Authors: Yamuna Basnet, Binayak Krishna Thapa
One of the many ways of strengthening the education system in rural settings is through the promotion of gender equality and social inclusion in public schools, which envisions enhancing students’ quality of experience and ultimately their state of well-being for who they are, irrespective of the gender, class, caste, and ethnicity they may come from. Immense efforts have been put into Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) programs, interventions, and instrumental innovations toward addressing these issues at the community, family, and individual levels. Yet, much more needs to be done, and what has been done is still insufficient. One of the promising ways to work toward this end is working on an action research project engaging students in rural settings to promote gender equality and social inclusion within their respective schools, using the available resources based on their understanding and practices of GESI. The project “Promoting Gender Equality and Social Inclusion: Building On What Children Value and Aspire to Be and Do” aims for the aforementioned promotion in the public schools in the eastern hills of Bhojpur District in Nepal. This blog offers the lived GESI experiences of school-going children from the evidence harnessed from this research site.
There is a girl somewhere in Bhojpur, Nepal, who knows that she is not supposed to be considered ‘untouchable’ when she’s menstruating. She’s seen the drama ‘Ujeli’, and she’s also heard her teachers talk about gender equality. She knows in the part of her that has been shaped by school that this is wrong, but she may still go back to a household where the rules are different. This is the gap that GESI education is trying to close, not just between what is written in curriculum frameworks and what gets taught in classrooms, but between what children know and what they are actually free to live. The distinction matters more than it might seem, as it is easy to mistake equal numbers of enrolled students, or even ticked curriculum boxes, for genuine progress. But as Unterhalter (2007) argues following Subrahmanian’s review of gender equality frameworks, counting participation is not the same as achieving equity in provision or outcomes. Parity (equal numbers) is only the beginning of the story, and a thin beginning at that. What matters is whether students are developing what Sen calls “valued beings and doings”: the real capacity to understand, choose, and act differently in the world.
Voices from the Hill Schools
A recent study of GESI learnings in hill schools, examined through the Capability Approach, asked not only what students had been taught, but also what they’d understood, what they were willing to do, and what they actually did. When students were brought together in focus groups and asked what GESI means to them, the responses were remarkably grounded. There were things children had seen, thought about, and felt in their own lives. Boys talked about not discriminating against girls, against people with disabilities, against those in pain and against transgender people. They said girls and boys should play together on the same playground, and they talked about equal education for sons and daughters. One boy noted that women should be allowed to do anything a man can do. Another raised a point about caste.
Girls went further and named specific injustices: in their community, parents often send their daughters to public schools, and their sons, to private schools. Girls are overloaded with household chores, while boys are not. Menstruation is treated as taboo, and girls are made to feel untouchable because of it. Pay gaps between men and women persist. Caste discrimination including untouchability continues. Child marriage also remains a reality for some. One girl mentioned Ujeli by name, the drama about a Nepali girl navigating these exact struggles, as something that captured what she knew to be true.
What struck us when we recorded these responses was how much these children already understood. When they say discrimination based on caste is wrong, they are not necessarily repeating a textbook line, they are instead making a statement about the world they live in. They were not blank pages waiting to be filled, they were children growing up inside the very inequalities the curriculum is trying to address. This aligns with what Unterhalter (2007) describes as the third and most substantive meaning of gender, not gender as a neutral descriptive label, and not simply as a social structure to be documented, but as something lived, contested, and capable of being changed. In her words, it is something that “entails freedom and agency as well as the constraints of constructed social relations” (p.89-90). The girls in these focus group discussions are not passive recipients of inclusion messaging, they are navigating real social worlds and making meaning from what they learn in light of what they already experience.
Beyond their personalised views of GESI, what we wanted to understand by conducting these focus group discussion sessions, and the subsequent baseline survey, was the extent to which the existing school curriculum covered the said topic. And what we found from the 234 students in community schools of Bhojpur Municipality was that the current curriculum through grades 1 to 10 all addressed the values and topic of GESI in their social studies subject in some shape and form. However, what we also found was that while these children expressed that GESI was an important aspect of their lives (out of 21 domains, they ranked it 4th in terms of importance), the curriculum content and the satisfaction they felt regarding the subject matter were scored poorly.
And in the baseline survey, the variance in results in terms of gender and grade was also interesting to note. Girls scored higher than boys across every capability dimension in the quantitative data. The gap is widest in Agency Achievement, the dimension that measures whether students are actually putting inclusion values into practice. Even in the focus groups, the difference in depth is palpable: boys were articulate about rules like no discrimination, equal rights, equal treatment. Girls spoke about structures: the household chore burden, the school fees, the menstruation taboo, the documentary that showed what a Nepali girl’s life can look like when these structures go unchallenged.
Redistribution vs. Recognition
Unterhalter offers a framework for understanding this gap. She draws on Nancy Fraser’s distinction between redistribution, recognition, and representation in thinking about equality. Boys’ responses tend to sit in the redistributive register of equality as equal amounts, equal treatment, and equal rules. Girls’ responses reach toward the recognition that gender shapes lived experience in ways that are not resolved by applying the same rule to everyone. A girl who is sent to a public school while her brother attends private school is not experiencing a violation of a rule so much as a quiet, ongoing message about her worth.
This also connects to Unterhalter’s observation that women and girls who have experienced sustained discrimination often carry what she describes as a diminished sense of agency and an internalised sense of what is appropriate for someone like them to want or expect. The fact that girls in this study are not only aware of inequality but actively pushing back against it, in their words and in their reported behaviours, is not a small thing, and closing this gap with the boys matters enormously. Inclusion is not a value girls need to learn on behalf of the community, it is also a project that requires boys to change too. The curriculum’s challenge is to find the entry points that make GESI values feel personally relevant to boys, not just abstractly correct.
The scores rise almost continuously from Grade 1 through to Grade 10. Older students report greater awareness, more genuine choice, and more consistent practice of GESI-related values. This suggests that GESI learning is not a switch that flicks on after a single intervention. It accumulates through years of exposure, conversation, and growing experience of the world. Unterhalter is clear that the capability approach demands more than the provision of equal amounts of schooling. It requires sustained attention to the conditions: social, institutional, and personal, that allow capabilities to be identified, discussed, and deepened over time. A curriculum that names gender equality once and moves on is not doing that work. A curriculum that returns to these themes across grades, in age-appropriate forms that meet students where they are, is.
However, gender equity and social inclusion indicators score lower than health-related content, along with religious and social tolerance. As opposed to being marginal themes, these values sit at the heart of what GESI education is supposed to accomplish, and the focus groups offer a clue about why. When girls talk about discrimination, they are very specific: pay gaps, access to education, caste, menstruation taboos. These are real and complex problems that are embedded in social structures that do not change quickly, and also something that many adults around students either ignore or actively reinforce. Teaching a child that caste discrimination is wrong while they live in a community where it operates quietly places a significant burden on that child. Unterhalter (2007) is also direct about this problem. She describes what happens when girls formally have access to the same freedoms as boys, but social customs, family expectations, and gendered norms shrink what is genuinely available to them, producing what she calls an “empty opportunity” (p. 100). A girl who has learned about gender equality in school but returns home to find that education for daughters is seen as a drain on household resources is experiencing exactly this: the formal opportunity is present, but the substantive freedom is not.
She also makes an important distinction here between three approaches to equality in education: distributive equality (equal amounts of schooling), equality of condition (equal enabling conditions inside schools), and equality of capabilities (which connects education to the wider social policy areas that bear on it health, economic participation, freedom from violence). The data suggests that Nepali GESI education is performing reasonably well on the first two, but the third i.e. the harder, wider challenge of ensuring that what students learn in school is not systematically undermined by what they encounter outside it, remains at the frontier.
There is a girl, somewhere in Bhojpur, who goes home after school to a world where some of what she learned today will be quietly contradicted before dinner. The work of GESI education is to help her, and the boy sitting across from her in class, carry something strong enough to hold up against that.
