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Protecting, Educating and Empowering the Girl Child

on 10/11/2021 10/11/2021

Photo courtesy of Daily Mirror

Today is International Day of the Girl Child

While the lives of young girls in most countries around the world have certainly improved over the past few decades, there are still critical concerns that are unique to girls under the age of 18 such as female infanticide, early marriage and childbirth, Female Genital Mutilation, unequal access to education and health care, stereotyping, teenage pregnancy and sexual abuse. Girls also experience discrimination in food allocation and healthcare.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report (2020) states that gender parity will only be attained in just under 100 years from now.

On December 19, 2011 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to declare October 11 as the International Day of the Girl Child to recognize girls’ rights and the unique challenges girls face around the world. The day focuses on the need to promote girls’ empowerment and the fulfilment of their human rights.

“Adolescent girls have the right to a safe, educated, and healthy life, not only during these critical formative years, but also as they mature into women. If effectively supported during the adolescent years, girls have the potential to change the world – both as the empowered girls of today and as tomorrow’s workers, mothers, entrepreneurs, mentors, household heads, and political leaders. An investment in realising the power of adolescent girls upholds their rights today and promises a more equitable and prosperous future, one in which half of humanity is an equal partner in solving the problems of climate change, political conflict, economic growth, disease prevention, and global sustainability,” said the UN.

Although a few girls such as Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg have captured the world’s imagination with their bold and passionate championship of critical causes, young girls are still marginalized and discriminated against, especially in the developing world.

Some 650 million girls and women around the world have been married as children and over 200 million have been subjected to Female Genital Mutilation while 129 million girls are out of school. In developing countries, one out of every four young women have not completed their primary school education.

The lack of education is the most urgent issue because from it stems a host of other barriers facing the girl child. An uneducated girl may be married off early and have children at a young age, endangering her health. She is also more likely to face domestic violence. Without an education, she will be subject to low paying, menial jobs.

“Girls’ education is a strategic development priority. Better educated women tend to be more informed about nutrition and healthcare, have fewer children, marry at a later age, and their children are usually healthier, should they choose to become mothers. They are more likely to participate in the formal labor market and earn higher incomes. All these factors combined can help lift households, communities, and countries out of poverty,” said the World Bank.

But many achievements towards girls’ empowerment and equality are being eroded by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic; confinement with their families and keeping away from school is increasing early marriages and genital mutilation and is disrupting global efforts to end these practices. It has also resulted in more sexual abuse, including online abuse.

“There is already a worrying rise in abuse, forced marriages, school dropouts, cyberbullying, online sexual violence and female genital mutilation and the Coronavirus pandemic is putting more and more girls at risk,” said the Global Gender Gap report .

Girls are often deprived of the fundamental right to manage their own bodies and consent to sexual intercourse. Worldwide, it is estimated that at least 15 million girls aged 15 to 19 have experienced forced sexual intercourse or other types of sexual abuses during their lives.

In Sri Lanka, the problem of sexual abuse of children is a grave one where 14.4 per cent of late adolescent girls have been subjected to some form of sexual abuse. According to police data there were 10,593 cases of rape between 2010 and 2015, of which three-quarters were statutory rape cases of girls under 16.

Ninety per cent of child sexual abuse cases in Sri Lanka are from incest. This means that perpetrators are close relatives, a neighbour, a religious leader or a teacher.

“After being sexually abused, the girl child is considered soiled and impure, she is marginalized and even ostracized by her community. She becomes the victim twice over, with no form of reprieve,” said Hazel Rajiah-Tetteh, Country Manager of  Emerge Lanka Foundation, an organization that works alongside survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Its programme for children comprises of life skills, reproductive health, personal development and entrepreneurship.

“Economic instability, mental health issues, uncertainty and many other factors play into creating an unsafe environment for a child. There is an increased risk of violence towards people and, in this case, children. Children are extremely vulnerable in households that harbor tension, stress and isolation from routine,” said Ms. Rajiah-Tetteh.

“Discussing child sexual abuse has always been difficult and seasonal due to the stigma and sensitivity attached to it.  We do however see that people speak up and about it more often now. This awareness may play a key role in cases being reported more often,” she added.

Taking into account the rise in reported numbers on child abuse, as well as the pandemic climate where the risk has increased for child safety, Emerge has launched a project to keep children safe. #ProtectEveryChild is an online awareness campaign built to educate the public on childhood sexual abuse, its impact, indicators, ways to report cases, ways to be active in child protection and create a wave of solidarity online, for individuals to take accountability, responsibility and make an active pledge to “be alert, speak up, and to always Protect Every Child”.

To mark #DayOfTheGirl , Groundviews spoke to @EmergeGlobal Country Manager Hazel Rajiah on the worrying rise in sexual abuse in #SriLanka , its associated stigmas, and the role communities need to take on to protect our children. To read our article, see: https://t.co/aC8kEMIIdY pic.twitter.com/4m2gqHsAKy — Groundviews (@groundviews) October 11, 2021

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Empowering girls and communities through quality education

Meet these adolescent girls and young women achieving their dreams through education, and the parents and community members supporting their education and empowerment in Mali, Nepal, and the United Republic of Tanzania.

These individuals have been part of the Joint Programme on Empowering Adolescent Girls and Young Women through Education . Grounded in the collective commitment of UNESCO, UN Women and UNFPA, the Joint Programme applies a coordinated and multi-sectoral approach to empower girls and young women through quality education.

First stop, Mali

In Mali, over 5,600 out-of-school girls and young women were empowered through literacy and vocational training, and learned about sexual and reproductive health. Some 200,000 community members were also sensitised on girls’ retention, re-entry and access to education and 3,560 teachers, school administrators, parents and community leaders benefitted from trainings to foster inclusive and safe learning environments for girls in schools. School-age girls and boys who were displaced due to inter-communal conflict have also been re-integrated into the formal school system.

Adama, a bright learner from Mopti

“I like learning”, says Adama. “My first language is Fulfulde but I also can speak Bambara. I learned this language with my classmates at school.”

Adama, aged 11, was forced to leave her hometown with her family to flee from inter-communal conflict between the Peul and Dogon ethnic groups in Mopti, central region of Mali. She and her family are living in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Bamako.

“An educated person is more important than an illiterate one”, says Aminata, Adama’s mother. “I want her to study and get a good job after she finishes school.”

Adama had the chance to return to school through the joint efforts of UNESCO, UNFPA and UN Women to re-integrate internally displaced children into the formal school system in Bamako. At school, Adama learned to read and write in French, speak Bambara, the local language used in Bamako, and even made new friends.

When schools closed to contain the spread of COVID-19, Adama could not continue learning because she didn’t have access to the internet and had to focus on household chores. The Joint Programme enabled students like Adama to continue learning with refresher courses that were disseminated on the national television channel.

Adama has since returned to school. However, schools and access to education remain threatened by the ongoing conflict. Adama urges political leaders to do all they can to end the civil war so that she and her family can return to their hometown, and to ensure that girls like herself are able to continue their education.  

Next stop, Nepal

In Nepal, the Joint Programme worked across 5 districts and with 14 municipalities. Over 6,300 girls and young women came together in community learning centres or local resource hubs that foster education and livelihood for marginalised groups. Out of these girls, 1,874 participated in functional literacy classes integrating comprehensive sexuality education and mother tongue-based multilingual education to ensure an inclusive and equitable education. Nearly 4,470 girls and young women also participated in vocational skills courses, out of which 1,458 started generating an income.

Chanda, a champion for girls from Rautahat

“Pregnancy at a young age has huge costs on girls’ reproductive and psychological health. And they are subjected to gender-based violence”, says Chanda. “We must empower girls to speak out for their own rights and well-being. That’s why I will continue to work in education.”

Chanda, aged 23, had dropped out of school when she engaged with the Joint Programme and received vocational training. She was inspired to pursue a career in education while working as a facilitator for the UNESCO-led functional literacy classes.

Chanda works with girls who dropped out of school, girls who have never been to school, and girls who married young. “Child brides are denied further education, lack literacy, and are unable to manage their finances, making them completely dependent on others”, says Chanda. She believes that efforts to uplift girls and women must complement efforts to reduce early marriage.

Chanda has been able to follow girls’ progress after their participation in the classes. She noticed incredible improvement in their confidence stemming from their participation and learning. However, the lockdowns throughout the pandemic resulted in many girls returning to farm work and parents taking advantage of lower dowries to marry their daughters. There is still much progress to be made to change the attitudes of parents and guardians towards their daughters. 

Despite these challenges, Chanda is committed to working with adolescent girls to inspire them and change social attitudes towards girls’ education.

Dhauli, an entrepreneur and role-model from Bajura

“I couldn’t even recite the alphabet before I took the classes. Now I have the confidence to speak at workshops”, says Dhauli. “Education is important – without the trainings I received, I couldn’t have started my own enterprises.”

Dhauli was married at age 12 when her mother died, so she never had the opportunity to go to school. She attended the Joint Programme’s functional literacy classes, through which she developed entrepreneurship skills.

Since joining the classes, Dhauli started a grocery shop and runs a farm. She has already taken out NPR 400,000 (US$ 3,300) in bank loans to invest in her shop and the investment has paid off. She currently earns up to 4,500 NPR (US$ 37) each day. She has also been able to expand her family farm by purchasing buffalos and pigs.

Dhauli is the first person in her family to be financially literate. She is inspiring her peers through entrepreneurship skills and extending her knowledge to her husband and children. For Dhauli, the freedom of running her own business is also tied to securing a future for her daughters.

“I didn’t get to study but with my earnings, I can make sure that my daughters will get an education”, she says. “This must improve our future. I may have been an illiterate woman, but my daughters will not be.”

Komal, an advocate for girls’ education from Rajpur Farhadawa

“I used to think that I was a poor student, but now I know that I am a good student and can do well”, says Komal. The functional literacy classes have improved my life. I am confident that I will do well in the future.”

Komal, aged 15, dropped out of school by the time she was in grade 6 because of frequent teacher absences and low engagement. However, two years later, she took part in the classes and was inspired to go back to school as she discovered the value of her education.

Komal learned how to advocate for her own education, how to recognize and report gender-based violence, and how to pay attention to her own reproductive health and address health concerns. She even learned about sexual exploitation and human trafficking, and how to protect herself.

Komal also participated in a radio programme organized by UNESCO where she interacted with local leaders and stakeholders from her district. She discussed health, education and issues affecting youth with them. The experience boosted her confidence and helped her overcome her fear of public speaking.

Komal was empowered through the Joint Programme and inspired to pursue a future advocating for girls’ education. “I believe that all girls should have an education”, she says. “I want to be involved in similar programmes in the future so that I can motivate other girls to study.”

Parbati, an FLC facilitator from Simalkot

“To watch them learn to read and write before my own eyes – that filled me with pride and satisfaction”, says Parbati, a facilitator for the Joint Programme’s functional literacy classes and youth advocacy coordinator from Simalkot. “I realized how important education is in showing people their potential.”

When Parbati began teaching the classes, she noticed that the women who attended the trainings lacked the literacy skills needed to sign their own names. As she taught them the Nepali alphabet and numeracy skills, she noticed they gained interest in learning even more. Parbati helped the women gain a sense of pride as they no longer had to sign official documents with a thumbprint.

Parbati also organized interactive sessions with learners in Achham, where she discussed pregnancy, family planning and menstrual hygiene. She advocates for ending harmful practices, including sexual harassment, violence against women and girls and early marriage.

Teaching literacy to women has been especially rewarding for her as a facilitator as she has witnessed the transformation of women from learners to entrepreneurs. Beyond literacy, the functional literacy classes teach women about organizing savings and investment groups. Many of the women started their own businesses.

Parbati noticed that the women of Simalkot are excelling in the classes and asking for more educational opportunities. “If they have come this far after one round of training, imagine what they can achieve with more.”

Ratan, a transformed mother from Duni

“The first day attending the class was one of the happiest days of my life”, says Ratan. “I wanted to continue my education to secure a good future for my child. I have to be a good example for my daughter.”

Ratan, then in grade 6, was forced to drop out of school because she was arranged to be married. She became a mother at age 21 and cared for her family. Ratan’s options were limited, as engaging in public activities  outside of the home is often stigmatised according to social customs in the Sudurpashchim Province of Nepal.

After convincing her family, Ratan attended the functional literacy classes held under the Joint Programme. “At first, she was too shy and nervous to introduce herself in the class, but now, she can speak her mind in front of a crowd”, says Saraswoti, Ratan’s facilitator.

Ratan gained confidence as her literacy skills improved and she learned about family planning, reproductive health and hygiene, and harmful cultural practices. Ratan often shares her new knowledge, especially about reproductive health and hygiene, with women in her community. She has now found a greater sense of independence in life.

Before the training, Ratan lacked the skills to access her own bank account and withdraw money sent by her husband who is a migrant worker in India. Now, Ratan is financially literate, capable of accessing her own bank account, making withdrawals and deposits and organizing her family’s finances.

Last stop, Tanzania

In Tanzania, the Joint Programme reached girls and young women in remote areas where access to learning can be more limited. To prevent violence against girls and increase the retention of girls in school, 40 primary and 20 secondary schools across 4 districts now provide counselling services through 112 youth clubs. Out-of-school girls and young mothers were provided with vocational, literacy, numeracy as well as sexual and reproductive health programmes. Over 4,000 in-school and 1,000 out-of-school girls and young women benefited from quality educational opportunities. Over 180 local government officials, 440 teachers and 60 curriculum developers from higher learning institutions were trained on gender-responsive pedagogy, life skills, sexual and reproductive health, HIV and AIDS, and gender-based violence (GBV).

Fatma, a businesswoman from Mkoani

“When I dropped out of school, I could not even read full sentences. With the support from the Joint Programme, I gained the confidence to read, write and do basic mathematics. I now help other girls to learn how to read and write”, says Fatma, a businesswoman aged 25 from Mkoani.

Fatma dropped out of school like many girls and young women in Tanzania. Soon after, she was married and had three children. She felt like her dreams had ended when her education stopped at the age of 14. Life prospects are limited for girls and young mothers in Tanzania without an education, or the knowledge and skills for employment.

Fatma joined a community-based youth centre established by the Joint Programme, where she was taught basic literacy and numeracy. She also learned digital skills at the centre using a tablet and a smartphone provided by the Joint Programme to access other learning materials and build her entrepreneurship and vocational skills. She developed business management, accounting and communication skills.

Fatma is now pursuing her dreams. She opened a small grocery shop with the income she received for her work as a henna artist. She learned henna painting at the vocational training held under the Joint Programme. “I sell rice, sugar and some vegetables. It is such a big achievement being economically independent with my own income. My husband is supportive of my work.”

Fatma also provides guidance to young women in her community, sharing her own experience. “I helped my peers learn how to run a business. One of my friends also started her own business as a henna artist and a tailor.”

Ashura, an entrepreneur and role model from Kasulu

"People in the village no longer see me and other girls who dropped out as failures but see us as people leading our lives autonomously", says Ashura, an entrepreneur from Kasulu.

Ashura, a young mother now aged 22, could not continue learning after primary school due to her family's financial challenges. Girls and young mothers who drop out of school in Tanzania often take up household chores and are left behind from education. Without alternative learning opportunities and access to financial services, they are prevented from earning incomes and living autonomous lives.

When Ashura received entrepreneurship training and opportunities from the Joint Programme, she discovered how to run a small business making and selling products such as soap, batik and nutrition flour. She also learned how to apply for loans allocated to women’s groups by the District Council.

Starting out with seed money, Ashura increased her cash flow by selling sugarcane and rice. Together with a group of young women who had also benefited from the Joint Programme, Ashura formed an income-generating group to encourage women-led economic activities. Their financing model extended to the formation of a village community banking (or VICOBA).

VICOBA is particularly helpful when the existing social services are insufficient. "Each member of the group contributes 5,000-10,000 TZS (US$ 2-4) every two weeks. VICOBA money is like an insurance or a loan given to group members for any emergency needs", says Ashura.

As her life changed, Ashura noticed a change in the perception of community members vis-a-vis out-of-school girls, who were previously seen as failures and are now looked up to as role models in their community.

Rahma, a confident learner from Kasulu

“Through the Safe Space-TUSEME club, I gained the confidence to speak out to my friends, teachers and parents”, says Rahma, a grade 10 student. “I was motivated to study hard. That was why I passed the national exam with a good score.”

In Tanzania, only 69% of girls transition from primary to lower secondary education compared to 73% of boys, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2017). This is attributed to less support from the family, lack of confidence, gender-based violence (GBV) and adolescent pregnancy.

Rahma, aged 15, joined the Safe Space-TUSEME (‘Let’s speak out’ in Swahili) club established by the Joint Programme in her school. There, she learned about gender equality and GBV, where to report cases of GBV or seek guidance and counselling, and how to undertake collective action if faced with a GBV incident. Youth-led activities such as drama and poetry and advocacy with parents and teachers about the challenges faced by girls at school helped transform attitudes around girls’ education.

Encouraged through the club activities, Rahma successfully transitioned to secondary school with excellent exam results. Her relationship with her parents also changed positively: “Housework was considered only for girls. However, my parents don’t think like that anymore. They are encouraging me to study. They were delighted when I passed the national exam”, says Rahma.

Now, Rahma continues to take part in the Safe Space-TUSEME activities in her secondary school. Her club conducts campaigns to keep girls safe from adolescent pregnancy. “A night market is a common place where girls can be more vulnerable to adolescent pregnancy. With ongoing campaigns, now I see fewer friends are joining night markets”, says Rahma. She hopes other schools establish Safe Space-TUSEME clubs to support more girls to pursue their education. “I want to help other girls gain confidence.”

Warda, an ICT facilitator from Mkoani

"We can teach girls how to read and write and acquire vocational skills so that they can be financially independent. I hope that more girls gain confidence, leadership, independence, higher income and are safe from violence. I believe empowering women is empowering society", says Warda, a young woman from Mkoani.

Warda was unemployed after graduating from college. She joined an ICT lab established by the Joint Programme as a facilitator. Through this role, she acquired teaching skills for literacy, numeracy and entrepreneurship using tablets. More than 200 out-of-school girls and young mothers in Mkoani learned business management, accounting and communications skills as part of the ICT lab.

One of Warda’s students, Zuhura, did not know how to read and write but learned through a self-learning application on a tablet. Now she runs a small business selling pillows and teaching other girls how to read and write and gain other basic entrepreneurial skills. Warda also created an income-generating group together with her students called the 'Women Association for Community Development Strategies', enabling the group to raise funds and sustain business ventures.

Girls who learned about entrepreneurship through the course at the ICT lab felt empowered, but empowerment was not limited to learners. "I gained the confidence to teach adults from any background. I am delighted to see their transformation as well as mine", says Warda.

She is currently empowering more out-of-school girls while following a Master's course. Recently, she also started a part-time job in the Mkoani district office. She dreams of expanding this initiative to other districts in Pemba, Unguja Island and even the Tanzania mainland.

Angel, a science wiz from Sengerema

"I told myself, 'Angel, you will not fail'. I became number one in physics and moved to upper secondary school", says Angel, aged 17. “I believe girls can do as well as boys in sciences.”

In Tanzania, poor pedagogical practices have led to discrimination and girls' lower performance than boys, especially in mathematics and science subjects in national examinations during the past five years. It is one of the reasons hindering the transition of girls from secondary to upper secondary education.

Teachers at Angel's secondary school received a Joint Programme training on gender-responsive pedagogy to counter stereotypes and socio-cultural bias reinforcing the notion that science subjects are not only for boys and difficult for girls.

With support from her teacher, Angel's performance in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects improved. She achieved excellent scores in her national exams in biology among other subjects. She became the best female student within her school and was selected to focus her studies on physics, chemistry and biology.

Angel inspires other girls in her secondary school to study hard including in STEM subjects and to pass the national examination. Four of Angel's peers also successfully transitioned to upper secondary school. Angel also brought a positive influence home. Her parents are proud of her achievements at school and support her education.

Safia, a woman leader from Pemba

"Through the Joint Programme, more community members encourage the education of girls and boys, while discouraging early marriage and unintended pregnancy. It was helpful to persuade the government offices to establish a secondary school in our community", says Safia. 

Safia is a community leader in Pemba island. She is one of five women leaders in 143 shehias (or wards) in the region, "Being a woman leader can be challenging, but my community members are very supportive", says Safia.

Safia became a champion for girls’ right to education through the Joint Programme. She and other community members developed dramas to engage her community to invest in girls’ education. They raised awareness among other community members about preventing early marriage and providing needed support for girls to continue their education. Since then, the number of girls transitioning to secondary education in her shehia increased from 5 to 15 girls.

Safia also advocated for the construction of the first secondary school for girls and boys in her shehia. Students used to go to neighbouring shehias to attend a secondary school. "It is very tough for students to transition to secondary education when there isn’t a secondary school in our community. Imagine girls taking boats to reach a secondary school in different shehias. It takes around 2 hours", says Safia.

"I expect more girls to continue schooling at the secondary school in our shehia. I hope that they will become women leaders like me when they grow up", says Safia.

Almachius, a community leader from Kasulu

"Through the Joint Programme activities, adolescent girls and young women became more empowered. Parents and community members, ward and district officers witnessed their growth. In return, they started to expand their support", says Almachius, a focal point for the Joint Programme in the Kasulu District Council.

Almachius has observed many positive achievements in the district. One of them is a loan from the District Council of 9,000,000 TZS (US$ 3,900), awarded to three women-led income-generating groups created by the Joint Programme. And in Heru Ushingo, the girls' transition rate from primary to secondary education has increased from 85% in 2017 to 99% in 2020 since the Joint Programme was initiated.

Also, 7 out of 15 schools in Kasulu have built more classrooms, toilets, water facilities and changing rooms for menstruation after trainings held by the Joint Programme on water, sanitation and hygiene. "It was possible because parents and community members who participated in the trainings donated bricks and volunteered to build school facilities. The Titye secondary school is even building a science, technology, engineering and mathematics laboratory", says Almachius.

As a result of this work, early marriage and unintended pregnancy rates have decreased. "Harmful social practices and gender-based violence decreased while reporting cases increased", says Almachius. The ward and district offices and schools worked closely with the Joint Programme to reinforce reporting mechanisms.

Almachius hopes to scale up this work to other wards in Kasulu. Six additional wards in Kasulu are already replicating the Joint Programme interventions to promote girls’ empowerment through education.

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• CHAPTER 1 Introduction
• CHAPTER 2 Types of education
• CHAPTER 3 Importance of education
• CHAPTER 4 Early Childhood Education
• CHAPTER 5 Education system in India
• CHAPTER 6 Girl Child Education in India
• CHAPTER 7 Role of the civil society in the education sector
• CHAPTER 8 About Oxfam India
• CHAPTER 9 Role of Oxfam India in girl child education
• CHAPTER 10 Why donate to Oxfam India

Importance of Girl Child Education

Empowering girls through education.

Everyone wishes to see this world become a better place and strives to do their bit to change the world. But often we find it difficult to find a cause we want to support and the organization we would like to donate to.

Here we will explore the issue of quality and affordable education, which can help you understand why it is one of the most pressing issues and how you can sponsor child education in India. It will also help you understand.

Oxfam India’s work in education and how you can support Oxfam India to educate a child.

What You Will Know About Girl Child Education in This Resource

To help you read on all specific topics, we've put together an interactive table of contents. Click each link to be jumped to different sections. (Or, you can also scroll down and start from the beginning.)

• Definition of Education
• Types of Education
• Importance of Education
• Early Childhood Education
• Education System in India
• Girl Child Education in India
• Role of the Civil Society in the Education Sector
• About Oxfam India
• Role of Oxfam India in Girl Child Education
• Donate to Oxfam India

What is education? Is there a difference between education and schooling? In this chapter we will learn what is the meaning of education and the concept of education.

What is education?

Education definition.

The term ‘Education’ originated from the Latin word ‘Educare’, which means ‘to bring up’ or ‘to nourish’. Another Latin word ‘Educatum’ gave birth to the English term ‘Education’. ‘Educatum’ means ‘the art of teaching’ or training.

Oxford dictionary defines education as, “a process of teaching, training, and learning, especially in schools or colleges, to improve knowledge and develop skills.” It is the action or process of being educated.

Concept of education

Most of us, when we think of education, we imagine a formal school, with students learning subjects like Mathematics, English Literature, Social Studies, Physics, Chemistry, or Biology. We imagine a school where students play sports in their free time and are regularly assessed through exams. But is education only confined to a school or university building? Can a child, or even an adult learn outside of school and improve their knowledge and skills?

Education is the process of acquisition of knowledge and experiences, and development of skills and attitudes of an individual, which help them lead a fruitful life and contribute to the development of the society. The main purpose of education is the all-round development of individuals. Education aims to not only focus on skill development, but also on personality development to help individuals become socially responsible citizens of a country.

What is value education?

Value education aims to develop certain attitudes in individuals so they are able to face different situations in life. It is often wrongly assumed that value education teaches values. Value education does not teach values but develops the ability to find one’s own values. Individuals are encouraged to develop critical thinking so they can deal with conflicts, understand their actions and their consequences, develop healthy relationships, and become dependable members of the society.  

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/american_english/education

Education goes beyond the four walls of a classroom. A child continues to learn throughout their life, even during adulthood, through different experiences. Different types of education, gives different types of learnings.

How many types of education are there

There are three main types of education. In this chapter, we will learn the different types of education, their examples, characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages.

What are the three types of education

The types of education are: Formal Education, Informal Education, and Non-formal Education.

1. What is Formal Education

Formal Education refers to the education imparted to students in an established educational institute premises by trained teachers. The teachers must have a certain level of training in the art of education and knowledge of relevant subjects.

Students are taught basic academic skills based on a certain syllabus. Regular assessments of learning outcomes are conducted through examinations. There is a set of established rules which both teachers and students follow in order to complete formal education.

Formal education begins at the elementary/primary level, continues through high school and college or university. Children often attend nursery or kindergarten before beginning their formal education.

What is primary education

Formal education begins with primary education, also called elementary education. Primary education begins in kindergarten and lasts till the sixth grade. Depending on the specific education system, primary education may even begin from class 1 till class 4 – class 7. Primary education helps children develop the ability to learn and understand the rules of formal education.

What are the examples of Formal Education

• Classroom instructions or training
• Grading and certification in school, colleges, and university
• Set subjects and syllabus

What are the characteristics of Formal Education

• Structured hierarchy
• Strict rules and discipline
• Regular fee
• Grading system
• Formal teacher-student relationship

What are the advantages of Formal Education

• Structured and organised
• Trained professionals as teachers
• Regular assessments to enable students to reach higher levels
• Recognised certification
• Better access to employment

What are the disadvantages of Formal Education

• Rigid and lacks flexibility for students to pursue their own interest
• Too much importance to grades puts extreme pressure on those with average scores
• Fails to recognize non-academic talents in students
• Set syllabus limits the scope of learning
• High expenses

2. What is Informal Education

Unlike Formal Education, Informal Education is not imparted in school, college or university. It is not deliberate, does not follow a set syllabus and timetable, and there are no regular assessments. There is no structured teacher-student relationship.

Informal Education is imparted by parents to their children, one person to another. Children learning how to ride a bicycle from their parents, one individual teaching another how to bake are examples of informal education.

Informal Education is also conducted through reading books, or online material. It is also the education obtained in one’s surroundings, in their daily lives, like in a marketplace, or by simply living in a community. Individuals who join some community groups and learning occurs during their activities, or take up some project of their own and learn themselves, are also considered to be acquiring informal education.

What are the examples of Informal Education

• Spontaneous learning – a person learns how to use an automatic ticket vending machine
• Parents teaching their children certain skills
• Individuals taking up a sport activity on their own
• Learning a psychological fact by reading a website article

What are the characteristics of Informal Education

• It is spontaneous
• Happens outside the formal classroom
• Life-long process
• No structured syllabus
• No grading system for what one learns

What are the advantages of Informal Education

• More flexible as individual have the advantage to choose what they wish to learn
• Individuals have the opportunity to learn the skills not taught in formal education
• Utilizes a variety of means – TV, internet, conversations, magazines
• Learners are more motivated as they have flexibility
• Less costly
• Flexible time

What are the disadvantages of Informal Education

• Lack of discipline or rules may lead to inconsistency
• Information acquired through internet or conversations may not be reliable
• No set timelines or schedule
• Difficult to recognize

3. What is Non-formal Education

Non-formal Education is organised education outside the formal school/university system. It is often referred to as adult education, adult literacy education, or community education. Non-formal education is conducted by community groups, government schemes, or an institute. It can also be conducted as home education or distance learning.

Non-formal education may not have a set syllabus or curriculum. It focuses on the development of job skills, develop reading and writing skills in out of school children or illiterate adults. Non-formal education system may also be used to bring out-of-school children at par with those in formal education system.

This system does not have a specific target group and does not necessarily conduct examinations. Children, youth, and adults can be a part of this system.

What are the examples of Non-formal Education

• Community based adult education programmes
• Community based sports programmes for children
• Fitness programmes by private institutes
• Computer and language courses in a community
• Online courses

What are the characteristics of Non-formal Education

• Has a flexible curriculum
• There is no age or time limit
• One can earn while learning
• Examinations may not be necessarily conducted
• May not require certification
• Involves vocational learning

What are the advantages of Non-formal Education

• Flexibility of age and time
• Freedom to pursue one’s interest and choose a programme
• No need of regular exams or grades
• Helps in learning useful job skills

What are the disadvantages of Non-formal Education

• Lack of certificates may leave a skill unrecognized
• Students may be irregular due to the lack of set regulations
• Untrained teachers
• Basic reading and writing skills may still be required
• Lack of formal structure and rules may lead to students discontinuing

In this chapter, we will learn about the importance of education, early childhood education and the impact of lack of education.

Why education is important

Now that we know what are the different types of education, let us explore the importance of education in life.

Education is a human right. Education is important for not only a holistic development of an individual, but the society as well. 59 million children and 65 million adolescents are out of school, across the world, and more than 120 million children do not complete primary education.

Lack of education hampers an individual from reaching their full potential. Out of school children miss out the opportunity to develop their skills and to join the work force later in their adult life. Unemployment further creates more stress among people, especially the youth, leading to social unrest and crimes, adversely impacting the development of a country. Hence, education is the key to an individual’s and a country’s development. Learn more about illiteracy in India.

All the different types of education enable an individual develop cognitive skills, emotional intelligence, and skills required to be employed.

Education helps an individual develop the ability to think critically, understand the people around them and their surroundings, make informed decisions, and understand the consequences of their actions on themselves and others. Education is necessary for an individual to live a fruitful life and become a responsible member of the society.

Education must begin early in an individual’s life, during early childhood. This is the time when important brain development occurs. In the next chapter we will explore early childhood education more in depth. Let us first understand the importance of education in an individual’s life and the importance of education for a country.

Why is education important for an individual

As already discussed, education helps an individual develop cognitive skills and emotional intelligence. An uneducated person, who doesn’t understand themselves, who cannot understand how to interact with people around them, is isolated from their society.

Humans are social beings and need to form healthy relationships with their fellow humans and live with them in harmony, in order to survive. Lack of education, hampers a person’s ability to understand other people’s emotions and cannot understand their own emotions to be able to form a relationship. Additionally, education helps individuals combat diseases, change regressive social norms, and promote peace.

Further, an individual who does not attend school, or take any form of formal education, cannot develop the skills required to enter the workforce, and is eventually pushed into poverty.

Why is education important for a country

Education is the key to economic development. It reduces poverty, boosts economic growth, by ensuring people enter the work force and increase their income.

Education helps promote stability in times of conflict and crisis. Children are forced out of school in a conflict situation, leading to high drop-out rates. The chance of education lays a path to normalcy for children. Girl child education, especially, benefits a country. Educated women can make informed decisions, reduce gender violence, have fewer children, and join the work force. It is the first stepping stones towards ending gender based discrimination and inequality. This village in Uttar Pradesh has an inspiring story of changing regressive social norms through education.

In this chapter, we will learn what is early childhood and the importance of early childhood education.

What is an early childhood

Early childhood is the period from birth to eight years of age. These are the most critical years in a child’s life. During this time the brain is at its peak development stage and determine a child’s development over the course of their lives. 

This is period is extremely crucial because children develop cognitive, physical, social, and emotional skills. They are highly influenced by their environment and require utmost care by parents and community members to ensure holistic development. Hence, the emphasis on early childhood education.

What is early childhood education?

Early childhood education is not only preparation for primary school, it also aims to develop basic life skills in children to lay a foundation of lifelong learning and success. It consists of varied activities to aid in the cognitive and social development of children before they start preschool. 

It consists of both formal and informal education. Parents are considered to be the first ones educating a child, as a child develops their first relationship with parents. This relationship can have a significant impact on child development and early childhood education. This stage of early childhood care and education typically starts between 0 to 2 years of age. 

After this stage, formal education starts. Formal education for early childhood may vary from state to state, a child’s age and their learning abilities. Early childhood education programmes may vary for each age group and run at different levels – nursery, playgroup, preschool, and kindergarten.

Why is early childhood education important?

A child’s brain is at its peak developmental stage from 0 to 8 years of age. Their experiences lay the foundation of a child’s emotional, cognitive, and physical development. Following are some of the benefits of early childhood education:

Social skills

Humans are social beings. They need to develop healthy relationships in order to live a fruitful life. Early childhood education ensures children learn how to socialize with other children of their age, with people outside of their immediate family and develop the skills to successfully socialize with people later on in their lives.

Sharing with others is the core of any relationship and peaceful society. Early childhood education enables a child to learn how to share their things so they can develop strong friendships with other children. 

Team working skill is one of the most important assets of an individual’s holistic development. The skill is useful throughout formal education, in personal relationships, and in the workforce. Hence, it is crucial to ensure that children develop skills early in their childhood. 

A child cannot be educated if they do not have the enthusiasm and curiosity to learn new things. Early childhood education programmes ensure that children develop the curiosity to learn. 

What are early childhood education programmes

Several organisations in India, public, private, and non-governmental sectors provide early childhood education programmes. Below are early child education programmes in India, across different sectors: 

Government organisations

The Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD) plays a key role in providing early childhood education in India. The ministry has set up Anganwadi centres (courtyard shelters) across rural areas to provide health, nutrition, and education to children from minority groups and economically weak groups. The government has facilitated the transition of children from preschool to elementary school, by relocating the Anganwadi centres close to elementary schools and aligning their schedule with those of elementary schools.

Non-government organisations

In India, non-government organisations have an important role in filling the gaps left by the government. NGOs working for education provide early childhood care and child education to marginalised children. As per government estimates, NGOs run child education programmes have provided education to 3 to 20 million children in India. The programmes include direct intervention in areas where there are no government programmes or to improve the quality of government programmes. Oxfam India works with a network of grassroot partners across six states in India, to facilitate education, especially girl child education, and advocates for increased government spending in the public education system. Oxfam India and one of its partner, Lokmitra, run this small school in Raebareily which attracts students from private school as well.

Private Institutes

India has seen a rapid rise in private institutions at all levels of education. As per government estimates, around 10 million children have participated in early child education programmes run by private organisations. Some organisations provide only early childhood care and education, while others may run till elementary school and/or higher secondary school level. Private schools, however, charge exorbitant fee, leaving millions of children out of the education system.

Early childhood education in India

According to Census 2011, there are 164.48 million (approximately 16.5 crores), children from 0 to 6 years of age in India. [6]  These numbers indicate a strong need for efficient early childhood education programmes in India. Constitutional and policy provisions have been made to ensure early childhood education in India.

Article 21A of the Indian Constitution, provides for the right to free and compulsory education for children from 6 to 14 years of age, in purview of the Right to Education Act (RTE) (2009). Article 45 urges the state government to provide Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) to all children till the age of six years. 

The Right to Education Act, guarantees children the right to free education, whereas, ECCE is not stated as a compulsory provision. The RTE states to provide free pre-school education for children above three years. In 2013, the Government of India approved the National Early Childhood Care and Education Policy. [7]  

The policy promotes free, universal, inclusive, equitable, joyful, and contextualised opportunities for laying foundation and attaining full potential for all children below 6 years of age. [8]  It aims to promote a holistic development of children in the said age group. The policy is a key milestone in filling the gap in early childhood care and development in India and strengthening elementary education. 

https://www.educationforallinindia.com/early-childhood-care-and-education-in-india-1.pdf - National University of Education Planning and Administration – New Delhi - page 26

• https://unicef.in/Whatwedo/40/Early-Childhood-Education

https://wcd.nic.in/sites/default/files/national_ecce_curr_framework_final_03022014%20%282%29.pdf

Education in India is provided by public and private schools. The most important element of the education system in India, is the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, (RTE). RTE constitutionally guarantees education as a fundamental right of every child in the age group of 6 to 14 years.

Despite the provision, there are more than 60 lakh children out of school in India. [10]

In this chapter, we will understand the provisions laid down by the RTE and the gaps in its implementation.

What is Right to Education Act 

The RTE Act (2009) lays down legal provisions to grant every child aged between six to fourteen years, the right to free and compulsory elementary education of an appropriate standard in a neighbourhood school. Here are some interesting facts about RTE.

Education is a concurrent subject in which both the Centre and the states play a role. It is necessary for the states to draft rules to implement the provisions laid down in the RTE, with reference to the framework provided by the Centre. The states can modify the rules to suit their local needs. However, implementation of RTE has greatly varied across the states.  [11]

India continues to fail to spend the financial resources required to meet the minimal norms under the RTE Act. Bihar, for instance, spends only 30% of what is needed to implement the Act in totality – enrolling all children in school, hiring the minimum number of required teachers, improving infrastructure, and providing learning materials. Additionally, Bihar is also failing its children from minority groups.

Hardly 12.7% of schools in India comply with the minimum norms laid down under the RTE Act. There are wide gaps in RTE implementation between different states; ranging from 39% in Gujarat, to less than 1% in Nagaland, Sikkim, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Lakshadweep. 70% of teachers in Meghalaya lack the required qualifications. [12]  

The RTE Act, Section 12(1)(c) envisions that schools must provide spaces for the economically weaker section of the society so that children from different backgrounds have equal opportunities and that will help build a more equal society. Studies show that giving opportunities to students from different economic backgrounds, makes student more social, generous and egalitarian, and they are less likely to discriminate against poor children. But instead, private schools create hurdles for children with disabilities and those from marginalised communities to avoid their enrolment. 

India’s government spending on education has stayed below 4%, despite successive governments’ electoral commitment to spend 6% of its GDP on education. The government discriminates in the allocation of the education budget. For instance, in government-run Kendriya Vidyalaya and Navodaya Schools, government spending is roughly around Rs. 27,000 and Rs. 85,000 per student, respectively. However, the spending in regular government schools is just over Rs. 3000 per student per year. [13]  Without equitable investment in public schools, inclusive education cannot be achieved. This one of a kind satellite school in East Delhi imparts education with no desks, walls, or chairs.

The inefficient implementation of the RTE Act, is a classic example of the gaps between policy and its implementation. There are limited efforts in building awareness of the provisions of the act, the need of such an Act; among those on the ground responsible for its implementation and those for whom the Act is. [14]  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7WspAXyK5Y Is the government spending enough on education? Our Social Policy Researcher, Kumar Rajesh explains the reality behind the government’s claim of spending 4% of the GDP on education.

Privatization of education in India

In light of the gap left by the government in the education system in India, private schools are growing in huge numbers. However, the increasing rise in private schools is socially segregating children of rich and poor families in India. Financially better off families send their children to private schools, with better facilities and smaller classes, thus widening the economic and social gap in an already unequal society. 

Between 2010-11 and 2015-16, the number of students enrolling in government schools across 20 states fell by 13 million, while 17.5 million new students joined private schools. [15]  Private schools are further unregulated and many of them do not meet the basic standards of infrastructure, safety, and quality of education. However, the condition of public schools is forcing even the poor families in India to enroll their children in private schools, leading to huge financial burden on families. Thus, rendering education in India a privilege, instead of rendering by class and caste.

Even though, the enrolment in government schools is declining they remain the main provider of elementary education in India, accounting for 73.1% elementary school and 58.6% of the total enrolment. [16] India still needs to universalize its education system, by providing better quality public education institutes.

What are the problems in the education system in India [17]

• Lack of a clear definition of an out of school child is a grave concern. Without a clear definition to identify when a child stops going to school and becomes a drop-out, it is difficult to enroll and retain children in school.
• There is ambiguity about specific roles the School Management Committee (SMCs) have to play. The SMCs are not aware of their responsibilities or the members themselves do not know that they are a part of the SMC. A research by a leading non-profit Pratham based in Delhi in 2013 found that only 10 per cent of the SMC parent members interviewed were aware that they were part of the SMCs. [18]
• The SMCs have the mandate to prepare School Development Plans (SDPs), but this is hardly followed in practice. Capacity building programmes for SMCs, to enable them to follow their mandates are not being implemented thus affecting their functioning. [19]
• The RTE Act implies to both public and private schools, but its implementation in private school remains weak. Private schools are on the rise, and they deliberately omit the rule of the RTE, while most government schools struggle to implement because of lack of resources.
• The RTE Act provides for a mechanism to ensure the availability of qualified teachers by setting up teacher training institutions. Some states have completely omitted the provision to set up training institutes.

[9] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/Davos%20India%20Supplement.pdf

[10] https://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/upload_document/National-Survey-Estimation-School-Children-Draft-Report.pdf (2014) - pg 9

[11] Federalism and Fidelity – RTE Review (2014) – Oxfam India

[12] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/Davos%20India%20Supplement.pdf

[13] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/education/Government-spends-Rs-85000-on-each-Navodaya-student-annually/articleshow/47754083.cms (2015)

[14] Federalism and Fidelity – RTE Review (2014) – Oxfam India

[15] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/Davos%20India%20Supplement.pdf – pg 4

[16] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/Davos%20India%20Supplement.pdf – pg 4

[17] Federalism and Fidelity – RTE Review (2014) – Oxfam India

[18] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/2018-10/OIA-Community-Based-Monitoring-and-Grievance-Redressal-in-Schools-in-Delhi-1012-2015-en.pdf - Policy Brief - Community-Based Monitoring and Grievance Redressal in Schools in Delhi

[19] http://rteforumindia.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Year-9-Stocktaking-Report-RTE-Forum-draft.pdf

There are several schemes and programmes implemented by the Government of India to ensure child education in India. On 22 January 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign, to “change mindsets regarding the girl child”. The campaign was launch with an aim to raise awareness about the declining sex-ratio in India and the importance of girl child education.

Other government schemes for girl child education provide financial support to parents to educate their daughters. Some of these schemes are Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana (SSY), Balika Samriddhi Yojana (BSY), and Mukhyamantri Rajshri Yojana (MRY). These schemes provide benefits such as higher interest rates, direct financial support, and tax benefits to parents for investing in education of their girl child.

Even though some reports have shown increasing enrollment of the girl child, there are still several hurdles in girl child education in India. The World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study in Uttar Pradesh has shown increased girl child education in private schools over the years. The first data collection was done in 1997-98. The same set of households were surveyed in 2007-08 and then again in 2010-11. Enrolment rate of girls was only 50% as per the first survey. This showed significant improvement, with 65% enrolment in 2007-08 and 72% by 2010-11. [20]

Problem in Girl Child Education [21]

Financial constraints.

Financial restrictions create hurdles for many parents in educating the girl child. Usually, she is forced to stay at home to carry out household chores and take care of her younger siblings while the son in the family is sent to school. Even if some parents wish to educate their girl child, lack of quality schools or other social factors create restrictions.

Household Responsibilities

Many girls are forced to drop out of school because of household responsibilities. Losing a parent or a sick family members forces young girls to take up household chores. Social norms dictate that it is a woman’s duty to do domestic work or take care of sick family members. 12-year-old Meena from Uttar Pradesh, was pulled out of school to take care of household chores and her young siblings.

Early and Forced Marriages

Our society’s obsession with marriage has ruined many lives. Girls are denied education and instead forced to marry at an early age, often before she has attains the physical and emotional maturity to even understand what marriage is. Due to lack of education she cannot make an informed decision of whether she indeed wishes to marry or not, and has no say in choosing the person she is forced to spend her entire life with. Additionally, the later a girl marries, the more the dowry her parents are forced to pay.

Preference of sons over daughters

Son preference further creates problems for a girl child. The  deep-set social norm that sons will take care of the parents in their old age, while girls will have to get married and leave the parents house leads to a lot of preferential treatment to the sons and subsequently, discrimination against the girl child from a very young age. This then leads to parents not giving any importance to the education of the girl child. 

Lack of functional toilets

Lack of basic facilities such as funtional toilets and hand washing areas force children to stay out of school. Girls are especially affected due to lack of functional toiliets once they reach menstruation age. They may be either be absent from school on a regular basis, or drop out of school altogether. 

Long Distance to School

In rural areas, children have to walk, often alone, through forests, rivers, or deserted areas, and cover a long distance to school. Due to increased risk of violence against girls, parents prefer their daughters stay safe at home. Devyani was pulled out of school because she had to walk alone to school, but with Oxfam India’s support she was enrolled back in school.

[20] https://www.isid.ac.in/~soham9r/doc/pvt_paper.pdf - Intra-Household Gender Disparity in School Choice: Evidence from Private Schooling in India – Soham Sahoo, July 2015

[21] https://donate.oxfamindia.org/girl-child-education

[22] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/PN-OIN-ES-Education-07-CSA-Efforts-Effective-Implementation-RTE-EN.pdf

In this chapter we will learn the role civil society plays in the education sector, and how its actions impact the implementation of education policies around the world.

What is a civil society organisation

There is no one clear definition of a civil society organisation (CSO). It is defined in different ways by different organisations. 

A paper by World Health Organisation states that in the absence of a common defination, civil society is usually understood as the social arena existing between the state and the individial or household. It states that the civil sociey lacks regulatory power of the state and the economic power of the market but it provides social power to the ordinary people.

What is the role of civil society

Recently, CSOs have become more prominent across the world. They are growing in number and influence around the world. CSOs play a vital role in the development sector, by asserting the rights of the marginalised communities. Civil society organisations holds the government accountable and ensure their compliance with human rights and international treating and conventions. Oxfam India is one such organisation which mobilizes people and builds movement against discrimination .

On the other hand, governments and institutions around the world have become more motivated in response to the increasing influence of CSOs, to establish a formal mechanism of working with the CSOs.

What is the role of civil society in the education section

Civil society organisations has played an active role in the education sector. CSOs have raised issues ranging from implementation to advocacy. Civil society has brought about significant changes to national education policies and system, through advocacy, across the world, ensuring that the right to education is granted to each person. 

By holding the government accountable, civil society organisations ensures that each individual has equal access to essential services and they can raise their voice against violations of their rights.

What is the role of civil society in education in India

Civil society organisations in India have been playing a crucial role, since more than a decade. They are strengthening the education system in India by actively participating in advocacy, at the national, regional and internation levels in the education sector. There is an increasing collaboration between national, regional, and international CSO, through the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) and Education for All moverment. 

NGOs like Oxfam India campaigns for quality and free public education for all, with a network of other civil society organisations, think tanks, policy makers, parents, and teachers. 

Oxfam India is building a movement of people working to end discrimination and create a free and just society.

Oxfam India is building a movement of Indians coming together to fight discrimination. We stand for the rights of the marginalized such as Adivasis, Dalits, and Muslims, with a special focus on women and girls. We work with the public and policymakers to find lasting solutions to build an inclusive and just India where everyone can have equal access to rights, be safe, get quality education and healthcare, make their voices heard and thrive. We campaign and mobilize people to stand up and speak out, to demand decisions and policies from the government that help them fight inequality and discrimination in India. We save, protect and rebuild lives in times of crisis and humanitarian disasters.

Oxfam India changed the lives of over 1 million people across six poorest states* in India last year and campaigned to reach out to tens of millions more across the country. 

We put the rights of the marginalized at the heart of everything we do, as this will lead to the lasting change we need. Together, we can create a discrimination free India where everyone can live with dignity and free from inequality and injustice. 

Joins us as we fight discrimination today, to end it for good.

(* Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh)

Why we are here

Discrimination in India has been a social evil for ages. It has affected millions of lives in the past and continues to affect people basis their gender, caste, and economic background. 

Everyone has the right to safety, education, health, shelter, food, and water, and people should not have to fight for these rights every day. 

There are millions who are deprived of basic fundamental rights and Oxfam India champions their right to be heard.

With Oxfam India’s efforts, communities live safer lives; have access to health and education, clean water, food, sanitation, and other fundamental needs.   

Oxfam India strives for an inclusive and just society.

How we make it happen

Oxfam India helps people fight discrimination on four fronts. 

• Working with Marginalized communities: We work at the grassroots to generate awareness amongst the most marginalized communities such as Adivasis, Dalit and Muslims to stand up and speak out, to demand their rights and policies that help them fight discrimination and injustice. We work with the most vulnerable people with a special focus on women and girls.
• Public Campaign & Policy making: We work with the public and policy makers to find lasting solutions to build a just and discrimination free India where everyone can have an equal access to rights, be safe, get an education, quality healthcare, make their voices heard and thrive, irrespective of their caste, gender and economic background.
• Humanitarian Response: We save, protect and rebuild lives in times of crisis and humanitarian disasters.

Our commitment

We are committed to the people, both of who we work with and our supporters.

Oxfam India believes in the power of people coming together for justice and against discrimination.

In our 68-year history, we have seen that, when people join hands, raise their voice and demand action, change happens. We are committed to the power of people to fight discrimination and help marginalized communities pull themselves out of inequality and injustice. This is why our work and organization are based in the communities who are most affected in the six poorest states of India so that we can deliver change quickly and with impact.

Oxfam India uniquely combines the power of the public and the learnings from grassroots with the strength of supporters, partners, and allies to make a positive impact in the lives of millions of people. 

From supporting women farmers in Bihar to demanding good quality education for children in Uttar Pradesh, from mobilizing public support in Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad to delivering life-saving aid in Assam and Manipur, we strive to ensure that the most marginalized people are heard.

And we won’t stop until everyone in India can live a life of dignity free from discrimination. 

Our vision for the future

Our vision is a just and discrimination free India. Oxfam India will always be there in times of crisis and injustice to fight the inequalities and discrimination affecting the lives of millions of Indians. 

Over the next five years, we will help many more people of socially excluded groups (Dalit, Adivasis and Muslims), and especially women in ‘Oxfam India focus states’ exercise their rights of citizenship and live a life of dignity, free from discrimination.

And we cannot do it without your support. We need more voices to join us in speaking truth to power so that we can influence the policies and attitudes that will fight discrimination across the nation. 

As India’s leading movement against discrimination, we will not rest until everyone in our country can live in a fairer, equal society, and leave injustice and discrimination behind forever.

In this chapter, we will explore how Oxfam India support girl child education in India and the impact we have created in the last year.

Oxfam India’s role in education

Oxfam India is working to achieve the goal of quality and affordable education for each child in India. We campaign for the right to education of people from the most marginalised communities, especially the girl child.

Gudiya had to discontinue her education after her parents migrated to Delhi from Assam. After Oxfam India’s intervention she was brought at par with regular students and is now on her way to be admitted in a government school in New Delhi.

We advocate for the proper implementation of the Right to Education Act. Oxfam India is the founding member of the National RTE Forum. The forum has almost 10,000 non-government organisations members. The National RTE Forum has been one of the biggest achievements of Oxfam India, in the education sector. The forum brings together like minded groups and people working towards the common goal of inclusive education in India. The forum ensures that different groups work together and learn and support each other. [23]  

Activities undertaken by Oxfam India [24]

Social mobilisation .

Oxfam India works with grass root organisations and initiates debates and dialogues, with teachers, intellectuals, educationist, and the general public on various issues related to the state of education in India. Oxfam India engages with youth on ‘Inequality in Education’ .

We sensitise people from various sections of the society on the right to education, status of RTE, and advocate for the right of the education for children up to 18 years of age. We deploy media channels, form support groups inside the Parliament and among policy makers at both the centre and state level. 

Campaign for Policy Changes

We campaign for stricter regulation of private schools and ensure that 25% reservation for children from economically weaker sections and marginalised groups is implemented. We campaign against all forms of privatization of education in India to ensure that education is a treated as a fundamental right and not a privilege. Oxfam India holds consulations on Right to Education with other civil society organisation in its focus states.

Effective implementation

Oxfam India works with the School Management Committees (SMCs) and local authorities, to ensure effective implementation of the RTE Act. We also work with community members to raise awareness about the issues of marginalised groups, especially the problems of girl child education to ensure fulfilment of the RTE Act’s goal.

Accountability

Oxfam India strives to ensure the government is held accountable for the gaps in the implementation of the RTE, through careful study of the policy and its implementation. We also suggest recommendations for better implementation of the Act.

Oxfam India’s impact

Impact in bihar.

Oxfam India along with its partners, Dalit Vikas Abhiyan Samiti (DVAS) is working towards ending caste based discrimination in schools in Bihar and creating awareness about the value of education among marginalised communities. The Musahar community in Samastipur district of Bihar, is especially discriminated against. Their children are put in separate classrooms and the teachers hardly teach them. Teachers and upper caste students hold the bias that they are “dirty” and “pollute the environment of the school”. Oxfam India and DVAS work towards changing these attitudes. After a series of meetings in 2018 Oxfam India and DVAS managed to push the school administration to let children from the community eat their mid-day meals with other students. The Musahar families consider this an important milestone and say it’s a “big change” they have seen in years. [25]  

Impact in Delhi

When a study by Pratham revealed in 2013 that only 10% of the SMC parent members interviewed were aware that they were part of the SMC, Oxfam India and its partner JOSH (Joint Operation for Social Help) filed a complaint at the Central Information Commission (CIC)in 2011 evoking the Section 4 of the Right to Information Act (RTI), 2005. Section 4 of the RTI Act is a proactive disclosure section mandating all public authorities to share information with citizens about their functioning. Since the school is a public authority, compliance to Section 4 was demanded. [26]   Read More about Oxfam India's work on Education in Delhi.

Impact in Jharkhand

Students were irregular in schools in Kolpotka village, Jharkhand. One of the reasons behind this was that they were taught in Hindi. Coming from the Munda tribe, speaking a different language, they could not grasp what was being taught. To raise interest of the students, Oxfam India and its partner Society for Participatory Action and Reflection (SPAR) introduced Multi Lingual Education (MLE) in the schools and appointed part-time teachers in April 2015, who took training in the tribal language. This helped students enrol back in school who had dropped out. The SMC too played a crucial role in getting children back to school. [27]   Read More about Oxfam India's work on Education in Jharkhand.

                                             Part-time teacher appointed by SPAR taking a class at Kolpotka village in                                             West Singhbhum's Manoharpur block.

Impact in odisha.

Odisha has a high percentage of out-of-school children between six and fourteen years of age. One of the key reasons for high dropout rates is the language barrier in the Adivasi belts of the state. Most children in the Adivasi dominated areas have inadequate exposure to Odia, the main medium of teaching. In order to ensure access to quality, universal and inclusive elementary education, Oxfam India along with Sikshasandhan, an NGO based in Odisha, initiated Project Birsa in 2011. As part of the project, Sikshasandhan appointed teachers who could teach in the tribal languages. Eventually, school attendance increased in the Birsa focused schools. [28]   Read More about Oxfam India's work on Education in Odisha.

Books in Odia and Ho made available, by Oxfam India and Sikshasandhan, to students of the 11 primary schools in Noto Gram Panchayat in Mayurbhanj district, Odisha.

Impact in uttar pradesh.

In 2016-17 Oxfam India and its partner, Lokmitra, identified 63 out-of-school children from marginalised sections and provided supportive classes. These classes ran for four months. 27 of these children were mainstreamed into formal schools. [29]   Read More about Oxfam India's work on Education in Uttar Pradesh.

Oxfam India and Samarth Foundation introduced sports and extracurricular activities in five schools in 2016, to encourage more children to go to school. Initially, parents were hesitant to allow their daughters to follow sports, they had to be convinced. Eventually, more girls started enrolling in schools. They even train along with boys and outperform them. [30] Read More how girls are outperforming boys in sports.

Oxfam India’s Role in Girl Child Education

In 2018, 7,048 boys and 6,003 girls from our focus areas received quality education. 136 schools and 117 Anagwadi centres were made functional. 440 School Management Committees (SMCs) were made functional in Primary and Upper Primary Schools. When you support Oxfam India’s work, you help end Inequality in education and empower children to become future leaders and change-makers of our country. In just one year, Oxfam India benefited over 13,000 children. People like you make it possible for us to help the most marginlised children and empower girl child education. Visit our story section to know about the children we helped.

When girls stay in school, they are more likely to build an educated and healthier family, earn a better living, and contribute to the development of the society. Oxfam India, NGO for girl child education, aims to bring back girls missing from the classrooms of India and empower them through education. Our young girls leaders are leading the fight for education in India.

How Oxfam India and its supporters sent Rani back to school

Rani, a 16-year-old girl from Raebareli, was compelled to drop out of school after class 7 due to poverty and household responsibilities. But support from our donors sent Rani back to school.

After dropping out of school, she spent all her time in household chores. She woke up at 5 am every day to start household chores. In order to fetch water, she had to go multiple times to a handpump, a little away from her house. She then used to clean the house, wash utensils, feed the buffaloes nearby and prepare breakfast for the entire family.

Her father Harilal is a woodcutter and her mother Sona is a housewife. Rani has three sisters and all have dropped out of school. Her eldest sister is the most educated in the family. She studied till 10th standard before she was married.

But Rani did not let her passion for studies die. Support from our donors sent Rani back to school. Supporters like you helped us and our grassroots partner in Raebareli build a Kishori Shiksha Kendra, an educational training institute for girls, near Rani’s village. Today, Rani is studying and is on her path to follow her passion. “I want to become a teacher and encourage children to attend school and fulfil their dreams.” says Rani. Read more about Rani and her journey back to school.

There are many girls like Rani who are currently outside the education system in India. Socio-economic circumstances force them to leave schools, work at home and at times, as child labours. Often, they are forced to get married at an early age and raise a family.

Oxfam India has been fighting for the implementation of the Right to Education Act in India. 

Oxfam India also advocates for the importance of right to education and aims to change regressive social norms to end discrimination. Deepti, a primary school teacher in our partner’s school keeps paretns motivated to educate their children.

But not every girl is as lucky as Rani. Each girl deserves the chance to fulfil her dreams. We must understand the importance of educating a girl child. Education is the first step to reduce poverty and inequality in any society. 

Educating a girl child helps her develop the ability to make informed decisions, join the work force, overcome poverty, and benefit her community at large, thus contributing to the development of our nation. Importance of girl child education has been observed in several studies. Girl child education has a significant impact on her own child’s development. Many studies indicate that educated women have healthier children, lower child mortality, and impart better education to their children, thus overcoming inequality. [31] These young warriors are the perfect example for fighting inequality through education.

[23] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/PN-OIN-ES-Education-07-CSA-Efforts-Effective-Implementation-RTE-EN.pdf [24] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/PN-OIN-ES-Education-07-CSA-Efforts-Effective-Implementation-RTE-EN.pdf [25] https://www.oxfamindia.org/blog/failed-education-priorities-bihar-government [26] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/2018-10/OIA-Community-Based-Monitoring-and-Grievance-Redressal-in-Schools-in-Delhi-1012-2015-en.pdf [27] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/2018-10/OIA-Mobilising-Civil-Society-towards-Right-to-Free-Public-Health-and-Education-in-Jharkhand-14052016-EN.pdf [28] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/2018-10/Oxfam-in-Action-Promoting-Multi-Lingual-Education-in-Odisha%E2%80%99s-Adivasi-belt-080915-EN.pdf

[29] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/2018-10/PN_LOKMITRA%20hi-res.pdf

[30] https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/2018-10/samarth.pdf

This chapter will help you understand why you should donate to Oxfam India and the benefits you receive.

How Your Donation Will Change Lives

Your immediate support will help oxfam india .

• Identify out-of-school children
• Provide support to children, especially girls to enrol in school
• Help reduce discrimination in education
• Raise awareness among girls about their rights
• Encourage parents to educate girls 
• Overcome social norms which restrict girl child education
• Urge the government to increase spending on government schools

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhJT_5pCxqU Donate for girl child education in India

Why monthly donation matters

Your monthly donation for girl child education ensures continuous and consistent support for hundreds of girls from marginalised communities. Without which, it will be difficult for Oxfam India to plan a long-term, sustainable programme to support girl child education. It is a small amount for you and a life-line for us at Oxfam India and thousands of children. Through your urgent support, you can help enrol thousands of girls in India who continue to live in poverty and are deprived of their rights. The amount you invest every month will help a child learn, grow and build a better life for themselves and their future generations.

Oxfam India works with children from the top 5 poorest states of India. Nandini’s parents, from Bihar, believed that girl child education is a waste of money. But after attending Oxfam India’s workshop, they now encourage other parents to educate their daughters too!

Your generous donation for education in India will enable children to achieve their dreams and transform our nation.

What’s in it for you

• When you support Oxfam India’s work, you make a difference by helping a child study and contribute to our nation’s development
• You will receive monthly updates from us about the lives you are transforming 
• You will also receive an audited annual report from Oxfam India for fund transparency and work accountability.
• Your donation also helps you in saving tax. We will provide you with Tax exemption certificate, 80G, to claim your tax.

If you wish to cancel your donation at any time, we are just an email away. Write to us at [email protected]

Help us build a nation where every girl child is in school. Bring girls back to school so they can build a better future and an empowered nation.

References:

• https://examplanning.com/types-education-formal-informal-non-formal/
• https://www.pearson.com/corporate/about-pearson/the-importance-of-education.html
• https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-weaknesses-of-non-formal-education
• http://www.studylecturenotes.com/foundation-of-education/non-formal-education-nfe
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK310920/
• https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-disadvantages-of-informal-education
• https://en.unesco.org/themes/early-childhood-care-and-education
• https://www.early-childhood-education-degrees.com/what-is-early-childhood-education/
• https://parenting.firstcry.com/articles/importance-of-early-childhood-education/

[31] https://www.firstpost.com/india/indias-female-literacy-has-gone-up-but-still-22-percentage-points-behind-world-average-education-among-young-women-rising-7197631.html

Article on Education of Girl Child in the Country

Fresh Reads

In many parts of our country girls are still discouraged from going to school. Consequently sizable section of the population is deprived of education. Schemes like Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, CBSE scholarship to single girl child and the Government’s policy of giving free education to girls have come as a boon to our society. Write an article in 150- 200 words on education of the girl child in the country.

Education of the Girl Child in the Country

In many countries, including India, the girl child is discriminated against from the early stages of her life. It is because of this discrimination, girls are not allowed education either in their childhood or after a certain age. In rural parts of India, one of the reasons why girls are deprived of education is that they would leave the parents’ house post marriage. Poor parents do not consider it to be economical investment. Since boys are the bread earners, their education is given the maximum importance.

Often girls themselves choose not to study, usually due to financial crisis at home, domestic responsibilities and even lack of aspiration. However, education for girls is extremely necessary because they too play an important role in country’s economy and society. Also, women are the primary care givers in the family. Proper education would enable them to improve their lives and others’ as well. Educated girls can share the burden of earning a livelihood, which would eliminate child labour.

Education will also make girls aware of family planning, health and sanitation. As a result, there will be low infant mortality rates and less numbers of death of women in child birth.

Fortunately, government schemes, such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, CBSE scholarship to single girl child and the policy of giving free education to girls have come as a boon to our society. One can say there is still hope for the betterment of the country.

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Peace Studies for Sustainable Development in Africa pp 259–269 Cite as

The Girl Child Education and Sustainable Development in Africa

• Ayo Ayoola-Amale 9 , 10  
• First Online: 27 October 2022

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Part of the book series: Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development ((AAESPD))

Gender equality demonstrates the moral, ethical, and real reasons why greater gender equality is very essential to sustainable development.

Gender equality is indispensable for sustainable development in Africa considering the fact that education decreases poverty in all its forms (SDG no. 1), ends hunger through reaching food security (SDG no. 2); Quality education for girls, reduces fertility rates and therefore slows down population explosion; lowers infant and maternal mortality rates and improves health and nutrition and well-being of families (SDG no. 3). Educated mothers ensure better prospects of education for their children (SDG no. 4).

The apparent gap and imbalance between the boy child and the girl child is attributed to patriarchy, lack of quality education, poverty and gender disparities, and consequently, the differences in access to human, financial, and social capital.

The socio-economic marginalization of girls and women resulting from gender inequalities, lack of access to education, and if at all, lack of quality education result in poverty, poor standards of living, diminished career choices, unequal salaries, and economic exclusion. It is very essential for governments and their leaders to invest in girl-child education for sustainable development in Africa.

• Girls’ education
• Gender parity
• Human rights
• Human capabilities
• Sustainable development

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Further Reading

AfDB (2014) Gender strategy: investing in gender equality for Africa’s transformation. www.afdb.org . Accessed 18 Mar 2016

African Gender Index (2015) Empowering African women: an agenda for action. www.afdb.org . Accessed 13 Mar 2016

Carter JA (2012) The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. JRio+20: The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, June 2012. US Congressional Research Service

Google Scholar  

European Parliament Report (2016) Women’s empowerment and its links to sustainable development. www.europarl.europa.eu . Accessed 22 Mar 2016

Johnsson-Latham G (2007) A study on gender Equality as a prerequisite for sustainable development. Report to the Environment Advisory Council, Sweden. www.atria.nl/publications

OECD (2008) Gender and sustainable development: maximizing the economic, social and environmental role of women. www.oecd.org . Accessed 15 Mar 2016

Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues (OSAGI) (2001) Important concepts underlining gender mainstreaming. www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi . Accessed 22 Mar 2016

Ojalammi S (2010) Gender and development in Sub- Saharan Africa. European Regional Development Fund. www.winnet8.euget/file . Accessed 17 Mar 2016

Sharma M (2016) Women education: need for sustainable development. Global J Hum Soc Sci C Sociol Cult 16(1):22–25

Stevens C (2009) Drat Report. Green jobs and women workers: employment, Equity and Equality. www.sustainlabour.org . Accessed 16 Mar 2016

Stevens C (2010) Are women the key to sustainable development? Sustainable Development Insights. www.bu.edu/pardee . Accessed 16 Mar 2016

Tchouassi T (2012) Does gender equality work for sustainable development in Central African countries? Some empirical lessons. Eur J Sustain Dev 1(3):383–398

Article   Google Scholar  

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2013). Powerful synergies: gender equality, economic development and environmental sustainability. www.udp.orgon . Accessed 19 Mar 2016

United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) (2012) Empowering women for sustainable development. www.unece.org . Accessed 22 Mar 2016

UN-Women (2014) World survey on the role of women in development: gender equality and sustainable development. www.unwomen.org . Accessed 23 Mar 2016

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Ghana (WILPF Ghana), Girls’ Education Campaign (2010–) www.wilpf.org , http://www.wilpfghana.org , www.facebook.com/WILPFGhanaSection

World Bank Report (2001) Engendering development through gender equality in rights, resources, and voice. www.worldbank.org . Accessed 22 Mar 2016

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Lester R. Kurtz

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Ayoola-Amale, A. (2022). The Girl Child Education and Sustainable Development in Africa. In: Spiegel, E., Mutalemwa, G., Liu, C., Kurtz, L.R. (eds) Peace Studies for Sustainable Development in Africa. Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92474-4_22

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Essay on Girl Education for Students and Children

500+ words essay on girl education.

If we look at the demographics, India is one of the most populated countries. However, the rate of girl education is quite low in the country. It is quite troubling to see the figures in a country where women are given the status of goddesses. The figures have significantly improved to an extent but there’s still a long way to go.

Women were not allowed to even step out of their houses in ancient India , but times are changing. Along with changing times, people’s thinking is also changing. They wish to educate their girls and see them succeed in life. However, this is not the case in rural India which makes for more than 60% of the population. We need to identify the factors responsible for such low rates of girl education to find some solutions.

Factors Contributing to Low Rate of Girl Education

There are various factors that make it impossible for girls to get an education in our country. Firstly, the poverty rate is alarming. Even though education is being made free, it still involves a substantial cost to send girls to school. Therefore, families who are struggling to make ends meet fail to pay the educational expenses of their children.

Secondly, in rural areas, there aren’t many schools. This creates a distance problem as they are located far from the villages. In some areas, students have to walk for three to four hours to reach their school. This is where the safety of the girls gets compromised so parents don’t see it fit to send them off so far.

Furthermore, the regressive thinking of the people makes it tougher for girls to get an education. Some people still believe girls are meant to stay in their houses and look after the kitchen. They do not like women to do any other tasks expect for household ones.

Other than that, social issues like child marriage and child labor also stop the girl from getting an education. Parents pull daughters out of school to marry them off at an early age. Also, when girls indulge in child labor, they do not get time to study.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Benefits of Girl Education

If we wish to see India progress and develop, we need to educate our girl child. They are indeed the future of our nation. Moreover, when they become educated, they will not have to be dependent on others for their livelihood.

One of the most important benefits of girl education is that the country’s future will be brighter and better. Similarly, our economy can grow faster if more and more women become financially strong thereby reducing poverty.

Furthermore, women who are educated can take proper care of their children. This will strengthen the future as lesser kids will die due to a lack of vaccination or a similar reason. Even for women, they will be less likely to become a patient of HIV/AIDS as they will be aware of the consequences.

Most importantly, educated women can result in a decrease in social issues like corruption, child marriage , domestic abuse and more. They will become more confident and handle their families better in all spheres. Thus we see how one educated woman can bring so much change in her life along with the others as well.

Some FAQs on Girl Education

Q.1 Why is girl education not encouraged in India?

A.1 India is still a developing country. It has too much poverty and regressive thinking. It is one of the main reasons why people don’t encourage girls to get an education.

Q.2 What are the advantages of educating girls?

A.2 When we educate girls, we educate a whole nation. As she teaches everyone around her. The education of girls will result in a better economy and a brighter future along with enhanced confidence of the girl.

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• Importance of Girl Child Education in India
• On: January 23, 2024
• By: Smile Foundation

Our Constitution accords equal rights to both men and women in every sphere of life, including the right to education. However, the reality is very different. The girl child is provided only primary or at most secondary education. The numbers bear witness to our country’s sex ratio of 943 females per 1000 males. How can we hope for India to progress when half of our society doesn’t even have access to basic education or skills?

The numbers are no better in other parts of the world. On average 129 million girls are out of school, including 32 million of primary school age, 30 million of lower-secondary school age, and 67 million of upper-secondary school age. In war-torn countries, these numbers are twice as high. 

Right to Education

However, there has been some progress towards rectifying this issue. In 2009, the Right to Education Act (RTE) , mandated that it is the right of every child to obtain a minimum amount of education. The program makes it compulsory for all children from the ages of 6 up to 14 to have unconditional rights and access to educational opportunities. This was the first step in the right direction, but has not yielded the results as expected and even today, in 2021 we see a gender gap with girl child education lagging far behind in India. 

Girl Child Education

Girl child education is a pivot for families, communities, and societies today. Investing in girls’ education transforms communities, countries, and the entire world. Girls who are able to get educated will be able to join the workforce, earn livelihoods, take care of their families, and marry at a mature and responsible age. This way they can build better futures for themselves and their families. 

Importance of Girl Child Education

As countries get more modern and strive towards developing their economic status, girl education assumes an ever bigger role. Since half of the active workforce is female, not having them receive an education will end up being a burden on the country’s economic progress.  Girls’ education strengthens economies and reduces inequality. It contributes to more stable, resilient societies that are able to give all individuals numerous opportunities to fulfill their potential and realize their dreams.

Challenges to Achieving Maximum Girl Education 

Apart from ensuring enough schools and easy access to girls, many key elements need to be in order before girls’ education can increase and run a smooth course. So while dedicated educated classrooms and schools for girls will boost attendance, there are several other issues that need to be addressed and resolved. Such as 

• Girls’ safety within these surroundings is paramount– often parents are scared of the distances that their girls need to travel to receive an education. Especially in rural areas where neither roads nor transportation are available or reliable. This can be a deterrent leading to massive dropouts from girls attending school. 
• Access to free education – this is the only way that parents in marginalized and rural economies will agree to send their girls to school. Eliminating any expense and cost burden to families will make them more receptive to the idea of education.
• The academic curriculum ideally should be a blend of subjects and vocational courses that support girls in the careers they choose to pursue. The curriculum offered should be created keeping in mind that most of these girls are likely to be either married off or allowed to work in selective professions. In both cases, apart from traditional education methods, schools should also offer robust and easy-to-understand vocational courses that can be of help should girls wish to pursue occupations in their later age
• Access to free and hygienic sanitation – this is also one of the reasons why we see girls dropping out of schools without completing even their primary education. Schools set up in rural areas as well as tier 2 and 3 towns should have provisions for clean toilets and hygienic waste disposal systems for girls to avail of during their menstruation cycles 
• Language-based education – Native language-centric education will see higher consumption amongst families who prefer their children to be educated in their mother tongues. This also helps parents be involved in their child’s education making them willing and open to sending their daughters to school as well.
• Freedom to study with no burden of household chores – once parents understand that the role of education for their girls is equally important as it is for their sons, they can be persuaded to let the girl child study without expecting her to help with household chores. Parents need to see the benefits of education for the girl child and how it will impact and enhance their quality of life. Once we are able to achieve that, girls can devote their time to learning well and studying hard.

Dream of a Gender-Equal World in Education

“ Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao ” (translated into “save the girl child, educate the girl child”) is the country’s slogan to prevent female infanticide and move the spotlight to the importance of girl education. If India wants to be perceived as a highly developed nation and one of the leading voices in world affairs, then it must focus on girl education and work hard to ensure that there are no gaps and that education is openly and freely offered to both genders.

Smile Foundation and Girl Child Education

Smile Foundation’s initiative ‘ She Can Fly ’ is an honest effort to enable, equip, and empower girl children with quality education, proper nutrition, good health, adequate skills, and most of all self-confidence to help them unlock their true potential.

Let us all come forward and join hands to give wings to a girl child’s dreams. Empower, educate, and make her strong enough to stand her own ground and shine in her efforts. She Can Fly, let’s give her the sky!

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School’s out: how climate change is already badly affecting children’s education

Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo

Associate Professor, Psychosocial Difficulties, University of Oslo

Honorary Professor, Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research, Macquarie University

Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Computational Social and Behavioural Science, Columbia University

Disclosure statement

Helen Louise Berry has received funding from the National Health & Medical Research Council, the Australian Research Council and various other national and international competitive and consultancy research funding sources. She is affiliated with The Australian Greens.

Caitlin M Prentice, Francis Vergunst, and Kelton Minor do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Schools across South Sudan have been ordered to close as a heat wave of 45°C sweeps across the country. In recent years, severe flooding has already caused major disruptions to schooling in South Sudan where, on average, children complete less than five years of formal education across their lives .

As researchers interested in both climate change and learning, we’ve been surprised that most public debate in this area concerns how best to teach children about climate change as part of the curriculum. Recently, we examined a less discussed, but arguably much more consequential, question: How is climate change impacting children’s education worldwide?

In a recent paper published in Nature Climate Change , we reviewed studies linking climate change-related events or “climate stressors” to education outcomes. One of the clearest connections was between heat exposure and reduced academic performance.

A study in the US found that adolescents’ maths scores decreased significantly on days above 26°C. In China , hotter day-of-test temperatures were associated with a drop in exam performance equal to losing a quarter of a year – or several months – of schooling.

But it’s not just test days that matter. Studies show that raised temperatures also affect learning over longer time periods. For example, pupils’ test scores suffered when there were more hot days across the school year and even when the hotter weather occurred three to four years before exam day.

Our review also highlights how climate-related regional disasters like wildfires, storms, droughts and floods are keeping many children out of school entirely. Floods can prevent children from travelling to school and cause damage to school buildings and materials, which disrupts learning and lowers test scores.

In developing countries, storms and droughts commonly cause children to leave school permanently to join the workforce and support their families. Children in higher-income countries are not immune. They miss school days due to hurricanes and wildfires and these absences have measurable effects on education outcomes.

The impacts of climate disasters can also affect children before they are born with consequences that reverberate across their lives. For example, children whose mothers were pregnant during Hurricane Sandy were more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a condition that can make schooling more challenging.

In India , researchers found that raised temperatures lead to lower test scores due to crop failure and malnutrition, highlighting the importance of indirect links between climate stressors and subsequent school participation and learning.

Educational injustice

Our analysis suggests that climate change will exacerbate existing inequalities in global education access and attainment, with already disadvantaged groups facing the largest learning setbacks. In the US, heat had worse effects on exam scores for racial and ethnic minorities and children living in lower-income school districts.

Following a super typhoon in the Philippines, children whose families had fewer financial resources and smaller social networks were more likely to drop out of school than their better-resourced neighbours. In contexts where girls’ education is less prioritised than boys’, their school attendance and exam scores have suffered more following climate change stressors such as droughts and storms .

Globally, regions where people are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change – in terms of risk of harmful stressors occurring and resources available to adapt – are also regions where children already receive fewer years of schooling.

The impacts of climate change on education are already widely visible. While the scale of the problem is daunting, there are many ways to take action. Most critically, global heating urgently needs to be limited by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

At the same time, children’s education must be protected from climate change stressors that are already occurring. Possible measures include installing cooling technologies, effective disaster response planning, building stressor-resilient schools and addressing systemic global inequalities related to socioeconomic, gender and racial discrimination.

Preventing harm to children’s education is a worthy goal in itself. But improving education can also contribute to greater awareness and climate literacy , while mitigating climate change and making children more resilient in the face of climate stressors.

Education can help fight climate change. But we must also fight climate change to prevent harm to education. Without action, the future of young people around the world hangs in the balance.

• Extreme weather
• Climate justice
• Climate crisis

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• Published: 15 October 2020

Defining and deconstructing girl child marriage and applications to global public health

• Yvette Efevbera   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5947-9816 1 &
• Jacqueline Bhabha 2 , 3  

BMC Public Health volume  20 , Article number:  1547 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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An estimated 650 million girls and women alive today married before their 18th birthday. Referred to as girl child marriage, the formal or informal union of the girl-child before age 18, the practice is increasingly recognized as a key roadblock to global health, development, and gender equality. Although more research than ever has focused on girl child marriage, an important gap remains in deconstructing the construct. Through an extensive review of primary and secondary sources, including legal documents, peer-reviewed articles, books, and grey literature across disciplines, we explore what the term “girl child marriage” means and why it more accurately captures current global efforts than other terms like early, teenage, or adolescent marriage. To do this, we dive into different framings on marriage, children, and gender. We find that there has been historical change in the understanding of girl child marriage in published literature since the late 1800s, and that it is a political, sociocultural, and value-laden term that serves a purpose in different contexts at different moments in time. The lack of harmonized terminology, particularly in the global public health, prevents alignment amongst different stakeholders in understanding what the problem is in order to determine how to measure it and create solutions on how to address it. Our intent is to encourage more intentional use of language in global public health research.

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Worldwide, an estimated 650 million girls and women alive today married before their 18th birthdays [ 1 ]. One in three girls in developing countries is married before age 18, while one in five girls is married before age 15 [ 2 ]. Referred to as girl child marriage, the formal or informal union of the girl-child before age 18, the practice is increasingly recognized as a key roadblock to global health, development, and gender equality. South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa regions account for the largest number of women married as children [ 1 ]; however, a recent report also shows high rates in previously understudied geographies like South America, where 25% of girls married before age 18 [ 3 ]. Girl child marriage is also increasingly documented in high-income countries like the United States, where a recent study estimates nearly 1% of 15–17-year-olds surveyed had been married, with variation across states [ 4 ]. (See Table  1 for countries with the highest prevalence rates.) Despite increasing global consensus that girl child marriage should be prevented given its harms to the rights and well-being of girls [ 5 , 6 , 7 ], no region is on track to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 Target 3 to eliminate all harmful practices including child, early, and forced marriage [ 1 ].

Although more research than ever has focused on girl child marriage, an important gap remains in deconstructing the construct. Girl child marriage elaborates on the definition for child marriage, often synonymously referred to as early marriage, which is defined by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) as the union of an individual before age 18 [ 1 , 8 ]. Such terms have become normative, used today among governments, non-governmental organizations, advocacy groups, popular media, researchers, and members of affected communities alike. Indeed, references to child marriage appear more frequently than a decade ago. A new Google alert regularly shares at least one new article or report on child marriage, overwhelmingly focused on the girl-child, across disciplines including global health, public health, education, and social sciences broadly. Even popular media outlets in the United States (U.S.) such as National Public Radio (NPR), the New York Times , and Teen Vogue have increasingly discussed this social phenomenon, describing its occurrence and consequences for women all over the world [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ].

Through an extensive review of primary and secondary sources, including legal documents, peer-reviewed articles, books, and grey literature across disciplines, we explore how the term “child marriage” has been used and defined and why “girl child marriage” more accurately captures current global efforts than other terms like early, teenage, or adolescent marriage. To do this, we dive into different framings on marriage, children, and gender. Unlike much global public health research that defines child marriage, or girl child marriage, in a single sentence, we demonstrate that it requires deconstruction. Our intent is to encourage more intentional use of language in global public health research.

A historical journey on terminology

The concept of the term “child marriage” appears to have strong roots in India, perhaps unsurprisingly, as it is a country with high rates that has led rigorous activism for over a century. Some of the earliest discussions identified in published literature came from India, raising questions about marital unions that were early and with questions surrounding an ability to consent [ 13 , 14 ]. In a letter to an American friend in the nineteenth century, Roy [ 13 ] described critical arguments for why child marriage in Hindu culture existed at the time, suggesting thousands of years of history to reconcile. He interchangeably referred to “child marriage” and “infant marriage,” and though he never defined either term, he reported that 10% of girls and 3% of boys age 8 and below were married at his time of writing. Yet at the same time, Roy explained that the age of consent for marriage in England was similarly low – 12 years for girls and 14 years for boys – a considerable departure from England’s majority age of 21 at the time [ 13 ]. This early published reference serves as an important reminder that marriages at young ages were practiced worldwide, in Western and non-Western countries, in economically advantaged and disadvantaged countries, alike. It would not be until the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 that a legal framework for reconsidering age at marriage laws was formalized in India, eventually leading to a revised Act that outlawed marriage of girls under 18 years and boys under 21 years in 1978 [ 15 ]. Footnote 1

The earliest references to the term “child marriage” in scientific articles in PubMed, a leading database for health-related research, emerged in 1955 and 1957, in the context of Israel and England respectively [ 17 , 18 ]. There were no publications again until 1978, and the very limited articles focused on India, neighboring South Asian countries, and the merits of preventing child marriage for population control. The first PubMed mention of child marriage in sub-Saharan Africa was an article in 1984, which hypothesized (though did not test) adolescent sexual exposure, heightened by the common practice of child marriage, may contribute to cervical cancer [ 19 ]. Published health-related research on child marriage remained sparse over the few decades, with a slight increase in published research in 1995 (particularly in the context of India).

This slight increase in research in the mid-1990s was consistent with increasing discussions about protecting girls’ and women’s rights and promoting their sexual and reproductive health [ 20 ]. The World Summit for Children had convened world leaders for the first time around basic protections for boys and girl in 1990. The International Conference on Population Development (ICPD) in Cairo called to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment as part of a broader agenda on population growth and development in 1994 [ 20 ]. And, just one year later, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing built on the momentum of the ICPD and the Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action, an agenda for gender equality, was unanimously adopted by 189 countries. These global moments, which referenced the girl-child and marriage in their recommendations, were complemented by domestic activism in India, where much child marriage research was coming from in 1995; India had signed onto key international instruments establishing children’s and women’s rights and demographic surveys showing high rates of marriage prompted calls for marriage registration reform around this time [ 21 ].

By 2000, leading international organizations based in Europe and the U.S. promoted attention toward setting and enforcing a minimum marital age of 18 years, favoring the term “early marriage” in reference to this practice among both girls and boys [ 15 , 22 , 23 ]. They called for a human rights-based approach toward protecting young people, particularly girls, from early unions, which were increasingly recognized as harmful. For example, early marriage was identified as a key advocacy issue by the Forum on Marriage and the Rights of the Children, which built a global network of organizations that collectively called for increased attention to this “relatively neglected area” [ 23 ]. Similarly, the UNICEF Innocenti Center for Research [ 15 ] called for increased attention by UNICEF and other international organizations to early marriage, its harmful impacts, and solutions; they favored the term “early marriage,” sometimes interchanging it with “child marriage,” and furthered support for defining it as a union by age 18 under statutory and customary law. The International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) [ 22 ] and researchers such as Jensen and Thornton [ 24 ] also referred to early marriage as occurring before age 18 in line with international convention; their analyses looked not only at an age 18 cut-off but more broadly at trends in age at marriage and its health and well-being correlates, such as sexual and reproductive health, pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, and education.

In the few years that followed, “child marriage” gained traction as the dominant term. Technical consultations across organizations took place, UNICEF and other partners agreed to measure five indicators to better understand this construct in 2003, and by 2005, UNICEF introduced an expanded definition of child marriage [ 25 ]. In their report titled “Early Marriage: A Harmful Traditional Practice,” UNICEF used the term “child marriage” more frequently throughout the text, stating: “The term ‘child marriage’ will be used to refer to both formal marriages and informal unions in which a girl lives with a partner as if married before the age of 18” [ 25 ]. While there was not yet consensus on the inclusion of informal unions in the definition, others including the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), the Forum, and UNFPA similarly articulated a focus on “child marriage” (synonymous to “early marriage”), maintaining the age 18 threshold due to a human rights agenda and its health, social, and economic costs [ 26 ]. Publications on “child marriage” increased over time, and Raj appears to be the first to publish using the term “girl child marriage” in her paper on child marriage and health in 2010 [ 27 ]. Though she provided no rationale for her use of this revised terminology, it makes sense as a framing tool, given her research focus on the consequences for only women married as children. Footnote 2

Since that time, publications on child marriage, particularly for the girl-child and as related to health, have grown exponentially. In 2019 alone, there were 47 publications in PubMed, a 25% increase from the previous year (See Fig.  1 ). This increase in scholarly research is accompanied by global momentum over the last decade, including: the establishment of the high profile Girls Not Brides: The Global Partnership to End Child Marriage , the inaugural UN International Day of the Girl featuring a call against child marriage, and the inclusion of child marriage indicators to monitor in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals blueprint.

Number of PubMed articles searchable using “child marriage” published, by year

Parsing out “marriage”

To understand what is referred to as “girl child marriage” requires an understanding of the construct of marriage itself. International legal frameworks have sought to define marriage. As illustrated by the Convention to Regulate Conflicts of Laws in the Matter of Marriage, drafted by 12 European countries in 1902 (and later dissolved), and the Havana Convention on Private International Law, drafted by 15 Latin American countries in 1928 [ 28 ], more than 100 years of international legal agreements have sought to legally define marriage and the rights it guarantees individuals in marriage. The 1926 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices similar to Slavery also sought to ensure all individuals’ freedoms including that of women and children [ 29 ], creating foundations where marriage could only occur with each parties’ consent. These can be viewed as predecessors to understanding modern legal constructs around the global definition of marriage, and more specifically child marriage and forced marriage.

Today, legally-binding international conventions and treaties illustrate a global consensus on the rights and protections humans should be offered, including as related to a legal construct of marriage. The 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights provided the first internationally-agreed upon modern legal definition of marriage. Article 16 specifies that all “men and women of full age … have the right to marry and found a family,” that marriage is a union that can be formed with “free and full consent” of participants as well as dissolved, and, by interpretation, that there are rights and protections afforded to married individuals [ 30 ]. The 1962 Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriages reiterates the 1948 guidelines and explicitly calls for registration of marriages and eliminating “child marriages and the betrothal of young girls before the age of puberty,” though further explanation of what these unions are was omitted from this Convention [ 31 ]. A 1965 follow-up to this convention, the Recommendation on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriages, is the first document to explicitly define “full age” as 15 years [ 32 ], establishing a legal benchmark for who is eligible to marry among signatories.

More recent international agreements further create legal frameworks for defining marriage. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), both drafted in 1966, provide additional guidelines for protecting human rights, particularly for women and children, though these were not enforceable until 1976 [ 33 , 34 ]. Article 23 of the ICCPR calls for marital union among those who consent and are of “marriageable age.” Other rights protected, such economic and social exploitation of young people (ICESCR, Article 10) and education (ICESCR, Article 13), begin to form a context in which attention must be paid to unions that violate these rights. The 1981 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) articulates that women, especially at younger ages, may be vulnerable in marital practices and prohibits discrimination of women; men and women have differential rights and “the marriage of a child” must be eliminated. More specifically, the Convention calls for countries to set a minimum age of marriage and require formal registration [ 35 ].

While marriage may seem clearly defined legally, anthropological and demographic literature reveal that marriage is not a straightforward concept. It is a practice symbolizing a union that can have different meanings in different contexts. Bell describes marriage as “a construction in a social space whose dimensions are defined by an articulation of rights and responsibilities” [ 36 ]. “In the structurally simplest case,” Bell writes, “marriage involves the entry of a man into a woman’s domestic unit” [ 36 ]. One could argue that in contemporary societies, this “entry” might be more figurative, rather than literal, as marital arrangements can now take place with someone half-way across the world. Moreover, marriage is no longer exclusively considered as male-to-female relationships in all contexts. Regardless, marriage is an institution, or an established interpersonal relationship, that offers rights to those in this bond, and in traditional societies, will often involve others beyond the individuals themselves. The extent and strength of those rights, and subsequent responsibilities, may differ in different societies because rights only exist in the context of relationships with others [ 36 ].

Marriage, particularly in traditional societies, is rooted in sociocultural and economic contexts involving the joining of two families, rather than just two individuals [ 37 , 38 ]. This union in many societies may have religious roots. One could point toward several religions (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Judaism) for guidance on religious principles that have informed marital practices. As one example, in the context of Hindu religion in India in the 1890s, Roy describes:

[Marriage] is expressly said to be a divine union. Christ said “What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” We find Solomon calling the wife a “gift from the Lord,” and in the marriage service appointed by the Church of England some one [sic] is required to stand as the donor of the bride, as is the case in every Hindoo marriage. “Marriage,” says an eminent doctor (Hindoo) of law, “is viewed as a gift of the bride by her father or other guardian to the bridegroom.” The marital union is thus a divine union; it is an act of God and not of man. It is apparent that marriage is not a civil contract, and the consent is not the essence of it. The Roman Catholics regard it as a sacrament; so do the Hindoos [ 13 ].

Indeed, Roy’s writings even today serve as a reminder that colonial legacies and an increasing mixture of cultures are redefining how many now conceptualize a marriage. A study in Uganda, for example, illuminates that although concepts like “love” and “faithfulness” are often used synonymously with marriage in discourse, the reality of marriage, in practice, may be expressed in different ways [ 39 ]. Marriage is perhaps best viewed as a process – a series of events, decisions, and rites – instead of a dichotomous categorization of a person’s relationship status [ 37 ].

Importantly, some relationships considered marriage in local contexts may not result in a legal union [ 37 ], creating a challenge for how one measures or documents marital status, particularly in research. Common or civil law provide legislation in support of some marriages, such as based on age and consent of the marrying parties, while customary law and religious teachings may allow divergent unions [ 15 ]; age at marriage is one way in which these differences manifest. The lack of agreement, even in a single community, of what constitutes a marriage is moreover complicated by a colonial legacy that implemented laws on marriage that directly clashed with customary law [ 15 ]. Demographically, perhaps inspired by these challenges, marriage is today conceptualized to include a union through cohabitation. The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program asks women to self-report on their marital status and counts “married women and women living with a partner” as currently married to generate nationally-representative data on marriage estimates [ 40 ]. Similarly, the UNICEF Multiple Indicator Clusters Surveys (MICS), another major international source of nationally-representative household data, asks women: “Have you ever been married or lived together with someone as if married?” and synonymously refers to her spouse as “husband/partner” [ 41 ]. This conceptualization of marriage adopts an understanding of customary laws and local norms, providing a more comprehensive picture of how individuals themselves view their relationship status.

Definitions of marriage are constructed in different ways, including legally and socioculturally as briefly touched on above. Legal frameworks are perhaps a top-down approach to constructing definitions of marriage and have resulted in broad international policy agreement on the creation of harmonious regional agreements and national legislation. Subsequently, legal definitions contribute to understanding marriage civilly and across geographic boundaries, which has the advantage of being more tangible to conceptualize, practice, and enforce. Yet in societies as complex and multifaceted as those that exist today, where civil law only serves as one influence on how marriage is constructed and understood, marriage cannot be reduced to its legal definition alone. Although understanding marriage from only a legal perspective loses the customary, religious, and broader sociocultural contexts for which individuals in communities may understand and engage in the practice of marriage, it is among the most common ways to define marriage across contexts.

Parsing out “Child”

The construct of “girl child marriage” also incorporates the concept of a “child,” another ambiguous and difficult term to define. Here, too, international legal frameworks have played an important role in creating shared global norms defining childhood. As early as 1924, the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations (UN) established after World War I to maintain world peace, identified children as an important and special population. A first framework was put forth stating that children “have inalienable rights and are not the property of their father”; Sharma and Gupta [ 42 ] further point toward the 1959 UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child, the 1979 declaration as the International Year of the Child, and the 1990 World Summit on Children.

The 1990 Convention on the Rights of Child (CRC), a legally-binding international agreement ratified by all but one country, was a major turning point. Article 1 defines that “a child means every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier” [ 43 ]. The CRC creates a framework that establishes children, based on years of life, as a special population for whom specific rights should be granted and protected, which proposes something unique about younger human beings. However, while the CRC proposes the age of 18 years as a benchmark of adulthood, the age of a child, or a minor, often legally varies across contexts.

An ethical, or moral, argument supports the establishment of a “child-adult” distinction. As Schapiro [ 44 ] argues, certain characteristics are ascribed to someone who is a child, which warrants a different treatment or perspective on their actions until they reach the adult threshold; a child, Schapiro proposes drawing from Immanuel Kant, is “undeveloped” and “dependent.” In other words, there is a level of immaturity children demonstrate, resulting in a lack of agency and requiring additional support until they are able to reason and act independently based on these reasons.

Developmentally, a child is understood to achieve biological, cognitive, psychological, and social milestones over time [ 45 ]. At different ages, children are expected to crawl then walk, talk, and express themselves; process increasingly complex forms of information; and develop relationships with others. Children are not expected to behave as maturely as adult counterparts or to clearly assert and describe their own identities, which are shaped overtime as the brain continues to develop and individuals interact with their contexts [ 46 , 47 ]. Psychology theorists, including Sigmund Freud (founder of psychoanalysis and psychosexual development theory), Erik Erikson (founder of psychosocial development theory), and Jean Piaget (founder of cognitive development theory), have written extensively on child development across different domains [ 46 , 48 , 49 ]. Their different perspectives contribute to the position that childhood is a fluid construct evolving in an individual’s early lifetime.

In recent years, a further distinction of adolescence, referring to older children who are still not yet adults, has emerged. Defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as individuals aged 10 to 19, adolescents biologically and socioculturally occupy a gray space between childhood and adulthood [ 50 ]. Only recently have adolescents been recognized as distinct, more mature than children, yet less developmentally advanced than adults physically, cognitively, and socially [ 51 ]. The need to recognize older children as adolescents may be rooted in changing sociocultural contexts, with different expectations and norms for young people. As Bearinger and colleagues explain:

First, acknowledging wide cultural variation, adolescents are increasingly delaying marriage—for some, to pursue education or employment options. Urbanisation has an important role in this societal shift. Second, historically, societies expected childbearing to follow shortly after marriage; now norms are shifting towards delayed childbearing. These key changes, which affect all societies by varying degrees, have expanded the gap between puberty and marriage, and between marriage and childbearing [ 51 ].

Moreover, interntional agenda-setting organizations such as the WHO and World Bank have further called out youth (10–24 years) and suggested that for health and human development interventions, there is a need to consider young people through the first 8000 days (through age 21) [ 52 ]; such guidance has renewed nominclature on the definition of a child.

Importantly, what perhaps all of this points to, defining a “child” has evolved historically and in different spaces and places. These varying ideas of childhood and adolescence are relational concepts and their definitions at a given moment are influenced by culture, history, local ideology, and different levels of law [ 53 ]. Macleod explains that childhood “is not a timeless, transcultural phenomenon”; instead, it should be understood “as the product of a number of cultural processes and modernist ideas, which have come to define a specific life stage as different from others and as in need of special treatment” [ 53 ]. Moreover, there may not be a clear or single trajectory from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, and trajectories may vary by context.

The fluidity of the concept of childhood, as detailed above, presents a challenge in the universality of the definition of a child. Different stages of human development are often ascribed to age ranges where these stages are commonly observed and achieved, yet it is not difficult to imagine that transition from childhood to adolescence to adulthood varies depending on local context. For example, where completion of secondary school in some communities signifies a transition, age 18 in one setting may be the normal age of this transition while age 24 may be the age in another setting; completing secondary schooling may be a rare event in other settings, which would make that marker of transition near impossible. In recognition of such differences, normative definitions of a child such as in the CRC acknowledge that countries may have their own guidelines that lower (or raise) the legal age of majority [ 43 ]; it is also for this reason that social and cultural constructs of childhood must be acknowledged. The concepts of childhood and adolescence explored have in common the implication that young people have basic universal needs, although how these needs show up and how these needs are met may vary by context [ 54 ].

In reflecting on the construct of “girl child marriage,” a child cannot be simply viewed as less than adult: small, weak, young, helpless, little, irresponsible. In fact, such stereotypical ideas of a child are, in many cases and contexts, incorrect. Yet a reference to “girl child marriage” or “child marriage” rather than “adolescent marriage,” “teenage marriage,” or even “early marriage” reminds the reader that a protected population, demonstrated to be less developmentally or socially mature than an adult, is the population being addressed. We have proposed the use of this term to explicitly connect this scientific research with the human rights and advocacy discussions, reminding the reader that the focus is on social experiences young women have experienced preceding their adult life.

A child, as referenced in “girl child marriage,” should be understood to consist of individuals within the first couple of decades of life, afforded varying levels of legal responsibility and accountability, biological and sociocultural maturity, and agency in a cultural context at a given moment in time. Definitions of a child often overlap with an adolescent, pointing toward a unique period earlier in an individual’s life that is distinct across legal, biological, and developmental domains. Like the construct of marriage, international legal frameworks setting a child at age 18 – which draw from theories of child development, ethics, and other areas – have been successful in building agreement around a shared definition of a child that can be operationalized more widely, particularly in the context of consent for marriage.

The need to focus on girls

We have elected to suggest the need to make a distinction between “child marriage” and “girl child marriage,” a departure from most publications by explicitly engaging with the construct of a “girl.” Child marriage, by definition, impacts both boys and girls [ 55 ], yet existing research and advocacy emphasize girls affected due to the prevalence of the practice and the intensity of its consequences for this population [ 8 ]. Ages at marriage are lower for females, on average, as compared to male counterparts [ 56 ]. Currently, no region is on-track to eliminate child marriage by 2030 to achieve SDG 5 Target 3, and nearly 650 million girls and women living today have been affected [ 1 ]. If rates of girl child marriage remain unchanged, 12 million girls under age 18 will continue to marry each year, in contrast to the prevalence of child marriage among boys, estimated to be one-fifth the level of girls [ 57 ]. Legal ages of marriage in countries often differ between girls and boys. In fact, a review conducted by the World Bank in 2017 identified 17 countries where the legal age for boys was higher than for girls, including Mali (16 years for girls, 18 years for boys), Iran (13 years for girls, 15 years for boys), and India, where the majority of women married before age 18 reside (18 years for girls, 21 years for boys) [ 58 ]. Similarly, social expectations on the ideal age of marriage for males and females often differs. An in-depth qualitative study in Guinea revealed that among the 19 participating women married as children, the majority proposed that the ideal age of marriage for women was younger than that of men [ 59 ]. Thus, while recent literature overwhelmingly focuses on the causes and consequences of marriage at younger ages for females, their use of the term “child marriage” masks an implicit gendered lens.

Indeed, while not discounting that boys also experience child marriage, the potential severity of its consequences makes a focus on girls important. Married girls and young women were traditionally considered more protected than unmarried counterparts, due to the perceived economic security and reduced risk of sexually-transmitted infections as a result of a perceived reduction in sexual partners [ 60 ]. However, increasing research illuminates that married adolescents may experience limited social support, restricted mobility, and lower levels of education [ 2 ]. From the perspective of the health consequences a child spouse may encounter, the hypothesized pathways for girls and boys differ. Child marriage and early childbearing are closely linked, sometimes even discussed interchangeably. According to 2010–2017 data, more than three-fourths of adolescent births (age 15–19) occur in the context of marriage, ranging from 77% in Latin America and the Caribbean to over 90% across Asia and North Africa [ 61 ]. Childbearing is not known to directly affect the health of boys through biological pathways yet is of the utmost concern for girls who marry. Additionally, the UN General Assembly recognized explicitly the role that gender inequalities play in the causes and consequences of girl child marriage today [ 62 ].

The use of the term “girl child marriage,” moreover, makes explicit what other scholars and practitioners who refer only to child marriage often fail to: that a focus on the causes and consequences of child marriage for only the girl-child has implicitly applied a gendered lens. The use of this term makes explicit the assumption of differences between males and females and identifies the population of focus in much research. Krieger explains that a girl-boy distinction in health and medical research requires thinking beyond a biological division and engaging in the socially-constructed nature of gender, a concept only introduced in the 1970s [ 63 ]. We further suggest that beyond the experience of marriage, other variables often measured as related to child marriage including education level and wealth are likely shaped by gender norms, in addition to social norms, and that a girl’s value in her household, community, or society more broadly is influenced by gender norms in the context in which she lives. While further interrogation of this important perspective is beyond the scope of this paper, the articulation of “girl child marriage” signals consideration of these socially-constructed norms.

Overlaps and distinctions with forced and early marriage

Forced marriage refers to a formal union without the free and full consent of both parties [ 64 ]. In contrast to definitions of child, or early, marriage, it is not age-bound. To some, child and early marriage are considered forms of forced marriage because in many contexts, a child, by definition, is unable to provide free and full consent. Such perspectives have not yet been universally adopted. Moreover, there are different terminology practices over the use of child marriage, early marriage, and forced marriage. Certain agencies and initiatives use a combination of all three terms [ 62 , 64 , 65 ]. SDG 5 Target 3 calls for the elimination of “all forms of harmful practices including child, early, and forced marriage and female genital mutilation,” yet its measurement of marriage practices is confined to marriage before age 15 and 18, and not forced marriages that may occur after those age groups [ 66 ]. In fact, nationally-representative data on forced marriage remains sparse, and the shared grouping of these concepts masks the differences between these concepts.

While forced marriage may more clearly be distinguished from child marriage, the distinction with early marriage is less clear cut due to different interpretations on what “early” means. To some, “early marriage” serves as a euphemism that hides that children, a protected group, are involved in an act of marriage; moreover, the language of “child brides” romanticizes a problematic practice [ 67 ]. To others, “early marriage” better captures that the marital union is premature and encompasses an understanding of different legal and cultural concepts of a child that the term “child marriage” misses [ 68 ]. Of note, the legal age of majority is 18 years old in only half of the countries in the world [ 69 ]; in a country where the age of majority is reached by 16 years, “early marriage” may more accurately capture the prematurity of a union at age 16 or 17, despite that the individual is not legally a child. There are others who would also argue that an early marriage may even occur after the age of 18 if the spouse is not mature physically and/or emotionally [ 70 ].

The term “forced marriage” promotes consideration for the reasons a girl marries early, importantly providing additional context for not only who is affected but why. While acknowledging the variability of legal and social constructs, we propose the language of girl child marriage, or child or early marriage among girls and women synonymously, to focus on marriages where the girl-child spouse is below the age of 18. We adopt the convention on the synonymous use of early marriage, defined by UNICEF as “the marriage of children and adolescents below the age of 18” to convey the prematurity of the union [ 15 ]. We argue that forced marriage, in its full totality, must be explored separately from girl child marriage and that more research on forced marriage, and its relationship to girl child marriage, is needed.

Measuring girl child marriage

With such possible variations in an understanding of girl child marriage, it is likely clear that measurement is imperfect. UN estimates use data from the DHS, UNICEF MICS, and other national surveys measuring child marriage as the “percentage of women 20-24 years old who were first married or in union” before 15 years and 18 years [ 71 ]. This convention has been set because the indicator for adolescent girl marriage (marriage among girls ages 15–19 years) extends beyond the definition of a child as under age 18 and because measuring marital status among 15- to 17-year-old girls will miss counting women who marry post-survey but still before age 18 [ 72 ]. Prevalence of child marriage is also measured through calculating the median age at first marriage among females, using UNICEF MICS and UN Statistics Division data [ 73 ]. Importantly, as earlier discussions on social constructs of marriage point toward, measuring girl child marriage includes both formal and informal unions. To this end, UNICEF has importantly and recently articulated that living informally in union, or cohabitation, raises some of the same concerns as marital unions [ 57 ].

Girl child marriage relies on self-reported data, which has raised concerns in its validity. A study in India that compared self-reported age at marriage to two calculated indicators – derived by comparing current age to months in marriage as well as current age to months since menarche and marriage – concluded that self-reported age at marriage was an adequate measure in the absence of additional data [ 74 ]. Additionally, in many countries, lack of birth registration (confirming the age of the spouse) and lack of marriage registration (confirming a civil marriage and date) complicate a more nuanced perspective of early marital experiences. Consequently, national marriage registries may severely underestimate the number of marriages considered to include girl spouses.

Finally, although we acknowledge the convention of using self-reported data from DHS and UNICEF MICS to measure girl child marriage as a union before age 18, based on available data, we further acknowledge aspirations for future measures. Presumably, a binary cutoff of 18 years omits important information about the consequences of marriage at age 15 or age 12; consequently, several quantitative research studies look at age categories and how they relate to different socioeconomic and health outcomes. Others have recommended more complex indices that adapt from poverty measurement [ 75 ]. Footnote 3 We encourage, in future efforts, more locally-driven research to better understand and measure girl child marriage from the perspective of those most affected, including through the use of more qualitative methods. We also call for attention toward reaching the existing global benchmarks set in SDG 5 while further creating measures for success beyond martial age alone in order to target progress on gender inequalities that underly why girl child marriage poses human rights, health, and socioeconomic challenges.

Conclusions

We have presented a theoretical argument defining and deconstructing “girl child marriage.” In doing so, we have articulated consideration for concepts of marriage, children, and gender, which we hope will inform future work particularly impacting the millions of women and girls today who have married before the age of 18. Just as the construct of girl child marriage has evolved over time, we posit that it will continue to evolve.

Additionally, the use of different terms in different contexts may take on a range of meanings at a point in time. To focus only on “early marriage” would prove challenging both quantitatively and qualitatively due to a lack of consistency in how “early” is defined; as we discussed in this paper, “early” referred to age for some while it referred to maturity (independent of age) for others, and it is sensitive to a given context. To focus only on “forced marriage” may result in measuring a different construct and would be challenging due to a dearth of nationally-representative data capturing the extent to which girls’ and women’s marriages are forced, as determined by legal definition and girls and women’s experience; additionally, as we previously called for, more research is needed to better understand forced marriage. To use “adolescent marriage” or “teenage marriage” could result in narrowing the breadth of individuals who marry at younger ages, even in advance of entering adolescence or the teenage years.

Our intent is to encourage more intentional use of language in global public health research, which we argue is lacking to-date. We hope this encourages global public health researchers to engage with the broader social, economic, political, cultural, and historical dimensions of key concepts examined and measured.

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable.

Similarly, in England, advocacy in 1929 resulted in raising the minimum age of marriage. However, according to the UK Parliament, the minimum age was raised to 16 years for both girls and boys, where it remains, with parental consent, today [ 16 ].

Personal communication after preparing this manuscript clarified that her intent was to ensure child marriage was recognized as a gendered issue that disproportionately affected girls to capture that her research focused only consequences for females, rather than males, in those analyses.

Nguyen and Wodon [ 75 ] drew from poverty indices to propose a headcount index of child marriage, equal to the number of girls married below the legal age of marriage divided by the total female population (married and unmarried); a child marriage gap, which accounts for the gap between a girl’s marital age and the legal age of marriage; and a squared child marriage age gap, which would place additional weight on girls who married much earlier than the legal age.

Abbreviations

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women

Convention on the Rights of Child

Demographic and Health Surveys

Forum on Marriage and the Rights of the Children

International Center for Research on Women

International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

International Conference on Population Development

International Planned Parenthood Federation

Multiple Indicator Clusters Surveys

National Public Radio

Sustainable Development Goal

United Nations Children’s Fund

United Nations Population Fund

United States

World Health Organization

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The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The authors would also like to express sincere gratitude to Paul Farmer of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Günther Fink of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute at the University of Basel, for their support and review of an earlier version of this manuscript.

YE was previously funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number F31HD090939 and the Initiative to Maximize Student Diversity GM055353–14 through the National Institutes of Health. The funder had no role in design of the study; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; or in writing the manuscript.

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Efevbera, Y., Bhabha, J. Defining and deconstructing girl child marriage and applications to global public health. BMC Public Health 20 , 1547 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-09545-0

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What the Data Says About Pandemic School Closures, Four Years Later

The more time students spent in remote instruction, the further they fell behind. And, experts say, extended closures did little to stop the spread of Covid.

By Sarah Mervosh ,  Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris

Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic.

Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.

A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.

While poverty and other factors also played a role, remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic, research shows — a finding that held true across income levels.

Source: Fahle, Kane, Patterson, Reardon, Staiger and Stuart, “ School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the COVID-19 Pandemic .” Score changes are measured from 2019 to 2022. In-person means a district offered traditional in-person learning, even if not all students were in-person.

“There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write guidance for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended in June 2020 that schools reopen with safety measures in place.

There were no easy decisions at the time. Officials had to weigh the risks of an emerging virus against the academic and mental health consequences of closing schools. And even schools that reopened quickly, by the fall of 2020, have seen lasting effects.

But as experts plan for the next public health emergency, whatever it may be, a growing body of research shows that pandemic school closures came at a steep cost to students.

The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind.

At the state level, more time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores, according to a New York Times analysis of school closure data and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress , an authoritative exam administered to a national sample of fourth- and eighth-grade students.

At the school district level, that finding also holds, according to an analysis of test scores from third through eighth grade in thousands of U.S. districts, led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard. In districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math on average, while in districts that spent most of the year in person they lost just over a third of a grade.

( A separate study of nearly 10,000 schools found similar results.)

Such losses can be hard to overcome, without significant interventions. The most recent test scores, from spring 2023, show that students, overall, are not caught up from their pandemic losses , with larger gaps remaining among students that lost the most ground to begin with. Students in districts that were remote or hybrid the longest — at least 90 percent of the 2020-21 school year — still had almost double the ground to make up compared with students in districts that allowed students back for most of the year.

Some time in person was better than no time.

As districts shifted toward in-person learning as the year went on, students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.

Students in hybrid or remote learning, 2020-21

80% of students

Some schools return online, as Covid-19 cases surge. Vaccinations start for high-priority groups.

Teachers are eligible for the Covid vaccine in more than half of states.

Most districts end the year in-person or hybrid.

Source: Burbio audit of more than 1,200 school districts representing 47 percent of U.S. K-12 enrollment. Note: Learning mode was defined based on the most in-person option available to students.

Income and family background also made a big difference.

A second factor associated with academic declines during the pandemic was a community’s poverty level. Comparing districts with similar remote learning policies, poorer districts had steeper losses.

But in-person learning still mattered: Looking at districts with similar poverty levels, remote learning was associated with greater declines.

A community’s poverty rate and the length of school closures had a “roughly equal” effect on student outcomes, said Sean F. Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford, who led a district-level analysis with Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard.

Score changes are measured from 2019 to 2022. Poorest and richest are the top and bottom 20% of districts by percent of students on free/reduced lunch. Mostly in-person and mostly remote are districts that offered traditional in-person learning for more than 90 percent or less than 10 percent of the 2020-21 year.

But the combination — poverty and remote learning — was particularly harmful. For each week spent remote, students in poor districts experienced steeper losses in math than peers in richer districts.

That is notable, because poor districts were also more likely to stay remote for longer .

Some of the country’s largest poor districts are in Democratic-leaning cities that took a more cautious approach to the virus. Poor areas, and Black and Hispanic communities , also suffered higher Covid death rates, making many families and teachers in those districts hesitant to return.

“We wanted to survive,” said Sarah Carpenter, the executive director of Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy group in Memphis, where schools were closed until spring 2021 .

“But I also think, man, looking back, I wish our kids could have gone back to school much quicker,” she added, citing the academic effects.

Other things were also associated with worse student outcomes, including increased anxiety and depression among adults in children’s lives, and the overall restriction of social activity in a community, according to the Stanford and Harvard research .

Even short closures had long-term consequences for children.

While being in school was on average better for academic outcomes, it wasn’t a guarantee. Some districts that opened early, like those in Cherokee County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, and Hanover County, Va., lost significant learning and remain behind.

At the same time, many schools are seeing more anxiety and behavioral outbursts among students. And chronic absenteeism from school has surged across demographic groups .

These are signs, experts say, that even short-term closures, and the pandemic more broadly, had lasting effects on the culture of education.

“There was almost, in the Covid era, a sense of, ‘We give up, we’re just trying to keep body and soul together,’ and I think that was corrosive to the higher expectations of schools,” said Margaret Spellings, an education secretary under President George W. Bush who is now chief executive of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Closing schools did not appear to significantly slow Covid’s spread.

Perhaps the biggest question that hung over school reopenings: Was it safe?

That was largely unknown in the spring of 2020, when schools first shut down. But several experts said that had changed by the fall of 2020, when there were initial signs that children were less likely to become seriously ill, and growing evidence from Europe and parts of the United States that opening schools, with safety measures, did not lead to significantly more transmission.

“Infectious disease leaders have generally agreed that school closures were not an important strategy in stemming the spread of Covid,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department.

Politically, though, there remains some disagreement about when, exactly, it was safe to reopen school.

Republican governors who pushed to open schools sooner have claimed credit for their approach, while Democrats and teachers’ unions have emphasized their commitment to safety and their investment in helping students recover.

“I do believe it was the right decision,” said Jerry T. Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which resisted returning to school in person over concerns about the availability of vaccines and poor ventilation in school buildings. Philadelphia schools waited to partially reopen until the spring of 2021 , a decision Mr. Jordan believes saved lives.

“It doesn’t matter what is going on in the building and how much people are learning if people are getting the virus and running the potential of dying,” he said.

Pandemic school closures offer lessons for the future.

Though the next health crisis may have different particulars, with different risk calculations, the consequences of closing schools are now well established, experts say.

In the future, infectious disease experts said, they hoped decisions would be guided more by epidemiological data as it emerged, taking into account the trade-offs.

“Could we have used data to better guide our decision making? Yes,” said Dr. Uzma N. Hasan, division chief of pediatric infectious diseases at RWJBarnabas Health in Livingston, N.J. “Fear should not guide our decision making.”

Source: Fahle, Kane, Patterson, Reardon, Staiger and Stuart, “ School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the Covid-19 Pandemic. ”

The study used estimates of learning loss from the Stanford Education Data Archive . For closure lengths, the study averaged district-level estimates of time spent in remote and hybrid learning compiled by the Covid-19 School Data Hub (C.S.D.H.) and American Enterprise Institute (A.E.I.) . The A.E.I. data defines remote status by whether there was an in-person or hybrid option, even if some students chose to remain virtual. In the C.S.D.H. data set, districts are defined as remote if “all or most” students were virtual.

An earlier version of this article misstated a job description of Dr. Jeanne Noble. She directed the Covid response at the U.C.S.F. Parnassus emergency department. She did not direct the Covid response for the University of California, San Francisco health system.

How we handle corrections

Sarah Mervosh covers education for The Times, focusing on K-12 schools. More about Sarah Mervosh

Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. More about Claire Cain Miller

Francesca Paris is a Times reporter working with data and graphics for The Upshot. More about Francesca Paris

Afghanistan's school year starts without more than 1 million girls barred from education by Taliban

I SLAMABAD (AP) — The school year in Afghanistan started Wednesday but without girls whom the Taliban barred from attending classes beyond the sixth grade, making it the only country with restrictions on female education.

The U.N. children’s agency says more than 1 million girls are affected by the ban. It also estimates 5 million were out of school before the Taliban takeover due to a lack of facilities and other reasons.

The Taliban's education ministry marked the start of the new academic year with a ceremony that female journalists were not allowed to attend. The invitations sent out to reporters said: “Due to the lack of a suitable place for the sisters, we apologize to female reporters.”

During a ceremony, the Taliban’s education minister, Habibullah Agha, said that the ministry is trying “to increase the quality of education of religious and modern sciences as much as possible.” The Taliban have been prioritizing Islamic knowledge over basic literacy and numeracy with their shift toward madrassas , or religious schools.

The minister also called on students to avoid wearing clothes that contradict Islamic and Afghan principles.

Abdul Salam Hanafi, the Taliban’s deputy prime minister, said they were trying to expand education in “all remote areas in the country.”

The Taliban previously said girls continuing their education went against their strict interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia, and that certain conditions were needed for their return to school. However, they made no progress in creating said conditions.

When they ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, they also banned girls’ education.

Despite initially promising a more moderate rule, the group has also barred women from higher education , public spaces like parks, and most jobs as part of harsh measures imposed after they took over following the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from the country in 2021.

The ban on girls’ education remains the Taliban’s biggest obstacle to gaining recognition as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan.

Although Afghan boys have access to education, Human Rights Watch has criticized the Taliban, saying their “abusive” educational policies are harming boys as well as girls . The group, in a report published in December, said there has been less attention to the deep harm inflicted on boys’ education as qualified teachers — including women — left, and inclusion of regressive curriculum changes as well as an increase in corporal punishment have led to falling attendance.

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‘I will not feed a demon’: Ruby Franke details torture of her children in newly released journals

ST. GEORGE — A journal kept by 41-year-old Ruby Franke, who, along with her codefendant, 55-year-old Jodi Hildebrandt, is in prison for aggravated child abuse, outlines the “training” process that resulted in the torture and abuse of Franke’s two youngest children.

The journals were recovered by investigators shortly after the pair’s arrest in August 2023. The writings, released to St. George News, encompass dozens of pages authored by Franke starting in the middle of May 2023, when she brought her two youngest children to live with Hildebrandt in a remote, affluent area of Ivins. 

The final journal entry was dated on or about Aug. 25, five days before the pair was arrested after Santa Clara-Ivins Police officers found one of the children partially bound and emaciated. 

Over the course of more than three months, Franke outlined the “training” program that was implemented with the intent to remove the “evil” from her 9-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son, whom Franke describes as “the spawns of Satan.”

Franke described the program as “an intervention for the possessed.”  

Stripping down a child’s world to the basics of beans and rice and hard work would be considered abuse, Franke wrote, but it was “necessary for the prideful child.”

In the writings, the program consisted of long periods of exposure to the elements. One day in July, after the older child was forced to work for hours in the hot sun, Franke took “old mop water” and poured it over the child.

Also in July, both children were told to stand in the sun, since “only demons stay in the shade.”

When the children refused, Franke used a “cactus poker” to force the children back into the sun. The heat the children were exposed to was not as hot as the heat in hell, Franke wrote, telling her daughter that was where the child would burn, along with the rest of the wicked.

“So either get used to it or start changing,” she reportedly told the child.

Water was also restricted, and whenever the children were caught drinking water from one of the garden hoses outside, Franke wrote that they were “stealing water.” 

During another instance, Franke suspected that her son drank water during one of the numerous fasts she instituted.

“He admits to stealing water three times yesterday. He lies and feels no remorse.”

Food was restricted, according to several of the entries, and both children were forced to endure days without food or water, during what Franke described as fasting, which the children were required to do often as a means “to invite them to be humble.”

Following a two-day fast for her daughter, Franke wrote, “s he has hardened her heart and will do one more day of fasting.”

In many instances, the children were required to confess before they were given food.

“If you want food, then be prepared to tell the truth about your behaviors.”

In another instance, she told her young daughter, “I will not feed a demon.”

In one entry, Franke says she placed her daughter in a dog bath and shaved the youngster’s head.

“All her long hair is gone. No more distracting with hair.”

Part of the program required the children to perform repetitive tasks that included carrying boxes up and down the stairs, in part to show them the value of hard work, according to multiple entries in the journal. Franke describes how the children were forced to carry boxes up and down the stairs for entire days.

“Good works need to be painful,” she wrote of the exercises.

In one instance, Franke explained a reason for the task to the 9-year-old.

“It’s because you follow Satan that you keep doing boxes.”

The children were separated from one another with periods of complete isolation, causing them to lose all track of time. When Franke realized her son knew his birthday had passed, she wrote that he “has been counting days.” 

The younger child had also appeared to be trying to keep track of the days, telling Franke that she thought they had been there about eight weeks. To that, Franke asked the child if she felt like she had made any progress, to which the child said yes. 

“I told her she was delusional,” Franke wrote.

Placing the children in a closet was also mentioned numerous times, and in one entry referring to the youngest child, Franke wrote, “ Jodi carried her back to this closet and she screamed and sulked and asked for water.”

By Aug. 7, both children were in isolation much of the time and were sent into “sedation,” as mentioned more than once during the last days and weeks.

When her son continued to bang on the side of the closet, Franke wrote that she “got a pair of boots. I went in and kicked him again.”

The children routinely slept on the concrete basement floor, while Franke told them she “slept in a soft bed.”

One morning in June, Franke awoke at 2:30 a.m. to find the older child gone, and when she went outside to look for him, she found pebbles arranged to form a message that read, “Jail. I will call when I get there.”

She then woke Hildebrandt, and they drove around looking for the child. Franke wrote that both were hoping he had not reached the main road yet. While searching, Franke prayed that she and Hildebrandt would be protected while they searched for the boy.

“Oh father, we need a miracle. Show us where he is.”

She went on to write they needed to speed up the search since they were in a race against the sun to find the boy before dawn. Minutes later, she spotted the child walking on the side of the road and described the look of shock on the child’s face when she pulled up.

She also noted they found the child before sunrise when he would be more visible to others, writing, “The devil wants me in prison.”

Finding the child, she wrote, “was a miracle from God.”

Following the escape attempt, the boy spent time in the closet, was tethered to Franke and was only allowed outside without shoes so “he wouldn’t run away.”

Franke wrote that she and Hildebrandt were “buying time” until they could move away from Ivins, which was “not conducive to the intervention” they were engaged in with the children.

While the children believed that once the training was over they would be able to return to their home in Springville in northern Utah, Franke wrote they had different plans for the children.

“They are never going home.”

It was during this time that Hildebrandt was preparing to sell her home so they could move to Arizona, which would get the children to “open land,” a move that Franke said needed to happen sooner than expected since they could not continue the program in Ivins, as the children continued to scream and wail.

“We decided the escalation of the kids is not manageable.”

She went on to write they needed enough property to build a ranch, where “good can be done” and where the kids could experience natural outcomes.

“The kids need a good kick from a horse and a cactus to run into.”

The children were kept in the dark about the move and had no idea of Franke’s and Hildebrandt’s plans to move to a desolate area in the Arizona desert, which would end their days of “enjoying the air conditioning” and other amenities in the Ivins home. But once they moved to Arizona, things would be different. 

“We will drop them like hot potatoes out in the desert — their new home.”

On Aug. 1, Hildebrandt contacted Franke from Arizona to advise she was looking at a 500-acre piece of property, and at some point Hildebrandt sent a text: “I found the land.”

By Aug. 16, less than two weeks before the arrests, Franke writes that one of the children was “full of evil puffy infection” and described how the older child needed help with balance and coordination. When asked to balance on one foot, the child fell over, hit his nose on the ground and began bleeding.

By Aug. 25, five days before the arrests, Franke wrote that both children were still defiant and were “out of control” as “the girl” continued to scream and scream.

In one of the final entries in the journal, Franke described her role as a mother by writing that her two youngest children were sent to her because of the powerful intervention she was performing upon “the possessed.”

“God knew I would take my responsibility to mother them seriously.”

On the morning of Aug. 30, the older child climbed out of a window and ran to the house of a neighbor, who called police. By that time, both children had been kept in isolation and neither had seen the other in more than a month.

Inside of a panic room at the home, detectives found the ropes and handcuffs used to bind the older child, while the younger child was still bound when officers found her locked in a dark closet.

Washington County Attorney Eric Clark told St. George News in an earlier interview that the children are doing better than expected.

Franke and Hildebrandt were sentenced to consecutive prison sentences of 1-15 years on four separate second-degree felony counts of aggravated child abuse.

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2024, all rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cody Blowers was raised in South San Francisco, California. A 2013 graduate of Colorado Technical University, Cody earned her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice with a minor in paralegal studies. Through the course of her academic studies she discovered that writing is her true passion, and she is committed to providing credible, integrated news coverage. Cody joined St. George News in 2015, and when she’s not busy chasing the news, she can generally be found chasing her young granddaughter, Kali.

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Ohio mom who left toddler alone 10 days when she went on vacation pleads guilty to aggravated murder

An Ohio mother whose 16-month-old daughter died after being left home alone in a playpen for 10 days last summer while she went on vacation has been sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.

FILE - This booking photo provided by the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Sheriff’s Department shows Kristel Candelario, of Cleveland, Ohio. The Ohio mother whose 16-month-old daughter died after being left home alone in a playpen for 10 days last summer while she went on vacation was sentenced Monday, March 18, 2024, to life in prison with no chance of parole. (Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department via AP, File)

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CLEVELAND (AP) — An Ohio mother whose 16-month-old daughter died after being left home alone in a playpen for 10 days last summer while she went on vacation was sentenced Monday to life in prison with no chance of parole.

Kristel Candelario, 32, had pleaded guilty last month to aggravated murder and child endangerment as part of a plea deal with Cuyahoga County prosecutors, who dismissed two murder counts and a felonious assault charge.

Authorities have said Candelario left her daughter, Jailyn, in their Cleveland home when she went on vacation to Detroit and Puerto Rico in June 2023. When she returned 10 days later, she found the girl was not breathing in the playpen and called 911. Emergency responders found the child was “extremely dehydrated” and pronounced her dead shortly after they arrived.

An autopsy by the Cuyahoga County medical examiner’s office determined that the toddler died of starvation and severe dehydration.

County Common Pleas Court Judge Brendan Sheehan told Candelario she committed “the ultimate betrayal” by leaving her daughter alone without food.

“Just as you didn’t let Jailyn out of her confinement, so too you should spend the rest of your life in a cell without freedom,” Sheehan said. “The only difference will be, the prison will at least feed you and give you liquid that you denied her.”

Candelario, who has struggled with depression and related mental health issues, said she has prayed daily for forgiveness.

“There’s so much pain that I have in regards to the loss of my baby, Jailyn,” she said. “I’m extremely hurt about everything that happened. I am not trying to justify my actions, but nobody knew how much I was suffering and what I was going through ... God and my daughter have forgiven me.”