The fourth United Nations Sustainable Development Goal — quality education — highlights the importance of learning in an accessible, safe, and high-quality environment. Unfortunately, schools can be unsafe spaces where children are vulnerable to sex-based discrimination (SBD) and sexual and gender-based violence (GBV). These experiences oftentimes lead to psychological and/or physical trauma and can be detrimental to students’ learning. Students may develop a negative perception of learning or perceive schools as unsafe. In an effort to mitigate these risks, in 2021 GPE KIX began supporting the project Strategies to prevent sexual and gender-based violence and foster equity in rural schools, implemented by the Latin American Campaign for the Right of Education (CLADE). Beginning in April 2021, to December 2023, the project team strengthened strategies for the promotion of gender equality and the prevention of gender-based violence in Latin American rural school contexts. The project’s parallel efforts to raise GBV awareness among youth while providing policymakers and educators with evidence and suggestions to increase student safety reduced vulnerabilities to SBD and GBV in rural school settings across Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
Outcomes
SBD and GBV manifest in a number of ways. This project increased its efficacy by addressing gender roles, harmful practices towards children, pregnancy in adolescents, and bullying from a gender perspective in addition to sexual violence at schools. In a Nicaraguan municipality this project led to the creation of a medical post for the prevention of teenage pregnancy and in Honduras local authorities initiated the renovation of safe school toilets. Efforts to prevent and mitigate diverse forms of SBD or GBV have extensive impacts on the lives of boys, girls, and all youth.
The Latin American Campaign for the Right of Education (CLADE) implemented this project in working alongside local communities to identify local need. CLADE’s workshops with teachers, parents, and students guided the recommendations given to policymakers and stakeholders. Policymakers are now using recommendations that reflect youth’s and parents’ voices to foster dialogue and influence education policy on local and national levels. For example, at the local level in Honduras mayors were invited to a roundtable to speak on GBV at schools in their communities, and at the national level, the Honduran Ministry of Education invited the Dakar Forum -which led the research in the country- to participate in discussions on a new curriculum.
Community organizations in Honduras, Haiti, and Nicaragua were involved in promoting and facilitating the project’s objective. CLADE reached these organizations by producing blogs, an academic article, and inviting government and education stakeholders to knowledge mobilization events. Increasing awareness of GBV among governments and youth in rural communities was essential to the project. As result, youth can recognize different forms of GBV, and governments bolstered preexisting measures to prevent and mitigate GBV.
The project’s impact transcended Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua and attracted the attention of governments in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru. There, government institutions and local organizations expressed interest in scaling the project to protect local youth from SBD and GBV.
CLADE’s engagement with a large number of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and with regional actors, such as the Parlamento Centroamericano, is fostering a safer learning environment for schoolchildren across the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Youth in these regions are now more safely accessing their right to quality education, owing to the project’s successful efforts to raise GBV awareness and to guide policymakers and educators towards safe school systems.
Key Research Outputs
Explore a selection of the reports, case studies, and situation analyses completed by this project:
- What works to prevent sexual violence and bullying at school? An international review (in Spanish)
- Recommendations for the promotion of equality and the prevention and eradication of gender-based violence in rural schools (in Spanish)
- The human right to an education free from gender-based violence (in Spanish)
- Methodologies and tools for participatory action research and gender focus (in Spanish)
- Scaling strategies to prevent Sexual and gender-based violence in rural schools (in Spanish)
- Empirical data on gender-based violence in rural schools - Participatory Action Research (PAR) in local communities in Haiti, Honduras and Nicaragua (in Spanish)
