Girls’ Education to Reduce Gender-Based Violence

Dr. Christina Myers, Special advisor to Dr. Alaa Murabit

Dr. Alaa Murabit, SDG advocate and UN High-Level Commissioner on Health Employment and Economic Growth

In Meta, Colombia, a region that reports the highest national rates for gender-based violence and human rights violations, a local leader, Viviana Palacios has been changing realities for girls and women by implementing the SDGs.

We first met Viviana 2018, in the small town of Nuqui, on the Colombian Pacific Coast, for a community-led leadership programme on the SDGs that our organisation, The Omnis Institute, organised with Unilever. That day, she told us that she had recently accomplished her dream, which she described as “to become a lawyer and make sure that less girls go through the same atrocities that I have lived’. We were so in awe of her leadership, impact and story that we have been working with her ever since.

To recognise the impact of Viviana’s leadership, it is important to know her story. One of 7 children, Viviana was born in the small town of Mesetas, in Colombia’s Meta region. With drug-trafficking rife in the town at the time, Viviana's family were forced to leave her home for another town called Granada. Soon after moving, Viviana found herself caught in an abusive relationship and became pregnant at the age of 16. After giving birth to her son, she spent 10 years working multiple jobs to provide for her son, siblings and parents, while saving money to go to university. Two years before graduating from law school, at the age of 28, she was appointed by the Mayor of Villavicencio as a planning advisor to shape public policies in human rights, education and gender equality.

Building on her personal and professional experience in shaping educational policies, monitoring human rights, and women’s reproductive rights, she created an activist and women-led group called YoPuedo (“I can”). The main objective of YoPuedo is to locally implement the SDGs, mostly Goal 3: Health, Goal 4: Quality education and Goal 5: Gender equality. YoPuedo implements grassroot solutions and builds on these solutions, by gathering data, framing best practices and monitoring results, to transform public policies into being more inclusive and reflective of underprivileged realities.

The YoPuedo school, their most recent programme, was born from their frustration on the lack of governmental initiatives targeted at tackling gender-based violence by increasing the number of girls attending school, teaching sex education, and democratising processes to shape public policies. The school was built in Vista Hermosa, a region that holds the record for the highest number of crimes on violence against women and girls. “We refuse to live in fear, we will not accept violence and discrimination any longer, this school reflects our leadership and feminism and it is our solution to stop violence against our girls”, said Viviana. The school ended up being financially supported by UN Women and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The school is based on facilitating 10 modules, including the formulation of inclusive public policies, teaching gender stereotypes, inclusive leadership, sex education, reproductive rights and gender- based violence, and involves 43 girls, most of whom had never been to school before.

The modules are co-designed with the girl students - their experiences, ideas and knowledge are directly used to define the educational content of these modules. The school also includes the creation of the ‘Agenda de Paz’ [Peace Agenda], which is a shared written agreement framing collective actions to tackle social, economical and political issues that the girls identified in their everyday lives, with a stronger focus given to gender-based violence. This agenda was presented to local municipalities, including to the mayor and governmental representatives, and they collectively agreed to organise monthly meetings to ensure and monitor the implementation of the proposed actions. This agenda included solutions targeted at finding innovative funding approaches for educational grants, to include internet access in more schools, and to build a network of professionals who could provide preventive, juridical and psychological support related to gender-based violence.

The school also uses new technologies, such as interactive stories, podcasts, online classes and virtual educational games, to access girls living in remote or very violent communities. All these educational technologies were also co-designed to ensure that they were effective, inclusive and impacting to these communities.

Screenshots of the online classes and virtual educational game

With the intention to create evidence on the impact of girls’ education, data has been collected throughout this project. This data, for example, showed that before attending the school, 70% of the girls could only identify very violent cases of gender-based violence and 76% did not know how to seek support or how to report a gender-based crime. By the end of the programme, 82% of them could identify broader forms of gender-based violence and 86% reported they would know where to go and what to do if they were to observe a crime. “I thought that there was only one form of gender violence, sexual and physical, I didn’t know about other forms of violence, such as online, psychological, or economical gender violence”, said one of the girls. Vivana also told us that four girls ended up breaking up with their partners after recognising they were in abusive relationships based on the signs taught to them at the school. They also organised local gatherings targeted at violence prevention, providing safe spaces to report crimes and coordinating demonstrations to raise awareness of this topic (now online campaigns due to COVID-19).

First demonstration on gender-based violence organised by the students

It is widely known that schools need to be contextualised to be impactful to students, which often leads educators, governments and local institutions to conceive schools the way they think is best. This school presents best practices that could be used to create other local schools, in Colombia and in other countries. It highlights the importance of integrating students into the design of curriculums, to enable students to define how their learning could be translated into transformative action, to co-design technological tools to make online education effective, and to use schools as a space to reflect on social, political and economic issues that they face.

In January 2020, there were at least 130 millions of girls who were out of school. These numbers have become even more alarming due to Covid-19 - the Malala Fund anticipated that girls will be the last ones to go back to school and also estimated that 20 million more girls could be permanently out of school after the pandemic has passed. Girls’ education not only enables girls to define what their future will look like, it also has a significant impact on making communities and countries safer, richer and healthier. When educated and employed, women reinvest 90% of their incomes back into their communities, in comparison to 35% for men.

Gender equality is often associated with the ‘empowerment’ of girls and women, which often results in picturing girls and women without inherent agency and power. As we watched the students graduate from YoPuedo School on the 3rd of September 2020, we appreciate that Viviana, her leadership with YoPuedo and through this school, illustrate that not only do women and girls have agency, but also that providing platforms and opportunities for them to unlock their power is what is needed to implement the SDGs.

Students with their diploma at the graduation of the YoPuedo school