There is a great deal of evidence that demonstrates how addressing inequalities in girls’ education is an effective strategy for lifting girls and their families out of positions of marginalisation. The importance of improving girls’ education is reflected in global educational discourse and can be found, to varying degrees, in most Education Ministries’ sector plans within sub-Saharan Africa. Although progress has been made towards gender parity in primary enrolments in many contexts, completion and transition rates drop dramatically for girls; which is indicative of the cumulative effect of inequalities that limit and undermine girls’ educational achievements.
The Capability Approach provides a powerful lens with which to analyse and evaluate these inequalities, as it considers the environmental, social and personal factors that can constrain girls’ opportunities to learn. These constraints can be further located within different levels of the education system, such as the institutional/policy level, school/classroom level and community/family level. Given this type of analysis, it is clear that the inequalities that affect girls’ education are complex, interconnected and compound each other from the macro to micro level.
This paper will discuss how such a capability analysis forms the basis for a holistic Theory of Change (ToC) that aims to reduce constraint from the institutional to individual level; and how such an approach is necessary to produce sustained access, completion, transition and empowerment for girls. This ToC is drawn from a robust theoretical framework and body of research on girls’ education, and has been used to inform Cambridge Education’s work on DFID-funded education programmes in Ghana and Tanzania. Specifically, we will discuss how this ToC underpins salient interventions to strengthen national institutions and policies responsible for overseeing girls’ education and for ensuring that grassroots, bottom-up activities are holistic, sustainable and bear the most fruit in transforming girls’ opportunities to learn.
