Changing Social Norms to Universalize Girls’ Education in East Africa. Lessons from a Pilot Project.

The educational experience reproduces gender ideologies and socialnorms, which interact with schooling for girls in very particular ways andare implicated in their persistent gendered exclusion and marginalization.The authors in this volume focus on this link by taking a social normsapproach to profile the processes, strategies of and research on community-led interventions. The chapters are paced around a pilot project thatcritically adapted a successful model in India to develop context-appropriateintegrated approaches to universalizing secondary education forgirls in purposively selected rural and urban poor contexts in Kenya andUganda.

The analyses provide reflexive documentation of the successesand challenges of project implementation activities that have successfullycontested girls’ exclusion and marginalization in education. This requiresa sustained focus on the link between social and educational institutionsand policies and working in an integrated manner with a range of policyactors including young people and targeted communities to bring aboutsignificant and sustainable change.