Dr. Auma Okwany (ISS) and Dr. Rekha Wazir (Intl. Child Development Initiatives, ICDI)) have co-edited a book titled: Changing Social Norms to Universalize Girls’ Education In East Africa: Lessons From a Pilot Project (2016) Garant Publishers, Antwerp
This edited book is an output of the three-year pilot-project (2013–16) titled: ‘Righting the Future: South-South Collaboration and Capacity Building for Universalizing Secondary Education for Girls in Africa’.
The project, which was co-coordinated by the two editors, was a collaborative effort between ICDI and ISS funded under the donor collaborative: Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education (PSIPSE) initiative. The project was designed to draw good practice from the successful experience of MV Foundation, an NGO in India, by testing how this approach could be critically adapted and owned by communities in East Africa.
The varied, but positive, responses form the subject of the chapters written by the project partners who implemented the project, and university partners who collected evidence to inform implementation. The authors provide reflexive documentation of the strategies, successes and challenges of project implementation activities that have successfully contested gendered exclusion in education in Kenya and Uganda.
The book informs efforts to understand and improve gender and education by demonstrating how a responsive model can be operationalized and empirically applied to girls’ education in context through a critical interrogation of policy, practice, discourse and research.
ISS PhD researcher Elizabeth Ngutuku and ISS alumnus Aurelia Munene have co-authored chapters in the book.