Beyond Parity: Making A Case For Substantive Equality

Central Province has 533 secondary schools: 501 public and 32 private secondary schools. Of the public schools, there are 6 national, 62 provincial and 433 district schools (MoES&T, 2002). In 1999, there were 515,545 boys and girls aged 14 to 17, the school going age for secondary school (259,856 boys and 255,689 girls). Of the total 166,535 enrolled in secondary school 77,991 were boys and 88,544 girls (ibid.).

The increase in secondary school enrolment is attributable to a government initiated “take over” of thriving Harambee schools in the eighties (Keller, 1983:58). The move improved the financial status of Harambee schools. They began to receive government grants and qualified teachers with the government paying their salaries.

There is no denying that self-help initiatives made secondary education more accessible in Kenya. However, the “take over” did not alter secondary education in terms of differences between schools. A case in point is girls’ education. Even though girls’ take the lead in school enrolment, the majority are in schools of poor quality. According to Kinyanjui (1978) the type of school that one attends ultimately affects the quality and type of curriculum that are offered and generally in Kenya girls attend what were previously referred to as government assisted and unaided schools (ibid.) and these are Harambee schools. Fort Hall and Dominican are former Harambee schools (see 6.2.1 and 7.2.1) and one assumes that the change in status and the value that comes with it influences girls’ experiences of secondary education in positive and fruitful ways.

Within Murang’a district, which has the biggest percentage of schools established on a Harambee basis, there are 87 such secondary schools of which 69 are mixed sex schools, 7 are boys’ and 11 girls’ schools. The total number of students enrolled in these secondary schools in 2001 was 19,422 of whom 8,591 were male and 10,831 female (Kenya, Murang’a District Education Office, 2001a). Like the rest of the province, Murang’a district has more girls than boys enrolled in secondary schools. Mixed sex schools account for 65.5% of the students. Most co-education schools in Kenya were originally Harambee schools. Harambee schools are associated with easy access to secondary education but at the same time they are also known for providing poor quality education and poor academic performance in public examinations. Although they do not exist as a category following the ‘ungrading’ of

42 secondary schools in Kenya, Harambee schools are accessible to anyone who cares to pursue a secondary school education. As the statistics show, females have fewer chances with post primary education and girls enrol in these schools. Such are the contradictions that come with the growth and expansion of schooling.

Teachers’ gender is another factor of importance in girls’ education because they have multiple roles. Of the total number of teachers in Murang’a district, 90% are highly qualified and hold either a university degree or a teaching diploma (Murang’a District Education Office, 2000d and 2001a). The percentage of male teachers is higher (62.45%) to that of female teachers (37.5%).

The statistical evidence above suggests that education opportunities are open for females in the same ways they are for males. One could argue that the equality of educational opportunity prevails in Murang’a district.

The equality of educational opportunity is associated with accessible education where “gender equity is perceived as access to education, so that criteria for gender equity are fulfilled by parity in enrolment” (Stromquist, 1999:25). Parity in enrolment is an important feature of improved education quality; however, its achievement does not necessarily mean that education is equitable. The question then is; when then does education become equitable?

Aikman and Unterhalter (2005:2) commend the many countries that have or are progressively closing the gender gap in education but go on to argue that under that “rather narrow aspiration” the “more challenging dimension of gender equality and equity are often not considered, analysed and monitored”.

In similar vein o Aikman and Unterhalter (2005:2), Stromquist (1999) lays out a critical theoretical perspective which serves as a foundation for the examination of gender equity in education where educational issues require to be taken beyond school access and school enrolment. The perspective recognises that education is a complex phenomenon because of the power relations that exist in the interfaces between school, household, community and state. It also recognises that even though males and females might attend school and survive an education cycle in equal numbers, they do so from different positions of advantage. It recognises that the constraints that go with schooling are also experienced differently which

43 illustrates that there are limitations with formal equality. Similar to Stromquist (1999), Subrahmanian (2003:2) in her UNESCO working document Gender Equality in Education: Definitions and Measurements, advances a new way of examining gender equality which pays attention to the importance of substantive equality in the framing of gender issues in education.

Subrahmanian describes gender parity as “a quantitative or numerical concept … the equal participation of boys and girls in different aspects of education” (ibid., 2003:2). However, unlike the early thinking on gender equality in developing countries (see Schiefelbein and Farrell, 1980), recent thinking takes the issue beyond numbers. Subrahmanian has argued that gender equality is a process of “ensuring educational equality between boys and girls” (ibid.).

According to Subrahmanian (2003), substantive equality recognises “the ways in which women are different from men, in terms of their biological capacities and in terms of the socially constructed disadvantages women face relative to men.” He argues that the attainment of substantive equality depends on two further processes:

… indicators of which can tell us how equality of outcome has been achieved. These processes refer to the quality of experience of education, in terms of entering education, participating in it and benefiting from it. For gender equality to be meaningful, mechanisms for ensuring equality of treatment as well as equality of opportunity for men and women are important. These in turn rest on a commitment to non-discrimination, to ensure the erasure of social norms that construct women and men as unequal in value in terms of their contributions and entitlements, and to ensure that all social actors are committed to eliminating stereotypes and attitudes that reinforce and perpetuate inequalities in the distribution of resources between women and men. Assessing gender equality thus requires assessing whether fundamental freedoms and choices are as equally available to women as they are to men. This involves focusing on pathways to equality, extending the concern with treatment and opportunity to also focusing on agency and autonomy exercised by women in enjoying their freedoms.

Substantive equality considers education in totality. For Unterhalter (2005:29) totality means using a combination of approaches to interrogate equality. The key features of interrogation might include securing conditions for social justice, a focus on disempowering structures and an emphasis on identities.

44 In the context of Murang’a district, this means interrogating gender beyond the depictions of formal equality. Such a move is important given that the ‘educational playing field’ is not level even though formal equality may portray it as such6.