Grassroots Responses to School DropoutHow diverse civil society programs for adolescent girls in Central America contribute to improved school retention. By Kimberly McClain, Regional Director, Americas

INTRODUCTIONSuccess in secondary education is not the only metric of girls’ empowerment, but it is as important a foundation for development for adolescent girls as it is for boys. Grassroots organizations working with adolescent girls pursue a variety of goals using a wide range of methodologies, but these organizations’ diverse interactions with girls as they wrestle with school, identity, relationships, and the future can collectively contribute to keeping girls on the path to educational achievement.

In 2018, Global Fund for Children, in partnership with Dubai Cares, part of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives, began supporting a growing cohort of local organizations across Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua who are committed to working with adolescent girls.

As the group of organizations and the vast diversity of their activities began to take shape, we began to ask ourselves, they can better prepare for independent economic and civic lives as young women?

© Un Mundo

THE CHALLENGEIn Central America, both adolescent girls and boys are dropping out of high school at alarming rates – in Guatemala and Honduras, 74-70% of youth do not complete high school by age 231 and 65-56% never will.2 Despite a relatively high initial enrollment, 37% of students in Guatemala, 42% in Honduras and 43% in Nicaragua drop out before completing lower secondary (9th grade).3 In most Latin American countries, girls are more likely than boys to attend high school, but in Guatemala, where there is a large indigenous population, there are 9 girls for every 10 boys enrolled in lower secondary school.4

Girls who are enrolled in school tend to achieve on par with their male peers in literacy skills, but a 2015 study found that less than 10% of girls enrolled in lower secondary school in Honduras have satisfactory achievement in math, compared to 30% of boys.5

The picture for adolescent girls’ and boys’ education in Central America is stark, and understanding the dynamics holding back each group from their full potential is key to

Our PartnersGuatemalaAsociación AMAAsociación GenerandoCoincidirGOJoven GuatemalaOrganización Sololateca por los Derechos

de las Mujeres Jóvenes Indígenas Tan Ux’ilWomen's Justice Initiative

HondurasArtemisaGOJoven HondurasRedes Juveniles de la MANORCHOUn MundoUnidad de Desarrollo Integral de la Mujer

NicaraguaAsociación Movimiento de Jóvenes de OmetepeAsociación Movimiento de Mujeres por Nuestros

Derechos HumanosCooperativa Multisectorial Jóvenes Protagonistas

del CambioCREA NicaraguaEnRedadas, por el Arte y la TecnologíaFundación para el Desarrollo Comunitario

CAUSES & RESPONSESA recent study commissioned by the CAF Development Bank of Latin America identified seven primary factors contributing to secondary school drop-out rates in Latin America.6 The study focused on the perspective of the school system as the primary actor, which is an important acknowledgement of the influence schools themselves have in student enrollment and performance.

Yet throughout Central America, civil society plays a complementary role to public schools in shaping adolescents’ education and school experience. We looked at the study’s

interventions to address them, and found a wide range of ways in which our local partners are already helping girls push back.

Even as many partners’ programs and school-based interventions influence multiple causes simultaneously (a reality acknowledged by the study’s authors), the categorization of causes and responses into these seven primary factors is a useful framework for understand what girls go through as they navigate the educational landscape during adolescence.

#1: Limited student supportThe study describes how students who feel unsupported at school in the face of bullying by peers or mistreatment by teachers, or simply

environment, will disconnect and are more likely to dropout. Well-resourced schools can respond to these challenges with dedicated counselors and internal mentorship programs, but for many schools, this is beyond their capacities.

Our local partners GOJoven Guatemala, UDIMUF (Honduras), and MOMUNDH (Nicaragua) are all helping to fill gaps in student support for local schools through a variety of in-school and community-based programs to address bullying, sexual harassment, and other gender-based violence that is common in secondary schools. They create safe spaces, both inside and outside classrooms, for adolescent girls to share their hopes, fears, frustrations, and worries, and to connect with peer allies and adult mentors who can help them

their protection if they face violence or harassment. These complementary safety nets build resilience for

and persist in school.

#2: Poor school quality & capacitySchools that are deficient across any number of factors – teacher quality, school management, curriculum, resources, student-teacher ratios, physical school environment – are unwelcoming to students and create a strong disincentive for adolescents to continue their studies. The primary responsibility for improving public school quality lies with the government, but grassroots civil society has both a democratic and complementary role to play as well.

Youth organizers with AMOJO (Nicaragua) and RedJuMA (Honduras) advocate with their municipal governments for greater investment in secondary and vocational education. Un Mundo (Honduras) and CREA Nicaragua, meanwhile, collaborate with locals schools to extend learning beyond their limited capacities through after-school tutoring, libraries, community learning spaces and a computer lab, reading volunteers and clubs, extracurricular environmental programs, and more. Artemisa (Honduras) brings theater, arts, and dynamic games into schools to enhance the learning environment while teaching skills in communications, conflict resolution, critical gender analysis, and healthy relationships.

© Kuba Okon / With and For Girls Collective

#3: Weak educational relevanceAcademic curricula that are disconnected from the local context, culture or language, world of work, or that are otherwise perceived by students to be irrelevant to their future lives, demotivate adolescents from continuing to invest their time and energy in school. While ministries of education must work to modernize and diversify formal curricula, and individual public schools must customize their teaching to their student body, grassroots nonprofits are often the innovators and influencers promoting solutions to obsolete educational methods.

RedJuMA’s (Honduras) youth empowerment programs help students to map out educational and economic plans that relate to their interests and goals and remind them of the importance of their educational path. From this base, they mobilize youth to advocate with the municipal government for smart investment in youth-focused job-training and employment programs that are relevant to local economic opportunities. EnRedadas (Nicaragua) develops girls’ technological prowess through online guides and in-person trainings focused on creative expression through social media, online safety, and cyber security, preparing them to use their education to be protagonists in the ever-expanding digital world.

#4: Individual student factorsThe study’s literature review identified a myriad of factors at the student-level that increase the risk of dropout – from low academic achievement, grade repetition, and over-age enrollment, to adverse behaviors and attitudes, poor attendance, and lack of interest. Schools can put in place early warning systems and customized support plans for individual students, but often schools resort to punishments for “bad” attitudes, behaviors, attendance records, or grades, which even further discourages struggling students.

COINCIDIR (Guatemala) organizes extracurricular activities for teenage girls that encourage exploration, discovery, and self-reflection, and that help girls build confidence and open up about the challenges they face in school. Among their participants, COINCIDIR has recorded an increase in girls’ school enrollment from 50% to 74% as a result of their programs. AMOJO (Nicaragua) inspires and motivates education for adolescent girls through youth groups and soccer tournaments that build leadership, confidence, self-expression, and grit in the face of adversity. Safe spaces to meet outside of school, with the mentorship of caring adults and activities that build confidence, can be powerful emotional safety nets that can help struggling kids persist in school.

© Global Fund for Children

#5: Teen pregnancy/parentingAfter discussing dropout factors considered at least partially endogenous to the education system, the authors discussed major factors outside the influence of schools, starting with the most prominent for adolescent girls: teen pregnancy and young parenthood. The education system can play a positive role in both preventing pregnancy through comprehensive sexual education and allowing adolescent parents to continue their studies by providing childcare, but these interventions are still rare within Central American public schools.

GOJoven Honduras has worked with the Ministry of Education to develop a national curriculum for

access to sexual and reproductive health services for adolescent girls. Asociación AMA (Guatemala) has similarly developed a school-based curriculum for comprehensive sexual education and is training teachers across their state within Guatemala to use it in their classrooms, while also producing sexual education radio programs in Mayan languages to reach girls and families outside of schools.

Tan Ux’il (Guatemala) and many others (UDIMUF and Artemisa in Honduras; GOJoven, COINCIDIR, and Mujeres Sololatecas in Guatemala; FUNDECOM, MOMUNDH and CREA in Nicaragua) go into schools with trained facilitators to teach sexual education classes to adolescent students and/or organize their own groups outside of school to do the same.

These comprehensive sexual education approaches include not only human reproduction and family planning information but also address issues of sexual violence and harmful gender norms that encourage early marriage. Providing information, building skills, and empowering girls to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy and to choose to delay motherhood is crucial to encouraging the completion of their secondary education.

© Natalia Roca / Asociación AMA

#7: General risk factorsThe study further identifies a wide range of risk factors that heighten the probability of student dropout, including racial and ethnic marginalization, drug use, crime and violence, household and family situations, low parental education levels and limited family engagement in their children’s education, and distances to schools (geography).

These factors can work in a number of direct and indirect ways to create barriers to adolescents’ completion of secondary school. For example, in Guatemala, girls’ enrollment has continued to lag far behind boys in indigenous communities. Mujeres Sololatecas (Guatemala) focuses exclusively on the experience of indigenous girls and women, creating community conversation circles to talk about marginalization by the wider society and indigenous cultural norms that conspire to block equal access to education for girls, and what the community can do together to change this. Women’s Justice Initiative and ASOGEN (Guatemala) are actively reaching out to indigenous communities to address gender-based violence that is frequently associated with girls’ departure from school. FUNDECOM (Nicaragua) has developed a unique program that helps to bridge the gap between adolescent girls and their mothers to generate support for and improve family engagement in girls’ education.

#6: Poverty & economic pressuresFamilies often face tough financial decisions at the start of and throughout the school year when the costs of attending school exceed their capacity and the immediate need for income from their adolescent children is greater than the potential future benefit of an additional year of school.

COMJOPROC (Nicaragua) operates a youth cooperative where adolescents 18 and older can access credit to support income-generating activities along with practical training and business skills. These small enterprises can help pay for school costs and reduce the pressure to abandon school entirely to seek employment elsewhere. COMJOPROC also provides scholarships for

rural communities to schools in town. FUNDECOM (Nicaragua) works with adolescent workers to help them balance their time selling fish and handicrafts to tourists with their school day and homework, acknowledging that their families need them to work, but that this does not have to mean the end of their education.

© Global Fund for Children

This project is made possible with support from Dubai Cares, part of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives, which aims to break the cycle of poverty by ensuring all children have access to quality education.

CONCLUSIONFailing to finish high school, or failing to learn the necessary breadth and depth of each subject and the professional skills that prepare adolescents for the workforce, has a number of negative consequences, particularly for young women. Gender discrimination and gender norms that demand women care for children put women at a disadvantage for gaining economic independence, which is exacerbated by not having a high school degree. In Honduras only 37.9% of women over 15 are employed, compared to 79% of men (2011).7 Economic dependence aggravates women’s vulnerability to domestic violence, limits women’s decision-making power, and contributes to generational poverty. Furthermore, a woman’s limited educational achievement reinforces dropout risk factors for her children.

While school systems have a responsibility to address many of the primary factors that contribute to school dropout, grassroots civil society can and should play multiple roles in addressing these same factors.

In some cases, the role is supplemental or even substitutional: filling gaps the school system is currently unable to fill, even if ideally schools will someday assume this responsibility. In other cases, it is complementary: providing a second layer of support outside the school that is just as, or perhaps

than if similar interventions were attempted by the school itself. In some cases, it is instructional: piloting programs, curricular materials, and approaches and teaching formal educators and administrators how to incorporate new methodologies into their classrooms. And in some cases, it is political: advocating with local school administrations, regional school systems, national education ministries, or even legislative bodies for improved public education policies and allocation of public resources.

Within the complex lives of adolescent girls, the diverse factors that influence whether or not they continue in school require diverse, contextual, human responses. The grassroots organizations in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua who have joined GFC in the Empowering Adolescent Girls initiative each bring their unique approaches and deep connections to girls and their communities.

As they pursue a variety of goals with these girls, both declared and unspoken, it is clear that their investment is also pushing back against the risk factors that cause girls to drop out of school. When we recognize the value of adolescent girls and invest holistically in their lives, society, family, and the girls themselves will follow suit.

Endnotes:

1 “Secondary education: completion rates,” HDX, UNICEF/OCHA Services, accessed April 2019, https://data.humdata.org/dataset/secondary-education-completion-rates

2 “Educational Attainment,” Unesco Institute for Statistics, accessed April 2019, http://data.uis.unesco.org. Equivalent data could not be found for Nicaragua.

3 Sakho, Seynabou, “Aprender, clave para el futuro de los jóvenes centroamericanos,” World Bank Group, Feb. 2, 2018, accessed May 2019 ,14, https://www.bancomundial.org/es/news/opinion/01/02/2018/aprender-clave-para-el-futu-ro-de-los-jovenes-centroamericanos.

4 “UNICEF strategic plan education country profiles,” UNICEF, accessed April 2019, https://data.unicef.org/resources/unicef-strategic-plan-education-country-profiles/

5 Educational Challenges in Honduras and Consequences for Human Capital and Development,” Inter-American Dia-logue, Feb. 2017, http://www.thedialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/03/2017/Educational-Challenges-in-Honduras-and-Conse-quences-for-Human-Capital.pdf

6 Josephson, K., Francis, R., & Jayaram, S. (2018). Promoting secondary school retention in Latin America and the Caribbean. Caracas: CAF. Retrieved from http://scioteca.caf.com/handle/1248/123456789, p. 24.

7 Educational Challenges in Honduras and Consequences for Human Capital and Development,” Inter-American Dia-logue, Feb. 2017, http://www.thedialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/03/2017/Educational-Challenges-in-Honduras-and-Conse-quences-for-Human-Capital.pdf

Photo Captions:

Page 1: At a youth club run by Un Mundo in Honduras, girls learn about how to care for the environment.

Page 2: Participants at Asociación Movimiento de Mujeres por Nuestros Derechos Humanos (MOMUNDH) in Nicaragua.

Page 3: Young leaders at Women's Justice Initiative in Guatemala.

Page 4: Girls in Guatmala take part in curriculum led by Asociación AMA.

Page 5: Estelle, 17, youth participant of GOJoven Guatemala.