Educating women for development: The Arab Human Development Rreport 2005 and the problem with women's choices

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Volumn 41, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 105-122

  Adely, Fida J ^a  

^a GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK; ECONOMIC GROWTH; EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT; HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX; SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS; UNITED NATIONS; WOMENS STATUS;

EID: 65749088499     PISSN: 00207438     EISSN: 14716380     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020743808090144     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. United Nations Development Programme, Arab Human Development Report 2005: Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World (New York: Regional Bureau of Arab States, cosponsored with the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development and the Arab Gulf Programme for United Nations Organizations, 2006). Please see the overview in this issue. Lila Abu-Lughod, Frances S. Hasso, and Fida J. Adely contributed to the following background note. The AHDR 2005, published online in Arabic and English in December 2006, is the last volume in a four-part series focused on development in Arab-identified states and territories. A research and policy document as well as visionary political statement, this 230-page report (plus eighty pages of charts, statistics, and references) was produced over several years through the research, writing, and editing of over seventy-five individuals from the Arab world, including some of its most prominent social researchers and feminists. The AHDRs were produced under the auspices of and governed by the UNDP. The first, the ADHR 2002, presents and comparatively analyzes various indicators in Arab states and highlights three major "deficits" hindering human development that are addressed in depth in the volumes that follow: "Building a Knowledge Society" (2003), "Towards Freedom in the Arab World" (2004), and "Towards the Rise of Women in the Arab World" (2005).
2. Mahbub ul Haq, Reflections on Human Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 14.
3. This initial report was followed annually by a new global human development report, each new release grappling with a new dimension of human development, with topics ranging from gender to democracy to technology and human rights. The UNDP's Human Development Report Office maintains a website (http://hdr.undp.org) with information about the global reports as well as national human development reports that have been developed by select countries.
4. I am indebted to Mervat Hatem for reminding me that the discourse of choices in and of itself was not necessarily a departure from the essential components of earlier development discourse.
5. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999), 75.
6. Ibid., 62.
7. Ibid., 63.
8. Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge:CAmbridge University Press, 2000), 2.
9. Nussbaum, "Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice," Feminist Economics 9 (2003): 33-59, 34.
10. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 5.
11. In their recent work on educated and un- or underemployed males in northern India, Jeffrey, Jeffrey, and Jeffrey have argued that the emphasis on capabilities, such as education, as drivers for change can "divert attention away from social struggles over the values and uses of education in situations of economic uncertainty." Craig Jeffrey, Patricia Jeffery, and Roger Jeffrey, Degrees without Freedom? Education, Masculinities and Unemployment in Northern India (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 8.
12. I put "Arab women" in quotes here because one key concern about such reports is the way in which "Arab women" become a category that is essentialized as some homogenous group without sufficient attention to class differences, rural/urban disparities, and so forth. The body of scholarship critiquing this essentialization of Third World women or the feminine other has a long history aided in large part by postcolonial theory and its call for the interrogations of such representations. Within feminist scholarship, Chandra Mohanty's work in this vein has been seminal. Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," Boundary 2, no. 12 (1984): 333-58.
13. See also Frances S. Hasso, "Empowering Governmentalities Rather than Women: The Arab Human Development Report 2005 and Western Development Logics," International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 63-82 (this issue).
14. For a review of this research, see Kevin Watkins, Oxfam Education Report (Oxford, U.K.: Oxfam Publishing, 2000),
15. and Robert LeVine, Sarah LeVine, and Beatrice Schnell, "Improve the Woman": Mass Schooling, Female Literacy, and Worldwide Social Change," Harvard Educational Review 71 (2001): 1-50.
16. Watkins, Oxfam Education Report.
17. Elizabeth M. King and M. Ann Hill, Women's Education in Developing Countries: Barriers, Benefits, and Policies (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1993)
18. Watkins, Oxfam Education Report.
19. LeVine et al., "Improve the Woman"
20. Watkins, Oxfam Education Report.
21. For a critique of this perspective, see Frances Vavrus, Desire and Decline: Schooling amid Crisis in Tanzania (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003).
22. Watkins, Oxfam Education Report.
23. Ibid.;
24. LeVine et al., "Improve the Woman."
25. World Bank, Gender and Development in the Middle East and North Africa: Women in the Public Sphere (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2004), 1.
26. World Bank, Gender and Development, 1-2.
27. World Bank, The Economic Advancement of Women in Jordan: A Country Gender Assessment (Washington, D.C.: Social and Economic Development Group, Middle East and North Africa Region, 2005).
28. UNDP, AHDR 2005, i.
29. Asef Bayat, "Transforming the Arab World: The Arab Human Development Report and the Politics of Change," Development Practice 36 (2005): 1225-37, 1230.
30. Kamran Ali's research on family-planning programs in Egypt is informative here. He argues that despite a family-planning discourse on helping women achieve their rights as individuals to make choices related to their bodies and fertility, "choices are determined by a medical discourse and practice linked to the development agenda." Kamran Ali, Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 2002), 60.
31. See Ingemar Fagerlind and Lawrence Saha, Education and National Development, 2nd ed. (New York: Pergamon, 1989) for a discussion about mass public schooling as a very contemporary notion. For example, in the United States and Great Britain, the notion of providing public education to the masses only took off in earnest in the 20th century after much public debate about whether the masses need to be educated and for what purposes.
32. UNDP, AHDR 2005, 73.
33. Ibid., 7.
34. Education is almost always synonymous with formal schooling in the report. However, in at least one instance, literacy rates for females over fifteen are used as a proxy for levels of education in the Arab world. The use of literacy rates as an indicator of levels of education and progress in the expansion of educational access is problematic given that the educational development efforts of countries are typically targeted toward children and illiteracy is most prevalent among older age cohorts, reflecting the limited educational opportunities available historically. See Nadia Farah, "Arab Women's Development: How Relevant are UNDP Measurements?" Middle East Policy XIII (2006): 38-47.
35. Timothy Mitchell makes an analogous critique of development documents and their representation of the "overpopulation" problem in Egypt, arguing that is often unclear to what "over" is referring. Timothy Mitchell, "America's Egypt: Discourse of the Development Industry," Middle East Report 169 (1991): 18-34, 36.
36. UNDP, AHDR 2005, 74. The reader has only to move on to the next page to figures 2-5, which display female enrollment as a percentage of male enrollment at all levels of education. According to the data in this figure, half of the twenty countries for which data are provided have an equal ratio of girls to boys. Furthermore, in nine Arab countries the ratio of females is greater than that of males, and in five countries the gap between females and males is less than 10 percent.
37. Ibid., 76.
38. UNDP, AHDR 2004, 235.
39. Central Intelligence Agency, The World Fact Book, https://www.cia.gov/ library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cn.html (accessed 18 October 2007).
40. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/ TableViewer/document.aspx?ReportId=121&IF_Language= eng&BR_Country=2620&BR_Region=40525 (accessed 30 September 2008).
41. Roy Carr-Hill, "Educational Services and Nomadic Groups in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda," in The Education of Nomadic Peoples: Current Issues, Future Prospects, ed. Caroline Dyer (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 50.
42. UNDP, AHDR 2005, 77.
43. According to the World Bank, the gross secondary-school enrollment in Yemen was 60 percent for males and 26 percent for females in 2004-5, http://www.ds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/ 2008/02/28/000333038_20080228234736/Rendered/PDF/ 417730PAD0P0891ly10IDA1R20081-003611.pdf (accessed 30 September 2008).
44. Yemen had the largest gender gap of these three countries. For Djibouti, gross secondary enrollment was 27 percent for males and 18 percent for females in 2006 (UNESCO Institute for Statistics). In Mauritania, the gross secondary-school enrollment was 27 percent for boys and 23 percent for girls in 2006, http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/ document.aspx?ReportId=121&IF_Language=eng&BR_Country= 4780&BR_Region=40525 (accessed 30 September 2008).
45. UNESCO, Institute for Statistics, 2005.
46. Maureen Lewis and Marlaine Lockheed, Inexcusable Absence: Why 60 Million Girls Still Aren't In School and What to Do About It (Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development, 2007). Although Lewis and Lockheed set out to write a book about girls' exclusions, their focus on issues surrounding "excluded sub-groups" of various types points to a barrier that goes beyond gender, although it may be compounded by gender.
47. Ibid., 32.
48. UNDP, AHDR 2005, 79.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Engineering Workforce Commission, Engineering and Technology Enrollments: Fall 2005 (Washington, D.C.: American Association of Engineering Societies, Engineering Workforce Commission, 2006).
52. Ibid.
53. The superiority accorded to particular fields of study, namely, the scientific, medical, and technological fields, is consistent in the development literature on education. In the most recent World Bank report about education in the Middle East and North Africa, one of the key indicators used in the bank's assessment of educational quality in the region is the number of students enrolled in the sciences, engineering, and medicine. World Bank, The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2008).
54. UNDP, AHDR 2005, 91.
55. Another important expected choice discussed in the report is participation in the political sphere, with politics narrowly defined as participation through election to office. In both respects - economic and political - the decision to frame women's development and proper use of human capabilities in such a manner precipitates and reproduces the ways in which traditionally male activities are given greater value, UNDP, AHDR 2005;
56. Lila Abu-Lughod, "Dialects of Women's Empowerment: The International Circuitry of the Arab Human Development Report 2005," International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 83-103 (this issue).
57. See Hoda Hoodfar, Between Marriage and the Market: Intimate Politics and Survival in Cairo (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997).
58. Almost across the board, development documents and the broader literature on women's labor-force participation acknowledge the limits of official statistics in capturing the true extent of women's economic contributions, let alone their important labor in maintaining households and families. Yet these documents continue to make assessments about the status of women's development and economic opportunity based on these limited categories, data, and definitions of work - and in some instances explicitly devalue forms of work that are not easily measured. See Farah, "Arab Women's Development."
59. UNDP, AHDR 2005, 79.
60. A recent phenomenon in the United States makes a useful comparison here. In response to decreasing male enrollment in undergraduate institutions, some U.S. universities have unofficially begun lowering the standards for male applicants. See Jennifer D. Britz, "To All the Girls I Have Rejected," New York Times, 23 March 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/ 23britz.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed 30 September 2008)
61. John Tierney, "On Campus, A Good Man is Hard to Find," New York Times, 25 March 2006, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/ fullpage.html?res=9A0DE3D81730F936A15750C0A9609C8B63 (accessed 30 September 2008)
62. Tamar Lewin, "At Colleges Women are Leaving Men in the Dust," New York Times, 9 July 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/ education/09college.html?scp=1&sq=At+Colleges+Women+are+Leaving+Men+ in+the+Dust&st=nyt (accessed 30 September 2008).
63. UNDP, AHDR 2005, 83.
64. For an earlier construction of the Arab family in these terms, see Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (New York: University Press, 1988).
65. Abu-Lughod, "Dialects of Women's Empowerment."
66. Jennifer Olmsted, "Is Paid Work the (Only) Answer? Women's Well-Being, Neoliberalism, and the Social Contract in Southwest Asia and North Africa," Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 2 (2005): 112-39, 112, 131.
67. Linda Hirshman, "Off to Work She Should Go," New York Times, 25 April 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/opinion/ 25hirshman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed 30 September 2008).
68. "Change the World and That Diaper," letter to the editor, New York Times, 27 April 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/ opinion/127work.html?_r=1&oref=slogin (accessed 30 September 2008).
69. Hirshman, "Off to Work She Should Go."
70. "Change the World and That Diaper."
71. My research was based in northern Jordan in a city of about 30,000 people. I conducted ethnographic research primarily in one secondary school, visited and interviewed families of the adolescent girls with whom I interacted daily, and spent a significant amount of time visiting, speaking with, and interviewing teachers, the overwhelming majority of whom were women from the local community.
72. All names of people and places are pseudonyms.
73. See Olmsted, "Is Paid Work the (Only) Answer?" as well as Mervat Hatem, "In the Shadow of the State: Changing Definitions of ArabWomen's Developmental Citizenship Rights," Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 1 (2005): 20-45.
74. Some local governments have pursued a policy of promoting employment for lower-income women in low-wage manufacturing jobs in newly constructed "free-trade zones." The low wages and the exploitive nature of many of these jobs leave them less than desirable and not always economically viable. For an argument about the importance of such low-wage jobs for female entry into the labor force, see Valentine Moghadam, "Women's Economic Participation in the Middle East: What Difference Has the Neoliberal Policy Turn Made?" Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 1 (2005): 110-46.
75. For perspectives on why such jobs may not be desirable and/or economically desirable, see Hoodfar, Between Marriage and the Market
76. Vavrus, Desire and Decline, 10.
77. This perspective on the education of women has its roots in a modernizing discourse that is more than a century old, one that also has had distinct implications for the conceptualization of marriage. See Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
78. Fida Adely, "The Mixed Effects of Schooling for High School Girls in Jordan: The Case of Tel Yahya," Comparative Education Review 48 (2004): 353-73.
79. In the twelfth grade, Jordanian students take the tawjihi, or high school completion exam. (The term also refers to twelfth grade itself.) Their score determines if they can study in a public university and what major they can choose. Students and families held a great deal of anxiety about this exam, given its role in deciding one's future and given that only about half of twelfth graders pass the exam. Furthermore, passing does not guarantee admission to a public university. In 2006, for example, of the 54,000 students who passed the exam, only 28,000 gained admission to public universities.Mohammad Ghazal, "Girls Take Top Spots in Six Streams of Exam," Jordan Times 30 July 2006. Today in Jordan, as in several Arab countries, one increasingly finds private options for higher education, but the cost is too prohibitive for the majority of citizens.
80. See Mervat Hatem on the "middle-class ideal that dealt with work as a choice" in her comparison of secular and Islamist discourses on women's work. She argues that their positions are both based on this ideal. "Egyptian Discourses on Gender and Political Liberalization: Do Secularist and Islamist Discourses Really Differ?" Middle East Journal 48 (1994): 661-76, 670.
81. The barriers to accessing economic opportunities that education is assumed to provide have distinct class dimensions and are not solely a female phenomena. In many respects, because of the "breadwinner" expectations tied to masculinity in many parts of the world, limited economic opportunities and access to stable jobs even for schooled men present a male educational crisis. See Jeffrey et al., Degrees without Freedom?
82. Abu-Lughod, "Dialects of Women's Empowerment."
83. Vavrus, Desire and Decline, 7.