The New Nation - Internet Edition

Staff Reporter

The World Bank has dropped a broad hint that it would either abandon or influence the Government to "reform" the Female Secondary School Stipend Programme (FSSSP), an official project financed by it, which earned global acclaim for Bangladesh due to its success to trigger higher girls' enrollment in school than that of other third world countries, including India and Pakistan.

Blaming the FSSSP programme, which had been replicated in many countries of the world as a important tool for development and empowerment of women as well as creating enlightened mothers, for generating a "boys left behind" phenomenon, the World Bank (WB) on Thursday said the Government policymakers should seriously reconsider or reform the project.

The WB said this in a report titled 'Whispers to Voices: Gender and Social Transformation in Bangladesh'. The Bank, however, refrained from prescribing any specific paradigm of the reform it feels the FSSSP needed immediately.

Released yesterday in Dhaka, the report's findings said, "Stipend programmes at the secondary level need to be reformed immediately as the spectacular growth in female secondary education has put boys at a distinct disadvantage, making the national goal to achieve gender equality a far cry."

It said the Government needs to be cognizant of this new challenge without any further delay and scholarship programmes at the secondary level should to be redesigned to make it more equitable.

The report found that boys enrollment at all levels is lower than that of girls except when they get to grade 11 and the incentives of the Female Secondary School Stipend Programme (FSSSP), which provides cash support to girls from grades 6 to 10, no longer applies.

The WB report described the newly emerged problem as "one of major issues" confronting policymakers and practitioners in Bangladesh today is the "boys left behind" phenomenon.

It said some recent studies have addressed this issue and hypothesised that the causes for this lie in the direct and indirect effects of the FSSSP. "Adolescent boys are less likely to remain in school and more likely to do wage work following the introduction of the stipend scheme.

Thus parents may have decided to send adolescent girls to school and adolescent boys to work in response to the financial incentives created by the stipend programme," the report said.

It said the relative fall in enrollment of boys in coeducational schools suggest that the FSSSP aided the process of closing gender gap not solely by raising female enrollment, but also in an unintended way by cutting back on the participation of boys in secondary schools.

Quoting some other studies, the WB report said discrimination against women in the labour market may also play a part. Thus if a daughter's job prospects are lower than son's and the FSSSP is providing a monetary incentive to families to keep girls in school, families would choose to keep the daughter in school and send the son to work.

Education researchers described such emerging concerns as strong barriers to the path of achieving balanced development of gender equality.

Experts, however, expressed mixed reactions on the conclusion of the WB reports.

"In such a situation where boys' attendance at schools is decreasing, the government and other concerned agencies should redesign the development programmes without delay," said an expert working in the field of developing secondary education.

He said there are thousands of boys in the country who are too poor to go to school. "Without ensuring their enrollment, we cannot expect a balanced, sustainable development. The government can arrange stipend programmes for such poor boys too," he said.

Disagreeing with the conclusion, development experts apprehended that the World Bank's advice might lead to the birth of a negative project in the name of reforms of the FSSSP with a view to a achieve a "balanced and sustainable" development featured with so-called "gender equality" that was neither attained by US, the most developed nation of the world nor by Sweden, which is said to have achieved better gender equality than anywhere else.

However, economists said the so-called "boys left behind phenomenon in education" is an obvious outcome of development and advancement of a society that none of the industrialised countries, including the US, Japan, UK and Germany, could be able to avoid or bypass.