Girls continue to top public exam scoreboard
It is truly inspiring that our girls continued to perform extraordinarily in the two biggest public examinations in the country—Primary Education Completion Examination (PECE) and Junior School Certificate (JSC) Examinations—last year, outdoing their male counterparts in terms of participation rate, success rate and grades achieved. They also outperformed boys in the pass rate for Secondary School Certificate (SSC) and Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) and equivalent exams earlier in 2019, with an outstanding number of girls securing GPA 5. These results are a testament to what our girls can achieve if and when given the right opportunities. They also speak of the tremendous success of coordinated efforts of the government and NGOs in reducing the gender parity in education.
However, we are still struggling to replicate this success story as girls move up the ladder—dropout rates for girls are at a high 42 percent at the secondary school level and secondary level completion rates are at a mere 59 percent. Child marriage, entrenched patriarchal norms, sexual harassment to and from schools, lack of access to appropriate information about sexual and reproductive health and high cost of education continue to deter girls from realising their full potential. Unfortunately, these trends carry through tertiary education, explaining why the female participation rate in the labour market is still much lower than that of their male counterparts, despite the promise that girls show early on in their educational trajectory. Women are still predominantly employed in low-paid, low-productive activities, which further increase their vulnerability in the labour market and society at large.
Girls have consistently proved that they can deliver results—often better than boys. But we, too, must prove our commitment to our girls, by continuing to invest in their education, retain them in schools and create an enabling environment in which they can pursue their own dreams.
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