Role of education in promoting gender equality in post-genocide Rwanda

Abstract

The end of large-scale armed conflict provides a window of opportunity to reshape social norms and promote gender equality in post-conflict societies. Rwanda, for example, has widely been considered as a success story of gender equality since the 1994 genocide. As laid out in Rwanda’s national development plan launched in 2000, girls’ education has been an integral part of the country’s promotion of gender equality. Whereas emphasis is on girls’ access to education and their potential contribution to development, scant attention is paid to the effect of girls’ education on pupils’ lives not just during adolescence but also into adulthood. Drawing on the lived experiences of both women and men, my doctoral research shows that girls’ education has done little to change everyday gender relations on the ground.

Taking a qualitative approach, this research explores the extent to which girls’ education has influenced the lived experiences of young women and men in Rwamagana district in the Eastern Province of Rwanda. The data was collected through participant observation, repeated semi-structured and unstructured interviews with 30 Rwamagana residents from diverse backgrounds, and informal spontaneous conversations with others whom I met during my fieldwork. The fieldwork findings were complemented and contextualised by one-off structured interviews with two government officials and two NGO practitioners and official government documents including statistics and policy papers.

The empirical findings of this research point to the fact that the recent changes in gender relations are attributed more to what the political leader preaches, than to what is taught in school. Despite the Rwandan government’s proposal to transform school curricula, textbooks, teaching and learning materials and practices, the focus remains largely on girls’ access to and representation in school. According to the majority of my participants, schools indeed changed curricula and textbooks, but many teachers were not trained enough to utilise those and continued to treat girls and boys differently in the classroom. Due to such a gap between policy and practice, girls’ education appears to have played a negligible role in instilling gender-equitable attitudes and behaviours amongst pupils. The lived experiences of my participants suggest that gender relations have changed to an extent because of what is preached by President Kagame, who is considered as a national hero for stopping the genocide in 1994 and has been promoting gender equality throughout his presidency. His 20- year-long top-down approach has created an environment where Rwanda’s younger generations grow up constantly learning about and being exposed to various gender issues. During my fieldwork, I observed that the president and other politicians often speak on national television and radio about gender-based violence, girls’ education, and women’s entrepreneurship. The implication of this is that what Rwandans hear from their political leadership tends to be more influential than what they learn in school.

The key contribution of this dissertation is its relevance to the literature on topdown approaches to promoting gender equality in a post-conflict context and its concomitant effect on gender relations on the ground. The empirical findings of this study show that girls’ education is often entwined with women’s representation in public life and contribution to development, rather than with the simple reason that it is girls’ right to be educated. Drawing upon the concept of developmental state (Johnson, 1982) and the capability approach (Sen, 1993; 1999), I devise a framework to investigate the rationale for educating girls as a way of promoting gender equality in a post-conflict context and to capture women’s and men’s lived experiences of it. In doing so, I analyse whether, and if so how, their lives have changed as a result. The foundation of my theoretical contribution is that the adoption of gender-responsive curricula and textbooks is not guaranteed to lead to meaningful change in gender relations. As is the case in post-genocide Rwanda, political discourse can reshape social norms if its focus remains the same for a very long period of time. For girls’ education to bring about lasting change, it is necessary for the Rwandan state to resolve the ambiguities around who and what gender equality is intended for, to move its focus beyond access, representation and growth, and finally to actively challenge existing beliefs about gender roles and relations.