Within reach: A conceptual framework for defining and targeting educationally marginalised girls

Identifying and keeping the most marginalised girls in education is a challenge. Doing this at scale is an even greater one. Despite significant investment, education programmes still struggle to reach marginalised girls who... [ view full abstract ]

Identifying and keeping the most marginalised girls in education is a challenge. Doing this at scale is an even greater one. Despite significant investment, education programmes still struggle to reach marginalised girls who have never set foot inside a school, or whose education has been seriously disrupted.

The Sustainable Development Goals are a timely impetus to go beyond current, mainstream education solutions to understand and reach those who remain marginalised. Goal 4 provides us an unprecedented opportunity to collect and analyse higher quality, disaggregated data that focuses our attention on these girls’ needs and realities.

The Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) Fund has reached over a million marginalised girls through 36 projects in 18 countries in Africa and Asia between 2013 to 2017. Drawing on learning from the Fund’s first phase, a conceptual framework has been developed to deepen an understanding and targeting of educational marginalisation across the dimensions of access and learning. This has enabled the GEC to form a coherent differentiation of types of marginalisation at both primary and secondary level, and serves as an important component in Value for Money considerations to ensure the Fund maintains its commitment to targeting harder to reach, marginalised girls.  A number of projects in the Fund have met the challenge of catering to girls who experience multiple intersections of marginalisation both within mainstream interventions, as well as projects targeting specific subgroups such as those with disabilities, young mothers and pastoralist groups. Through the lens of the proposed framework, this paper reflects on these projects’ challenges, realities and best practise in targeting the most vulnerable girls to enrol, attend and learn.