This is a research and policy engagement project that examines the relationship between educational disadvantage and gender amongst children and young people in India, Ethiopia and Vietnam.
The project aims to support decision-making to advance the empowerment of children, particularly girls. The research team originally set out to use data from Young Lives' household and school surveys to answer three key questions:
- Which girls and boys develop positive psychosocial attributes, cognitive abilities and transferable skills? How do these skills, attributes and mind-sets change over time?
- To what extent do early investments in education and nutrition affect cognitive skills and psychosocial development? Does this differ for girls and boys?
- How do psychosocial, cognitive and transferable skills support one another? Does this differ for girls and boys?
After COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in March 2020, educational institutions around the world began to close in order to try to slow the spread of the virus. By April, over 90 per cent of the global student population were unable to attend their school, college or university. In response, the research team refocused the project to consider what teaching and learning was taking place during school closures and explore the implications for educational equity. We are grateful for the funder’s flexibility in supporting this change. The project now includes:
- a phone survey of schools in India (Andhra Pradesh and Telengana) and Ethiopia to understand what provision schools made during closures, the extent to which this provision was driven by a focus on equity, and the expected impacts of school closures on children and young people.
- analysis into the reasons for different levels of support offered by schools during the closures. The team will match this phone survey data with data collected from the same schools in 2016/17 to conduct this analysis.
The headline findings from the COVID-19 head teacher surveys in Ethiopia and India are available here. More information on the 2016/17 school surveys can be found here.
The Gendered Young Lives project aims to influence national policy in Young Lives' countries as well as global dialogue on COVID-19, gender, education and skills. The research team are working with the Young Lives' country teams to engage national policy and practice audiences with the research findings.
