A-5: Education Methods in COVID-19 Response: Assessing Gendered Impact
Broad Recommendations
- For effective tele-schools, it is important for the government to ensure, in the long-term, that there are no domestic power outages at least during school hours.
- It is important for the government to adopt international practices and replicate higher education virtual methods at primary and tertiary school level as well.
- Education departments and schools can improve the quality of virtual education by using various mediums like Flipgrid, Vialogues, Thinglink, Edpuzzle and other video-based edtech apps and approaches.
- The government needs to invest in ICT infrastructure financially in the form of capacity-building in a consistent, incremental, partnership-based approach applying an intersectional lens.
- The Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training should pursue partnerships with stakeholders to comprehensively map and develop virtual educational capacities in all public schools, especially those for girls.
Specific Recommendations
- For Safe & Gender-responsive Return
- Gender-responsive actions on learning, health/nutrition/WASH, protection for teachers and students should be developed.
- The federal and provincial education departments should develop targeted remedial and catch-up learning support for marginalised girls and other vulnerable groups.
- Provincial governments should revitalise school management committees to engage households with at-risk children.
- Gender-responsive back-to-school campaigns should be supplemented with actions to address supply-side issues.
- Stipend programmes should be scaled-up.
Mitigate Financial Impact on Households
- Scale-up social protection by ensuring it is targeted to the most vulnerable groups, including girls, students with special needs or disabilities; and those in lower socioeconomic, and previously conflict-affected states, to help mitigate negative coping strategies that could impact re-enrolment.
Protect Progress for Girls’ Education
- Provide gender-equitable and inclusive distance learning to support all students for future school closures.
- Education departments should use publicly available gender-disaggregated data on re-enrolment and retention to inform policy and practices.
- The government needs to reverse the declining trend in the development budget and commit to maintaining, and eventually increasing, public spending on education; and implement emergency financing packages for education.
- Education disaster risk preparedness strategies should be gender-responsive.
- Education departments need to incorporate sensitisation and awareness creation programmes that ‘normalise’ girls’ access to the Internet for learning and education in policymaking.
