New UK funding to boost education opportunities for women and girls in Southeast Asia

A new UK-funded program will offer some of the most marginalized women and girls in Southeast Asia a better future by boosting access to quality education. Funding will go towards improving the quality of education for women and girls by prioritizing teaching basic reading and maths skills to unlock their full potential.

The program 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, the urban poor, and children with disabilities by setting up disability assessments to identify additional needs and medical referrals for eye tests.

International Development Minister Andrew Mitchell will announce the funding at the Education World Forum (EWF) conference in London – the largest international gathering of education ministers.

Minister for Development, Andrew Mitchell, said: ”Greater gender equality brings freedom, boosts prosperity and strengthens global security. Countries can’t develop if half the population is 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 the 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 program 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 program is the first in a series of new ASEAN-UK programs designed to deliver on UK commitments as a dialogue partner and is further evidence of the UK’s renewed effort to prioritize educating girls as set out in the Women and Girls Strategy. It is part of the UK’s effort to improve the effectiveness of education and follows the recently announced Scaling Access and Learning in Education program 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.