UNICEF: Work will continue to close gender gap

We spend a lot of news time covering various conferences. Usually we’ll catch the opening and a bit of the first day’s agenda before moving on to more pressing stories. But the gathering that took place earlier this week on gender disparity in education is important enough to merit a second look.

Rana Flowers, UNICEF Belize
“At the moment the curriculum is largely geared to the P.S.E. and that’s from the child enters pre-kinder they are already starting thinking P.S.E.”

Kendra Griffith, Reporting
The move from an exam-centred system is one that may help to keep boys in the classroom. According to UNICEF Representative in Belize, Rana Flowers, the focus needs to shift to character-building.

Rana Flowers
“No longer will schools be rated as successful on P.S.E. alone. Very clear demand and recognition that schools must be rated on their success in building character, their success in addressing self-esteem, their success in building values and getting the two genders to work together for both to realise and be able to deal with their lives outside of the education system.”

One way of realising that change is to expand the Health and Family Life Education Programme and integrate it as a core component in the school’s curriculum. Other recommendations coming out of the focus groups involve sports, increasing after school programmes, and the need for male teachers and role models. The issue of poverty also did not escape the meeting’s attention.

Rana Flowers
“We need to look at cash transfers from government, what we would call conditional cash transfers from government, which are payments to social economically deprived families, which if the children go to school then there is a cash transfer and that is a way to address what was very clear in the meeting, that this is an issue that affects poor and excluded children more than the children in the middle and upper classes in Belize so we need to acknowledge that and address it. It’s also an ethnic issue, which is why we need to look at the culture in the schools and the language of instruction.”

According to Flowers, UNICEF has no intention of letting the issue or the proposals gather dust on a shelf.

Rana Flowers
“The commitment that was made to take action at the regional level, through CARICOM mechanisms, to have a plan of action that we monitor and assess we keep the pressure on, all of ourselves, to move on this, not just to let it rest because there will need to be action over several years to make a difference.”

Kendra Griffith reporting for News Five.

Flowers says they hope to see some tangible results of their efforts within five years.