Educate! Leader Develops Gender Expertise Through Brookings Fellowship
What barriers still exist for girls’ education in Uganda?
This is the critical question that Hawah Nabbuye, Educate!’s Deputy Country Director in Uganda, is seeking to answer this year as part of the Echidna Global Scholars Program, a visiting fellowship hosted by the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution.
Hawah is leveraging her 10+ years of experience with Educate!, where she drives gender strategy and ensures Educate!’s outsized impact on girls, to unpack the persistent inequality that afflicts girls’ educational experiences in the classroom. She recently authored an article for Brookings, entitled Gender assumptions that challenge a quality education for girls in Uganda, to share her key research findings. Throughout her fellowship, Hawah is focusing on exploring methods that teachers are using to empower girls to improve attendance, participation in co-curricular activities, involvement in leadership positions, and academic performance.
In her article, Hawah outlines how critical stereotypes and assumptions about gender-sensitive teaching methods are blocking further progress for girls’ education. She illustrates how stereotypes and biases stretch from social spheres, such as home and work, into schools, where teachers typically have lower expectations for girls – leading to under-involvement in school leadership and co-curricular activities, and ultimately to higher dropout rates and lower achievement for female students. As an Echidna Global Scholar, Hawah has spent much of 2018 researching effective ways to close the policy and implementation gap and identifying key strategies teachers can use to empower girls. Hawah’s important research will serve to inform Educate!’s gender equity strategy, helping us to continue to address gender barriers faced by the students we work with and to ensure that every learner, male or female, receives a quality education that prepares them for today’s economy.
To share what she’s learned, Hawah is speaking at the Brookings Girls' Education Research and Policy Symposium on November 7th in Washington D.C. The panel, hosted by The Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings, will examine approaches to creating systems-wide change for the most marginalized girls around the world. Hawah will present her innovative research on the panel Bridging the implementation gap in teachers’ use of gender sensitive pedagogy.
Learn more about the Brookings Girls' Education Research and Policy Symposium.
Read on for more about Hawah’s innovative gender research:
Gender-sensitive pedagogy - November 7, 2018
More than policies are required to implement gender-sensitive pedagogy in Uganda - November 6, 2018
Gender assumptions that challenge a quality education for girls in Uganda - July 24, 2018