South Africa has bolstered its commitment to gender equality in education by becoming the latest country to endorse the continental initiative to promote gender equality.
The Freetown Manifesto for Gender-Transformative Leadership in Education is regarded as the first global initiative led by ministries of education.
South Africa’s participation in the initiative was revealed during the G20 Education Working Group seminar in Durban on Tuesday.
The seminar was organised in partnership with the UN Girls' Education Initiative (Ungei). The initiative wants leaders to develop and implement policies that promote gender equality and challenge gender-based biases in the education system.
The Freetown Manifesto outlines an effort to advance gender transformation in education by empowering girls and women. It has since been credited with a major shift in gender transformation education in the 13 African countries who became founding signatories in 2022, including:
- Burkina Faso, where gender equality is now a required criteria for approval in the national education budget;
- Mali, which endorsed a budgeted five-year gender action plan for education that includes strategies to promote women’s leadership; and
- Chad, which developed and disseminated a new teacher’s manual for gender equality in education.
Many other countries in Africa are building movements for gender equality education through government or civil societies.
Conrad Sackey, minister of education in Sierra Leone, said it was factors such as the 11-year civil war where rape was used as a weapon, the Ebola outbreak where 59% of the victims were women, and cultural and religious beliefs that held them back, which resulted in their government introducing policies aimed at gender equality education.
“We recognised this was a problem we needed to address and the president took a leadership role. We now have a pro-poor education policy where kids don’t pay school fees, and offer free sanitary pads and cash transfers to girls where poverty is a big issue to ensure they stay in school. We also revamped our schools to make sure they have ramps and assistive technology for those who are disabled. We have a political commitment where 20% of the national budget is put into education so, we’re putting our money where our mouth is.”
Dr Maimouna Kere, director of education in Burkina Faso, said several initiatives have been taken by their ministry of education since adopting the initiative in 2022, including the training of teachers and responsible budgeting, which has allowed everyone to understand their contribution and that of the ministry in the promotion of the gender transformative education.
Equality can be learnt; it doesn’t take generations. It can be taught in schools and that is what transformative education is about
— Antara Ganguli, Ungei Secretariat head
“There has been the organisation of numerous awareness campaigns where youth and religious leaders have been called to be educated and trained in different issues which ladies and young girls are facing, notably pregnancies in school and forms of violence.”
South Africa's higher education deputy minister Buti Manamela said advancing gender transformation in education demands a broader approach that extends beyond schools to other environments that shape children’s values and behaviours, including family, community and societal institutions.
“It’s not enough to have this work done in our academic institutions when patriarchal forms of social relations remain reproduced on other sides of socialisation such as churches, sporting fields and even in our homes.”
He said the department had collaborated with various organisations through various interventions, one of which is the Transforming MEN'talities initiative in partnership with Unesco.
“It is a national effort to challenge harmful masculinities and reframe how boys and men see themselves in relation to others because gender transformation will not succeed if we only focus on girls and women. We must also address the socialisation of boys and how they are taught to relate to power, vulnerability, sexuality and respect.”
He said the engagement of boys and men was critical to advance the gender equality agenda.
“This initiative engages young men in schools, colleges, universities, prisons and sports; not to guilt them, but to empower them to be part of the solution.”
His remarks were supported Ungei Secretariat head Antara Ganguli, who said such initiatives were necessary in today’s world. She said global figures showed the likelihood of a child being out of school is higher for girls than boys and that young women were 33% more likely than men to be not active in education, employment and training.
Ganguli noted, however, that boys are also victims of gender norms.
“Men and boys also suffer because gender norms are like prison walls, they imprison each one of us. We all can remember a moment when we were pigeonholed into being something that may not resonate into our hearts and souls just because of the gender that we were.”
She added gender transformation education can change that and transform communities and countries like Sierra Leone bear witness to this.
“Equality can be learnt; it doesn’t take generations. It can be taught in schools and that is what transformative education is about.”
Mbali Shongwe, a GBV and mental health activist and founder of Mindful organisation, said mental health is deeply undervalued in Africa, which has serious consequences.
“When we fail to centre mental health and education we uphold harmful general norms and power structures that quietly shape how students experience themselves and others. We’ve seen that mental health programming has the power to transform attitudes and disrupt gender norms,” she said.
“When boys are supported to speak about rejection, grief, emotional regulation they begin to challenge the rigid expectations of masculinity that too often leads to violence and isolation.”
She said this was crucial in South Africa where there’s a “troubling” link between suppressed male emotion and the rate of GBV.
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