Keynote address by Naledi Pandor, MP, Minister of Education, Republic of South Africa, At the Japan Education Forum II, Tokyo

8 February 2005

“Girls’ Education: the View from South Africa”

Good morning, everybody, and thank you very much to the chairperson for the very kind introduction. It is indeed a great pleasure to be with you this morning. I would like to thank the colleagues from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology for being with us this morning, particularly the Ministry of Education in Japan for providing the support for the conference of this nature.

Today I will address important issues relevant to educational development, and particularly relevant to educational development in our continent, Africa, where we face the challenge of ensuring that women and girls enjoy the opportunity for access to as well as success in education.

I have submitted to the organizers a written paper, which I understand has been translated and will be provided to you during the course of this conference. In order not to repeat myself, I have chosen to extract what I believe are the core issues from my paper, issues which are relevant to the challenge of advancing girls’ education, and which relate particularly to South Africa initiatives in this regard.

First, I think it’s important to say that the subject of girls’ education is an important one for all our countries, because none of us have got it right as yet. It’s particularly important for the millions of girls in developing countries who are denied education everyday. I think as we discuss the subject today, we must also remind ourselves that the biggest challenge to succeeding in educating girls exists outside education. It exists in our families. It exists in our community arrangements. Because the barriers to the access of girls emanate from the social context in which girls find themselves, it is not merely a matter of government policy. It’s a matter of how we raise our sons, how we raise our daughters, and the kind of attitudes our societies have to girls and women. So we must look within in order to elaborate externally.

Second, South Africa is a very new democracy, 10 years old only, with a very progressive constitution. As I indicate in my paper, we had apartheid for many decades in our country. Apartheid by its nature gave white people the predominant position in our society, but primarily gave white males predominance in our society. If you look at the pictures of the previous cabinets of South Africa, you will see only white males. There was a woman appointed for the first time in the middle of the 1980s, but generally apartheid society and apartheid oppression was male in character, was white in character, was middle aged in character. That has now changed completely. We now have a very progressive and an exciting constitution. We have made many positive strides in girls’ education, but we cannot claim to have fully addressed the challenge. A great deal more needs to be done and I sure refer to that in my remarks.

A third important point is that it seems to us that in order to begin to address the empowerment of girls and women, our country has to take the step of changing the social and political character of our society. What do I mean by that? Our constitution states that all persons are equal. It also has a clause that makes education a right to be enjoyed by all, including others who have not had the opportunity for education. But in addition, our constitution extends several rights to women, political rights to women, and our new democracy creates the opportunity for women to participate fully in public institutions in our society. So for the first time we have large numbers of women in parliament; we have women as school principals. We have women as vice chancellors of higher education institutions. We have women heading parastatals. We have women business executives in South Africa.

So our social institutions acknowledge and give status to the issue of empowerment of women. We also have established statutory bodies that promote the rights of women. We have a commission of gender equality. We have an office in the Office of the President on the status of women with a minister in the presidency as its head. We also have made financing credit available to women who wish to engage in business activity, and an important element as well, is that we have begun the process of reforming the negative customary law that negate the women’s equality in our society.

So the essential point I am attempting to make is that you cannot pursue access to education without addressing the social and political barriers that impact on women’s empowerment. So we have addressed all these in South Africa. Some with success, others without full success for women, but many particularly in the customary law area still imposing a barrier in social terms, because our male society is not ready in the traditional setting to make the kind of shift that is necessary.

Fourth, education has played a leading role in this process of transformation. With the inclusion in the constitution of the right to education, parents suddenly began to realize that they should send girls to school. Once there was a public statement, children, girl children receive the attention of their families and began to have admission to our schools. So today in South Africa, girl children enjoy full access to school, and while in school, they receive additional support from our education authorities to build their confidence and ability. Our success here lies in a strong and visible advocacy for gender equality. It has helped to move South Africa toward becoming, becoming, not yet, but toward becoming a society that will reflect equality between genders.

A fifth point is that part of our strategy has involved affirmation of women and girls in legislation. Women have to see themselves present in our laws. If you create a board, and you don’t specify its composition, that there must be equality, women will never be included in that board. So your legislation must make affirmative references to gender.

We have also, as part of our strategy, focused on encouraging and supporting girls to succeed in the non-traditional disciplines in education. Because in many of our societies, yes, girls have access, but they become the nurses, they become the primary school teachers, they become the social workers, and males remain the engineers, the physicists, the chemists, the biochemists, the genetic micro biologist and girls never have access to those opportunities. We are encouraging girls to focus on math and science, and to aspire to be engineers, to be accountants, to be businesspersons. Our success has been noteworthy in many of these areas. Regrettably at the moment, looking at the statistics of the professions, we have noted, that very few young women are pursuing information technology and computer science. So while in engineering, medicine, micro-biology we have progressed, information technology and computer science remain, excluding disciplines. So it’s a area we believe must be examined.

Now, the increased participation of girls in school means we have succeeded in getting girls into school. But what we find is that while we have a large and significant enrolment of both boys and girls in school, we notice that in higher education we still do not have young women entering the core critical disciplines in sufficient numbers. And this is the core area that we have to focus upon. One of the participation statistics that we have noted is that, once you have democracy, there is increase enrolment in education. Once you have peace and the absence of conflict, there in increase enrolment of girls in education. What it indicates is what the vice minister of education just now spoke of, the fact that the context of peace supports girls’advancement in education. A context of conflict denies girl’s opportunities to enter education. We have realized that the promotion of peace, human security, and democracy is vital to girls succeeding, because the girls and women are often the victims of war and suffer the most negative consequences during situation of conflict under dictatorships and national emergencies. I think as we deal as the world with the outcome of the Tsunami disaster, we have to look at whether the girls are receiving adequate support, because if we neglect, we will find a regression in those countries that have most been affected by the Tsunami, and that it is girls who will suffer the negative consequences.

Access to education has also been increased and supported by our government’s ability to fund education. So if you don’t provide funding girls do not get access. It’s very important for government to ensure adequate financing so that girls have the access that all of us aspire toward. We have increased funding in education in South Africa from R31 billion in 1994 to R65 billion in the last financial year of 2004, a massive growth but a necessary one, if we are to succeed in ensuring access. We have, as a middle-income developing country, one of the highest levels of investment in education of any country of comparable economic size to our own. But I think it’s honest to also say, that despite the excellent positive features, we have a number of negative aspects that I believe require consistent and focused attention, if we are to sustain the early successes that we have made.

First, many girls in rural communities living in families that have no education, find themselves not helped by our positive policies. Girls or the children with illiterate parents are not getting the opportunity for education. Therefore the issue of adult literacy is becoming increasingly important.

Second, we still need as I have said to improve success rates in mathematics and science.

Third, the majority of our learners in South Africa attend school in terrible infrastructure. And this distracts from their real potential to succeed. We still have thousands of children in South Africa schooling under trees. We have thousands of schools in very luxurious conditions, but those schools are often not opened to the majority who are poor. So there is a need to ensure that we improve the infrastructure so we can improve quality.

Fourth, HIV positive status and AIDS sickness are causing a serious national challenge to girls in our country. There are early signs that girls are the ones who have to assume the caring burden in AIDS affected homes.

Fourth, abuse and sexual violence against girls is a serious problem in many of our schools and many of our communities. And we need to confront it, to protect our young women.

Fifth, from our statistics it seems that girls do not have equal access to early childhood education. And therefore, because of this lack of the preparedness in the early stages, it would seem some of the dropout rates we do see may be related to this inadequate preparation for learning. So we need to really ensure that girls also enjoy the opportunity as young children of access to early childhood education.

I believe that each of these challenges requires specific responses. For the rural communities that have no basic literacy, I believe South Africa must engage very vigorously in a literacy program for adults. We cannot afford to have adults who are illiterate in our country. And we have to move speedily to address this. We are addressing the math and science access question. We have development programs for teachers, we have an excellent partnership with Japan, where we are being assisted in supporting our teachers to improve their science and mathematics teaching abilities. And many partners are assisting us, including Japan, with the provision of more classrooms and better schooling facilities for our children. On the issue of HIV and AIDS, we have a vigorous school based education campaign directed at the young people and directed at the educators. We also have to assist many of the poor children who attend our schools. We have a very large national school nutrition team, to provide food to the most needy children in schools in our most needy communities in South Africa. And it is interesting how this has improved retention in school as well as academic performance.

We believe as well that the effort to increase girls’ success in education goes beyond the work in the classroom. Our education department has led an active girl’s movement campaign that includes girls from Kenya, form Zimbabwe, from Namibia, from Botswana and Uganda. Through this program, financed by South Africa, and assisted by UNESCO, it is our intention to build a network of young women empowered for success, and encouraged to build African women networks. Our empowerment program organizes girls’ summer camps and provides access to training for these young women, allows them to meet women who are role models in our society, so that they have role models to aspire toward. It allows focused discussions by young women, and allows them the opportunities to discuss and plan their future. So that you don’t leave girls empowerment to just academic learning in a class room setting, they are also the empowerment related to the program and campaign of this nature that we address.

We have also identified that you cannot have girls empowerment as something that is limited to succeeding at the school level. It has to translate into support in higher education. Because if you have women who’ve all completed school, but very few who have degrees, you have not really altered the make up of your society. So we have higher education scholarships particularly for girls to support them in study, especially in the critical field of engineering, science and technology. And this scholarship program is beginning to show real success.

I believe there is still a great deal that South Africa needs to do in order to ensure that women are truly empowered. For example, I am particularly worried about what I have seen in the schoolbooks that our children read. Our curriculum content doesn’t sufficiently treat women in a respectable manner, doesn’t accord with the constitutional provision that we are equal. Many of the books in our schools - and I am sure in many of your schools - show the traditional roles of women, women as mothers in the home, men outside fixing up the car, boys with the father fixing up the car, girls in the kitchen with the mother. This is the kind of literature that is in our school that’s our girls we are trying to empower are using, so the image they are getting of themselves is to plan to be a woman in the kitchen. Not plan to be a doctor, not plan to be an engineer; that is something that males plan for.

So I believe that the curriculum must be altered in order to reflect the kind of aspiration for young women that we have. I believe that we need to use a gender lens to look at our teaching material. We need to be saying: does this book, this material, this approach sufficiently address the kind of gender equality that we would want to have in our education system.

I note that in many countries, that we tend to have memorials, museums, etc; we talk about the heroes of our nations. And we always use the terminology like the founding fathers, as though there were no women in society when history was been made. Only men were making history. This is the kind of image we present in our society and to girl children, and I believe this must change. We need to be looking to reflect the totality of our society and the totality of the contributions that persons in our society have made to the world. In fact, I always remind girls in my country that it was a woman who proposed the declaration of human right as a universal set of rights. And I noted it wasn’t a man, but she was hardly acknowledged for those contributions. It was as though a man made that proposal.

So let’s change the heroes, and let’s have heroines, so that girls see themselves as a part of our histories. I believe the curriculum revision issue presents a wonderful opportunity to all, to do more research into our countries and to involve young women in material development, to set them on a path of shaping our societies in new ways. So that they produce learning materials that are gender sensitive and that truly reflect the full makeup of our world.

I believe that the universities in our country need to do more in this regard, because many of them perpetuate gender inequality. And if you look at the number of universities in the world that offer Women’s Studies, you will find actually very few.

So there is a great deal in the intellectual domain that we need to do in order to promote gender equality. Over all, South Africa has begun to show positive outcomes in the area of girls’ education. I welcome the success, but I believe it’s the beginning. We cannot be complacent on the basis of our early successes. Our challenges are significant. There are still thousands of girls who are victims of apartheid and who have had no educational opportunity. Today they are adult women in our society and we must find a way of addressing their need.

We also must ensure that the energy directed at gender equality doesn’t exclude the other gender, boys. Because you cannot have disempowered boys as a result of empowered girls; you must have true gender equality; you address men and women, boys and girls. So we must ensure that boys are not marginalized in our keen desire to pursue the success of girls.

We also, in our keenness to pursue our science, technology and commerce, should not forget to focus on the arts, on the social sciences and on other skills in technical skill areas. We tend to be blinded by engineering, science and technology. Then you don’t develop the classical writers who are female and so on. So I believe we must be careful that we don’t end up without women social scientists; it will be terrible to have men defining social science on their own.

So I believe the arts and humanities are the areas that we must ensure we focus upon. We also must evaluate and monitor development. One of our weaknesses I believe on the African continent is data capture, data analysis, and the basing of policy on real research. So I believe the development we are beginning to see in our country requires careful research scrutiny. We require ongoing evaluation in order that we monitor progress and ensure that it continues to achieve the ideals that we have aspired.

We have set up a research team, to formally assess our progress of gender equality through education. I hope that the team’s report will assist us in improving our efforts, and in developing further interventions in South Africa.

In conclusion, this brief outline then is an indication of the kind of steps that South Africa has taken. I should say we are doing this in partnership with other countries on the continent. Because we believe South African we shouldn’t benefit our selves only. We became free because many of our countries on this continent supported us and worked with us to achieve our freedom. So we are very committed to working with the rest of countries on the continent to ensure that finally we break this blight on our society, which is inequality of women.

Thank you very much for your kind attention.