previous lesson (line 9). Teacher: Class: Teacher Class: Teacher: Class: Teacher: Class: Teacher: Class:

Do you know what is a bed? Yes. Do you know what is a bed? Yes. You see it here? (Teacher holds up the primer book that has a small drawing of a bed). Yes. You see it? What do you call this thing in Vai? Kpengbe, kpengbe. Kpengbe. All right. B-E-D, bed. B-E-D, bed.

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While requiring simple responses from students, the teacher was still able to monitor student comprehension of the lesson, as the following example shows. Teacher: Class: Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student: Teacher:

Class: Teacher: Class: Teacher: Class:

OK. Let's stop here now. Do you know what 1s C-A-P, cap? Yes. What is cap? Cat to steal everything. No-o, no-o. That hat, that hat. I didn't ask you C-A-T. I didn't ask you what-When you say C-A-T (writes it on the board). C-A-T. Here it is, this one here. What you call manya (in Vai). Manya. Manya, cat, manya, cat. Manya, cat. (Undercurrent of students repeating these words over and over.) Be quiet now. I'm not asking you for manya. I'm asking you for C-A-P. Cap.

The repetitive form of the questions allowed students to absorb the question and to follow the lead of the students who had a correct answer the first time. Thus in this participant structure, direct evaluations were seldom needed, except when the entire class was unable to provide the correct answer, as in the second example. Within this participant structure, individual student answers were treated as though they were class responses or ignored altogether. Individual students were never called upon or acknowledged. Most of the choral response time was spent repeating information over and over, as a whole class or by sections of the class. The other participant structure in primer was the private interaction of the teacher with an individual student. Depending upon the degree of crowdedness of the classroom, the teacher walked around the room, stopping at each child to check work, or the children brought their work up to the teacher at the front of the room. At such times, the teacher dominated the interaction, commenting on both the academic work and the student's progress and demeanor. Since the student work consisted almost solely of copying material from the board, the teacher's comments focused primarily on the form and neatness of the work. An examination of children's copybooks revealed that misspelled words and arithmetic problems with incorrect answers were ignored, but poorly formed letters were corrected and messy formats were marked wrong. There was a high level of compliance with this participant structure even though some teachers tended to scold almost every child.

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The participant structures in primer successfully promoted many of the socialization goals of that grade level. The choral response format precluded children from interacting with each other, and the teacher had a fairly easy job of monitoring who was actively participating in a lesson. As one teacher noted, new primer students sometimes would just cry when they arrived at school, without working. The group activity was a nonthreatening way of getting such students involved in a lesson. By this chapter's measure of lesson success (level of student involvement, percentage of correct answers), primer lessons were quite successful. Children dutifully responded over and over again with amazing persistence. The actual interactional demands placed upon the children coincided with those outside school. As at home, most individual childadult interaction took place privately, with the main communication burden placed upon the adult. For much of the class time, students were actively copying the board as the teacher worked with individual students, a format that coincided with how tasks were accomplished at home. This teaching style corresponded to what one teacher called "motherly technique," a combination of patience, concern with the individual child, and discipline. Unlike in the home environment, peer interactions were sharply curtailed. Children of this age (5 to 9) were still considered somewhat unsocialized, and the major lesson to be instilled was respect for adult authority. However, the less supervised primer classes had an undercurrent of constant peer interaction. Children took many of their cues for proper behavior and response style from the other students. The participant structures of primer were apparently gender-neutral in terms of enabling both boys and girls to participate. Boys and girls had equal numbers of times to respond in chorus, and they received equal numbers of turns in getting individual attention from the teacher. Sometimes choral responses were done by rows or tables of children. Since the children were seated with other children of the same sex, turns were often alternated between boys and girls. When obtaining individual attention was dependent upon a student approaching the teacher, the girls were just as likely to take their work up for inspection. In fact, the few students who did not always get their work checked were boys who seemed fairly confident that they had done the work correctly. However, the outcomes of primer were not equal for boys and girls. As shown in Table 7.2, girls and boys performed quite differently on the tests administered in one class. Although the girls performed slightly better at reading the alphabet, most girls were totally unable to do any of the reading or arithmetic problems. Boys were more likely than girls to have had experiences such as strategic games and craft apprenticeships, which enhanced math achievement (Brenner, 1985) and may have given them an initial advantage on math problems. The passive learning opportunities of primer were unlikely to do anything to change this imbalance. Learning English, which was a major goal of primer, was unlikely to be greatly

144 Table 7.2 Gender Girls (17) Boys (15)

Formal Education

Test Scores by Gender in Primer (% correct) Alphabet

87 77

Word Recognition 13 31

Arithmetic

28 53

facilitated by the class experience in which students never had to produce independent English-language statements.

First Grade: Classroom Interactions and Achievement With the introduction of more rigorous academic content, first grade also entailed a wider variety of participant structures and more frequent evaluations of student performance. The largest difference between first grade and primer was the expectation that individual students would answer questions during recitation. About half of the recitation time was spent on individual responses, as opposed to group responses. However, of the three grade levels studied, first grade had the widest variety of instructional arrangements. For instance, the actual proportion of time spent on individual responses during recitation ranged from a low of 31 percent in one class to a high of 80 percent in another. Despite differences between classes, the teachers all had to deal with two problems inherent to individual performance-motivating students to answer and defining an appropriate role for the rest of the class. All classes continued the participant structure that predominated in primer-teacher question and group response. Most frequently, this participant structure occurred at the beginning of study of very new material and close to the end of study of material that was nearly mastered. As a form of practice, this participant structure stimulated high involvement and was intended as a form of rehearsal for later individual performance. As a form of review, this interactional mode was a very time-efficient way to enable children to go over the material. Unlike teachers in primer, those in first grade used more evaluation during choral responses. One teacher in particular was very good at picking out individuals who were giving incorrect responses or using incorrect pronunciations during group responses. As in primer, responses were often made by groups of the same sex because of seating arrangements. Each class also used a participant structure in which the teacher asked a question, an individual was designated by the teacher to answer, and the class as a whole evaluated the response, but only with material that had been extensively covered. Thus it was used as an advanced form of practice or review. The class was asked to evaluate a response by booing or

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applauding after a student response or by voting on the accuracy of a response. The success rate of responses was typically low to medium, with about half of the students giving correct responses. However, the amount of involvement was high because the class evaluation generated much excitement. The types of answers that were required within this participant structure were very simple, typically a one-word answer or memorized phrase directly taken from the notes given at the beginning of a lesson. Two teachers explicitly created competition by gender within this type of participant structure. In one class, spelling bees, addition facts, and word recognition contests were organized by having two teams, one of boys and one of girls. In another class, the teacher occasionally kept track on the board of responses by gender and encouraged the students to best the children of the opposite sex. Although the male teams tended to win more frequently during the observation periods, the implicit message (and it was sometimes stated explicitly as well) was that the girls could compete with the boys if they put their effort into the task. In contrast, the participant structure mentioned as the ideal in Table 7.1, in which the teacher poses a question to an individual and then evaluates the answer, was much less successful. On some days most children did not even try to answer, even though the material was similar to that covered in the structure described above. When using this participant structure, teachers almost always began by calling on boys, and in fact boys were more successful at answering the questions in this context. Girls frequently avoided answering and even acted as though they had not heard the teacher call their name. The four classrooms differed in terms of how the teachers stimulated students to produce higher-risk responses such as reading unfamiliar text, participating in extended discourse, or offering original answers to questions. Two teachers used an open-response format in which the students volunteered their answers and the evaluative component of the interaction sequence was essentially dropped or delicately assumed by the teacher. Teacher:

We say that some animals do hatch their babies, you understand? Okay. That's what you can say. But I want you to name us one animal that you know. That can hatch their babies. (Students call out simultaneously.) Student 1: Monkey. Student 2: Chicken, chicken. Student 3: Garden snake, garden snake. Student 4: Dog. Student 5: Chicken. Student 6: Lizard. Teacher: Say what. We have the chicken.

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Class: Teacher: Class:

Yes. We have snakes. Snakes.

In this example many students volunteered answers. The wrong answers were not sanctioned, and individual contributions, right or wrong, were not acknowledged. The same class remained silent when the teacher began to direct such questions at specific students. This type of speech event was explicitly recognized by some teachers. One teacher began the school day with the following announcement: Teacher:

Now after inspection, I will ask a volunteer to come up. I won't call any names. At that time you can tell the story as you heard it yesterday; you will just get up on your own free will and tell it to us. Do you understand?

In most instances, such participant structures stimulated good responses and lively interest. However, only a minority of students routinely answered under these circumstance, although not always the same students. There was a definite tendency for one sex or the other to dominate such participant structures on a given day. In one first-grade class, three girls in a row told long versions of a story from the previous day's class. The boy called upon by the teacher refused to try, even though on other days he was an eager answerer. The other two teachers were not observed trying to elicit anything but memorized answers. Another fairly successful participant structure was similar to the private teacher-student interaction of primer. One teacher (who used the lowest proportion of individual responses during recitation) tried to meet daily with individual students, usually going around the room as students did seat work. During these meetings she not only evaluated written work but asked students to read from their copybooks. The success rate was high under these circumstances-80 percent of the children successfully read at least part of the text, and only a few refused to try at all-but the rest of the class was left without much to do, with a resulting low rate of task involvement. This teacher, the only female teacher at the first-grade level, was more likely to give girls verbal comments on their written work during individual meetings but gave girls and boys equal amounts of written comments. Many of her verbal comments were praise; most written comments were corrections. The final participant structure observed in first grade was used by one teacher when students were reluctant to answer questions individually under the other structures. In this participant structure, individual students were called upon to correct a fellow student's response. If the second

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student was able to answer the question correctly, he or she was allowed to give the first student one or two lashes on the hand. In this structure, individual students were delegated the evaluation phase of the interaction sequence. Although the accuracy of students' responses did not improve noticeably under these circumstances, student involvement was greatly enhanced. Almost every student called upon would produce some kind of answer. Many students volunteered to answer questions, and the rest of the class avidly watched the proceedings. Although some students obviously relished the opportunity to punish their classmates, the protective instincts of other students were aroused. Students would call out answers to prevent a student from receiving punishment, and some students refused to hit certain other students. Girls were as motivated by this participant structure as the boys. It was the boys who were most careful about not hitting too hard, and they gave lashes that were obviously soft to the girls. The teachers in first grade shared the problem of inducing the children to answer questions aloud in front of peers. All of them used the practice of making the students accountable to their peers by letting the class evaluate other students' responses. This concept was compatible with Vai norms in that children were expected to be contributing members of the social group from a relatively early age. Students in first grade assumed responsibility in numerous ways. They did routine cleaning of their classroom without teacher supervision. The class president automatically tried to maintain class order when the teacher was out of the room. The older students were expected to look after the younger students. The games organized by gender in one class produced a much higher rate of response than other participant structures, particularly among the girls. This may be due to the fact that although individual responses were required and given, the attribution of success or failure was given to the group and not to the individual. In first grade, sex differences were highly marked on the measures of achievement. Table 7.3 shows the mean grades and test scores by sex for each class. On every measure of school achievement, the girls scored lower (and in most cases the differences were statistically significant), with two exceptions. On the arithmetic test in Rural School 1 and on the reading grade in Town School 2, the girls and boys did about equally well. The differences between the sexes in grades were most pronounced in the rural schools, where the girls averaged well below the passing grade of 70 in both arithmetic and reading. In the town schools, there were girls who were at the top of the class, but in the rural schools the gap between the boys and girls was more marked. The pattern of achievement was much like that of primer, with the girls lagging behind the boys. Sex differences in class participation were more evident in first grade than in primer as the teachers attempted to use more types of participant structures. Although at times the girls were

148 Table 7.3

Formal Education

Comparison of Boys' and Girls' Test Scores and Grades, by School in First Grade Arithmetic Test

School

Reading Test

(% correct answers) (% correct answers)

Arithmetic Grade (mean)

Reading Grade (mean)

- - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Town school 1 Girls (12) Boys (12) Town school 2 Girls (17) Boys (17) Rural school 1 Girls (7) Boys (17) Rural school 2 Girls (1) Boys (8) ---------- -

--

67 83

47 79

74 81

69 75

66 79

40 46

75 80

75 73

85 86

59 81

61 77

61 76

83 92

0 61

61 77

61 74

-

-

-

-

--------------------

equally involved with class interactions and some girls were reliable participants, some girls were relatively reluctant speakers and only became involved during the most stimulating activities. Of course, some boys fit this pattern as well, but it predominated among girls. The achievement differences between boys and girls in primer can be attributed to differences that began before the children entered the classroom since their participation in school activities seemed about equal. However, the girls' reluctance to participate in the more academic routines of first grade would serve to perpetuate or even exacerbate the achievement gap that was apparent in primer.

Fourth Grade: Classroom Interactions and Achievement Several major differences were observed between first grade and fourth grade in the way classroom life was organized. In all schools the teachers specialized by subject matter; each class had at least four different teachers each day. All observed teachers were male. The ratio of boys to girls was also more skewed, and girls constituted a definite minority in all classrooms. Despite the greater number of teachers per class, there was more uniformity in the ways classroom sessions were structured. Math classes between schools were more similar to each other than were English and math classes in the same school. By fourth grade, individual students were expected to answer questions for about 80 percent of the recitation periods. The most common participant structure entailed the teacher calling upon one student to answer questions and another student to evaluate the answer or correct the answer. Thus students provided most of the feedback to other students. At times the whole class was entrusted with the evaluative phase of the interaction sequence by being asked to vote upon the accuracy of student responses.

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Some teachers attempted to provide the evaluation of responses themselves, but this tended to reduce the number of student responses. In fact, there was so much spontaneous help given to other students in a very open way that the teacher's evaluative role was nearly eliminated in some lessons. Unlike in the earlier grades, students were much more likely to ask questions as well, thus taking slightly more control of the direction of classroom discourse. However, students were most likely to ask specific questions of fellow students while merely asking the teacher to give repetitions of earlier explanations. Girls and boys continued to ask questions of their gender peers, in part because of seating arrangements. But at times girls and boys were seen walking to another part of the room to interact with someone of the opposite sex. In fourth grade, the responses required of the students had also increased in complexity. In math class, students were required to explain problem solutions step-by-step to the class in addition to providing an answer. In language arts, the students made up sentences to demonstrate grammatical points and explained why sentences were ungrammatical. In science, the students gave accounts of their experiences with different illnesses. Along with the increased complexity of their responses, the students had greater autonomy in the nature of their responses. For instance, when attempting an arithmetic problem at the board, a student was allowed to take time and work out a solution in whatever way possible. The emphasis upon student, rather than teacher, completion of work led to class lessons in which as many as five students attempted a problem without success before receiving any help from the teacher. The participant structure in which the teacher worked with individual students was nearly nonexistent in fourth grade. Individual work assignments were done primarily as homework, and most of the class time was spent taking notes or in recitation. When individual work was done in class, it was done in small blocks of time. For instance, one student would work at the board while the class and teacher worked the same problem. Extensive interstudent consultation, but little teacher-student contact, took place at such times. Observations of individual students revealed that they turned to their peers with most of their problems, and only the best male students spontaneously asked questions of the teachers. The primary participant structures of fourth grade did not have clear counterparts outside school and were the end product of a socialization process that began in first grade. The best students-defined by teachers as those who combined mastery of the material with active participation in class discussions-were surprisingly forward by Vai standards. They were the ones who led the classes in protesting unfair assignments and who asked the most questions in class. Despite the teachers' apparent intentions, the better students dominated recitations, whether the participant structure functioned through volunteers or through teacher nomination of

150

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speakers. Since most of the responses required lengthy answers relatively unaided by teacher scaffolding, a lively class pace was best maintained by responses from the more willing and articulate students. Because assignment to grade level was fairly loose and grade repetition was very common, teachers knew that some students did not belong in their classroom at all and did not feel obligated to include all students in discussions. The participant structures in fourth grade created some difficulty for the female students. Girls were much less likely to volunteer answers as they did in first grade; they were called upon less often by teachers; and when called upon, they were less likely to answer. As in some of the firstgrade classes, the teachers tended to call upon males first, and thus most class sessions began with male participation. Despite this, a few girls did volunteer to participate in any lesson. Most classes had girls who equaled the boys in both achievement and participation. Although female excellence was recognized when the honor rolls were posted, these girls received almost no recognition from teachers-they were seldom called upon to open up discussion, and they were seldom referred to by name by teachers. The boys were also sensitive to which gender was expected to participate at any given time. On the few days when girls were the first volunteers, boys were unlikely to follow up by volunteering to correct the girls or to answer subsequent questions. Even though some girls were likely to volunteer in the larger classes, their behavior differed from that of the boys. Some responses called for written work on the board or one-word responses. Girls did these things readily. However, even the volunteers were reluctant to give more extended verbal explanations. Thus it was not uncommon to see girls write out long solutions to math problems on the board and then refuse to state the solution process to the class. The classrooms were more male-dominated in fourth grade than the earlier grades. All the teachers were male, and the proportion of females was less than a third in most classes. Although at times the girls may have had some trouble with the academic content, the interactional demands seemed to cause more problems. Overall the girls displayed proportionately less verbal behavior than at the first-grade level. The female teachers in the town schools exhibited the same behavior at school assemblies, when they refused to sit onstage with the other teachers and only spoke in public when absolutely required to do so. This problem was particularly obvious for the one girl in Rural School 1. She spoke out loud only once in all the hours of classroom observation and said precisely one word. But the written work she was observed doing was comparable to that of the male students. When addressed individually by boys in the class, she was responsive but did not seem to initiate such contact. Despite the more obvious differences between boys and girls in interaction patterns in the fourth grade, the achievement gap was narrowed

151

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relative to earlier grades (see Table 7.4 ). In fact, girls got better grades in some classes, although their math test scores lagged behind the boys' scores. Two factors contributed to this change, which counterbalanced girls' lack of involvement in classroom interactions. First, between first and fourth grade, girls had a higher dropout rate, and it was likely that the weaker female students had left the school system and the weaker male students remained. A study of school dropouts in Liberia had found that students felt that parents had less commitment to their daughters' education, particularly if the girls were making little apparent progress (Brenner, 1987). Second, the girls had another arena in which to demonstrate their academic competence in fourth grade. By this grade, the system of written exams was well established, and girls had the regular opportunity to demonstrate their competence in a relatively private forum. During classroom observations, it was noted that girls focused upon their written work even if they refused to participate in the oral component of classroom lessons.

Conclusion Although gender differences in school achievement are pervasive in Africa, there is little existing research on how classroom interactions may contribute to this differential achievement. In this chapter I developed a framework for examining classroom interactions, using the constructs of participant structure and interaction sequences. The resulting interaction

Table 7.4

Comparison of Boys' and Girls' Test Scores and Grades, by School in Fourth Grade Core Math Test

School

Math Grade (mean)

(% correct answers)

--------------

Town school 1 Girls (13) Boys (18) Town school 2 Girls (14) Boys (23) Rural school 1 Girls (1) Boys (6) Rural school 2 Girls (2) Boys (6) Note: n.a.: not available.

- -

-

--

-

-

English Grade (mean)

---------------------------

56 67

74 65

78 65

67 89

n.a. n.a.

n.a. n.a.

75 84

83 84

83 85

45 74

67 71

59 77

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matrix was applied to data from three grade levels at four elementary schools in southwestern Liberia. Quite different participant structures were observed in the three grade levels, and girls and boys had different kinds of participation depending upon the grade level. In primer, boys and girls were treated quite equitably and had equal amounts of interaction with teachers. In first grade, students began to experience more demands for individual responses, and some gender differences began to appear. Although many girls were quite eager to participate in class, at times they were quite unresponsive. The girls were most involved when they acted as a team or when they were given the responsibility of evaluating their peers' answers. In the fourth grade, major differences were found in how boys and girls performed in class. Girls were called upon less often by teachers and volunteered less frequently, and although some girls continued to be active participants, even they were reluctant to speak much in front of their peers and preferred to write responses on the board. However, the girls were obviously quite involved with their schoolwork when teachers ran lessons that turned control of the evaluation phase over to the students. The results point to both teachers and students as contributors to a pattern that gave girls fewer opportunities to participate in class recitations, a finding in agreement with those in U.S. and European studies (Brophy, 1985; Good and Slavings, 1988; Jungwirth, 1991; Weinekamp et al., 1987). In some Liberian classes the pattern seemed to be stronger than that described in the U.S. and European literature, in that the girls absolutely refused to participate orally in some classrooms. Achievement data, test scores, and grades generally reflected the patterns observed in classroom interactions. At primer and first-grade levels, the girls were obviously doing more poorly than the boys, although some girls were quite competitive. The girls did relatively better in fourth grade and even bested the boys by some measures, particularly in school grades, but not on the tests administered in the research project. Although the disparity between boys' and girls' achievement might be expected to be greater in fourth grade because of the more problematic classroom discourse patterns, there are two explanations for the lack of greater disparities. The girls in fourth grade were a much more elite group than the boys. At the four schools included in this study, 40 percent of the girls had dropped out by the fourth grade on average. The girls who remained in school came from families at a higher socioeconomic level and with more experience with formal Western schooling. With these advantages they could reasonably be expected to greatly outdistance the boys, but they did not. In addition, the effects of classroom interaction patterns are reflected as much in long-term results as in immediate results. Despite the widely documented differences in how boys and girls participate in U.S. classrooms, there is not a wide difference in grades and test scores between boys and girls until late elementary and junior high school years (Sadker,

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153

Sadker, and Klein, 1991). The drop in girls' achievement is most marked on tests, as it was in this chapter, whereas classroom grades show less of a difference. The more pernicious effect of problematic classroom patterns is in the braking effect they have upon girls' long-term educational accomplishments. In the United States, girls turn away from science and mathematics, taking less coursework, achieving at a lower level, and avoiding careers that require mathematical and scientific proficiency. In a country like Liberia, lower achievement by girls contributes to their higher dropout rates as well as lowered levels of aspirations. The framework proposed in this chapter can be used to examine how educational innovations may differentially impact boys and girls, as the IEL program does in Liberia. In addition to supplying more and better materials to schools, the IEL program radically changed the roles of teachers and students when fully implemented (Thiagarajan, 1990). In the early grade levels, the program relied on programmed teaching with two components. Teacher-led lessons were designed to be rapidly paced recitations, akin to what teachers attempted to do in the classrooms I observed. However, through the end of third grade, a higher proportion of group as opposed to individual responses was expected. Teachers gave immediate feedback to student responses rather than allowing other students to do this. Students spent the other half of their class time doing review activities with small groups of peers. The upper elementary students spent all of their time in programmed learning activities with a group of peers. Students asked questions of teachers only when absolutely necessary. The IEL program clearly addressed some of the problems experienced by Liberian teachers. Through greater use of choral responses, it eliminated some of the problems teachers had stimulating individual student responses. It also capitalized upon peer relationships that were clearly important to Liberian students. However, two features of the IEL program have been disadvantageous for girls. Since teachers controlled all evaluation of answers to questions, the kind of lesson that proved most stimulating to students in the observed classrooms was eliminated. Girls were especially likely to participate in large group lessons when they could help evaluate peers. The small group lessons may have been difficult in a different way for girls. Male students did not greatly respect their female peers and may not have interacted with them equitably during small group sessions. Girls were also accustomed to interacting primarily with other girls both at home and at school in more traditional classrooms and may have been reluctant to assert themselves in mixed-gender groups. This is particularly likely to happen if the group is predominantly male. Other innovative educational programs have found that peer work is sometimes best done in same-sex groups (Vogt, Jordan, and Tharp, 1987). Although these comments about the IEL program are largely speculative, this chapter has provided a framework for starting to address issues

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of gender equity in classroom interaction. The descriptive data also provide some insight into how teachers and students cope with the frequently difficult task of managing classroom lessons in a context that is so different from everyday life.

Note This research was supported by a dissertation grant from the National Science Foundation (BNS-78-25732), the Wenner-Gren Foundation (3340), and the Patent Fund of the University of California.

References Au, K. H-P., and J. Mason. (1981). Social organization factors in learning to read: The balance of rights hypothesis. Reading Research Quarterly 17, 115-152. Boothroyd, R. A., and D. W. Chapman. (1987). Gender differences and achievement in Liberian primary school children. International Journal of Educational Development 7, 99-106. Brenner, M. E. (1984 ). Cultural adaptations in Liberian classrooms. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Denver, Colo., November. - - - . (1985). Arithmetic and classroom interaction as cultural practices among the Vai of Liberia. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of California, Irvine. - - - . (1987). Schooling and motherhood: An inevitable conflict? Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association meeting, Chicago, Ill., November. Brophy, J. (1985). Interactions of male and female students with male and female teachers. In L. C. Wilkinson and C. B. Marrett (eds.), Gender influences in classroom interaction, pp. 115-142. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press. Eccles, J., and P. Blumenfeld. (1985). Classroom experiences and student gender: Are there differences and do they matter? In L. C. Wilkinson and C. B. Marrett (eds.), Gender influences in classroom interaction, pp. 79-114. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press. Erickson, F., and G. Mohatt. (1982). Cultural organization of two classrooms of Indian students. In G. Spindler (ed.), Doing the ethnography of schooling, pp. 132-175. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Fennema, E., and P. L. Peterson. (1986). Teacher-student interactions and sexrelated differences in learning mathematics. Teaching and Teacher Education 2, 19-42. Fuller, B. (1990). What investments raise achievement in the third world? In D. W. Chapman and C. A. Carrier (eds.), Improving educational quality, pp. 17-43. New York: Greenwood. Good, T. L., and R. L. Slavings. (1988). Male and female student question-asking behavior in elementary and secondary mathematics and language arts classes. Journal of Research in Childhood Education 3, 5-23. Grant, L. (1985). Race-gender status, classroom interaction and children's socialization in elementary school. In L. C. Wilkinson and C. B. Marrett (eds.),

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Gender influences in classroom interaction, pp. 57-77. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, C. (1985). Translating culture: From ethnographic information to educational program. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 16, 105-123. Jungwirth, H. (1991). Interaction and gender-findings of a microethnographical approach to classroom discourse. Educational Studies in Mathematics 22, 263-284. Lave, J. (1990). The culture of acquisition and the practice of understanding. In J. W. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, and G. Herdt (eds.), Cultural psychology: Essays in comparative human development, pp. 309-327. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons: Social organization in the classroom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. - - - . (1980). The competent student. Anthropology and Educational Quarterly 11, 131-152. Moran, M. (1990). Civilized women: Gender and prestige in southeastern Liberia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Morine-Dershimer, G. (1985). Gender, classroom organization, and grade level as factors in pupil perceptions of peer interaction. In L. C. Wilkinson and C. B. Marrett (eds.), Gender influences in classroom interaction, pp. 237-261. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press. Philips, S. U. (1972). Participant structures and communicative competence: Warm Springs children in community and classroom. In C. B. Cazden, V. P. John, and D. Hymes (eds.), Functions of language in the classroom, pp. 370-394. New York: Teachers College Press. - - - . (1976). Some sources of variability in the cultural regulation of talk. Language in Society 5, 81-95. Piestrup, A. (1974). Black dialect interference and accommodation of reading instruction in first grade. Language Behavior Research Laboratory Monographs 4. Berkeley: University of California. Republic of Liberia, Ministry of Education. (1979). The National Education Survey 1978. Monrovia, Liberia: Republic of Liberia. Robertson, C. (1985). A growing dilemma: Women and change in African primary education 1950-1980. In G. Were (ed.), Women and development in Africa, pp. 17-35. Nairobi: Gideon S. Were Press. (Special issue of Journal of Eastern African Research and Development 15.) Robitaille, D. F., and R. A. Garden. (1989). The lEA study of mathematics 11: Contexts and outcomes of school mathematics. New York: Pergamon Press. Ryan, D. (1986). Developing a new model of teacher effectiveness: Lessons learned from the lEA classroom environment study. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Sadker, M., and D. Sadker. (1984). Year 3: Final report, promoting effectiveness in classroom instruction. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Education. Sadker, M., D. Sadker, and S. Klein. (1991). The issue of gender in elementary and secondary education. Review of Research in Education 17, 269-334. Sherman, M. B. (1982). Education in Liberia. In A. B. Fafunwa and J. U. Aisiku (eds.), Education in Africa: A comparative survey, pp. 162-187. London: George Allen and Unwin. Stodolsky, S. S. (1988). The subject matters. Chicago: University of Chicago. Stromquist, N. P. (1989). Determinants of educational participation and achievement of women in the third world: A review of the evidence and a theoretical critique. Review of Educational Research 59, 143-183.

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Thiagarajan, S. (1990). An integrated approach to primary teacher support and training. In D. W. Chapman and C. A. Carrier (eds.), Improving Educational Quality, pp. 111-133. New York: Greenwood. Vogt, L.A., C. Jordan, and R. G. Tharp. (1987). Explaining school failure, producing school success: Two cases. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 18, 276-286. Webb, N. M. (1984). Sex differences in interaction and achievement in cooperative small groups. Journal of Educational Psychology 76, 33-44. Webb, N. M., and C. M. Kenderski. (1985). Gender difference in small-group interaction and achievement in high and low-achieving classes. In L. C. Wilkinson and C. B. Marrett (eds.), Gender influences in classroom interaction, pp. 153-170. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press. Weinekamp, H., W. Jansen, H. Fickenfrerichs, and R. Peper. (1987). Does unconscious behavior of teachers cause chemistry lessons to be unpopular with girls? International Journal of Science Education 9, 281-286. White, D. R., M. L. Burton, and M. M. Dow. (1981). Sexual division of labor in African agriculture: A network autocorrelation analysis. American Anthropologist 83, 824-849. Wilkinson, L. C., J. Lindow, and C-P. Chang. (1985). Sex differences and sex segregation in students' small-group communication. In L. C. Wilkinson and C. B. Marrett (eds.), Gender influences in classroom interaction, pp. 185-207. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press. World Bank (1988). Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: Policies for adjustment, revitalization and expansion. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.

8~ Gender and Formal Education in Africa: An Exploration of the Opportunity Structure at the Secondary and Tertiary Levels Josephine A. Beoku-Betts

Over the past two decades, the sub-Saharan region of Africa has experienced a significant decline in the level of investment in the educational sector due to fiscal problems arising from economic recession, structural adjustment programs, and global economic restructuring. For many African countries, the inability to keep up with external debt payments has forced governments to cut down on the rapid rate of human resource development that occurred after independence in the 1960s. Current problems facing the educational sector are declining enrollment rates, reduced educational investments per pupil at all levels, erosion in the quality of education and level of student achievement, and inefficiency in management of educational systems (UNDP, 1989, p. 18; World Bank, 1988, p. 2; Hinchcliffe, 1987, p. 8). Evidence suggests that although these problems have led many governments in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to reduce or at best maintain levels of investment in education, much has been done to continue progress in enrollment rates for women and girls. For example, from 1970 to 1990, total public expenditure on education as a percentage of government expenditure declined from 16.2 percent to 13.5 percent, and the average annual growth rate for total educational enrollment correspondingly declined from 6.8 percent to 3.1 percent. In this same period, women as a percentage of total education enrollment increased from 36 percent to 43 percent of the category of students ages 6 to 23 (DAE, 1994). Much of this progress has been apparent in primary-level education, where government subsidies and support from the ·international donor community have done much to increase universal primary enrollment levels. Although overall improvements in enrollment levels for girls are under way in primary-level education, several challenges still exist, especially in reducing gender disparities in secondary-level and higher education. Although girls now constitute around 45 percent of primary-level enrollment, they constitute only 40 percent and 21 percent of enrollment

157

158

Formal Education

levels in secondary- and tertiary-level education, respectively (DAB, 1994). When compared with their male counterparts, women students also tend to have higher repetition and attrition rates and lower attainment at all levels, with the highest level showing the greatest disparity (World Bank, 1988; Hyde, 1989). In this chapter I propose that, although the economic downturn in SSA may not appear to be seriously impeding progress in women's education, conclusions drawn from indicators that account only for enrollment rates as a measure of progress in the education of women may be misleading. I propose that in addition to enrollment rates, indicators such as attainment and accomplishment levels are strong explanatory variables with which to assess the situation of women and girls in African educational systems. These latter measures provide an indication of completion and repetition rates, the type of education girls gain entrance to in the school system, and their future prospects, particularly at the secondary and tertiary levels. Other factors that should be examined with respect to gender disparities at the secondary and tertiary levels of education in sub-Saharan Africa are educational policies, school curriculum structures, and cultural and societal expectations of gender-differentiated roles and accomplishments. Examples include educational policies that foster expectations of women as biological reproducers and producers of labor power. Such policies would effectively endorse the subordination of women by affecting their ability to control their life chances in the home, the labor market, and society at large. Similarly, the structure of the curriculum often determines how students perform academically and how well equipped they are to meet the defined development goals of their nation-states. In many African countries, the school curriculum still reinforces societal perceptions of women's role in family life through the academic subjects offered, genderrole stereotypes in textbooks, methods of teaching, and even the lack of women as role models in the teaching profession. Cultural and societal perceptions of the division of labor and expected gender roles also influence patterns of gender inequality in the educational process and its outcomes. Parental expectations of a daughter's domestic and marital responsibilities and parental investment decisions regarding the benefits of educating sons relative to daughters, for instance, would curtail women's ability to further their education and may hold implications for the type of education the state may consider appropriate for women. In this chapter I examine trends in women's education at the secondary and tertiary levels in SSA and identify some of the factors influencing observed conditions. I situate the analysis in secondary- and tertiary-level education because the framework for promoting gender equality in the educational system is largely defined and institutionalized from the secondary level in Africa. Furthermore, because much progress has been made in recent years in increasing universal primary enrollment

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levels through government subsidies and support from the international donor community, enrollment rates for girls in primary school have increased substantially in many African countries. At the secondary and tertiary levels, however, similar developments are not widely apparent. These levels of education exhibit the greatest gender disparity in formal education in terms of enrollment; achievement; training in critical disciplines, such as science and technology; and career mobility patterns. At the secondary level, especially, education is usually not free, and parents have to make crucial investment decisions to determine the relative costs and benefits of educating sons and daughters. Invariably, girls are more commonly perceived as offering relatively lower returns. Therefore, it is usually from the secondary and tertiary levels that enrollment rates for women noticeably begin to decline at each consecutive stage and that repetition and attrition rates for women become more evident. These patterns tend to be present in both rich and poor SSA countries, regardless of differences in enrollment rates for women. This analysis is based on the educational data on sub-Saharan Africa compiled from the following sources: (1) "A Statistical Profile of Education in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s" (Donors to African Education, 1994); (2) Teresa Hartnett and W. Heneveld, "Statistical Indicators of Female Participation in Education in Sub-Saharan Africa" (World Bank, 1993); and (3) E. M. Walker, "Statistical Indicators of Female Participation in Education: An Update" (World Bank, 1994). The main indicators used to measure patterns of gender disparity in secondary- and tertiary-level education are access, attainment, and accomplishment. Access is measured using secondary and tertiary education enrollment rates, including nontraditional disciplines such as science and technology. These measures give a sense of how the decisionmaking process works with respect to entrance into various levels and categories of education. Attainment is measured according to completion, continuation, and repetition rates (data available only for secondary education). These indicators show the type of education girls will have once in the school system and what their future prospects might be, irrespective of enrollment levels. Accomplishment is measured according to labor force participation and career mobility patterns in professional and managerial fields. These patterns show some of the results of women's participation in the educational system (Hartnett and Heneveld, 1993). For each of the three variables, I also use the gender ratio indicator to highlight specific patterns of gender disparity in the educational process. This measure was first introduced in a report by Teresa Hartnett and Ward Heneveld of the World Bank, Statistical Indicators of Female Participation in Sub-Saharan Africa (1993). According to the authors, this measure often shows significant inequities within a given country, even where overall female participation in education is good. The gender ratio is based only on a country's educational profile for one year and therefore

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cannot indicate whether or how conditions are changing within that country. However, its strength lies in its ability to pinpoint, within a given year, a particular level or area where women seem to be at a disadvantage and critical pressure is necessary. The gender ratio is calculated by dividing the rate for women in a particular variable by the same rate for men. A gender ratio of 1.00 denotes that women are doing as well as men in that area. A ratio of 0.50 suggests that women are doing half as well as men in that area (1993, p. 4). Given the considerable variation within and between African countries, and in order to avoid wide-ranging generalizations, six SSA countries representing World Bank classification levels of economic development were selected for analysis. The selected countries are Niger (low-income semiarid region), Ghana and Kenya (low-income region), Senegal and Cameroon (lower-middle-income region) and Botswana (upper-middleincome region). General trends for SSA as a whole will also be used as a baseline for comparison for each of the indicators used. At this juncture, it is worth noting some observations on the nature and character of the data from which general conclusions are drawn. First, there is a serious paucity of data and scholarly research on gender-related issues in education in SSA. Second, the available data are generally aggregated and sometimes inconsistent. Third and finally, case studies are few and far between and, where they exist, are likely to be based on poor record keeping (making certain variables difficult to quantify) and inappropriate sampling methodologies and tests of statistical significance. Since such problems make comparisons and generalizations difficult, only broad conclusions are drawn from subsequent analyses and discussions. The discussion is organized into four sections. The first section commences with an overview of investment trends in the educational sector in SSA and then examines general trends in enrollment for the period from 1970 to 1990 and patterns of gender distribution over this period. It explores the relationship between enrollment trends for women and changes in investment patterns for education and annual growth rates for secondary- and tertiary-level education. The second section examines the gender distribution in educational attainment, using fields of study within secondary-level education as the point of analysis. It locates those areas where women are more likely to be represented and those disciplines where pressure must be applied to increase their representation. The third section follows the preceding line of analysis while focusing on education at the tertiary level and discusses the gender distribution in accomplishment by examining patterns of labor force participation, especially in the teaching and scientific disciplines. The three preceding sections set the stage for the fourth section, which explores the major factors that influence patterns of gender disparity at the secondary and tertiary levels in

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SSA, focusing on the policy process, academic structures, and societal and cultural expectations of gender roles.

Investment and Enrollment Trends in Education Whatever conclusions we draw from examining the relationship between gender and access, attainment, and accomplishment in secondary- and tertiary-level education in SSA, it must be acknowledged that, despite the economic recession and structural adjustment problems suffered by many SSA countries in the period from 1970 to 1990, education remained a priority on many national agendas. In many countries, educational budgets were moderately reduced or maintained at a level that ensured a steady rate of growth to keep up with rising demands and population growth levels. The data in Table 8.1 indicate that for SSA as a whole, total public expenditure on the educational sector as a percentage of government expenditure declined from 16.2 percent to 13.5 percent. Regardless of economic growth levels, only Ghana and Senegal were able to maintain steady growth levels, whereas Cameroon maintained the growth level set in 1970. Even for those countries that increased or maintained expenditure levels on education, such efforts were not always without costs, such as cutting expenditure on other social sectors (Graham-Brown, 1991, p. 37). Despite the fact that such countries as Niger, Kenya, and Botswana represented different categories of economic growth, each of these countries was forced to reduce its level of expenditure in education. Even Botswana, which has one of the strongest economies in SSA, was not able to sustain its budget for education. As in many African countries, the problem of inflation caused the value of Botswana's currency to decline on the international market. In cases such as Ghana, where in the face of critical economic problems the government was still able to increase expenditure

Table 8.1

Total Public Expenditures as a Percentage of Government Expenditures

Country

1970

1980

Niger Ghana Kenya Cameroon Senegal Botswana SSA

17.7 19.6 17.6 19.6 21.3

22.9 17.1 18.1 20.3 23.5 16.1 16.2

16.2

1985

19.0 14.8 24.4 15.4 15.1

1990 9.0 24.3 16.7 19.6 24.1 12.5 13.5

Source: DAE (Donors to African Education). (1994). A statistical profile of education in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s. Paris: UNESCO.

162

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levels for education, in actuality, the levels of expenditure would have effectively declined (Graham-Brown, 1991, p. 37).

Secondary-Level Education In the period from 1970 to 1990, the average annual growth rate for secondary education declined by 50 percent for SSA as a whole (Table 8.2). With the exception of Senegal, which maintained a modest rate of increase in secondary-level enrollment (1.9 percent), all the selected countries suffered significant declines. Ghana and Niger were particularly affected: in Ghana the average annual growth rate declined from 21.4 percent between 1970 and 1980 to 1.8 percent between 1985 and 1990, and in Niger the growth rate went from 18.7 percent to 7.5 percent in the same period. As a percentage of total enrollment in secondary schools, women's enrollment increased moderately for the region as a whole and for each of the selected countries between 1970 and 1990. With the exception of Niger and Botswana, each of the selected countries maintained an average growth rate in the enrollment of girls as a percentage of total enrollment at between 10 percent and 13 percent. At a rate of 2 percent between 1970 and 1990, very little progress was made in enrolling more girls in Nigerois secondary schools. This country, which is in the lowest income category in SSA, also has the lowest percentage of girls enrolled in secondary schools compared with the other selected countries. Compared with Niger and the other countries, Botswana has maintained a modest but significant growth rate in the enrollment of girls as compared with boys over the past twenty years, to the extent that there are more girls than boys enrolled in secondary schools (52 percent). It is clear that, when the gross secondary-level enrollment ratio is analyzed according to the gender ratio, secondary-level enrollment rates are

Table 8.2 Secondary Enrollment Growth Rate (percentage) Average Annual Rate Country

1970-1980

Niger Ghana Kenya Cameroon Senegal Botswana Sub-Saharan Africa

18.7 21.4 12.1 11.8 4.9 15.0 10.9

Girls as % of Total

1980-1985

1985-1990

1970

1980

1985

1990

6.5 2.8 1.4 8.0 6.4 11.5 6.6

7.5 1.8 7.0 7.8 6.8 11.3 5.3

27.0 28.0 30.0 29.0 28.0 45.0 28.0

29.0 38.0 41.0 35.0 33.0 55.0 34.0

28.0 38.0 38.0 38.0 33.0 53.0 37.0

29.0 38.0 43.0 41.0 33.0 52.0 40.0

Source: DAE (Donors to African Education). (1994). A statistical profile of education in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s. Paris: UNESCO.

Gender & Formal Education in Africa

163

extremely low for both girls and boys in many countries. For example, even though as few as 7 percent of secondary school age girls are enrolled in schools in Niger, in terms of the gender gap, this still represents 70 percent of the number of boys in the same age category enrolled in secondary schools. Based on the data presenting enrollment rates and gender ratios by region and selected countries in Table 8.3, access to secondary education in SSA for the year 1990 was on average considerably lower for women than for men. Among the selected countries, only in Botswana are women overrepresented in secondary school enrollment (GR = 1.09), whereas in Senegal, serious difficulties exist for girls in gaining access to secondary school, with a rate that is below the regional average and around half of the rate for boys enrolling in secondary school in that country (GR = 0.51). Although Ghanaian schools maintained the second-largest female enrollment rate among the selected countries, twice the regional average (29 percent), the gender ratio (0.62) indicates that girls were still underrepresented, at a rate of just less than two-thirds of that for boys enrolled in secondary schools in Ghana. The percentage of girls completing secondary school in SSA is less than that for boys, although the gap is not substantially wide (Table 8.4 ). In 1990, the regional average in terms of gender ratio was 0.92, and only Niger (among the selected countries) had a rate that was less than 90 percent of the rate for boys. Although 82 percent and 89 percent of girls of secondary school age were able to complete school in Kenya and Senegal, respectively, the gender ratio shows that girls were more likely to complete school than boys (1.00 and 1.02, respectively). In the case of Botswana and Cameroon, which have the highest percentages of girls of secondary school age completing school among the selected countries, girls and boys were more likely to complete secondary school at a similar rate (0.95 and 0.98, respectively).

Table 8.3

Gross Secondary-Level Enrollment Ratio, 1990

Country Niger Ghana Kenya Cameroon Senegal Botswana Sub-Saharan Africa

% Rate for Girls

7.0 29.0 25.0 23.0 11.0 45.0 12.0

Gender Ratio (GR) 0.70 0.62 0.77 0.71 0.51 1.09 0.71

Source: E. M. Walker. (1994). Statistical indicators of female participation in education: An update. For distribution at the NGO Forum, African Preparatory Conference on Women, Dakar, Senegal. Workshop on Girls' Education, Human Resource and Poverty Division, Technical Department, Africa Region, World Bank, November 14.

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Formal Education

Table 8.4 Repetition and Completion Rate for Secondary Schools, 1990 Repetition Rate Country

Niger Ghana Kenya Cameroon Senegal Botswana Sub-Saharan Africa

Completion Rate

Rate for Girls(%)

Gender Ratio

Rate for Girls(%)

Gender Ratio

21.0 1.0 0 19.0 13.0 0 19.0

1.13 1.06 0.98 1.05 1.15 1.59 1.07

58.0 83.0 82.0 100.0 89.0 92.0 77.0

0.89 0.91 1.00 0.98 1.02 0.95 0.92

Source: E. M. Walker. (1994). Statistical indicators of female participation in education: An update. For distribution at the NGO Forum, African Preparatory Conference on Women, Dakar, Senegal. Workshop on Girls' Education, Human Resource and Poverty Division, Technical Department, Africa Region, World Bank, November 14.

In most SSA secondary schools, repetition rates for girls are higher than for boys notwithstanding the growth in enrollment levels for girls. Table 8.4 shows that for the region as a whole in 1990, 19 percent of girls of secondary school age repeated school, which is above the rate for their male counterparts (GR = 1.07). Irrespective of economic growth levels and rates of completion for girls, this pattern is prevalent in all the selected countries, with the possible exception of Kenya, which shows very little gender disparity in the completion rates for boys and girls (GR = 0.98). Finally, access to secondary schooling, despite increasing enrollment levels for girls, is not a sufficient condition for determining prospects and opportunities within the educational process for girls, but the type of education they gain entrance to does indicate what their future prospects might be. UNESCO annual statistics on education categorize types of secondary education by general education, teacher training, and vocational/ technical education. General education usually requires four years of secondary school not geared to a specific trade or occupation and offers courses of study that, if completed, would be a minimum condition for college-level admission. Teacher training usually prepares a secondary school student enrolled in such an institution for the teaching profession, whereas vocational/technical prepares students for a trade or occupation other than teaching (DAE, 1994, p. 31). For SSA between 1980 and 1990, the majority of all secondary school students were enrolled in general education, followed by substantially lower percentages in vocational/technical education and teacher training. As a percentage of total enrollment in each of these categories, enrollment rates for women were substantially below those of their male counterparts, and more women were concentrated in general and teacher training and fewer in vocational/technical education (see Table 8.5).

Table 8.5 Distribution of Secondary Education by Type of Education ----------

----

------

--

-------

All Students

Country

1980

1985

Teacher Training 1990

1980

1985

---

-

Women's Enrollment as % of Total Enrollment -

General

-------

------·-

----------

Voc{fech

1990

1980

1985

1990

1980

1990

1980 -------

Niger Ghana Kenya Senegal Cameroon Botswana Sub-Saharan Africa

94.0 94.0 95.0 87.0 72.0 87.0 92.0

96.0 94.0 96.0 93.0 74.0 89.0 93.0

97.0 93.0 95.0 96.0 82.0 92.0 93.0

4.7 1.7 2.8 2.3 0.9 4.0 2.7

2.4 1.9 2.8 0.4 1.2 3.3 2.2

2.1 1.9 2.8 0.5 0.1 2.2 2.1

1.3 3.9 2.0 10.4 26.5 8.6 5.1

1.2 3.9 1.7 6.7 24.2 7.7 5.7

1.1 5.2 1.7 3.7 18.0 5.7 5.2

29.5 38.5 41.0 33.7 33.9 56.1 33.3

-----

---

-

Teacher Training

General

29.4 38.8 43.7 33.7 41.5 53.3 37.8

28.7 40.5 40.2 32.3 36.3 82.9 35.4

-

Voc{fech

1990

1980

1990

41.9 45.5 43.8 18.1 55.0 71.6 43.8

8.4 24.8 30.0 24.7 39.1 25.1 27.3

8.8 22.8 24.0 29.9 41.5 27.2 29.9

-

-------

Source: DAE (Donors to African Education). (1994). A statistical profile of education in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s. Paris: UNESCO.

166

Formal Education

Although indications are that enrollment rates for women and girls may be increasing moderately for vocational/technical training for the region and several of the selected countries, their underrepresentation in this category suggests that more women should be trained in nontraditional disciplines that might enhance their future prospects on the labor market. In 1980, a UNESCO report on technical and vocational education for women reached a similar conclusion about the lack of technical education for girls. It concluded that there was an automatic priority given to males in educational planning, particularly in Asian and African countries (Bryne, 1990, p. 7). The United Nations Platform for Action endorsed at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing also addressed the need to improve women's access to vocational training, particularly in the fields of science and technology and continuing education. Actions to be taken by governments include the provision of information to women and girls on the availability and benefits of vocational training programs and the diversification of vocational training to improve access for and retention of women and girls in these fields of education (United Nations, 1995, p. 26). Based on the data presented on trends in secondary-level education in SSA, the following points are salient. First, it is clear that both boys and girls of secondary school age are underrepresented in enrollment rates, although the proportion is higher for girls than for boys. Of girls enrolled in secondary school, the proportion is far less than the proportion of girls in the school age population. Another point is that, regardless of a country's level of economic growth, rising enrollment rates for girls do not necessarily preclude the fact that there is a persistent problem of gender disparity within African educational systems. In each of the two categories examined, access (measured by enrollment) and attainment (measured by completion and repetition rates and by type of secondary education), girls were either substantially underrepresented or overrepresented, as in the case of repetition rates. Among the six selected countries, only Botswana was above parity in the percentage of total enrollment for girls as well as in enrollment in the general education and teacher-training categories. The case of Botswana merits mention as atypical for the SSA region. Like other Southern African countries, Botswana represents a special case because of the high rates of men migrating to South Africa to work in the mines or opting to work on their family cattle farms. According to Wendy Duncan (1989), historically, there has been more resistance on the part of parents to the recruitment and retention of Tswana boys in local schools because they represent a greater opportunity cost to the family. Because girls tend not to be under the same obligations, their enrollment levels are likely to be higher in Botswana educational institutions. However, even given the low repetition and dropout rates for girls in the data, it is not clear that women receive or maintain the

Gender & Formal Education in Africa

167

same content or quality of education as do their male counterparts in Botswana. Duncan (1989, p. 12) also notes that overall, boys have ended up benefiting more than girls from developments in the educational system in Botswana. A number of factors explain why girls find it more difficult to benefit equitably from the educational process in SSA secondary-educational systems. Among these are fewer schools available for girls, high dropout rates for girls due to teenage pregnancies and early marriage, religious beliefs and traditions, cultural expectations of women's roles and the investment choices related to that, lack of female role models among teachers, and the design of the school curriculum. These factors, which affect the ability of girls to proceed to the tertiary level and to pursue nontraditional subjects such as the sciences, will be discussed in more detail in the final section of this chapter.

Tertiary-Level Education Tertiary-level education is the critical stage of preparation for future positions of responsibility in policymaking and decisionmaking in government, business, and professional fields. According to a World Bank report on education in sub-Saharan Africa, "Africa requires both highly trained people and top-quality research in order to be able to formulate the policies, plan the programs, and implement the projects that are essential to economic growth and development" (World Bank, 1988, p. 68). It is the role of institutions of higher education to develop the potential resource capacity of a society's men and women by providing support in teaching, research, advice, and consultation (World Bank, 1988, p. 68). Although most SSA governments acknowledge the importance of tertiary-level education, the growth rate of this sector has declined from 14.1 percent to 7.3 percent between the periods 1970-1980 and 1985-1990 (see Table 8.6). This may be due to pressures from donor agencies, such as the World Bank, for African governments to focus on primary-level education as a key to meeting the immediate development needs of these countries. It is unfortunate, however, that it is at the tertiary level that the gender gap is greatest in SSA educational systems. In 1990, women accounted for only 21 percent of total university-level enrollment in SSA (see Table 8.6), the lowest percentage for women's participation in higher education in any region of the world (UNESCO, 1994, p. 23). Only modest attempts have been made by SSA governments to improve opportunities for women in higher education. For example, Table 8.6 shows that between 1970 and 1990 only a 6 percent increase was made in the total enrollment of women in SSA. In a study sponsored by the World Bank on the influence of lending to higher education on female enrollment, of the total sum of U.S.$417.2 million Africa received to

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Formal Education

Table 8.6

Tertiary Enrollment Average Annual Growth Rate Total(%)

Country

1970-1980

1980-1985

Women as % of Total

Niger Ghana Kenya Cameroon Senegal Botswana Sub-Saharan Africa -----~-

16.7 1.9 10.9 10.2 0.8 12.4

11.1 5.2 15.8 16.2

14.1

9.1 ~--

-~-

1970

1985-1990

----------

11.3 2.2 8.7 11.8 3.4 13.8 7.3 - ---

-

-

-

1980

1985 --

---

--

1990 -

-

14.0 15.0 8.0 14.0

20.0 21.0 19.0 14.0 18.0 35.0

18.0 21.0 26.0 12.0 20.0 31.0

15.0 21.0 29.0 12.0 21.0 46.0

15.0

20.0

20.0

21.0

-- - - - -

-

--------

Source: DAE (Donors to African Education). (1994). A statistical profile of education in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s. Paris: UNESCO.

undertake projects in higher education between 1982 and 1992, only nine projects acknowledged gender issues, and five had elements directed toward gender problems. Likewise, Africa accounted for only 4 percent of a total of U.S.$2.8 billion invested by the World Bank in intervention projects designed to improve women's participation in higher education (UNESCO, 1994, p. 23). Table 8.6 shows that unlike the situation in primary and secondary education, very little progress has been made in improving access for women to university-level education between 1970 and 1990 in SSA. Among the selected countries, only Botswana is double the regional average in enrollment rates and has almost attained parity with enrollment rates for men (46 percent in 1990). Kenya has almost doubled the percentage of women enrolled at the tertiary level (29 percent), whereas Senegal's and Ghana's rates are comparable to the regional average. Women's access to university education is significantly below the regional norm in Cameroon (12 percent), and for Niger, the percentage dropped steadily from 20 percent to 15 percent between 1980 and 1990. The gender ratio for 1990 emphasizes the gap between men and women in tertiary-level education in SSA (see Table 8.7). Among women in the tertiary-level age population, less than 1 percent are enrolled in universities in SSA. Although the rates are similar for each of the selected countries, there are indications that the higher a country's level of economic growth, the more likely women will gain more access to higher education. For example, Cameroon and Botswana, which have comparatively stronger economies, have a higher percentage of women enrolled (3.2 and 2.8 percent, respectively); followed by Senegal, Kenya, and Ghana, which are in a lower income category; and finally Niger, which is classified by the World Bank in the lowest income category (0.2 percent). The gender

Gender & Formal Education in Africa Table 8.7

169

Gross Tertiary Enrollment Ratio, 1990 Rate for Women

Country

(%)

Gender Ratio

Niger Ghana Kenya Cameroon Senegal Botswana Sub-Saharan Africa

0.2 0.6 0.9 3.2

0.18 0.27 0.42 0.57 0.27 0.82 0.30

1.2

2.8 0.9

Source: E. M. Walker. (1994). Statistical indicators of female participation in education: An update. For distribution at the NGO Forum, African Preparatory Conference on Women, Dakar, Senegal. Workshop on Girls' Education, Human Resource and Poverty Division, Technical Department, Africa Region, World Bank, November 14.

ratio shows that each of the selected countries' enrollment rates for women fall substantially below the male rate of the age group enrolled, although Botswana (0.82) and Cameroon (0.57) show some indication of closing the gender gap. The gender ratio for Botswana is probably better than most because of labor force factors discussed earlier. Who pursues particular fields of study is also pertinent to understanding the rate of access and participation of women in higher education in SSA. Table 8.8 shows that the majority of students in all higher educational institutions are concentrated in arts disciplines (67 percent), particularly in the social sciences (31 percent). Among the 32 percent involved in science disciplines, less than 10 percent of students are represented in

Table 8.8

Distribution of Tertiary Enrollment by Field of Study, 1990

----------------------

Field of Study

Niger (1989)

Ghana

Kenya (1989)

62 9 10 15 51 31

58 5 9 12 45 41

68 34 6 10 29 32

3 2 4 7

8 13 7

6 7 9

----------

Cameroon

Botswana

SSAb

61 2 14 19 59 39

70 8 2 23 62 30

78 16 22 40 2

67 14 8 9 31 32

I

22

3

4 2

Senegal (1989)

-------

All arts Education Medical science Natural science Social sciences All sciences Communication and business Math and engineering Agriculture Other

--------------

-

---

-

-

---

-

14 9 4 4

----

Source: DAE (Donors to African Education). (1994). A statistical profile of education in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s. Paris: UNESCO. Notes: a. Included in social sciences. b. Average of all years ranging from 1984 to 1990.

170

Formal Education

the natural sciences, medical sciences, mathematics and engineering, and agriculture. In the selected countries, students involved in the sciences are more inclined toward the natural sciences relative to other areas and generally seem less inclined toward the agricultural sciences. Given the fundamental importance of agriculture in Africa and the very high representation of women in food and agricultural production, it is alarming that total student representation in agricultural sciences is so low; it ought to be a critical policy issue in higher education. For the region as a whole, women comprise 25.5 percent or less of total enrollment in any university-level discipline (see Table 8.9). More college women favor the social sciences, medical and health related sciences (here the data do not indicate whether they are pursuing nursing or medicine), and education, followed by law and agriculture. Their enrollment is relatively less in traditionally male areas such as math and computer sciences, the natural sciences, and architecture. The latter finding is consistent with the gender ratio in Table 8.10, which shows the regional average for 1990 and for selected countries during that period ( 1987 for Kenya). Only in Senegal were more women than men enrolled in science disciplines at the tertiary level in 1990. The low participation of women in science and technology at the tertiary level is a serious problem, not only in terms of their future prospects in the labor market but also in terms of building human capacity to address development priorities in the countries of SSA. Among the contributory factors explaining their underrepresentation in this area are inadequate preparation at the pre-tertiary level and the male orientation of science education generally. In addition, many girls' schools lack adequate science facilities and qualified women teachers to prepare students for critical qualifying examinations for university entrance. The structure of education at the pre-tertiary level also requires students to decide at an early stage

Table 8.9 Women as a Percentage of All Students Enrolled in Various Fields at the College Level in Sub-Saharan Africa (1985-1989 average) Field of Study Social and behavioral sciences Medical and health-related sciences Education Law Agriculture Math and computer sciences Natural sciences Architecture Total

%Women

25.5 24.9 23.4 22.3 20.8 18.3 18.0 10.8 22.8

Source: UNESCO. (1992). Statistical Yearbook (compiled by B. I. Logan and J. A. BeokuBetts).

Gender & Formal Education in Africa

171

Table 8.10 Enrollment in Sciences at the Tertiary Level (n = 32) Country

Year

Rate for Women(%)

Gender Ratio

Niger Ghana Kenya Cameroon Senegal Botswana Sub-Saharan Africa

1990 1990 1987 1990 1990 1990 1990

25.0 27.0 25.6

0.77 0.60 0.46

41.0

1.06

23.0 0.68 ------------------Source: E. M. Walker. (1994). Statistical indicators of female participation in education: An update. For distribution at the NGO Forum, African Preparatory Conference on Women, Dakar, Senegal. Workshop on Girls' Education, Human Resource and Poverty Division, Technical Department, Africa Region, World Bank, November 14.

whether they will pursue arts or science disciplines. Once the decision is made, it is often difficult to make a change. Although the above issues will be discussed in more detail in the final section of this chapter, it must be noted that these problems are not unique to Africa and also that more comparative investigative studies are needed to find ways in which more women can be encouraged to enter and perform well in nontraditional disciplines. This point is clearly acknowledged in the UN Platform for Action, which recognizes that women and girls are still concentrated in a limited number of fields of study and that positive action should be taken by governments to ensure that women have better access to and participation in technical and scientific areas at the tertiary and other levels. Action to be taken by governments include the development of appropriate curricula and teaching materials and a supportive training environment (United Nations, 1995, pp. 24-25). Some effort is now being made to reverse this trend in some SSA countries at the secondary level, which means that in the next decade we might expect to see a higher percentage of women enrolled in the sciences at the tertiary level. For example, a UNESCO report (1994, p. 13) notes that girls studying science in schools in Nigeria, Malawi, and Kenya are showing high achievement scores as a result of program initiatives and that science clinics and a science road show in Botswana are encouraging more girls to participate in the sciences. The low participation of women in university-level education and their lack of preparation for critical fields such as the sciences affects their capacity to move into a wide range of occupations in the labor market after graduation. In fact, women tend to cluster around traditional "feminine" occupations such as teaching and nursing (Stromquist, 1989, p. 118). For example, a 1984 study on the mobility patterns of University of Zambia graduates found that only 22 percent of women respondents worked in science-based occupations, such as medicine and human biology, and 71

172

Formal Education

percent were concentrated in nonscience-based occupations like teaching. Their male counterparts, however, represented a wider range of scientific and nonscientific occupations (Bardouille, 1984, p. 19). Evidence suggests that women constitute the larger percentage of teachers in educational institutions in SSA (Beoku-Betts and Logan, 1994, p. 128). Among those who go into teaching, the majority are concentrated in primary school teaching, followed by a smaller percentage in secondary school teaching. Table 8.11 shows that between 1980 and 1990, the percentage of female primary school teachers increased from 28 to 36 percent in SSA. Among the selected countries, only Ghana showed a decline in this trend (42 percent to 36 percent), whereas Botswana increased its percentage of women primary school teachers from 72 percent to 80 percent. There was only a modest increase in the percentage of women secondary school teachers during the same period in the region (21 to 24 percent). This pattern is consistent among the selected countries, with the exception of Niger, Senegal, and Kenya, which experienced a decline in the teaching pool. Apart from teaching, other career mobility patterns of women in technical/professional fields (which would include the labor force in the sciences) are much more limited than that of men. In fact, their participation in the labor force as a whole is significantly lower. Analysis of the gender ratio for the region and selected countries in the study shows that with the exception of Niger, where women constitute 47 percent of the labor force (GR = 0.86), women's labor force participation is two-thirds or less of the male rate (GR range= 0.66 to 0.49) (see Table 8.12). Of course, these figures must be evaluated in the context of how labor force participation is defined for a particular country, who is registered, and what criteria are used. Among selected countries for which data are available, women's labor force participation is fairly high in professional, technical, and kindred

Table 8.11

Percentage of Women Teachers in Primary- and Secondary-Level Education Primary

Secondary

- - - - - - - -

Country

1980 -

-~

-

-

-

Niger Ghana Kenya Senegal Cameroon Botswana Sub-Saharan Africa -

-~

-

-

--

-

-

-

30.0 42.0 28.0 24.0 20.0 72.0 28.0 -

1985 -

1990

1980

1985

1990

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

33.0 40.0 34.0 27.0 27.0 78.0 35.0

33.0 36.0 37.0 26.0 30.0 80.0 36.0 -

21.0 21.0 25.0 20.0 37.0 21.0

16.0 25.0 36.0 15.0 22.0 40.0 23.0

------------

18.0 24.0 32.0 15.0 21.0 40.0 24.0 -

-

Source: DAB (Donors to African Education). (1994). A statistical profile of education in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s. Paris: UNESCO.

--

Gender & Formal Education in Africa

173

Table 8.12 Women's Labor Force Participation, 1990 (n = 42) Country Niger Ghana Kenya Cameroon Senegal Botswana Sub-Saharan Africa

Rate for Women(%) 47.0 28.0 31.0 25.0 34.0 23.0 31.0

Gender Ratio 0.86 0.65 0.66 0.49 0.63 0.51 0.62

Source: E. M. Walker. (1994). Statistical indicators of female participation in education: An update. For distribution at the NGO Forum, African Preparatory Conference on Women, Dakar, Senegal. Workshop on Girls' Education, Human Resource and Poverty Division, Technical Department, Africa Region, World Bank, November 14.

occupations (PTK), irrespective of whether they are viewed as a percentage of total female wage employment or as a percentage of total employment in an occupation (see Table 8.13). Nonetheless, even though they may be hired on the basis of their qualifications for these positions, indications are that upward mobility within the profession is very limited, as shown in their lack of representation in administrative and management positions (approximately 3 percent or less of women are employed at this level).

Constraints on Women's Education The preceding examination of trends in women's education at the secondary and university levels in SSA shows that there are serious genderdifferentiated problems that must be addressed in policy and program planning for the educational sector. It is necessary, therefore, to elucidate some of the processes shaping the construction and reproduction of gender-specific differences in education at the secondary and tertiary levels. I classify and discuss them in three distinct but not unrelated categories: (1) policy factors, which are direct and indirect government initiatives in education and training; (2) academic factors such as quality of educational programs, subject content, teacher involvement, textbooks and instructional resources, and academic performance; and (3) cultural and societal expectations of gender roles, which affect parental attitudes and career advice (Manthorpe, 1982).

Policy Factors Irrespective of country income levels or efforts to increase the educational enrollment rates for women in SSA, women continue to be more disadvantaged than their male counterparts. Educational policies play a critical

Table 8.13 ---

Occupational Distribution of Women in Wage Employment, Selected Countries and Years

----

--------

Ghana (1984)

Occupations

%of Total Women in Wage Employment

Kenya (1980)

%of Total Employment in Occupation

%of Total Women in Wage Employment ---

Professional and related technical workers

Botswana (1986)

%of Total Employment in Occupation

%of Total Women in Wage Employment

%of Total Employment in Occupation

-·--

34.6

36.1

34.4

29.7

27.0

60.0

0.4

8.7

3.1

10.9

2.0

25.0

18.1

42.8

17.9

12.8

25.0

50.0

6.8

30.0

2.2

28.5

13.3

64.0

Service workers

13.0

51.8

6.0

9.4

19.0

33.0

Agriculture, animal husbandry, and animal forestry workers, fishers and hunters

51.1

25.0

1.0

9.5

Production-related workers, transportation equipment operators, and laborers

11.9

13.6

Administrative and management workers Clerical and related workers Sales workers

------

---

----·-------

15.5

!3.0

---- --------·-----

Source: ILO (Jobs and Skills Program for Africa). African Employment Report no. 2 (1990), Addis Ababa, p. 76.

8.5 ------

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role in fostering or perpetuating these gender imbalances in the system. Although these policies may not be consciously framed to produce patterns of inequality, some of the indirect consequences resulting from these policies constrain women's ability to access and perform equitably within the system. For example, the promotion of World Bank educational initiatives such as cost sharing might well discourage enrollment and continuation rates for girls in secondary schools (UNESCO, 1994, p. 5). Furthermore, until recently in most SSA countries, very few educational policies were designed to include the needs and particular concerns of women. In response to these particular needs and concerns, many Arab and Asian countries have now introduced compulsory educational policies that have increased enrollment levels for women at and beyond the primary level (UNESCO, 1994, p. 7). Among the countries considered in this chapter, only Ghana has enforced this type of policy over a number of years. Other countries like Burkina Paso now retain pregnant girls in school, and Malawi has a special teacher education program to attract women who would not have been able to attend teacher-training institutions (UNESCO, 1994). Among the policy factors that have direct and indirect consequences for gender-role outcomes in SSA are school location, availability of statemaintained versus private or missionary-run schools, single-sex versus coeducational schools, the enactment and enforcement of civil rights laws, and protection during periods of civil unrest. School location has direct consequences for women's access to education because parents may be unwilling to risk the safety of their daughters by sending them unaccompanied to distantly located schools, a situation that is common in rural areas. The relative availability of state-maintained versus private or missionary-run schools also influences access and retention patterns for girls at the secondary school level. In Kenya, state-maintained schools, which tend to provide higher-quality education at a lower cost, also tend to have higher enrollment levels for boys. The poor quality of education that is typical of unfunded secondary schools limits girls' success on school terminal examinations; in turn, poor performance on examinations reduces girls' attainment of the necessary prerequisites to enter college (Eshiwani, 1985). The issue of girls' education at the secondary level is also complicated tendency for African secondary schools to be single-sex rather than the by coeducational. Cross-national research on the effects of single-sex versus coeducational schools suggests that single-sex schools provide particular advantages and benefits for their constituents, especially for girls (see Chapter 10). Others suggest that if benefits other than academic achievement are taken into account, closer interaction between boys and girls in coeducational schools would more likely reduce gender stereotypes that perpetuate the subordination of women (Sara-Lafosse, 1992, p. 87). In

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general, boys benefit from both single-sex and coeducational schooling because of the preferential treatment they receive from both male and female teachers (Sara-Lafosse, 1992, p. 87). However, boys' schools may have negative effects on their students, as was found in a study on schools in Nigeria (see Chapter 10), but girls tend to have higher educational aspirations and improved performance levels in girls' schools than they do in coeducational schools (Eshiwani, 1985; Boit, 1986; Forge, 1989; Obisodun, 1991 ). Research on the effects of single-sex secondary schools in Africa are consistent with findings that girls gain more benefits from girls' schools than coeducational schools. In Kenya and Swaziland, single-sex schools have been shown to raise girls' performance levels relative to their counterparts in coeducational schools (UNESCO, 1994, p. 6). Finally, when civil laws are not enforced or reformulated by governments to protect women's rights with respect to protection from sexual harassment or violence against their persons, the ability of women to fully use educational opportunities is impeded (Nammudu, 1993). Sexual harassment is a common occurrence on university campuses, and women are not always in a position to protect themselves, for fear of victimization from their male peers, male professors, or senior male administrative staff. And with regard to violent acts against women, a case in point is Kenya, where in 1991, nineteen schoolgirls at St. Kizito Secondary School were killed and seventy-one raped by schoolboys in that school district (Perlez, 1991). Also, violence and political instability in many African countries, often associated with popular strikes and university closures, have made it unsafe for women to proceed with their studies on campus. Academic Factors

The academic structure also determines how well women and men perform educationally and how well equipped they are to meet the defined development goals of their nation-states. I focus on the sciences particularly because this academic field has the greatest gender disparities in terms of opportunities and actual participation and because it offers opportunities key to meeting future development needs. This point was clearly acknowledged by African governments in the platform for Africa prepared for the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. Africa was the only region of the world that identified science and technology as a critical area of concern in its regional plan of action. Paragraph 191 of the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies states that women should be viewed as users and agents of change in science and technology. Their technological, scientific knowledge and managerial skills should be improved in order to enhance their participation in industrial production, innovation, productive design, product adaptation and production techniques.

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Women's participation in science and technology subjects at higher levels as well as their participation in scientific research and the formulation of science and technology policies should therefore be promoted. African females will benefit from UNESCO's Project 2000+ which aims at promoting scientific and technological literacy for all. (United Nations Economic and Social Council, 1994, pp. 14-15)

Studies by George Eshiwani (1982) and Lois Weis (1980) in Kenya and Ghana, respectively, show that there are significant gender differences in secondary-level education when the latter is assessed in terms of students' level of preparedness for qualifying examinations for university entrance. This problem is particularly significant in science and mathematics, which are generally unpopular subjects among women. Scientific instructional programs in girls' secondary schools are generally poor, the overall proportion of girls studying science is small, and boys tend to have greater access to schools with good-quality programs in science and mathematics (Eshiwani, 1985). In Kenya, 75 percent of the boys' schools offer science at the upper levels, compared with only 40 percent of the girls' schools (Eshiwani, 1989). There is also reason to believe that the structure of the curricula affects girls more adversely than boys. In many countries, curricula are still structured to reinforce societal perceptions of women's role in family life. At the secondary school level, there is a strong tendency to channel girls away from subjects traditionally considered "masculine" into more "feminine" subjects like home economics and arts and crafts (Whyte, 1984; Okeke, 1986; Eshiwani, 1985; Manthorpe, 1982). Teachers are also important influences on the development of students' interests and performance (Simpson, 1978; MacMillan and May, 1979; Harding, 1985). Since they are viewed as role models, teachers can effectively communicate what they consider to be societal expectations of roles for men and women. Both male and female teachers have been shown to take the position that only boys can successfully study the sciences (Okeke, 1986; Hyde, 1989; World Bank, 1990). Science teaching and science textbooks therefore tend to be male-oriented, and there is a tendency for science teachers to draw on examples that reflect the experiences of men rather than women (UNESCO, 1994, p. 13; United Nations Economic and Social Council, 1994, p. 14). Teachers are also very insensitive to the different pedagogical needs of male and female students in the sciences. Eshiwani 's study of upper-level secondary school girls in Kenya found that they preferred to work in groups during science classes and laboratory sections, and they preferred teachers who emphasize the practical applications of science (Eshiwani, 1985, 1989). A study by Alphonsine Bouya (1994) on girls in science streams in secondary schools in Senegal also reveals that the structure of the science curriculum is not designed to address the needs of girls, who

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would prefer that these subjects be taught in a more concrete way that reflects their everyday experiences. Thus, girls in these schools show more interest in subjects like biology, medicine, and pharmacy, which show a concern for living things and the desire to put one's talents at the service of others. However, they did not show an interest in physics because they felt it related to the use of force and muscular power (p. 16). This analysis of academic factors indicates that the educational system, through the academic curriculum, reinforces gender inequalities embedded in societal norms and structures. Clearly, if women and girls are to make recognizable accomplishments in the educational process, certain social stereotypes must be abandoned and more women encouraged to pursue academic subjects of their choice, with proper curricular and pedagogical support.

Cultural and Societal Factors As well as understanding ways in which policy and academic factors shape the construction and reproduction of gender-specific differences in education, social and cultural perceptions of expected roles of men and women are also major impediments to the educational advancement of women. For example, in many African societies women are expected to participate in agricultural production and to take responsibility for domestic labor and caregiving. Typically, girls are either taken out of school or distracted from their schoolwork to undertake these tasks. Time budget studies in Burkina Faso show that no matter how much flexibility is exercised in scheduling school timetables, women and girls find it difficult to keep up with their studies because of household responsibilities (McSweeney and Freedman, 1980). The main sociocultural factors that affect women's participation and performance in education in SSA include family, religious, and social and economic influences. It is important to note, however, that although these factors may be common knowledge, there are few substantive studies available that address causal connections between them and the experiences of women in the educational process. Socioeconomic background is a major determinant of gender disparity in African educational systems, in terms of access, attainment, and accomplishment at all levels. Students who come from families with the economic means to support their education are less likely to experience gender disparities in access to education (Smock, 1981; Weis, 1980; Bardouille, 1984; Hughes and Mwira, 1989; Assie-Lumumba, 1995). Evidence from Kenya shows that both male and female students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds outperform lower-income students in all aspects of education, including the sciences (Eshiwani, 1985). However, low-income status has a more adverse effect on the education of women than on men

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from similar backgrounds. For example, studies in Zambia reveal that girls are more likely to perform poorly and drop out of school if they are from low-income households (Bardouille, 1984; Achola, 1984). These findings are also consistent with the experiences of women at the university level. Based on a sample of 295 University of Nairobi students between 1970 and 1983, the enrollment of female students was found to be strongly influenced by parental education, occupation, and income level. About twenty-eight percent of female students as compared with 7.7 percent of male students came from a high socioeconomic background; 35.1 percent of female students as compared with 30 percent of male students came from a middle socioeconomic background; and 36.8 percent of female students as compared with 62.3 percent of male students came from a low socioeconomic background (Hughes and Mwira, 1989). These figures indicate that poor families are more likely to send their sons than their daughters to college. Another study of University of Ife students in Nigeria concluded that in spite of the relatively privileged background of female students, their educational and occupational aspirations were significantly lower than those of their male counterparts (Biraimah, 1980). There are also families that for religious or moral reasons arrive at decisions that impede the education of their daughters. Although there may be considerable variation between and within countries, Muslim regions and countries in SSA, for example, tend to have more rigidly defined gender role norms and practices, which affect access and attainment rates for girls in the educational system. A UNESCO report notes that the predominance of male teachers in the classroom is a deterrent for parents who prefer that their teenage daughters be taught by female teachers (UNESCO, 1994, p. 13). Some parents worry that an educated daughter, particularly one trained in a nontraditional field, has fewer chances of finding a husband, bearing a child, or maintaining their moral values (Bowman & Anderson, 1982; Robertson, 1986; Achola, 1984; Dorothy Njeuma, 1993). Njeuma (1993, p. 127) also suggests that African men are less likely to want to marry women who are more educated than themselves or whose jobs would not leave them enough time to care for the children or the household. The growing incidence of high dropout rates among women and girls in African educational institutions because of pregnancy is another important sociocultural problem that begs for more investigative studies. According to a UNESCO report (1994), about 18 percent of African women ages 15 to 19 give birth each year, as compared with 8 percent in Latin America and 3 percent in Asia in the same age group. In Botswana, for example, 75 percent and 85 percent of dropouts from junior and senior secondary-level girls' schools, respectively, are due to early pregnancy. Such students must wait for twelve months following delivery before they can return to school (UNESCO, 1994, p. 12). These findings are also consistent

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with other studies conducted in Swaziland and Kenya (Wheldon, 1986; Eshiwani, 1985). In an effort to deal with the problem of teenage pregnancy in schools and the wastage resulting from this, the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in Botswana established an educational center for adolescent women in 1988. The purpose was to sensitize decisionmakers and local communities to the problems of teenage pregnancy and to demonstrate a positive approach to the problem by offering these young women an opportunity to finish their studies (UNESCO, 1994, p. 12). The preceding discussion of sociocultural factors affecting the education of women and girls in SSA suggests that these factors are very complex and deep-seated. A combined policy approach involving state, institutional, and community support systems would create more gender-sensitive educational programs designed to reduce gender imbalances and to foster more constructive participation of men and women in development goals.

Conclusion This chapter has examined current trends in gender-based efforts in secondary- and tertiary-level education in sub-Saharan Africa, assessed which factors contribute to maintaining sex-gender hierarchies in educational outcomes, and discussed the labor market implications of these trends. While it is clear that in spite of the crippling economic conditions experienced by most sub-Saharan African countries over the past twenty years (efforts have been made not to endanger positive gains in access to education for women), there has not been a corresponding improvement in reducing gender imbalances in the attainment process, irrespective of economic growth levels. Indeed, the higher the level of educational attainment, the greater the gender differential in the outcomes. This trend is most noticeable in nontraditional disciplines such as the sciences, which are critical pressure points for future development in these societies. It has also been observed that in many countries women and girls from upperand middle-class backgrounds are more likely to benefit from the opportunity structure than their counterparts from less privileged backgrounds. Overall, the evidence suggests that educational institutions are not structured to be gender neutral but, in fact, are designed to reproduce conventional gender identities of masculinity and femininity. This is clearly manifested in the comparative advantage men and boys have in access to secondary- and tertiary-level education and to more and better jobs in the labor market. It is manifested also in the implicit assumption that women enter fields of study that are likely to complement their expected roles as caregivers in the household. It cannot be overstated that fundamental restructuring of educational policies and institutional environments is critical in order to break down

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these barriers. Ultimately, there can be no substitute for strong commitment and action on the part of governments to promote more genderequitable educational policies if African societies are to be seriously competitive in the global economy of the future. Policymakers, educational institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and local communities are key actors in the management of these relations. Their collaborative efforts need to foster more gender-sensitive, enabling conditions that recognize and validate women's contributions and achievements, irrespective of regional or socioeconomic background, and they need to nurture, draw upon, and utilize women's productive skills and abilities. Program initiatives such as those of the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) are good examples of such collaborative efforts. If action is not taken to institute policies and program initiatives that address issues such as the gender distribution in student enrollment, subsidies for schooling beyond the primary level, teenage pregnancy, enforcement of civil laws to protect women from sexual harassment and violence, as well as more gender-sensitive teacher training-especially in nontraditional disciplines such as the sciences-the prevailing conditions are not likely to be altered. These are the challenges that face African women in any effort to transform the patriarchal structure of the current educational systems in sub-Saharan Africa. African women need to examine how to uncover and transform these existing patterns of inequality in their educational systems and to vigorously continue their efforts to create positive representations of their experiences and future prospects in the region.

Note I would like to thank Ivy Kennelly and Seth Beoku-Betts for assisting me with preparation of tables and research materials for this chapter.

References Achola, P. P. W. (1984). Women and equality in Zambia: Trends in educational opportunities and outcomes. Zambia Educational Review 5, no. 2, 105-123. Anderson-Levitt, K., M. N., Bloch, and A. Soumare. (1994). Girls' experiences in classrooms in Guinea. Final report to the World Bank, July. Assie-Lumumba, N. T. (1995). Gender and education in Africa: A new agenda for development. Africa Notes (April), 1-4. Bardouille, R. (1984 ). The mobility patterns of the University of Zambia graduates: The case of the 1976 cohort of graduates. Zambia Educational Review 5,no.l, 10-35. Beoku-Betts, J., and B. I. Logan. (1994). Developing science and technology in sub-Saharan Africa: Gender disparities in the education and employment

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process. Science in Africa: Women leading from strength. pp. 117-164. Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Biraimah, K. L. (1980). The impact of Western schools on girls' expectations: A Togolese case. Comparative Education Review 6, 196-208. Boit, M. K. ( 1986). The relationship of teacher behavior to student achievement in high and low achievement high schools in Nairobi, Kenya. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon. Bouya, A. (1994). African girls and the school science and technology curricula. Dakar, Senegal: UNESCO Regional Office. Bowman, M. J., and C. A. Anderson. (1982). The participation of women in education in the third world. In G. P. Kelly and C. M. Elliott (eds.), Women's education in the third world: Comparative perspectives, pp. 11-30. Albany: State University of New York Press. Byrne, E. M. (1990). Gender in education. Avon, UK: Multi-Lingual Matters. DAE (Donors to African Education). (1994). A statistical profile of education in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s. Paris: UNESCO. Duncan, W. A. (1989). Botswana. In G. P. Kelly (ed.), International handbook of women's education, pp. 3-23. New York: Greenwood Press. Eshiwani, G. S. (1982). A study of women's access to higher education with a special reference to science and math education. Working paper no. 5003. Nairobi: Bureau of Educational Research, Kenyatta University College. - - - . (1985). Women's access to higher education in Kenya: A study of opportunities and attainment in science and mathematics education. Journal of East African Research and Development 15, 91-110. - - - . (1989). Kenya. In G. P. Kelly (ed.), International handbook of women's education. New York: Greenwood Press. Forge, J. W. (1989). Science and technology in Africa. London: Longman. Graham-Brown, S. (1991). Education in the developing world: Conflict and crisis. London and New York: Longman. Harding, J. (1985). Girls and women in secondary and higher education: Science for only a few. Prospects 15, no. 4, 553-564. Hartnett, T., and W. Heneveld. (1993). Statistical indicators of female participation in education in sub-Saharan Africa. Washington, D.C.: Technical Department, Africa Region, World Bank. Hinchcliffe, K. (1987). Higher education in sub-Saharan Africa. London: Croom Helm. Hughes, R., and K. Mwira. (1989). Kenyan women, higher education, and the labor market. Comparative Education 25, no. 2, 179-195. Hyde, K. A. L. (1989). Improving women's education in sub-Saharan Africa: A review of the literature. Washington, D.C.: Education and Employment Division, Population and Human Resources Department, World Bank. ILO (Jobs and Skills Programme for Africa). (1990). African Employment Report, no. 2. Addis Ababa. Lee, V. E., and M. E. Lockheed. (1996). The effects of single-sex schooling on student achievement and attitudes in Nigeria. In M. Bloch, J. Beoku-Betts, and B. R. Tabachnick (eds.), Women and education in sub-Saharan Africa. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers. MacMillan, J. H., and M. J. May. (1979). A study of factors influencing attitudes to science of junior high school students. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 16, no. 3, 217-222. Manthorpe, C. A. (1982). Men's science, women's science, or science? Some issues related to the study of girls' science education. Studies in Science Education 9, 65-80.

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McSweeney, B. G., and M. Freedman. (1980). Lack of time as an obstacle to women's education: The case of Upper Volta (Part 2). Comparative Education Review 24, no. 2, S124-S139. Nammudu, K. (1993). Gender perspectives in the transformation of Africa: Challenges to the African university as a model to society. Paper presented at the Eighth General Conference and Twenty-fifth Anniversary Celebration of the Association of African Universities, Accra, Ghana, January 18-23. Njeuma, D. L. (1993). An overview of women's education in Africa. In J. K. Conway and S. C. Bourque (eds.), The politics of women's education: Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, pp. 123-131. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Obisodun, B. (1991). Women in science and technology development in Nigeria. In A.M. Faruqui, M. H. A. Hassan, and G. Sandri (eds.), The role of women in the development of science and technology in the third world. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing. Okeke, E. A. C. (1986). Attracting women into science-based occupations: Problems and prospects. Science and Public Policy (June), 147-154. Perlez, J. (1991). Kenyans do some soul searching after the rape of seventy-one school girls. New York Times, July 29, A1 and A4. Robertson, C. (1986). Women's education and class formation in Africa, 1950-1980. In C. Robertson and I. Berger (eds.), Women and class in Africa, pp. 92-113. New York: Africana Publishing Company. Sara-Lafosse, V. (1992). Coeducational settings and educational and social outcomes in Peru. InN. Stromquist (ed.), Women and education in Latin America: Knowledge, power, and change, pp. 87-105. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Simpson, R. C. (1978). Relating student feelings to achievement in science. In M. B. Rowe (ed.), What research says to the science teacher, p. 1. Washington, D.C.: National Science Teachers Association. Smock, A. C. (1981). Women's education in developing countries: Opportunities and outcomes. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers. Stromquist, N. P. (1989). Recent developments in women's education: Closer to a better social order? In R. Gallin, M. Aronoff, and A. Fergusson (eds.), The women and international development annual, vol. 1, pp. 103-130. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. United Nations. (1995). Beijing declaration and platform for action adopted by the Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development and Peace (unedited advance text). Beijing: United Nations, September 15. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). (1989). Education and training in the 1990s: Developing countries' needs and strategies. New York: Education Development Center, UNDP. United Nations Economic and Social Council. (1994). African platform for action adopted by the Fifth Regional Conference on Women. Held at Dakar, Senegal. E/CN.6/1995/1, November 16-23. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). 1992. Statistical yearbook. Paris: UNESCO. - - - . (1994). Education of girls and women: Beyond access. Contribution of UNESCO to the Fifth African Regional Conference on Women, Dakar, Senegal, November 16-23. Walker, E. M. (1994). Statistical indicators of female participation in education: An update. For distribution at the NGO Forum, African Preparatory Conference on Women, Dakar, Senegal. Workshop on Girls' Education, Human Resource and Poverty Division, Technical Department, Africa Region, World Bank, November 14.

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Weis, L. (1980). Women and education in Ghana: Some problems of assessing change. International Journal of Women's Studies 3, no. 5, 431-453. Wheldon, A. E. ( 1986). Representation of girls in school education in Swaziland. Swaziland Institute of Educational Research Bulletin 7, 65-77. Whyte, J. (1984). Encouraging girls into science and technology: Some European initiatives. Paris: UNESCO. Wolpe, A. M. (1978). Education and the sexual division of labor. In A. Kohn and W. Wolpe (eds.), Feminism and materialism: Women and modes of production, pp. 290-328. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. World Bank. (1988). Education in sub-Saharan Africa: Policies for adjustment, revitalization, and expansion. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. - - - . (1990). Kenya: The role of women in economic development: A World Bank country study. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.

9~ "Education Is My Husband": Marriage, Gender, and Reproduction in Northern Tanzania Amy Stambach

In this chapter I address the cultural context of girls' education in northern Tanzania by focusing on changing dimensions of marriage, gender, and social reproduction and on recent socioeconomic changes that have facilitated girls' participation in secondary and higher education. I focus on the Chagga living in Kilimanjaro region, among whom schooling has long been valued as an important avenue for upward social mobility. Drawing on field research conducted from September 1991 through January 1993 in Machame, Tanzania, and on a host of studies on girls' schooling in Africa (Bledsoe, 1990; Deabster and Stambach, 1994; Kerner, 1986; Kinyanjui, 1993; Mbilinyi, 1973; TADREG, 1990), I explore here the tensions and transformations that are implicit in discussions and debates about girls' and women's education in northern Tanzania. Early anthropological research on marriage in sub-Saharan Africa described marriage as universal and as culminating in the birth of children (Evans-Pritchard, 1965; Radcliffe-Brown, 1950). More recently, however, the premise that marriage occurs as a series of contractual arrangements between exogamous, corporate lineages and that it necessarily culminates with the birth of children has been questioned (Dyson-Hudson and Meekers, 1995; Gage and Bledsoe, 1994). In fact, some studies have suggested that corporate lineages are becoming increasingly nuclear, that singleparent households are emerging to replace extended ones, and that relations of romantic love are providing the basis of African marriage (Guyer, 1994; Meekers, 1994; Oppong, 1980). Whether or not such changes are signs of Westernization has been much debated, and yet such debates often overlook the fact that changes emerge from cultural ideals about gender, personhood, and communitythat new marriage preferences and family structures build upon local ideas about habitation, economic exchange, and reproduction. With notable exceptions (e.g., Bledsoe and Pison, 1994; Comaroff, 1980; Parkin and Nyamwaya, 1987), few have examined how changing marriage preferences

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today relate to cultural ideas about marriage or how sociocultural beliefs about marriage and gender facilitate (or do not facilitate) girls' and women's abilities and decisions to defer or avoid marriage and continue their education. The 1990 United Nations report on African marriage, for instance, assumes that marriage remains a universal preference and that where conjugal relations are becoming increasingly nuclear, Westernization and the forces of modernization are at work (United Nations, 1990). I argue otherwise: changing family structures and marriage practices are not necessarily an indication of the espousal of Western values; rather, they derive, at least in part, from local cultural ideals and practices. How marital changes and emerging preferences build on local cultural ideals is linked to wider sociopolitical and economic changes in the broader society. I examine these relations here with reference to Chagga cultural ideas about marriage, kinship, and social reproduction and to sociopolitical factors that have influenced local communities' decisions and abilities to invest in girls' education. I show that, unlike older women, some younger women in northern Tanzania prefer to avoid marriage and to set up households on their own, without husbands. These preferences constitute some of the most distinguishing characteristics between young and old, schooled and unschooled, and urban-oriented and rurally located persons. They are related to schooling and to changing ideas about inheritance. The situation I describe is unique in that the number of private secondary schools in the region increased at a rate greater than in any other area of the country from 1986 to 1992, thereby creating more education and employment opportunities for young women (British Council, 1992, p. 6). At the same time, however, the substitution of education for marriage among women living in Kilimanjaro region is representative of a national trend in which educated women are moving increasingly into professional positions. In describing the political and cultural contexts of Chagga marriage, I demonstrate ways in which schooling constitutes a form of social inheritance for both boys and girls and how Chagga ideas about women's lifelong connections to natal families influence decisions to enroll girls in school and to delay marriage. This approach highlights the importance of agency and the role of individuals who work through established social networks and institutional structures to shape and define their worlds. Although it is often identified as symbolic or interpretive, it grounds analysis in the combination of economic relations and ideations, not solely in the latter, as strictly interpretive approaches often do. Following a brief recounting of a conversation that served to motivate me to write this piece, I discuss the institution of Chagga marriage, recent trends in girls' school enrollments, and changing ideas of marriage and reproduction that are prevalent among younger generations.

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A Piece of Conversation A Chagga friend's comment has long intrigued me: "Education is my husband," she said, in response to a Chagga man's suggestion that she get married soon, "before it is too late." Four of us sat eating dinner, talking about marriage and schooling and about my friend's particular situation. "You are almost too old to have children!" protested this man. But Eshimuni,l a 27-year-old university graduate who was herself a successful college teacher, assured him that she would never marry, yet she would (if she could) have children. At first glance this piece of conversation appears to touch upon crosscultural feminist themes. Eshimuni's remark might have been said (albeit slightly differently) by a university graduate in the United States, or by a woman in Sweden, Germany, Japan, or England, concerned about starting and managing a career. What is particular about these remarks, however, is the way they reveal changing aspects of marriage and social reproduction in northern Tanzania. What did Eshimuni mean by saying that education was her husband? Why did she imply that schooling was a substitute for marriage? And what various influences were both motivating and preventing her from having children without a husband? Eshimuni's suggestion that education was her husband provides a provocative angle from which to explore cultural assumptions about marriage, education, and the possibilities for their reconstrual. People sometimes view with skepticism the growing trend among schooled young women to avoid or defer marriage, and yet young women like Eshimuni who express their desires to deferif not replace marriage with-education are increasingly prompted to voice their plans openly, as Eshimuni did during the course of our dinner conversation. Judging from many conversations I had with other Chagga women, Eshimuni was not alone in her sentiment about marriage and education. Although she and others represented a clear minority among the larger community I came to know, their stories reveal changing ideas about marriage in Machame and about the ways women draw upon their schooling to articulate new visions of family and motherhood. Eshimuni's view was expressed by others who sought to use their education as a marital substitute. Mushi, a Chagga woman who taught at a girls' secondary school near the house where I lived in Machame, for instance, was interested in finding a man to make her pregnant, but she was not herself interested in getting married (Deabster and Stambach, 1994, p. 26). The boarding school where Mushi taught, she said, provided her with all the benefits she would otherwise attain by being married to a man: a house, a garden, an income, and an occasional travel allowance. And Emi Shoo, a young woman who studied two years in secondary school and who worked at a maize-grinding

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mill in Moshi Town (the capital of Kilimanjaro region), told me she never wanted to get married but that she still wanted to have children. Not surprisingly, schooling is an important factor in influencing girls' and women's decisions to delay-or to consider completely avoidinggetting married and having children. An abundance of literature has discussed the relationship between schooling and childbearing practices (see, for example, Lloyd, 1993; TADREG, 1990) and has discerned a direct relationship between schooling and women's decisions to control fertility. Although the demographic data need not be disputed, certain interpretations might. Underlying some of this research (though not all) is the assumption that school curriculum changes local practices, that it teaches young women rational arguments for limiting the number of children they bear, and that it instills in them an awareness of reproductive alternatives and technologies that can improve their lives. Like the United Nations (1990) report mentioned above, such studies assume changing conjugal relations in Africa are the results of Westernizing forces and that often purely economic factors drive decisions about education and marriage, to the exclusion of cultural considerations. Putting aside here the cultural values about development and progress that undergird some of these arguments, I ask if it is in fact the school curriculum-that is, the content of what is taught or supposed to be taughtthat bears upon changing household and family relations, or if it is more broadly the implicit values of the school setting and all that the school signifies locally (modernity, internationalism, urbanity, development) that weigh into young women's decisions to marry or not, to have children or not. 2 One of the aims of girls' home economics education is to prepare girls for the institution of marriage and to make them conscientious housewives and mothers (Stambach, 1996a, chap. 7). Interestingly, however, few schools have regular home economics instructors, and schoolgirls rarely study the lessons that are outlined in the official syllabus. Indeed, Eshimuni commented to me that she had only about a dozen home economics lessons in all of her seventeen years as a student (seven years of primary school, six years of secondary school, four years at a university). In light of the lack of regular instruction in home economics for girls, it would seem that girls' ideas about marriage and family derive not from the curricular content of their home economics lessons but from another place. When girls do receive home economics instruction, this instruction typically emphasizes the value of schooling in "improving" the quality of married life (by teaching girls how to keep families healthy and productive), not how to substitute education for marriage, as Eshimuni hoped to do. Thus, the influence of schooling lies in what the school signifies locally, not in its literal content. Schooling constitutes and provides an institutional forum though which persons, like Eshimuni, might operate to shape and define their worlds. It is, to paraphrase Pierre Bourdieu, a "strategy-generating"

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institution "enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations" (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72). It is not, in contrast, a set of categories or lessons (like a syllabus) that prescribes social behavior. If we consider for a moment the broader Chagga institutions of marriage and inheritance, we might gain some perspective on what Eshimuni means when she says, "Education is my husband."

Gender and Identity N. Thomas Hakansson (1994) suggests that changing forms of East African marriage and cohabitation must be viewed in terms of politicoeconomic factors and social-structural ideas about gender and kinship. He distinguishes between African societies where married women maintain close links with their natal families and societies where married women are "immanently" associated (Kopytoff, 1990) with their husbands' families. The former are identified by a high rate of divorce, low bridewealth, and women's control of property; the latter by low divorce rate, high bridewealth, and women's lack of property ownership (see also Southall, 1960). Although one may well argue that identifying African societies as either one group or the other is impossible-as is perhaps identifying the boundaries of "an African society"-the distinction is useful nonetheless in recognizing that gender relations within patrilineal societies are not everywhere the same, but that relations vary, often in relation to local cultural cosmologies and to particular politico-economic opportunities. Among the Chagga of Kilimanjaro-and especially among the Wamachame (a subgroup within the larger Chagga community)-women maintain strong ties with their natal families after marriage. If we evaluate the Chagga according to the scheme Hakansson has set out, they are similar to the Ganda, the Soga, and the Toro of Uganda, among whom women's reproductive powers and personal properties are not entirely transferred to their husbands after marriage but remain an integral part of their identities throughout their married lives (Hakansson, 1994, p. 519). Machame women continue not only to send food and money to their parents but also to maintain ritualized relationships with their brothers and paternal relatives. This lifelong closeness has earned Machame women a reputation among other Chagga living on Mount Kilimanjaro for being a particularly strong-willed, even stubborn, group of women. Many Chagga men claim not to want to marry Machame women. "No, don't marry them," I heard a man from the eastern part of the mountain advise a younger Chagga man. "They will control you until you die. You know, they have excessive power." This "power" is worth exploring. More recently, it would seem, women derive their social power from formal schooling. They deploy their schooling

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as a kind of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1977, pp. 183-184) to distinguish themselves socioeconomically from their unschooled peers. Girls make up more than half of the graduates of local secondary schools in Machame,3 and a disproportionate number of Chagga women are represented at national universities. 4 But these basic statistics need to be understood in terms of Machame culture: What is it that motivates Machame families to send their daughters to school? And what is it that encourages girls to complete schooling before getting married? Caroline Bledsoe (1990) has described how marriage and schoolgirl sexuality are embedded in Sierra Leonian ideas about the family and reproduction and how marriage relations in Sierra Leone are increasingly difficult to identify: what appears from some angles to be a patron-client relationship between an older man and a schoolgirl whom he supports by paying school fees is also a courting relationship that appears to be one step in a longer marriage process. Relationships are similarly culturally embedded and often socially ambiguous, in Kilimanjaro region. Although schoolgirls often have older J?oyfriends and although some educated women like Eshimuni want to have children out of wedlock, their actions and decisions are often eschewed by elders who interpret such behavior as an unfortunate sign of the times. I contend that what motivates Eshimuni's comment about marriage and schooling and what motivates some women's decisions to have children without formalizing all of the stages that socially constitute marriage is a particular sociocultural ideology of marriage and descent that is common among Chagga living in Machame.

Chagga Society, History, and Culture Chagga trace their ancestry to lineage lands on Mount Kilimanjaro. Their territory comprises the Hai, Moshi Rural, and Rombo districts of Kilimanjaro region-a volcanic area that is rich in rainfall and can support a high level of agriculture. For many of the approximately one million people living in these districts, schooling is an important way to enter the national political economy. Many graduates of secondary schools, universities, and teacher-training colleges hold positions of socioeconomic power within the church or, increasingly, in private business, and although some people maintain that there has been an unofficial effort by members of the upper ranks of government to prevent Chagga from dominating national politics (in the interest of maintaining ethnic plurality), educated Chagga nonetheless have been influential in national programs.s Chaggas' interest in schooling extends several generations into the past. Chagga chiefs living on the mountain at the turn of the century recognized the importance of schooling for entering into-and controllingan emerging cash economy (Lawuo, 1984). Mangi Mamkinga, chief of the

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Wamachame at the time of early European contact, encouraged Lutheran missionaries to establish a school and a church near his chiefly court. Missionary Johannes Rebmann, for instance, records how Mamkinga made it impossible for him to continue his missionary journeys elsewhere, insisting that Rebmann teach Mamkinga the "magic" of the Bible (recorded in Krapf, 1860, pp. 259-261). Although chiefly control of early mission schools was quickly subverted through a system of indirect rule-a system in which the British administration ostensibly appointed "native authorities" to administer schools but in fact administered these authorities through a powerful colonial bureaucracy-schools remained important institutions for the development of a new Chagga political elite (Geiger, 1972). For various reasons, the British colonial administration favored the Wamachame over other groups living on the mountain. Some maintain this was because the Machame chief was adept in accommodating colonial coffee producers; others argue that it was because the Machame environment was amenable to European settlers (see Lema, 1969; Stahl, 1964). No matter the reason, European investment in Machame resulted in a comparatively high level of infrastructure. For the past several decades, people of Machame have enjoyed a tarmac road and electricity-amenities only recently extended to other areas of the mountain. More recently, a water project has been initiated in parts of Machame to bring piped water into people's homes. This system supplements and ideally replaces people's dependency on the irrigation canals that channel polluted water through coffee farms and near cattle stalls. Such infrastructure has contributed to a degree of jealousy (wivu) among Chagga who do not live in Machame but who observe its many privileges. Of course, alternatively, such privileges instill pride in Wamachame, many of whom see these facilities as testaments to their hard work and diplomatic skills in dealing with colonists and, more recently, with foreign investors and donors. This pride is part-and-parcel of what non-Machame men identify as so "powerful" or "dangerous" in Machame women. It is Machame women's apparently excessive pride-their excessive personal attachment to and affection for their natal homelands and families and their constant remarking about the "comparatively advanced" level of infrastructure and schooling available in Machame-that so offends the non-Machame men who see Machame women as "controlling" and "threatening" and provokes them to say things such as, "Never marry a woman from Machame; she will control you until you die." Indigenous Chagga social organization was first recorded by Bruno Gutmann in the early 1900s (Gutmann, 1926, 1932). To a degree, this organization continues to inform Chagga beliefs and practices about marriage, kinship, and social reproduction, particularly at the household level. According to Gutmann, there were about thirty semiautonomous chiefdoms on the mountain in the 1920s (Gutmann, 1926, p. 1; Moore, 1986, p. 17),

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each of which contained many exogamous patrilineages. These exogamous lineages and, in particular, minimal lineages6 within them, formed the basis of local politics (Moore, 1986, p. 19) and endured the administrative reworkings of the colonial and independent governments. Today, corporate decisions and family administration are conducted through the minimal lineage, not through the (now legally abolished) institution of chiefship. Descent within these localized lineages was-and to a degree, still is-reckoned through the inheritance of land. Last-born sons inherited fathers' houses and the immediate banana grove (kihamba) surrounding it. First-born sons inherited land away from the house-usually the largest portion of their fathers' banana groves. Sons in between inherited other land, if indeed there was any left to inherit. This land itself was not transferable, as evidenced by the Chagga saying, "Father has a cow that cannot be lent: the land" (Raum, 1940, p. 219). The patrilineal inheritance of land does not necessarily mean that women had no inheritance, yet it does indicate some of the material differences between women's and men's heritable rights. Married women, to an extent, maintained rights and sustained obligations within their fathers' households. Marriage was established through a process of ritualized mbege (banana beer) prestations. Following a pattern of three, sometimes four, prestations (gift-giving), women moved from natal households to their husbands' compounds. The continued transaction of cattle after relocation secured male rights in the woman's offspring and ensured a cultural pattern of patrilineal descent. The birth of the first child was marked with a gift of a heifer to the woman's maternal uncle; the birth of the second child was marked with the gift of a heifer to the woman's brother. Interesting here is that ritualized relations were maintained between the woman and these relatives throughout her life. Portions of meat that her husband slaughtered were given to her brother and paternal uncle, and although it is arguable that these prestations reflect her husband's obligations to her family, they also reflect the woman's control over her reproductive power and over her husband's claims to their children as a function of her own lineage relations. Further, the enduring connection of a woman to her natal family is evidenced in one particular ritual. The heifers that are transferred from the husband's to the wife's family upon the birth of their first and second children retained special significance to the Chagga. When these cattle first calved, the milk of the cows was given first to the children (boys and girls) of the woman's natal family-a gift that signifies the woman's natal family's embodiment of her new social situation as wife and mother.

Land, Lineage, and Female Inheritance It is against this cultural background of Chagga society, history, and culture

that I want to return to Eshimuni's comment, "Education is my husband"

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and to consider how education constitutes a form of inheritance for some Chagga women. Land on Mount Kilimanjaro has been scarce for several decades. In the past, lineages were able to sustain themselves by relocating on new plots of land, by planting bananas on the kihamba, and eventually by burying their dead in the banana grove (Moore, 1986, p. 81 ). This long-term process in effect "seeded" lineages on new plots of land and ensured that middle sons who inherited no land from their fathers would nonetheless be able to stake out new lands, to farm, and to sustain minimal lineages of their own. Little (if any) new land is today left to be claimed and cultivated, and "sons are wandering the village, waiting for their fathers to die," as one older man once put it to me (see Stambach, l996b ). Sons are waiting to inherit the land that their fathers currently cultivate. Unless young men are able to go to school and find wage employment after graduation, their only hope is to inherit the kihamba after their fathers have passed away. With land now scarce, it is simply impossible for every Chagga male to cultivate his own plot or for every married Chagga female to relocate virilocally, that is, to move to her husband's plot. One alternative to planting new banana groves or to inheriting lineage lands is to send children to school, where parents hope they will acquire skills that will bring wealth of another kind. Lack of land translates directly into motivation to go or to send one's children to school. Indeed, as one Chagga man recounted to me recently, his father explained to him that since there was no land left for him to inherit-no land for him as the first-born son to cultivate and call his own-he would have to go to school and find another way of making a living and starting a family. He told me, "People used to say when I was growing up [in the 1940s], 'Schooling is your inheritance!"' Now, of course, schooling is virtually the only inheritance a child may receive, the land having been subdivided to such a degree that some houses and kihamba occupy only about a quarter of an acre.? The shift from land to schooling reflects not only an economic transition but broader sociocultural transformations. In other words, it is not only the food from the land that is important to Chagga sociality but the relations and rituals that are sustained through the land and encoded in metaphors of cultivation. As mentioned, ancestors were once regularly buried on the land, and their graves were (and in many cases remain) powerful ritual sites. By shifting and expanding the locus of inheritance to include not only the land but also the school, Chagga expand as well the range of institutions through which to express and negotiate social relations-including those of marriage, kinship, and gender. The alternative of going to school thus brings with it a range of social changes closely associated with the local cultural economy and with gendered ideas of reproduction. Because land is, or was, so central to Chagga culture and to social reproduction, changes in land tenure and agricultural practices affect changes in many sociocultural realms. Not least of these changes is girls'

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participation in schooling and their potential to "inherit education" like boys. In light of the fact that girls' secondary school enrollments exceed those of boys, it would seem that girls are now inclined to have a more equal chance at inheritance than in earlier days and that even though they do not inherit land, as their fathers and grandfathers did before them, they now stand a chance to inherit education, like their brothers, male cousins, and other male agnates. In certain cases, like Eshimuni's, daughters have the same educational opportunities as sons. In addition, her parents wanted their daughters and sons to attend university. Eshimuni, the first-born child, had graduated from university. Her younger brother had himself completed only secondary school, and her younger sister was still enrolled in a prestigious, government-sponsored girls' secondary school. In the context of a sociocultural system in which natal families retain a degree of control over married women's economic and reproductive powers, it is understandable that families should also encourage daughters to go to school, for whatever benefits daughters gain from schooling, daughters will, in return, be expected to remit resources home to their natal families. What, then, might Eshimuni have meant when she said that schooling was her husband? Might she have meant that instead of marrying and gaining access to resources through the alliance with her husband, she would instead use her schooling to find a job and obtain these resources herself? And might she have meant that she would set herself up as head of an independent household by claiming an inheritance-education-of her own? Perhaps. Eshimuni was, after all, herself a government employee, an instructor at a teacher-training college in Kilimanjaro region. As a civil servant, she (like Mushi, a secondary school teacher mentioned previously) received free housing, a salary (albeit minimal), and a transportation allowance-some of the resources that would have otherwise come from a husband. She was also in a position to sell her services as a tutor to students for considerable money and in so doing make extra income that she could use to buy music cassettes or to have clothing tailor-made. The implications of her comment are broader than those mentioned in the previous paragraph, however. Eshimuni went on to say that she did not value cattle, banana beer (mbege), or the kihamba-some of the salient signs of Chagga identity that constitute the media of marriage exchange. She did not want any hypothetical husband to give bridewealth (masaa ya ukwe, in Kimachame) to her father, but preferred instead to acquire commodities like a car, a cassette player, a TV, and a VCR by earning them herself, by buying them with money she earned from her salary as a college teacher. Indeed, she went on to say that "men don't like gatekeepers these days; they don't like women who sit around at home, waiting for them to bring home nice things." Instead, she said, men prefer women who go out and acquire these luxury goods themselves. To Eshimuni, this

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seemed to imply that women were becoming more like men, that they were able to bring home the money, and in some cases (like hers) did not even have to marry: education could be their husbands. What is interesting here is that the cultural media that signify inheritance and that are used to transact bridewealth are taking on new formsas luxury items-and, accordingly, these items are coming to signify new social relations. This is not unusual, of course. The monetization of social relations in particular settings in sub-Saharan Africa has been noted by many others (see, for instance, Hutchinson, 1992; Masquelier, 1993; Weiss, 1996). What is interesting here is the way schooling becomes a factor in this process. As I noted above, it is not the content of lessons that necessarily empowers women like Eshimuni but the cultural and economic capital that schooling provides as a marker of social class and emerging gendered differences. Characteristic of this "new Tanzanian woman" (Mbilinyi, 1972) in the 1990s are expressions of new ideas of personhood and the assertion of political and economic autonomy in arenas traditionally controlled by men. Young, professionally oriented women make independent decisions, earn incomes of their own, and disregard male elders and other authorities. Insofar as patterns of inheritance typically favored sons over daughters-in the past, and continuing today-women's plans not to marry but instead to establish their own households circumvent established channels of inheritance and reconfigure the shape of Chagga families. They also change typical gender relations and women's roles within households. Men are "traditionally" in control of the formal channels of social reproduction, but in a context in which women decide their futures and arbitrate their own inheritance, the control of reproduction slips from men to women, at least in some hoped-for cases, such as Eshimuni's. To many Chagga, this is unacceptable, and women like Eshimuni are chastised for their lack of respect and for entertaining "European" ways (Stambach, forthcoming). Nonetheless, this "modern" view is growing in certain circles, and understanding it is critical to understanding how marriage and kinship are being redefined in relation to people's ideas about schooling.

Socioeconomic and Political Factors In addition to the sociocultural aspects of Chagga culture that I have dwelled on in the preceding paragraphs, socioeconomic factors and recent political changes have also been important in facilitating girls' participation in secondary and higher education. Most notably, pressures placed on Tanzania by the international community have prompted the government to allow private organizations to build and manage their own secondary schools. This has greatly benefited Chagga communities, though it has

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served further to differentiate wealthy communities from poor (Sarnoff, 1987, makes a similar point). For the past several years, Tanzania's political and economic climate has been hopeful. In contrast to empty store shelves in 1984 and 1985, shops are now generally full of basic commodities like soaps, oils, and sugar, and increasingly are supplied with luxury and specialty items: cosmetics, imported clothing, appliances, electronics, and the like. From some angles, the privatization of the economy-and the relatively recent legalization of the private ownership of foreign currency-appears to be a positive stimulation of the national economy. It has enabled wealthy business people, including elites living in Machame who have ties to church and other internationally based organizations, to invest in private schooling. It has provided the chance for the Chagga to revive their activities in education and to counter policies that for nearly two decades mandated that their enrollments in secondary schools be based on quotas, not qualifications (Malekela, 1983). From other angles, however, recent economic changes appear to be less successful. Among other effects, economic liberalization has contributed to dramatic currency adjustments and to subsequent inflation (Rosch, 1992; Stein, 1992, pp. 70-7 5) and to the increasing disparity between communities which are able to invest in private schooling and communities that cannot (Roy-Campbell, 1992). The Chagga, because they have had a strong economy that has profited from coffee production and, increasingly, from tourism, have been able to pool collective resources to invest in private schooling. Other ethnic groups, particularly those in southern regions, have less access to foreign currency and less opportunity to send children to private schools, where fees are often high. As a consequence, the liberalization of the Tanzanian economy that began in 1985 facilitated growth in the private sector and made it possible for communities on Mount Kilimanjaro to appeal to donor organizations like churches and mosques to sponsor new schools. (Although these organizations do not necessarily fund new schools, their official status as managers of new schools is necessary for government recognition.) By 1992, the number of secondary schools in Tanzania had increased twofold from 1986 (British Council, 1992, p. 6). In northern Tanzania, this rate was even higher, at 112 percent (British Council, 1992). The Chagga took advantage of new investment opportunities to send more of their daughters to school. As Marjorie Mbilinyi notes (in Chapter 13) about employment opportunities for school graduates in urban areas and throughout Tanzania, educational opportunities for some groups have laid the groundwork for others.

Conclusion My argument, then, is that schooling constitutes a form of social inheritance for both girls and boys. It offers girls a chance to be like men, by acquiring

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the cultural capital, a job, and an income that makes them independent of a husband's income. By looking at the structural positions of girls in Chagga families-by considering, as I have done briefly herein, that girls maintain lifelong ties to their natal families and that Machame women are regarded as embodying "excessive power"-1 have shown that there is a complex array of local ideological and cultural factors to be considered when thinking about education. Further, economic and political policies are influential in affecting educational opportunity, and sociocultural beliefs and practices operate in conjunction with politics and economics. Rather than assuming that schools are culturally monolithic institutions that replace and supersede local practices, my discussion illustrates how schooling relates to local ideas of inheritance, gender, and kinship. Marriage and inheritance are important concepts to people in Machame, and even when articulating social distinctions and making claims about schooling and new ways of life, many Chagga continue to use basic concepts like marriage and inheritance to condense critical information about Chagga society, history, and culture.

Notes 1. This is a pseudonym, as are all names in this chapter. 2. Maurice Bloch (1993) and Jean Lave (personal communication, November 30, 1994) have also raised this issue. 3. A figure derived from school surveys I conducted from 1991 to 1993. 4. This exact figure is not available officially, since data on students' "ethnic" (kabila) backgrounds are not kept as part of university records. Nonetheless, students and faculty at the University of Dar es Salaam and at Sokoine University generally maintain that Chagga women are overrepresented at the university level, as compared with their total representation in the national population (which is also an unofficial figure; national data on ethnicity are likewise not kept). 5. The view that Chagga have been underrepresented in government is one I heard among Chagga; I cannot support it with specific or comprehensive examples. To my knowledge, there have been no published reports on the representation of different ethnic groups in the national government. 6. A single patriline within a kinship group, whose members trace descent to the same ancestor. 7. According to a survey I conducted in Machame in 1992, the average kihamba size is 1 acre.

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- - - . ( 1996b ). "Seeded" in the market economy: Schooling and social transformations on Mount Kilimanjaro. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 27, no. 4, 545-567. Stambach, A. (forthcoming). Curl up and dye: Civil society and thefashion-minded citizen. In Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (eds.), The struggle for civil society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stein, H. (1992). Economic policy and the IMP in Tanzania: Conditionality, conflict, and convergence. In H. Campbell and H. Stein (eds.), Tanzania and the IMF: The dynamics of liberalization. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. TADREG (Tanzania Development Research Group). (1990). Girls' educational opportunities and performance in Tanzania. Dares Salaam, Tanzania: TAD REG. United Nations. (1990). Patterns o.ffirst marriage: Timing and prevalence. New York: United Nations. Weiss, B. (1996). The making and unmaking of the Haya Lived world: Consumption, commoditization, and everyday practice. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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Single-Sex Schooling and Its Effects on Nigerian Adolescents Valerie E. Lee and Marlaine E. Lockheed

The relative effectiveness of single-sex and coeducational schooling, particularly at the secondary level, has received considerable attention in recent research. This organizational feature of schools has been studied in Catholic schools in the United States, where approximately half of the schools are single-sex. In the high school classes of 1972 and 1982, students in single-sex schools were found to evidence higher achievement and higher educational aspirations than their counterparts in coeducational schools (Lee and Bryk, 1986; Riordan, 1985). For eighth graders in Thailand in 1982, Mailaine Jimenez and Emanuel Lockheed found higher gains in mathematics achievement for girls in single-sex schools, whereas boys fared better in a coeducational school environment (Jimenez and Lockheed, 1989). All of these studies found single-sex schooling generally more beneficial for females than for males. In developing countries, examination of the differential effectiveness of schooling by gender is complicated by the reality of gender differences in school attendance rates.! In many countries, fewer females attend school, sometimes resulting in a relatively more socially and cognitively select group of females in school. The situation is most acute in the nonindustrialized countries of East Africa, South Asia, and southern Europe (Horn and Arriagada, 1986; Strang, 1985; World Bank, 1991). Moreover, female participation rates decline precipitously between primary and secondary educational levels in the lowest-income countries (Komeran, 1987). Particularly in traditional cultures that question the value of education for the subsequent roles and behaviors of females, explanations for lower female participation rates and the decline in participation at the secondary level emphasize the importance of female maturation, marriage, and anticipated marriage in family decisions to remove girls from the educational system (Anderson and Bowman, 1965; Bowman and Anderson, 1982). The governments in such countries are less willing to invest in educational

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establishments that are exclusively for young women, except in countries such as Saudi Arabia, where coeducation is culturally unacceptable (alHariri, 1987). Moreover, because of ambivalence about the importance of educating girls, the actual treatment of females in schools in some developing countries has been found to be inferior (Boserup, 1970). The evaluation of the relative effectiveness of coeducation compared to single-sex schooling may be confounded by the fact that more males than females are in school in the first place in developing countries, even though single-sex secondary education could be seen as simultaneously facilitating female achievement and promoting greater female participation in schooling where the physical safety of adolescents is an issue. In addition to the relatively straightforward question of differential educational effectiveness, the issue of single-sex education may be seen through both economic and social lenses. A movement away from singlesex education at both the secondary and postsecondary levels, motivated by social and economic reasons, was experienced in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Single-sex education was viewed as a barrier to successful adolescent cross-sex socialization, and the declining demand for singlesex education led to institutions either closing or converting to coeducation in order to stabilize enrollments (Astin, 1977; Block, 1984; Hyde, 1971). This trend occurred at precisely the time that research on U.S. institutions was beginning to document positive effects-especially for young womenof single-sex education for students' academic and occupational achievement patterns, self-image, and career choice (Astin, 1977; Furniss and Graham, 1974; Graham, 1970, 1974; Tidball and Kistiakowsky, 1976). In many developing countries, where educational systems are still expanding, economic factors predominate in advocacy for coeducation. In this chapter we investigate the effects of single-sex and coeducational schooling on adolescents in a developing country's state-sponsored school system. Specifically, we have compared single-sex and coeducational schooling at the ninth-grade level in Nigerian public schools. We have examined whether the results of gender grouping differ for males and females and whether the results are sustained once differences in student background, school location, and teaching practices are taken into account. We compare the effects of these two school organizational types on two outcomes: academic achievement and stereotypical views of mathematics. We focus on one curricular area-mathematics-since the data are drawn from the Second International Mathematics Study (SIMS) conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (lEA) in Nigeria during the 1981-1982 academic year (Robataille and Garden, 1989). The analytical sample is large-1,012 students in forty Nigerian ninth-grade classes. The lEA design sampled a single class in each school, so that forty schools are represented, exactly half of which

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are single-sex. The student sample was 22.4 percent female, which slightly underrepresents the female secondary school participation in Nigeria for that year.

Structural Arguments for Single-Sex Education

A Social Critique of Coeducation Although coeducation has become the dominant form of schooling in both developed and developing countries, the practice has some prominent contemporary critics. Their criticisms have focused on two issues-either distractions from the academic enterprise offered by the opposite sex or gender equity (Lee and Marks, 1992; Epstein, 1988; Tyack and Hansot, 1990; Martin, 1990). Characteristic of the first issue, some argue that in a youth culture oriented to "rating and dating," coeducation may be inimical to adolescents' optimal intellectual development. Some criticism focusing on the second issue is quite specific, centering on particular policies and practices that discriminate by gender. In contrast, more current scholarly criticism concentrates on foundational issues that view coeducation as a process of inequitable socialization into a society stratified by gender. This view considers coeducation as reflecting a pervasive sexism that assigns women to a subordinate status in society. Within coeducation, it is argued, exists a "hidden curriculum" that functions to prepare students for genderstratified roles-for society as it is and not as it should be (Epstein, 1988; Keohane, 1990; Rossi, 1987; Sleeter and Grant, 1988).

Opportunity Versus Traditional Structures The sociological theory of "opportunity structure" is applicable here. The theory states that before social goals can be achieved, an opportunity structure must be in place favoring those goals. This notion has been extended by Cynthia Epstein to ask what is facilitative of women's taking full advantage of their options for social and professional development. Single-sex education would appear to provide such an opportunity structure for women because it has been shown to contribute positively to their academic development (more details on this will be presented later in this chapter). Compared with coeducation, single-sex education has been advanced as an interim strategy to sensitize young women to take their rightful places in a coeducational world (Keohane, 1990; Lockheed and Klein, 1985). Contrasted with the view that single-sex education provides young women with an opportunity structure is an alternate view of this type of

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education as a "traditional structure," whereby single-sex schools have offered upper-class families with education to their tastes-exclusive, cultured, and privileged, although generally more demanding than coddling. This type of education would provide children of such families with a shared class culture that could benefit their social and professional futures, assuring them their right to belong within the circle of the wealthy and powerful. Although this view is historically more typical of single-sex education for young men than young women, young women who received this type of education expected the experience to prepare them to marry well, to enjoy intellectually and culturally enriched lives, and to contribute to the community as volunteers with a spirit of noblesse oblige (Cookson and Persell, 1985; Lewis and Wanner, 1979; Moore, 1979).

Research on the Effectiveness of Single-Sex Secondary Schooling Research in Western Countries Other Than the United States The majority of research comparing single-sex and coeducational secondary schooling has been conducted outside the United States in developed Western countries.2 Those studies, which typically involve small samples, generally have focused more on students' attitudes about their schools' social and psychological environments than on academic attitudes and behaviors. The research generally does not include adjustment for intake differences of students who attend coeducational and single-sex schools and often doesn't consider whether effects might differ for boys and girls. Many of the studies are dated and probably are not reflective of attitude changes about sex roles within the last decade. Whereas single-sex schools, especially those for girls, were considered to emphasize control and discipline, coeducational schools had a more relaxed and friendlier atmosphere (Dale, 1969, 1971, 197 4; Feather, 1974; Jones, Shallcross, and Dennis, 1972; Schneider and Coutts, 1982). There is, however, some disagreement about actual academic emphasis between the two school types, with some researchers reporting a more academic orientation in girls' schools, whereas others find no positive relationship between gender grouping and academic orientation) A cross-national study used 1970 lEA data to measure attitudes and achievement in science and reading among 14-year-olds in the United States and England. No differences were found between coeducational and single-sex schools in the United States. Girls in English coeducational schools, however, showed a decline in science and vocabulary relative to male peers, whereas girls in single-sex schools excelled in reading and science (Finn, 1980).

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Research in the United States Two recent studies that have focused on U.S. Catholic secondary schools included large random samples. A study by Valerie E. Lee and Anthony S. Bryk (1986) used the High School and Beyond (HS&B) data and included longitudinal information on the background, attitudes, behaviors, and achievement of 1982 graduates. Whether concerning academic achievement, achievement gains, educational aspirations, locus of control, sexrole stereotyping, or attitudes and behaviors related to academics, their results indicated that single-sex schools deliver specific advantages, especially to their female students. Analyses included statistical adjustment for student background and contextual differences between schools. Another study, which used the 1972 National Longitudinal Study (NLS) data, found positive achievement effects for single-sex schools, particularly for girls (Riordan, 1985). In studies that examined the relation between sex-stereotyped attitudes and behaviors and U.S. sex-segregated education in students from first to twelfth grades, girls' school students were found to hold less stereotypical attitudes on women's roles in society, including the appropriateness of women entering typically male professions, and more favorable attitudes toward feminism (Lee and Bryk, 1986; Trickett et al., 1982; Vockell and Lobonc, 1981). Girls trained in a single-sex environment were also found to demonstrate lower levels of fear of success and were more likely to exercise leadership roles (Lockheed, 1976; Price and Rosemier, 1972; Winchel, Fenner, and Shaver, 1974). No significant single-sex effects for boys were reported in any of these studies. Research in Developing Countries Although single-sex education is more common in developing than developed countries, gender-focused educational research is considerably more likely to focus on the lower school attendance rates of females than on the differential effectiveness of schooling by gender. An exception is a recent study comparing gender groupings on the mathematics achievement of eighth graders in Thailand (Jimenez and Lockheed, 1989). Jimenez and Lockheed found that single-sex schools were more effective for girls and that coeducation was more effective for boys. Although the longitudinal design and the econometric selection modeling make this study particularly strong, the results were compromised by an unfortunate confounding of school grouping and school governance (most single-sex schools were private, whereas coeducational schools were mostly public). The fact that girls are generally less likely to attend school than boys in developing countries causes a special problem for research on single-sex

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schooling, since those girls who do attend school come from more advantaged homes with educated parents who are members of the emergent professional classes (Anderson and Bowman, 1965; Bowman and Anderson, 1982). This was found to be particularly true in studies in Kenya and Nigeria (Boserup, 1970; Eshiwani, 1983; Feldman, 1975; Muckenhirn, 1966). Despite the slightly higher socioeconomic backgrounds of girls, their education is often adversely affected by prevailing social attitudes that favor the intellectual advancement of males, particularly in coeducational settings. For example, although schools might seek to interest boys in skills that are useful in the labor market, girls are urged into more domestically relevant activities (Boserup, 1970). In Kenya, where most government secondary schools are single-sex, girls' schools receive less government assistance, resulting in lower-quality mathematics and science education (Eshiwani, 1983). The author concluded that the university attendance and professional preparation of young Kenyan women was affected both by girls' lower access rates to secondary school and by their attendance at underfunded girls' schools. At the same time, the physical safety of girls in coeducational secondary schools has been brought into question by a 1991 incident in Kenya in which nineteen girls were killed and seventy-one raped when boys attacked girls who were unwilling to participate in a student demonstration (Perlez, 199la, 199lb). Another example of differential treatment by gender in African schools is the "hidden curriculum" of a West African girls' boarding school in the early 1970s, which included the socialization of young women for future roles as wives and mothers, despite most students' intention to seek full-time employment. In spite of the official government policy in that country to offer equal educational opportunities to boys and girls, differing social attitudes about the usefulness of educating young women and young men influenced the curriculum (Masemann, 1974).

Research in Nigeria The small amount of existing empirical evidence on single-sex schooling in Nigeria is inconclusive. A descriptive study of the education of Nigerian females in the early 1970s found that both attendance rates and educational quality differed by region of the country (Glazer, 1977). In the predominantly Muslim north, the government has shown less interest in educating girls. Although more girls attended school in southern and western Nigeria, the quality of schooling was reported to be lower than that for males, especially in schools that enrolled only girls. A study from the mid1960s reported that safety-particularly for girls-was a factor in families' decisions to enroll their children in school. More specifically, a major factor discouraging families and adolescent girls from enrolling in school

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was fear of pregnancy (Muckenhirn, 1966). 4 In this regard, girls' schools (particularly boarding schools) would be seen as especially favorable, since both students and faculty are female. Although the social environment of Nigerian girls' schools might be preferable for families with educational aspirations for their daughters, however, these schools experience special difficulties in providing quality education due to high staff turnover, lack of special facilities (e.g., for science), more difficulty in obtaining well-trained teachers (especially women), and a general scarcity of resources (Glazer, 1977).

Education in Nigeria Nigeria, a federation of nineteen states, is one of the largest countries in Africa, with an estimated population of over eighty million. The education system enrolled approximately fifteen million primary students and 3.5 million secondary students in 1983. In 1982, it was estimated that 97 percent of the primary age group and 28 percent of the secondary age group were enrolled in school. Discrepancies between male and female enrollment rates at the secondary level were apparent, however, with females representing only 26 percent of secondary students. Only 14 percent of females ages 12 to 17 were enrolled, compared with 42 percent of same male cohort (UNESCO, 1986). Until 1976, the formal education system consisted of nursery and preschool institutions, primary schools, secondary educational institutions of different kind and duration, and a variety of higher education institutions. Primary education was six to seven years in duration, with entry age being 5 or 6. Basic secondary education lasted five years. The 1976 National Policy on Education introduced a uniform six-year primary education, followed by a three-year lower secondary and three-year upper secondary program. Because the data analyzed in this chapter were collected in 1980-1981, students in ninth grade would have attended school under both old and new plans. As in many developing countries, the Nigerian educational milieu is changing rapidly. Although school enrollment is expanding, the female proportion is not. An apparent steep decline in female participation in secondary education between 1980 and 1982 (from 35 percent to 26 percent of total enrollment) was entirely due to a doubling of the male enrollment in those two years. Although males and females have been afforded theoretically equal access to education since the 1960s, traditional social attitudes about the appropriateness of education for young Nigerian women were not apt to change so rapidly toward social equality of the sexes. It should not be surprising, therefore, if findings from this chapter, whose data were collected in the early 1980s, are somewhat different from those studies that described Nigerian educational conditions in the 1960s and 1970s. Although useful in depicting the historical educational difficulties

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for females, that research probably does not accurately depict the educational environment for Nigerian females in the 1980s. In almost all of the research on school gender grouping in both developed and developing countries, we see a confounding of school governance (private versus public or state-supported schools) with school gender grouping (single-sex versus coeducational) because the single-sex option is often characteristic only in privately funded schools. However, the study described here investigates the question of single-sex and coeducational school organization exclusively in the Nigerian public educational sector, thus avoiding the governance/gender-grouping confounding common in this body of research.

The Framework for This Chapter

Sample and Data The lEA Nigerian SIMS sample comprised forty-one mathematics teachers in state-owned secondary grammar schools that prepared students for the West African School Certificate Examination and 1,126 ninth-grade students; it was derived from a three-stage, stratified random sampling plan. The primary sampling units were the ten southern states in Nigeria, but acceptable data were received from only eight states. Within each state, a probabilistic sample of schools was selected, and then one class per school was randomly selected. Either the entire class (if less than thirty) or thirty students were selected from each class (Robataille and Garden, 1989). Students were administered a mathematics test and a background questionnaire. Teachers completed questionnaires about their backgrounds, their general classroom processes, their teaching practices, and the characteristics of their class. Data about the school were provided by a school administrator. The analytical sample of students and schools used in this study is described in Table 10.1. Only 227 (22.4 percent) of the 1,012 students comprising the analytical sample are female. About half (51.9 percent) of the students are in single-sex schools, with more of the males (56.3 percent) than the females (34. 7 percent) in such schools. The school sample is half single-sex (twenty of forty schools).

Measures The major dependent variable was the forty-item SIMS "core" mathematics test. The curricular content of the SIMS test was decided upon by all country participants in the SIMS study, and items testing this content are constant across countries. The core test contained items covering five

Single-Sex Schooling & Its Effects on Nigerian Adolescents

Table 10.1

209

Number of Students and Schools in the Analytical Sample

Type of School Coeducational schools Girls Boys Single-sex schools Girls Boys Total

Number of Schools

Number of Students

20

492 149

20 4 16

40

343 520

78 442 1,012

curriculum content areas (arithmetic, algebra, geometry, statistics, and measurement). Student background variables included both demographics (sex, age, rural residence, and professional or nonprofessional parental occupation) and indicators of student educational aspirations and attitudes.s The number of years of additional education the student expected to receive measured educational aspirations. We also explored four factors: perceived ability, perceived parental support, motivation with respect to mathematics, and gender-stereotypical views about math. A higher score on "perceived ability" indicated a lower perception of one's ability in mathematics. "Perceived parental support" contained such component items as "My parents are interested in helping me with mathematics." "Motivation" was constructed from four items, such as "I want to do well in mathematics." "Gender stereotypes" were constructed from three items: "Boys have more natural ability in math than girls"; "boys need more mathematics than girls"; and "men make better scientists and engineers than women." Higher scores on this measure indicated views of mathematics being more appropriate for males, which we interpreted as a more stereotypical attitude. We used several controls for characteristics of the schools and classrooms. School measures included school size, length of the school year, and our major covariate of interest-single-sex (boys' or girls' school) or coeducational school type. We considered two characteristics of the classroom: the student/teacher ratio and the percentage of students in class with fathers in professional occupations (an aggregate of the student responses to this item). Teachers and Teaching

Two teacher background characteristics were important: teaching experience and number of semesters of postsecondary mathematics education. We categorized teachers' reported use of time (in minutes per week): for administration, instruction, and evaluation, and the time students spent listening

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to whole-class instruction. "Administrative time" involved routine administration and maintaining order in the classroom. "Instructional time" occurred when the teacher explained new material and reviewed old material. "Evaluation time" was devoted to testing and grading student work. We also tested for nonlinear effects of time with a quadratic term for each of these. Material inputs were measured by an index of teacher use of commercially produced textbooks and workbooks and an index of teacher use of personally produced teaching materials. "Opportunity to learn" was gauged by the number of items on the mathematics test that the teacher reported having taught during that school year. Approach to the Analysis

Students were divided into four sex-by-school-type groups: (1) girls in girls' schools, (2) girls in coeducational schools, (3) boys in boys' schools, and (4) boys in coeducational schools. The two dependent measures examined in this chapter are mathematics achievement and stereotypical views of mathematics. In the analysis we combined male and female students into a single analytical unit, rather than running separate analyses by gender. We included variables describing girls-only and boys-only schools. We employed an analysis of covariance analytical design, the common method for program evaluations. We used ordinary least squares regression (OLS), which allows us to estimate the two program effects (boys' school, girls' school) after taking account of other variables in the model. After considerable exploratory work investigating the many variables included in the lEA study, concentrating particularly on classroom and teacher variables that might "explain away" the potentially spurious relationships between school type (single-sex or coeducational) and the two dependent variables, we arrived at the final analytical model. 6 Effects were presented as standardized regression coefficients. The statistical significance level of each coefficient was tested, and the probability of these results having occurred by chance was indicated with asterisks (*). A single asterisk suggested a probability level of 5 percent or lower; two asterisks a probability level of less than 1 percent; and three asterisks a very unlikely occurrence (less than one in one thousand). Because we chose toreport results in a standardized effect size metric, the magnitude of effects may be compared between independent variables in a particular model and also across outcomes measured in different metrics (Light and Pillemer, 1984). We presented regression results in two steps. The first step evaluated the effects of attending a boys' school or a girls' school, compared with a coeducational school, after adjustment for the background (age, sex, socioeconomic status [SES]) and attitudes (perceived ability and motivation) of students attending the schools. Thus, step 1 results constituted the major

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evaluation of the relative effectiveness of the two school types. In step 2, which also included the same characteristics of students, characteristics of schools (rural location, average SES, and student/teacher ratio) and of teachers and teaching (experience, sex, materials, and time usage) were taken into account. The change in the effect of school gender grouping type from step 1 to step 2 indicated whether these effect measures might be explained away by differences in school processes across school types. In addition, although the focus of the analyses was on the effects of school type, we also discussed the effect of these other school process variables.

Differences Between Boys and Girls in Single-Sex and Coeducational Schools Students enrolled in single-sex and coeducational schools were quite different from one another, with both boys and girls in single-sex schools generally more advantaged than their counterparts in coeducational schools (see Table 10.2) in terms of family and personal background. This suggests that single-sex schools are somewhat selective (despite the fact that all schools in the sample were "government" schools). Although the girls' schools were all located in urban settings, about a quarter of all other students attended school in rural areas. Although all students were in the same grade (ninth grade), students in single-sex schools, particularly girls, were younger. These girls were about a year younger, on average, than girls in coeducational schools and boys in boys' schools, and fully two years younger than boys in coeducational schools (who at seventeen years old, on average, are a year older than boys in boys' schools).? Although girls and boys in coeducational schools were equally advantaged in the proportions of fathers following professional occupations (17 percent), girls' school students were more likely to have professional fathers than boys' school students (34 percent versus 23 percent). However, less than a fifth of all students reported that the language in which their schools were conducted was the same language as the one they spoke at home, and this percentage was lower for girls in single-sex schools. There was a bigger difference by sex than by school type in educational aspirations, with boys expecting to complete more years of schooling. Nevertheless, students in single-sex schools reported higher aspirations than those in coeducational schools. This general pattern indicates that single-sex schools, particularly girls' schools, enroll a slightly more select group of students.

Attitudinal, School, and Classroom Differences The same pattern of greater advantage for students in single-sex schools existed for two of the three attitudes we investigated. Although students

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Table 10.2 Descriptive Characteristics of Girls and Boys in Single-Sex and Coeducational Schools in Nigeria Girls in Girls' Schools

Variables

Girls in Coed Schools

Boys in Boys' Schools

Boys in Coed Schools

196.38

194.42

201.66

~-~--

Family and Personal Background Age (months)

182.15

% of students with fathers in professional occupations (SES)

34.00

17.00

23.00

17.00

0.00

25.00

24.00

28.00

14.00

20.00

18.00

18.00

3.49

3.35

3.75

3.58

% rural residential1ocation % instructional language same as home language

Years more education expected Attitudes about Self and Family Perceived abilitya

3.33

3.56

3.00

3.20

Parental support

3.50

3.64

3.64

3.79

Student motivation

5.83

5.40

5.84

5.63

866.17

973.35

1,194.40

936.76

194.90

184.19

188.16

187.43

21.98

29.53

24.80

28.70

100.00

18.00

13.00

16.00

34.00

18.00

18.00

10.00

8.69

4.38

11.94

4.69

2.35

2.64

4.18

3.38

92.54

65.11

78.55

57.98

School and Classroom Characteristics School size School year length Student/teacher ratio % of teachers who are female % of students in school with fathers

in professional occupations (SES) Teachers and Teaching Years of experience Teacher preparation; number of semesters spent studying secondary math education Time, in minutes/week, spent on Administration Instruction

138.14

97.46

171.85

90.88

Evaluation

233.91

116.28

189.86

125.60

60.06

50.56

33.29

45.57

8.35

9.36

8.68

9.27

Whole-class lecturing Use of materials index Commercial texts Personally made materials

6.00

5.53

5.36

5.64

Opportunity to learn

4.83

10.96

11.70

11.62

12.76 3.54

14.51 4.84

13.87 4.61

Outcome measures Score on math test Stereotypical view of math

16.12 3.09 -~-

-----~--~--

Note: a. Variable coded so that a high score indicates a low self-perception of ability in mathematics.

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in single-sex schools reported having higher self-perceptions of their ability in mathematics and greater motivation to do well at mathematics, the type of school attended was unrelated to perceived parental support. Single-sex schools in Nigeria, especially girls' schools, were more advantaged than coeducational schools in several other respects: lower student/teacher ratios, more instructional days, and higher proportions of professional fathers (i.e., higher SES). The relative differences in average school size were difficult to determine. Although larger schools are likely to have access to more resources, smaller schools could have a more intimate environment, one that might foster a sense of community between students and faculty. We found that all-male schools were the largest and all-female schools the smallest, with coeducational schools about midway between.s The mathematics classes in the girls' schools were entirely taught by females, whereas less than a fifth of the mathematics teachers in the sampled classes in the other three groups were female.

Teachers and Teaching All teachers taught mathematics, but teachers in single-sex schools (especially boys' schools) had considerably more teaching experience. Boys in both types of schools were taught by considerably better prepared teachers. Teachers in girls' schools (all females) had the least preparation in mathematics. Teachers in single-sex schools spent more time on administration and instruction. Teachers in girls' schools spent considerably more time in testing and evaluating students, whereas boys' school teachers reported less time in this activity. We see the opposite pattern for time in lecturing-girls' school teachers spent the most and boys' school teachers the least. Teachers in coeducational schools reported more access to commercially made texts and materials, whereas girls' school teachers reported using more materials they prepared themselves than teachers in the other schools. Girls' school teachers reported having taught far fewer concepts on the lEA math test than other teachers, reflecting either noncoverage of a concept or coverage of the concepts in previous years.

Outcomes Large group differences existed on the mathematics test, with girls' school students scoring considerably above girls in coeducational schools. The latter group scored lowest on this measure. Boys' school students also outscored their male counterparts in coeducational schools, but by a much smaller difference. Gender-related stereotypes about mathematics also differed substantially by school type and gender, with girls in single-sex schools doing the least stereotyping and boys' school students holding the most gender-stereotyped attitudes. We should not place too much confidence

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in these outcome differences favoring girls' schools, however, since we have seen that the students in girls' schools are also advantaged because of background, attitudes, and school and teaching characteristics. It is, therefore, essential to take these differences into account in evaluations of the relative effectiveness of single-sex and coeducational schooling for boys and girls.

Single-Sex School Effects Mathematics Achievement The OLS regression model, which examines the net effect of attending either a boys' or a girls' school (compared with a coeducational school) on math achievement, is presented in Table 10.3. To build the final model, we started by including each variable from Table 10.2, and then we eliminated those that were unrelated to either the single-sex/coeducational contrast or the outcome variable. Thus, many variables in which there were considerable differences by school type (e.g., school size, educational aspirations, opportunity to learn, length of the school year, and time on administrative tasks or lecturing) were eliminated from the multivariate regression model. We proceeded in two steps. The first model included adjustments for student background and attitudes and is shown in the first column in Table 10.3. Clearly, attendance at a girls' school is significantly related to mathematics achievement (Beta 1 = 0.14), whereas boys' school attendance is not related (Beta 1 = 0.03). Other student characteristics related to achievement are age (younger students achieve at higher levels) and perceived ability (higher perceived ability is positively related to achievement level, due to the direction of the variable). Although this analysis shows that girls' school students score higher, the model is inadequate because we have been able to explain only 5 percent of the variance in mathematics achievement by taking into account only background and school type. Note that SES is not significantly related to mathematics achievement. In the second step, both single-sex school effects are statistically significant, albeit in opposite directions (Beta 2 = 0.12 for girls' schools and Beta2 = -0.11 for boys' schools). That is, girls who attend single-sex schools are significantly more likely to evidence higher achievement in mathematics than their female counterparts attending coeducational schools. However, boys who attend single-sex schools score significantly below their male coeducational school counterparts. These results hold after the considerable differences in background, attitudes, schools, and teaching across these schools have been taken into account. In addition to school sex grouping, other important factors are related to math achievement. Besides background differences (age and perceived

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215

Table 10.3 Estimated Effect of Attending a Single-Sex School on Math Achievement in Nigeria, 1981-1982

Variable School sex type Girls' school Boys' school Background Age, months Sex, female Professional father Attitudes Perceived ability Motivation Stereotyping, math School characteristics Rural % professional fathers Student/teacher ratio Teachers and teaching Teacher experience Teacher sex (female) Use of published material Time on instructional tasks Time students listen Time, administrative, squaredb % variance explained

Model Controlling for Student Characteristics

Model Controlling for Student and School Characteristics

Beta 1 Coefficient"

Beta2 Coefficient

0.14** 0.03

0.12* --0.11 *

--0.08* -0.08 0.01

--0.09* -0.06 -0.03

--0.10** 0.07 --0.02

-0.09* 0.06 0.01 0.22*** 0.14** -0.12**

5.00

0.06 0.00 -0.03 -0.11 * --0.26*** 0.14 16.00

Notes: a. Probability levels of statistical significance of regression coefficients are as follows:*= p