Girls’ Education and Empowerment: Strategies and Experiences from South Asia

The book builds an understanding on the issue of girls’ education and empowerment in the backdrop of a broad geographic canvas of countries in South Asia. Using select education and gender-related related indicators and qualitative data, it presents the status of girls’ education across these countries. It proceeds to explore the dominant structural, systemic, and situational, macro, and micro level interrelated barriers to girls’ education. Country specific situational issues like economic crises, political instability, natural disasters and conflict, that impact girls’ lives and education are underscored for contextual understanding. Within this landscape, the impact of Covid -19 on girls’ education has also been discussed. The book’s uniqueness lies in its approach to linking praxis with theory by distilling the fundamental principles and assumptions underlying the strategies, using these for theorizing and generating discourse in the field. The attempts to theorize are multidisciplinary in nature as they draw from the disciplines of Sociology, Psychology, Education, Development Studies, Conflict Studies, and Gender Studies.

This book would be useful to the students, researchers and teachers working in the field of Education, Development Studies, Gender Studies, Social Work, Sociology and Psychology. It would also be an invaluable companion to policy makers, professionals from government and non-government organizations working in the field of education, social development and gender.

Geeta Menon, a development professional, has a doctorate degree from the Centre of Advanced Study in Education, Baroda. As Director Girl’s Education CARE India and Signature Program Coordinator at CARE USA, she enabled conceptualization and implementation of successful strategies for girls’ education and early learning. She is known for her work in the field of Education in Emergencies and has worked in countries like Somaliland, Afghanistan, Nepal and Bangladesh . As an independent professional she has worked on diverse assignments with organizations like UNICEF, Save the Children, Plan International and Right to Education Forum.

Her areas of interest include Early Learning, Girl’s Education and Empowerment, Education in Emergencies. She has several publications and reports to her credit.

Namita Ranganathan is Professor at the Department of Education, University of Delhi. She has thirty eight years of teaching experience in teacher education and research programmes. Her specializations include early childhood education, childhood and adolescent studies, gender studies, guidance, counselling and mental health and research methods. She has authored six books and several research papers. She has engaged extensively in field researches and evaluation studies of girls’ education through various projects with The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), CARE India, Aga Khan Foundation, Save the Children, and the Government of India.

Dr. Sanjeev Rai, an expert on education and education in emergencies, has worked earlier with the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, Kabul, EAA Foundation, Qatar and Save the Children, CARE, Tata Institute of Social Sciences and some other organizations in India. He has recently completed a special assignment as OSD to the governor on university reforms.

He has written five books including,＂Conflict, Education and People’s War in Nepal＂ and served as the co-chair of the Global Alliance on Education in Post-Conflict and Conflict-Affected Countries.

He studied Political Science at the University of Allahabad and has done an M.Ed, M.Phil and PhD ( Education) from the University of Delhi, India.