- New support will provide around 100,000 women and girls with
access to education and training in Southeast Asia
- The programme will boost female employment in sectors such as
data analysis and technology
- This comes as the UK hosts the world’s largest gathering of
education ministers in London at the Education World Forum
A new UK funded programme will offer some of the most
marginalised women and girls in Southeast Asia a better future by
boosting access to a quality education.
Funding will go towards improving the quality of education for
women and girls by prioritising teaching basic reading and maths
skills to unlock their full potential.
The programme will expand women and girls’ access to digital and
technical education – focusing on what skills are needed to gain
employment in high-skill sectors such as technology and
manufacturing.
It will also promote the inclusion of remote and minority
communities, urban poor and children with disabilities by setting
up disability assessments to identify additional needs and
medical referrals for eye tests.
International Development Minister will announce the funding
at the Education World Forum (EWF) conference in London today -
the largest international gathering of education ministers.
Minister for Development, , said:
“Greater gender equality brings freedom, boosts prosperity and
strengthens global security. Countries can’t develop if half the
population are held back from fulfilling their full
potential.
“This means working in partnership with countries to provide a
quality education for all with a focus on girls to address the
barriers they face including violence, poverty, harmful gender
norms and climate change.
“We’re working with partners across Southeast Asia to tackle the
learning crisis and improve education and future employment
opportunities of women and girls to ensure a prosperous future.”
Around 140 million children in Southeast Asia experienced loss of
education due to school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is made worse by low quality schooling, learning poverty,
limited access to schools in rural areas, education that fails to
equip students with workplace skills and girls dropping out of
school because of early marriage.
In the ASEAN region, girls make up a larger proportion of out
of-school children at primary level. This limits opportunities in
later life and increases the risks of facing early marriage,
young pregnancy and poverty.
The new UK funding of £30m will address these barriers to
education for the 1.2m girls threatened with permanent school
drop-out through cost-effective measures such as merit-based
scholarships, girls clubs and catch up classes to ensure children
stay in school.
UK expertise will help schools improve the quality of teaching
through lesson planning and in-class support so more children are
able to read and understand a short story by the age of ten years
old. This means the programme will directly support progress
towards the UK’s commitments for 40 million more girls in school
and 20 million more girls reading.
The five-year programme is the first in a series of new ASEAN-UK
programmes designed to deliver on UK commitments as a dialogue partner
and is further evidence of the UK’s renewed effort to prioritise
educating girls as set out in the Women and Girls
Strategy.
It is part of the UK’s effort to improve effectiveness of
education and follows the recently announced Scaling Access and
Learning in Education programme to help get an additional six
million girls around the world into school.
The UK also launched a new report with the Global Education
Evidence Advisory Panel and World Bank on ‘Cost Effective
Approaches to Improve Global Learning’, which builds on the
importance of early childhood education and provides
recommendations covering health, nutrition and socio-emotional
development.
ENDS
Notes to editors
- ASEAN Girls Education
and Skills Programme, funded by £30m of UK support, will be
delivered in Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos,
Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam
and Timor Leste.
- The programme will
focus on four main areas: foundation learning; out-of-school
girls and children with disability; gender barriers to digital
skills and employment; enabling work on educating technology.
- The UK’s Dialogue Partner
status was formalised in August 2021, with the first UK-ASEAN
Plan of Action agreed
in 2022.
