Boosting Girls' Access & Engagement In Distance Learning

Girls face unique challenges as they pursue educational and economic opportunities after school. That’s why gender equity is core to Educate!’s mission and why we aim to provide girls with the tools to tackle the socio-economic barriers they face and work towards the future they envision. For over ten years, we’ve implemented an evidence-based gender equity and inclusivity strategy within our flagship in-school model, with measurable results. We target equal participation between girls and boys and deliver targeted pedagogy designed to emphasize women’s contributions to society, their right to decision making and agency, and their potential as leaders and entrepreneurs. In 2020, our gender equity strategy was more critical than ever: past crises show that girls face heightened challenges during pandemics and severe economic downturns leading to new barriers in obtaining quality education and employment, such as increased sexual exploitation, early marriage, and adolescent pregnancy. Recognizing these far-reaching impacts, we doubled down on our commitment to gender equity, supporting girls in our distance learning model to develop the critical hard and soft skills to face the future confidently and break down barriers. Within our distance learning model, we have learned important lessons related to gender equity, and we are taking a targeted approach to supporting girls’ skill building at home.

1. Increasing Enrollment & Participation

At the start of the pandemic, our data collection showed that more boys than girls were participating consistently in our distance learning model. Evidence shows that girls’ time becomes more limited during crises as they take on a greater share of chores like housework or childcare. Additionally, we learned through our research that female participants were less likely to own their own phones than males, so girls could often only participate when they were able to borrow a family member’s phone.

To respond and target equal participation in our distance learning model, we launched a girl-centered campaign to encourage girls to enroll. We started making calls to girls’ parents or guardians to share more about our distance learning curriculum and explain what the phone-based content would offer them. We found that this strategy increased youth participation by 29%. We have also been listening closely to youth along the way. When they let us know that they couldn’t attend lessons, we made scheduling more flexible by offering additional lesson times and trained Mentors to help youth catch up on missed activities. This flexible scheduling especially supports girls, who may have more restricted availability than their male counterparts.

2. Supporting Meaningful Engagement

Increasing the number of female participants enrolled in the model was a first step, and then we turned our attention to supporting girls’ meaningful engagement with distance learning activities and creating a space for them to put their new skills into practice. Towards this end, we recruited and trained ‘Girl Ambassadors’ — Mentors who are gender equity advocates and female role models — to run specialized lessons and connect one-on-one with youth. Beyond these special advocates, just like in our in-person experience, all of Educate!’s youth Mentors also receive training on gender-sensitive lesson facilitation, ensuring that they are intentional about promoting gender equity when connecting remotely with youth. We have also experimented with offering all-girl mentorship groups, which bring together 5-10 female participants for 30-minute conference calls run by Educate! Mentors. These sessions aim to create a safe space for female participants, where they are encouraged to share their learnings and experiences, engage actively with their peers, and discuss the challenges they face learning at home. Beyond the girls-only groups, gender equity-related conversations during peer learning sessions and on social media intentionally engage both male and female learners. On Facebook, for example, learners were asked to discuss the economic opportunity gap: “Do boys have better opportunities to succeed as entrepreneurs?” This has helped us to better understand our participants’ beliefs and challenges so that we can effectively meet them where they are.

3. Application

Educate!’s distance learning curriculum integrates a gender-responsive lens to ensure positive representation — debunking stereotypes that girls cannot fill specific roles or have limited opportunities. Our lessons feature fictional female protagonists who encourage girls to put their skills into practice by modeling business skills (like opportunity identification), soft skills (like creativity), and practical small business ideas (like growing vegetables) within relatable contexts. We know representation is powerful, and we have been excited to see a number of young women use what they learned to start businesses and community projects, all while adapting to the unpredictable challenges of the pandemic and prioritizing safety

What Comes Next?

The implications of working towards gender equity during the pandemic are important: the education sector has learned from past crises that girls’ participation in educational activities during times of disruption can be a pathway back to the classroom and to improved outcomes in the longer term. For example, girls enrolled in an empowerment program in Sierra Leone amid the Ebola outbreak were “more likely to re-enroll in school after the outbreak and had more educated and supportive partners 5 years later. ” These education and social spillover impacts, such as life-partnership dynamics, are similar to the results of Educate!’s 4-year post-program RCT. What we’ve learned during this time can help us strengthen girls’ participation and outcomes even beyond the pandemic. Looking ahead, we aim to continue exploring the most effective ways to equip girls with the tools to overcome gendered barriers to success and pursue their goals, and we are working to leverage lessons learned in 2020 to test new and creative strategies to advance gen - der equity. We hope that learnings from our distance learning model will help us build upon our existing gender equity strategies, broadening this focus to provide skills-based bootcamps to girls who cannot access secondary school beyond the pandemic.