Amy North

The Millennium Development Goals: a cross-sectoral analysis and principles for goal setting after 2015

Bringing together analysis across different sectors, we review the implementation and achievements of the MDGs to date to identify cross cutting strengths and weaknesses as a basis for considering how they might be developed or replaced after 2015. Working from this and a definition of development as a dynamic process involving sustainable and equitable access to improved wellbeing, five interwoven guiding principles are proposed for a post 2015 development project: holism, equity, sustainability, ownership, and global obligation. These principles and their possible implications in application are expanded and explored. The paper concludes with an illustrative discussion of how these principles might be applied in the health sector.

Responding to the Gender and Education Millennium Development Goals in South Africa and Kenya: Reflections on Education Rights, Gender Equality, Capabilities and Global Justice.

This paper explores understandings of gender equality and education and the nature of global goal and target setting, drawing on empirical data collected in central and local government departments in Kenya and South Africa reflecting on their implementation of Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 1, concerned with poverty, MDG 2, concerned with education, and MDG 3, concerned with gender equality. The study raises questions about the ownership of the MDGs and the reasons for the kinds of changes in meaning about gender and rights made by differently situated officials.

Girls’ schooling, gender equity and the global education and development agenda : Conceptual disconnections, political struggles, and the difficulties of practice

This article reviews ten years of political and analytical discussions regarding the global development agenda on girls’ schooling and gender equity. It considers struggles over the purpose and realizability of the global agenda, and attempts to widen frameworks to go beyond gender parity in access and enrollment. Drawing on a case study of one global NGO that took a women’s rights approach, it shows how difficult it has been, even in the best kind of organizational environment, to realize a women’s rights agenda that linked education to other forms of empowerment. These difficulties are confirmed by critical reflections on participation in the conference convened to review ten years of the work of the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI). However, the conclusions, while acknowledging problems of multiple sites of action, silences, and the attenuation of transformatory agendas, nonetheless point to a richer conceptual vocabulary, a wider range of actors, and clearer strategic orientation than a decade ago.

Blaming the poor: constructions of marginality and poverty in the Kenyan education sector

The article examines how blame and disconnection from the lives of the poor feature in a nexus of ideas about implementing education policy articulated by education officials and teachers in Kenya. Three different approaches to understanding marginality are distinguished, each associated with a different process of setting a boundary concerning the marginalised. This differentiation is used to analyse qualitative data collected between 2007 and 2011 in three sites – a school, a provincial education department, and the national education ministry. Analysis shows how work practices in all sites entail processes of distancing and exclusion which confirm the boundaries associated with marginalisation, rather than overcoming them. We conclude on the need to pay attention to shifting cultural perceptions concerning the marginalised, opening educational opportunities for officials and teachers to examine their presuppositions, and making space for the poor and the marginal to engage politically and culturally in developing inclusion and social justice in schools.

Assessing Gender Mainstreaming in the Education Sector: Depoliticised Technique or a Step towards Women’s Rights and Gender Equality?

More details/abstract: In 1995 the Beijing Conference on Women identified gender mainstreaming as a key area for action. Policies to effect gender mainstreaming have since been widely adopted. This special issue of Compare looks at research on how gender mainstreaming has been used in government education departments, schools, higher education institutions, international agencies and NGOs .1 In this introduction we first provide a brief history of the emergence of gender mainstreaming and review changing definitions of the term. In the process we outline some policy initiatives that have attempted to mainstream gender and consider some difficulties with putting ideas into practice, particularly the tensions between a technical and transformative interpretations . Much of the literature about experiences with gender mainstreaming tends to look at organizational processes and not any specificities of a particular social sector. However, in our second section, we are concerned to explore whether institutional forms and particular actions associated with education give gender mainstreaming in education sites some distinctive features. In our last section we consider some of the debates about global and local negotiations in discussions of gender policy and education and the light this throws on gender mainstreaming. In so doing, we place the articles that follow in relation to contestations over ownership, political economy, the form and content of education practice and the social complexity of gender equality.

MDG 3 and the negotiation of gender in international education organisations

Gender equality in education has held a prominent position in global policy making over the last decade through international frameworks and declarations such as the Dakar framework of Action on Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This paper draws on interviews conducted with participants who hold a gender brief in international organisations, active in the global Education for All movement. It examines the ways in which global commitments to gender equality in education are being understood in policy and programme work and what this reveals about gender mainstreaming in global education organisations. The MDG framework has been actively used in a number of organisations to leverage action on gender, primarily with regard to improving girls’ access to schooling and achieving gender parity – equal numbers of girls and boys in school. This has meant that more substantive understandings of gender, which relate to the experiences of girls and women in and beyond school, often go un‐discussed and un‐addressed. The need for organisations to develop a more substantive notion of gender equality work linked to activism on women’s rights is highlighted as a considerable challenge. This would take gender mainstreaming from a technical exercise to a political contestation with regard to processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Equity in education for/with refugees and migrants—toward a solidarity promoting interculturalism

This special issue brings to the forefront the complex educational challenges faced by migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. It focuses on different ways of understanding equity in relation to education for/with refugees and migrants. The core articles gathered for the special issue originate from the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) conference on the theme of “Equity in and Through Education” held in Glasgow, UK, between May 31 and June 3, 2016. Thus, the special issue addresses the question of equity in diverse local, national, and transnational contexts and from an interdisciplinary approach.

Domestic work, learning and literacy practices across transnational space

Abstract This paper explores the learning experiences and literacy practices of a group of female migrant domestic workers from Nepal, reporting on ethnographic data collected between 2008 and 2013. Drawing on the conceptualisation of literacy as a social practice, as well as the notion of translocational positionality, it examines the way in which the women’s emerging literacy practices in English interacted with their experiences as migrant workers. It argues that understanding the transnational nature of the women’s lives is essential to understanding the complex ways in which literacy was threaded through their social and material practices. In doing so it points to the need for a more complex conceptualisation of context and of the relationship between the local and global within literacy research, which pays attention to the way in which literacy practices interact with processes entailing movement and positioning across boundaries and between different transnational spaces.