Sustainable Development—Quality Education and Gender Equality

As the 2030 deadline for the UN's ambitious 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) looms, governments and third sector organizations are ramping up efforts to achieve—or least approach—benchmarks laid out in the SDG blueprint. Most of the goals won't be met by 2030, but progress toward achieving them is just as important as a deadline that could not possibly have taken into account a pandemic, war, or economic instability. Goal 4 is quality education, and goal 5 is gender equality. As with all the SDGs, these two issues are linked. It isn't possible to discuss improvements to global education without acknowledging the way two-tiered school systems thwart the ambitions of girls and women.

Nelson Mandela once said that education is the most powerful tool for changing the world. If changing the world is caused by changing individual lives, then there's data to back up that statement. Among education's many benefits are that it creates economic opportunity, decreases poverty, empowers its recipients, helps develop problem solving skills, brings greater self-determination, and contributes to social stability. It also correlates to better health and longer lifespans.

As with all the SDGs, COVID-19 dealt a serious blow to progress on goals 4 and 5. Disruptions to educational systems resulted in 147 million children missing 50% of in-class instruction. Overall, 244 million children and youth between ages six and 18 were out of school completely in 2021. Even before COVID there was a lot of work to do. A key metric for measuring education level is literacy, and while that has increased globally over recent decades, in certain regions and countries it's still low. In Niger, for example, only about 37.5% of people aged 15 to 24 can read, according to data from 2018. Lack of literacy affects women more severely. Globally, women make up almost two thirds of adults who can't read, and on the whole 130 million girls are denied the right to education.

The guidelines of SDG 4 emphasize the need for free primary and secondary education, equal access to quality pre-primary, technical, and vocational education, eliminating discrimination in education, and achieving universal literacy and numeracy. However, not only must money be directed specifically toward students in classrooms, but teachers need improved resources, training, infrastructure, and pay; meals should be provided each day because they improve learning capabilities and encourage parents to send children to school; and, where possible, school programs should include extracurriculars to keep kids engaged and to improve social skills.

Children and youth who forego schooling often do so in order to work, which can be a question of survival today, versus the possibility—but rarely the guarantee—of greater prosperity tomorrow. In several countries, early leavers tend to be boys, with a resultant reverse gender gap in schools, but generally it's girls that abandon education early and experience the consequences of that sacrifice more severely. Rates of child mortality, child marriage, and maternal mortality are all linked to low education levels for girls. Girl students are also much more likely to be subjected to violence and harassment—sometimes from state actors—that drives them away. This holds true as well for teachers who are women.

One boon for gender equality in education has been online learning, which has helped increase the reach of instruction, and has been shown to narrow the gender gap. But its availability hinges upon digital infrastructure—a key shortcoming in developing countries. SDG 9—infrastructure and industrialization— partly concerns itself with this issue, once again making clear how each SDG branches into multiple areas of need. SGD 8—economic growth—is also interlinked, because one of the most compelling benefits of educational equality is that national growth rates rise with girls' education.

Governments are almost unanimously in favor of better education. It's an easy goal to get behind rhetorically. But meeting SDG 4 will actually require increased capital commitment from sometimes tentative legislatures, even though the economic benefits that accrue are indisputable. The private sector must pitch in as well, and the hard work and advocacy of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) must continue. As the UN continues encouraging and assisting global governments, respected NGOs, such as United World Schools, Educate Girls, Plan International, Écoles Sans Frontières, and others too numerous to name, continue working to fill long extant education gaps created by neglect, poverty, culture, and conflict.

Another requirement is to acknowledge political obstacles within countries. Pro-education pretenses are easy for politicians to maintain, but in practice many countries, even wealthy ones, in their zeal to control exactly what is learned and by whom, are damaging education rather than bolstering it. The UN's education agenda doesn't list any overtly political goals to be achieved. As part of an overarching SDG framework meant to conquer poverty, it suggests training citizens for economic productivity. However the politics are embedded. More schooling for girls is political. And other SDGs—including gender equality—unavoidably touch the live wire of today's bitter rifts.

With girls and women representing half of the world's population, and therefore half of its potential, gender equality—SDG 5—is, in the words of the UN, “the unfinished business of our time.” There's no doubt of this, but the endpoint still looks a vast distance away. Reaching gender parity, as defined by World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2022 (PDF), would require considerably more than a century, on current trends. Since this obviously is far from ideal, as well as unsustainable, the question is how to approach gender equality in the here and now to reduce that timespan.

SDG 5 seeks to do this by, among other methods, decreasing discrimination and gender-based violence, promoting equal opportunity, bolstering reproductive rights, recognizing the economic value of unpaid and domestic work, and boosting the use of empowering technology. Reproductive rights are a divisive issue in many countries—including the U.S.—but then again, anything related to improving the lot of the world's women stabs to the heart of politics and male power structures—whether it's curbing early marriage, increasing legislative representation, or stopping unintended pregnancies.

While gender equality exists to a greater degree in some countries than others, progress is uneven within every nation, which means there's work to do even where indicators are higher. Globally, nonprofits such as Rise Up, MATCH International Women's Fund, Human Rights Watch, and PROMUNDO have touched tens of millions of lives and provided much needed empirical data on the issue. Even so, charitable giving to groups focused on girls and women is low. In the U.S. it represented 1.9% of total giving in 2021. Work on SDG 5 has in reality barely begun, and will need to continue long after 2030.