This report will therefore, focus on the importance of curbing this gender inequality predicament in the developing countries through education of girls to enable them attain the same kind of health care given too men. The Fourth Conference held in Beijing in 1995, discussed critical areas that women are discriminated against which included their rights, capacity and opportunity among others and concluded that by educating the girl child gender equity in regards to social, health, political and economic rights will be attained (UN 2001).
This report will also discuss how educating the girl child will ensure reproductive health care needs are availed to the women, decrease the vulnerability of women to sexually transmitted diseases and prevent the spread of this diseases in the human population, educating the women on prenatal, postnatal and child rearing care and defining their role as the supreme health care providers in their homes by teaching them on their reproductive and health rights. The information portrayed in this report is gathered from earlier studies and surveys that had been conducted.
The focus of this report will be on the provision of education to the girl child in Rwanda, Bangladesh and Tanzania. Girl child education and gender inequality Despite the fact that developing countries have embraced campaign against gender disparity, the girl child still lacks equal education opportunities as the boy child and in most cases though enrolled the girl child is forced out of school because of customary laws (Fennell & Arnot 2007). According to the report compiled by UN Millennium Project (2005) boys who seek primary education and managed to complete this basic education are approximately two third more than the girls.
For instance in Rwanda efforts undertaken by the State Minister for Primary and Secondary Education, Rwanda to educate the girl child are being curbed by several challenges. Curran et al. (2006), explains that the increased rate of poverty in Rwanda communities has resulted to the male being given prevalence to education because of limited resources, girls are reluctant to attend schools because of the traditional and cultural teachings embedded into them which defines household as the woman’s place.
He further explains that these practices are also used to the advantage of Rwanda families as they use girls to earn them money. Furthermore he perceives early marriages and sexual abuse to the girls as a common norm in the Rwandan setting, thus abusing the rights of the girls from attaining education because of unwanted pregnancies and psychological constraints. Efforts initiated by the Rwandan government and international donors to invest in this sector have seemed fruitless because of political influences which leads to the down fall of this projects.
For example in 2007 the Girl Empowerment Program in Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) was discontinued (Randell 2007). Therefore to fully achieve gender equity in developing nations more investment should be directed towards this sector to promote more girls to be educated and eradicate cultural practices and customary laws that perpetuate the spread of this mishap to the women. Positive attitudes that will help women gain exposure to non-tradition employment opportunities will also help to empower women with education thus improve the provision of health care to women.
This will improve the role of women in child care as child mortality rates will decrease because women will achieve independence in accessing productive resources such as employment and economic stability. The report complied by World Bank (2001), indicates that financially stable women takes care of their children better than economically empowered men, the studies they conducted depict survival rate of children under this women to be about twenty times higher than that of men (Chisholm & September 2005).