Educational Review, 2013 Vol. 65, No. 4, 402–415, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2012.689274
Challenging the status quo: the enabling role of gender sensitive fathers, inspirational mothers and surrogate parents in Uganda Molly Warrington* Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom Within a context where relatively few girls complete secondary education, 18 women were interviewed in Uganda with the objective of ascertaining how they were able to overcome the challenges they encountered to become well-qualified and successful career-women. An important finding from this research was that although parental involvement in Uganda is a much less formal process than that reported in literature from the Global North, it is nevertheless crucially important, with parents and other key figures enabling, supporting and encouraging the young women’s education, and acting as role models. The paper highlights, however, the gendered nature of such involvement, with some fathers having the advantages of authority, education, money and time to enable them to stand apart from their communities in supporting their daughters’ education. In contrast, mothers frequently struggled through lack of resources, yet their unstinting hard work and persistence offered inspiration and role modelling of a different kind. Interviewees growing up without one or both biological parents meanwhile relied on a network of people who in effect became surrogate parents, in various ways assisting them to complete their schooling. Keywords: parental involvement; gender relations; Uganda; school enrolment; fostering
Introduction Parental involvement “has become one of the centrepieces of educational dialogue among educators, parents and political leaders” (Jeynes 2011, 73). It has been the subject of extensive international research and hundreds of publications by researchers, and more latterly the focus of attention of policy makers, as parental involvement has taken centre stage. Such has been the interest that the role of parents is now acknowledged by governments in a number of countries as one of the pathways to improving educational outcomes, with specific strategies set out, for example, in the United States, England and New Zealand (Hornby 2011). The situation is very different in Uganda, however, where the Ministry of Education and Sports is currently more concerned with raising the quality of its education, improving gender equality and developing service delivery, than in setting out policies on parental involvement. Yet, as I will show, parental involvement in Uganda, though not involving the more formal practices set out in the various guidance literature that has spawned in recent years in countries of the Global North, has been a crucial factor in accounting for some women’s educational success. *Email:
[email protected] Ó 2012 Educational Review
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Uganda is a country where gender politics have been high profile, where women’s movements have been strong (Tripp 2000) and where an affirmative action programme was incorporated into the political structure by the National Resistance Movement which took power under Museveni in 1986 (Goetz 2002). Gender mainstreaming at university level has been practised for several years (Kwesiga and Ssendiwala 2006). Yet patriarchal relations ensure that men continue to dominate in the political and economic spheres, with Pankhurst (2002, 125) asserting that Uganda’s gender relations remain “highly unequal by any standard measure”. Whilst the net enrolment ratio in primary education is close to parity (1.03 in favour of girls, in 2009), the net enrolment ratio in secondary education shows a gender parity index of only 0.84 (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO] 2011). Females become fewer in number at each stage of the education system, with women remaining in the minority as students and staff in universities, especially as academics and managers (Mugisha Baine 2010). Thus while there have undoubtedly been some positive changes during the recent historical period, it is still generally the case that “men have a clear advantage over women in access to and control over resources, while cultural practices also bestow men with more power than women in different aspects” (Kasente 2003, 2). Given the disadvantages still faced by Ugandan women and girls today, research was undertaken in Uganda, interviewing women who had become successful in their careers. All had completed secondary school, proceeded to higher education and were currently engaged in a range of professional and managerial occupations, and the purpose of the interviews was to establish the factors contributing to that success. Among the findings of this research were that intrinsic factors related to the individual, such as self-determination, motivation and self-belief, were crucial in sustaining a commitment to education despite many setbacks and challenges along the way. Some girls also benefited from inspirational teaching. A major extrinsic factor contributing to the women’s success, however, was the role of key figures in their lives, notably their biological parents, but, in the absence of one or more parents, a network of other people who in effect took on the role of surrogate parents. Their material, practical and emotional inputs were of critical significance in determining the women’s educational and therefore future life pathways. This paper therefore focuses on the involvement of parents and other key figures in contributing to the women’s success in relation to primary- and secondary-level education. It offers a qualitative dimension to the more usual quantitative approaches to understanding various facets of parental involvement, focusing on a country where such studies are rarely undertaken. Thus the paper complements and adds depth to existing work, enabling greater understanding of the gendered nature of parental involvement in schooling in Uganda, and going beyond a narrow focus on biological parents in acknowledging the role of the extended family and wider networks of support. Firstly, in order to provide some theoretical underpinnings, I discuss literature relating to parental involvement from both North and South, drawing out some key points of relevance to the empirical research. I then briefly outline the context of the study and its methodology before discussing the findings as they related to fathers, mothers and other key figures. My argument is that as far as these women were concerned, the involvement of at least one biological or surrogate parent was critical to their success.
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Facets of parental involvement: from North to South As Smith et al. (2011) argue, decades of research point to numerous benefits of parental involvement in education, not only for students, but for parents, schools and the wider community. These authors cite a breadth of research showing positive and significant effects of parental involvement on academic and behavioural outcomes, with, for example, better grades, attendance, attitudes, expectations, homework completion, test results, lower drop-out rates and higher levels of social skills. It is not the purpose of this paper to review the breadth of that literature on the multi-faceted nature, characteristics and impacts of parental involvement, since upto-date reviews already exist (see, for example, Hornby 2011; Jeynes 2011; Smith et al. 2011). It is worth pointing out, however, that the field is dominated by research from the Global North, and, beyond the broad acknowledgement of the link between achievement and some kind of parental involvement in school, mostly speaks very little to the quite different contexts existing within Sub-Saharan Africa. For the women who took part in the research reported in this paper, for example, formal relationships between home and school did not exist, parents could not spend time listening to children read because homes contained no books and parental illiteracy was common. However, although heavily based on the context of the United States, Jeynes’s (2011) recent meta-analyses, bringing together a large number of research studies seeking to quantify the influence of parental involvement on academic outcomes, are particularly helpful in enabling a link from North to South. Firstly, and unsurprisingly, Jeynes confirms the positive association between parental involvement and higher student outcomes: even when the data were disaggregated, the relationship between parental support and educational outcomes held across different genders, ethnicities, cultures, backgrounds and situations. Secondly, his meta-analyses lead him to make the interesting claim that, “one definitive pattern that emerges is that some of the most potent facets of parental involvement are some of the more subtle aspects of family support” such as parental style and expectations (Jeynes 2011, 53–4). Both these findings have relevance within the Global South because they show the importance of general encouragement and support from parents, regardless of background or location. Research exploring the links between parental involvement and children’s educational attainment within the Global South, however, naturally reflects their very different contexts, with Suziki (2002, 243), for example, noting the emphasis given to community participation in the South, rather than parental participation. A fundamental aspect of parents’ participation highlighted by Suziki, often explicitly understood by parents, teachers and local leaders, concerns the decision to enrol children in school and subsequently to support the school through contributions in either cash or kind. Since the grant given to each school is determined by the numbers of children enrolled, any decision not to send children to the local school, or to withdraw them subsequently, reduces the resources available, and hence impacts upon the rest of the community. Suziki (2002) discusses this aspect of parental participation in relation to parents’ accountability with respect to the school. I am concerned here with accountability to children, rather than schools; nevertheless questions of enrolment and retention are very pertinent ones, and a key aspect of this paper, as in much of the literature on education in Uganda.
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In their study of the role of parents, Lloyd and Blanc (1996) therefore focus not just on analysing the familial determinants of children’s attainment, but those factors that predict actual enrolment and continuation in school. Using data from seven countries, they describe parents as gatekeepers to the educational resources provided by the state, deciding whether children enrol, and how long they remain in school in relation to the perceived economic costs and benefits. Their paper also highlights another major difference between the Northern contexts within which most of the studies of parental involvement in education are set and those of Sub-Saharan Africa. This is the difference between the Western model of the nuclear family and the more extended kin networks that structure family life in many African environments, where parenting is a shared responsibility and child fostering is common. Isiugo-Abanihe (1985, 53) defines child fostering as the “allocation or transfer of children from biological or natural homes to other homes where they are raised and cared for by foster parents.” As she points out, where fostering is prevalent, the material home is but one of several possible homes for a child, and a network of kin may be more crucial to a child’s present and future experience and achievement than a child’s natural parents. Isiugo-Abanihe distinguishes, however, between “kinship fostering” (where a child is sent to live with the relations of either parent, or exchanged among kinspeople because of the need to reallocate resources within the extended family), and “crisis fostering” (resulting from the dissolution of the family through divorce, separation or death, or children born out of wedlock). It is the second form of fostering that is particularly relevant in this paper, where, as will be shown, the loss of one or both parents was sometimes one of the most difficult challenges to be surmounted. High death rates from HIV/AIDS and other diseases lead to large numbers of children growing up as double or single orphans across Sub-Saharan Africa. This, coupled with parental absence or death as a result of political disruption and war, means that crisis fostering is commonplace. Consequently, a growing body of research explores the effects of orphanhood and fostering on children’s well-being and schooling, across various countries of the Global South. These studies explore differences in enrolment rates between orphans and non-orphans and the extent to which enrolment is affected by poverty (Ainsworth and Filmer 2006), as well as the quality of household relationships. Case, Paxson, and Ableidinger (2004), for example, found that the more distant the relative or caregiver, the less likely the child would go to school. Research is also beginning to highlight the importance of a consideration of gender in these fostering circumstances, with some evidence of girls’ attendance (Ainsworth, Beegle, and Godlike 2005), completion (Nyamukapa and Gregson 2005) and schooling outcomes (Beegle et al. 2010) worsening following the death of their mother. The negative impacts following a father’s death were less, possibly reflecting gender differences in care. Lloyd and Blanc (1996) suggest, for example, that both girls and boys in female-headed households showed invariably better school outcomes than children living in male-headed households with similar resources. Like Lloyd and Blanc, Chudgar (2011, 559) attributes this to the increased bargaining power for women-headed households, arguing that “when women have greater decision-making power in the household, they make certain decisions that might not be made in a household led by a man.” Nyamukapa and Gregson (2005) also argue that increases in autonomy and the contribution of women underpin high primary school completion rates enjoyed by paternal and double orphans living in female-headed households. Although often poorer and less
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educated than males in similar positions, female heads “are likely to be less constrained by patriarchal authority at the domestic level, and may experience greater self-esteem, more personal freedom, more flexibility to take on paid work, enhanced control over finances and a reduction or absence of physical and/or emotional abuse” (BRIDGE 2001, 3). This survey of the literature has highlighted two issues of particular relevance. Firstly it shows that parental involvement, even in the form of general encouragement and support and not necessarily involving formal relationships between home and school, has a positive impact on educational outcomes. In the Sub-Saharan African context, such involvement takes on a crucial role of enabling children to enrol and then complete their schooling. Secondly, literature from the Global South shows that parenting is not necessarily the prerogative of a child’s biological parents, but of a wider network of extended family and sometimes community, and so “parental involvement” takes on a wider meaning here. A growing body of research shows, furthermore, the relevance of gender and the benefits of care within a female-headed household (though recognizing that such benefits may sometimes be offset by poverty). Research study and context The women taking part in this study were identified through collaborative partnerships established with the Uganda Forum of African Women Educationalists, Makerere University and The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)-Uganda as part of a much larger research project into girls’ retention in school. A semistructured interview guide was developed during a workshop involving the whole project team, which was then piloted and refined at the beginning of the Uganda fieldwork. Eighteen women participated in individual in-depth interviews lasting between one and two hours, with discussion based on their family, household and cultural context, educational history and successes with respect to education and career. The interviews also explored the challenges the women faced as children and later as adults, specifically with respect to gender, and the factors they felt influenced and contributed to their success. The interviews were fully transcribed and coded using NVivo software, and a combination of deductive and inductive approaches enabled themes to be identified in relation both to the questions asked and to the literature, and as well as those arising from the women themselves. A long (10,000-word) report was then compiled and circulated to the research participants for comment, in a process of respondent validation. Interviews were also undertaken with a group of 20 women in Kenya; these yielded similar findings, and thus lent support to the outcomes from the Ugandan research. In the discussion that follows, all women have been given pseudonyms in order to protect confidentiality. Whilst the women spanned an age range of around 40 years old, most grew up during the period of rapid social, political and economic transformation following Uganda’s independence from Britain in 1962. They came from different parts of Uganda, and although some were from relatively affluent, privileged homes, others came from poor socio-economic backgrounds, and most grew up in remote rural areas without electricity, running water or modern sanitation. However, whilst there were differences in their ethnic, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, all shared the experience of significant challenges in their lives against which they had
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to struggle in order to complete their education. Some challenges were economic in nature, some cultural and some personal, with most women having to surmount a whole set of problems through childhood, adolescence and adulthood. All the women grew up in communities where education for girls was not valued, or taken as seriously as boys’ education (Subrahmanian 2005). A woman’s place was seen as in the home, with marriage as a sign of success, and so the transition of these girls to secondary school was seen as something of an aberration within their communities and often even within their schools, where few other girls attended. Educational opportunities for those women growing up in the 1970s and 1980s were limited. In fact, Heyneman (1983, 410) refers to a situation of “pedagogical stalemate” in Uganda between 1970 and 1981, with no way to improve the “obviously inadequate educational system without an improvement in available classroom resources.” The quality of the education in village schools was therefore often poor, and although their subsequent academic achievements demonstrated their ability, the women often under-performed in terms of school achievement, missing the grades required to study at university in their final secondary school examinations. Hence some went on to study for a diploma, usually in teaching, following this with a degree as a mature student some years later. “Parental” involvement in practice: different models of encouragement and support “Definitely it is my father” When asked about the key figures in their lives 11 of the women first cited their fathers, with several talking about the strong relationships they had with their fathers, who were keenly protective of their welfare, gave their daughters time and attention, listened, took an interest, gave advice and encouraged them in their education. As Magarita said, “from the very beginning he inculcated in us the spirit of studying.” Patricia became pregnant at an early age; yet in spite of community hostility, “my father gave me all the support he could”, and insisted on her being allowed to return to school, an extremely unusual outcome at the time. Three women described their fathers as “gender-sensitive”, treating their daughters the same as their sons, sending them to school and ensuring their material needs were met. What stood out, however, was the way in which these fathers built up their daughters’ self-confidence, with several talking of how their fathers believed in them and were proud of their achievements, desperately wanting them to succeed in their education. Lydia, for example, said, “I think I owe what I am today to my late father. Right from the very start he believed in me … I’ve faced a few challenges but I have always believed in myself, thanks to my father.” Angela’s story is particularly interesting because her father initially refused to allow her to attend school, so her education began with her listening outside the classroom window, making notes on banana leaves. In time the teacher, realizing Angela’s potential, persuaded her father to allow her to attend school properly, and from then on he was her strongest supporter, facilitating her progress and encouraging her in every possible way, despite taunts from other villagers. This is a good example of Lloyd and Blanc’s (1996) argument about parents as gatekeepers who decide whether children enrol in school or not. Some fathers were seen as role models to be admired and emulated. Eve, for example, saw how everyone in the community respected her
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father, a teacher, and sought his views: “so I told him I would like to be like you, and I kept on with that kind of ambition in me, that I really wanted to be a teacher.” Brenda’s father died when she was four, “but I could tell from the community that he was so ambitious and inspiring and hardworking, so deep down I felt I needed to carry on his legacy.” These findings resonate with Datta’s (2007) arguments about fatherhood embracing a broader range of parenting functions than the “deficit” model commonly depicted in opposition to, or in conflict with, motherhood, with fathers portrayed as disciplinarians if present, or irresponsible if absent. It reflects, too, Chopra’s (2001, 447) discussion, as she talks of how, “emerging from its feminist roots, the motherhood discourse has been generative of its crucial Other: the Phallocentric Patriarch or the Absent Father.” The consequent “muting” of fathers has, she argues, eclipsed any alternative versions of fathering and the care provided by them. However, unlike the practices of the Trobriand islanders, re-examined by Chopra (2001), the model of fatherhood presented above did not reflect a common approach within these rural Ugandan communities where little value was placed on female education, and most girls were not enrolled in school or dropped out after a few years. Indeed, not all fathers were involved in their daughter’s education. Maureen’s father, for example, despite being a teacher, did not believe in education for girls, and though he did not prevent Maureen from attending school, gave her no help or support, leaving her to beg from neighbours for money for books, pens and school fees. Those fathers who were supportive of girls’ education stood out from others around them: as Emily explained, “my father was a unique man, because unlike the attitudes of other men in the rural area, he valued education for his girls.” Supportive fathers were also, as several women pointed out, the butt of a great deal of overt criticism within their communities for apparently wasting money on girls who were perceived as destined only for marriage. Perhaps these “unique” fathers were able to stand apart from the rest of their communities because they had the power to do so. With one exception, the fathers whom women spoke positively about had a reasonable level of education and were often in positions of authority: they included teachers, government officials, a doctor, a magistrate, a clergyman, and a journalist. They were in paid employment and had control over money, which they could choose to spend on education for their children. As Emily commented, “my mother was supportive, but my father had the resources which my mother didn’t have.” Furthermore, although these fathers stood out as being “different” in the support they gave for their daughters’ education, their encouragement and building up of self-confidence, they were still embedded within a strongly patriarchal society, where gender relations within the home were not equal, and gender roles were clearly demarcated. Thus they had more time to sit and talk with their children because the gender division of labour meant that cooking, washing, cleaning, the fetching of water and fuel-wood and so on, was undertaken by wives and daughters (Kasente 2003). Indeed, in polygamous households, several wives and large numbers of children would be expected to be ready to meet the men’s various physical needs and wants. These fathers, then, had the advantages of authority, education, money and time, which, for the most part, their wives lacked. It was men who had dominance over household resources and who were the key decision-makers (Godfrey 2010): it was they who determined whether a child was educated or not, and so Angela’s fortunes, for example, changed radically once her father relented and not only
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allowed, but encouraged her to go to school. Thus the immediate response of several women that it was their father who played a crucial part in their education, reflected the advantageous position of fathers as compared with mothers. In Datta’s (2007, 98) words, fatherhood “is a gendered role which is invested with power, both in relation to motherhood and within the household.” “She was sacrificing so much” However, while the preceding discussion has focused on the power held by fathers, the position of mothers was very different. As David et al. (1997, 402) have argued, the “choices” women make in relation to their children’s schooling “are the products of particular social contexts and sets of structural and moral constraints.” Most of the mothers were not in paid employment, and so were dependent on their husbands to provide for theirs and their children’s material needs. As Angela put it, “my father provided us with all the things that we needed, but our mother gave us the love.” Many of the women attributed some aspects of their success to their mothers, who cared for their physical needs, and were generally engaged in extensive and intensive emotional caring to support their children’s education (O’Brien 2007). Yet the picture they portrayed was invariably one of struggle. Faith, for example, who grew up with both biological parents, became determined to have a better life than that of her mother because: “I hated that my mother was always waking up to go to the garden, whether she was sick or not. I respected her, I loved her, but I knew she was sacrificing so much, and it was too much.” Hannah, whose father was an alcoholic, and who lived with her cousin some distance away, talked of how, “I would always remember how my mother was suffering back in the village.” It was, however, in the instances where the father could not, or chose not to, support the family, that mothers’ involvement in education became crucial. Brenda’s father died, leaving a young widow with six small children; Patricia’s and Dorothy’s fathers were imprisoned during the Amin regime (1971–9), with Patricia’s father subsequently going into exile overseas. In the same period, Gloria’s father was taken away during the night, and she never saw him again. Christine’s father had 10 wives, but “he cut off all his children”, leaving her mother to provide for her own 11 children. In all these instances, the women talked about the inspiration they gained from their mothers’ determination to provide for their families and to ensure their education continued. In other words, their mothers provided them with the subtle aspects of family support highlighted by Jeynes (2011, 53) as so important. Thus for Patricia, My mother was my biggest inspiration. She instilled in me the importance of education – with education the sky was the limit, and she would go all the way to ensure we had education. Education was the key, and if you worked hard and believed in what you were doing, you are able to achieve it. So that became a strong part of our up-bringing. It might not have been the same if my father was not taken into exile.
Christine also talked about how, although her mother never went to school, She has been very instrumental in my education. I really attribute my success a lot to my mother because she was strong, she encouraged us, she always talked to us. We could see her do all kinds of businesses to provide for us. She worked very, very,
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hard. In times of hunger she would travel to other districts outside Karamoja to look for food for us. It was not easy, but my mother did all she could.
Other mothers challenged the status quo. Although Magarita’s father was very supportive of her education, she spoke of her mother as her first role model because she had stood up against her husband taking a second wife and returned to her family, despite having to leave her children behind as they were deemed to be her husband’s “property”. Gloria’s mother, whose husband was killed, refused to be “inherited” by his brother, as tradition dictated, and challenged her late husband’s clan when they said she had no right as a woman to inherit anything; she also refused to take her daughters out of school and marry them off in order to get dowries to pay for the education of boys within the extended family. All of this resulted in the family becoming “the enemy of the clan”, a very difficult situation, given all lived in the same village. What was evident, then, was that mothers became role models not because of their standing in the community, but because of their unstinting hard work and sheer persistence against all the odds, and in some instances, their willingness to challenge traditional gendered practices. They provided real inspiration and a determination from their daughters to emulate these characteristics and to succeed in school. Their actual or de facto household headship gave the mothers some autonomy and freedom from patriarchal authority, enabling a greater say in their daughters’ education and more control over resources, as posited by authors such as Chudgar (2011) and Nyamukapa, and Gregson (2005). Enabling their daughters to access the greater opportunities that education could provide, opportunities they themselves lacked, may also have given them some sense of power as in some measure they were able to live vicariously through their daughters. However, although freed to some extent at household (though not at community) level from the gendered moral constraints noted by David et al. (1997), the structural constraints they experienced were significant, particularly in relation to poverty. As Christine explained, “although we were rich in education, because we were going to school, we were a struggling family, really struggling.” Christine often went without food, had no basic school equipment, no shoes and her only clothes were provided by the local church. Yet, while a great deal of research shows that children who experience poverty are less likely to do well at school, “parenting is a key mediator of poverty and disadvantage in relation to children’s achievements” (Kiernan and Mensah 2011, 328), and so strong women strove to utilize whatever intrinsic and extrinsic resources they could find in order to enable their children to attend school. “I was taken in as a daughter” Not all the women grew up with their natural parents, and seven were fostered for some or most of their childhood. In five instances, their mother or both parents had died; Hannah’s father became an alcoholic and lost his job so her mother could not support the children, while Phyllis never knew her father and her mother moved away, leaving her as a baby with relatives. These seven women, together with Christine, whose polygamous father gave no support to his family, and Gloria whose father was killed by Amin’s henchmen, all highlighted the role of other key figures in contributing in various ways to their completion of primary and
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secondary school. These people in one way or another took on a surrogate parent role in the absence of one or both parents. This is an important finding, because neither the seven women whose home during their years of schooling was with both biological parents (albeit in some cases in a polygamous household), nor the two women whose fathers were imprisoned but eventually returned to the family home, spoke of the influence of key figures apart from their parents influencing their schooling. In one instance the fostering experience was very positive, as the sub-heading to this section implies. Mary was unusual in not being taken in by relatives when her remaining parent died soon after she had begun secondary school. Driven to earn money to pay for her schooling even before her mother’s death, she had set up a business roasting and selling chickens, and a newspaper article about her caught the attention of a group of women who then supported her through the rest of her schooling and university: “I call R my mother, and F is like an auntie to me. They are very supportive and that is why I am what I am today. I stayed with R in her house – I was taken as a daughter.” In other instances the fostering experience was more problematic. After Brenda’s mother died when she was 10 (her father had died 6 years earlier), the children were divided amongst relatives, with her and a 4-year-old brother taken in by grandparents, far from her previous home: “but my grandparents were so aged, they were so old, I actually had the responsibility to care for them and my brother. At the same time I had to walk to school seven kilometres away.” Thus despite Parker and Short’s (2009) positive view of grandparent fostering, there can clearly be costs as well as benefits. There were also two examples of girls suffering considerable cruelty at the hands of their guardians. As Hannah explained, “life was hard: she had a hard heart and you had to be someone without an alternative to stay with her.” Similarly, for Phyllis: When I reached Primary 6 life became very difficult, extremely difficult, because I was being beaten every day, because you come back from school so hungry, so weak, you want to eat, and they are telling you, “do this”, but they see you are not cooperating well, and then they beat you.
Patience’s mother died when she was three, after which she lived with her grandmother, but her father subsequently married two more wives, and started drinking. She described the difficulties of living with her second step-mother: “she was quite young and would distance herself from us, and we lacked guidance. It was not easy because there was no love being expressed.” While Mary was fortunate in finding women who gave her constant practical, financial and emotional support after she became an orphan, the other six women who were fostered lacked a constant parent figure in their lives. For Gloria and Christine, meanwhile, their mothers supported them emotionally, and gave them everything they could, but they were living in such poverty as to be unable to supply all their daughters’ physical needs. In all of these cases, rather than one or two parent figures providing the “parental involvement” necessary to support their schooling, there was a network of individuals who at different times played often small, but invariably crucial roles in helping them to stay in school. Financial support, not surprisingly, came from men, from uncles, older brothers, cousins or husbands of older sisters, who paid school fees in the absence of a father and
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sometimes helped with necessities such as soap. When Brenda and her siblings dropped out of school because she had no money for fees, a nun was able to enlist the help of a German benefactor, who sent money for them to return to school. Others took on the role of adviser. For example, Gloria talked about how her grandmother was instrumental in her decision to stay in school, because “after dinner we would sit on the floor and grandma would talk and talk and talk about education, about why we shouldn’t rush to marry”, providing numerous examples of women who were suffering through marrying too young. Magarita too talked about how “I would have dropped out of school when my father died, had it not been for some people who immediately said, ‘you’re going back’.” Meanwhile after Maureen’s mother died when she was eight, a “cousin brother” advised her “to look ahead in life, to be confident of success and to know what you’re aiming for.” Brenda was also the beneficiary of advice from her uncle, who, after she signed up for a non-professional course at the end of secondary school, told her, “Look, you can go and do this course, but it may not help you – you need a professional course.” On his advice she studied as a teacher and subsequently took two degrees, ending up in a managerial position. The advice given was always therefore practical in nature, including the advice given to Hannah by her aunt, who told her not to complain about the difficult situation in her cousin’s house, because “as long as they’re not denying you food, they’re not beating you, just be patient, just endure, because if they don’t pay the fees you won’t study. It’s only when you study you get your freedom.” Besides the financial and practical support the girls received to enable or encourage them to continue in school, they were also able to find role models to inspire them. For Patience, it was her uncle’s sons: “they were very hard-working and from a poor family, but they did well at school.” She and Phyllis also referred to older pupils as role models, with Phyllis taking inspiration from an older girl who was very committed to her education “at a time when it was not common to find girls passing Senior 6 and going to university.” Christine saw that her older siblings had been able to complete their education despite the struggles they all faced, “so we looked at them as role models: we wanted to be successful, like them.” Thus although Beegle et al. (2010) argue that the well-being and development of a child is closely tied to the household in which he or she lives, it appeared to be the case that these young women, through emulating certain older members of their peer group, following advice and accepting practical support, were able to draw on a network of “surrogate parents” who fulfilled some of the roles which among other interviewees, were undertaken by the parents themselves. Conclusion As stated at the beginning of this paper, the topic of parental involvement in children’s education has generated a vast number of research publications and policy documents. Most of the literature and the orientation of policies have focused on the Global North, and many of the studies (within both Northern and Southern contexts) have emanated from an educational psychology perspective, using large data sets and quantitative methods to test theories relating to various facets of parental involvement. Quantitative methods are of value in identifying the relative importance of specific indicators of parental involvement in their effects on educational outcomes, and they have provided a useful underpinning for the research reported
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here, which confirms some of the findings of large-scale studies. Statistical methods, however, cannot deal with the realities of individual people living out their lives in local communities, and therefore this research adds other dimensions of understanding through its particular spatial context and approach. Qualitative methods are not generally used within Ugandan research, yet the adoption of a close-focus, qualitative methodology to listen to and analyse women’s stories has enabled a more nuanced and deeper comprehension of how relationships within families and between home and school play out in practice, in a country where little attention has yet been paid to the role of parents in formal education, except insofar as they are willing or able to make financial contributions. The research discussed in this paper lends weight to Jeynes’s (2011) argument that the “subtle aspects” of parental involvement, often overlooked in a literature which advocates formally constructed and carefully managed home-school relationship, can have the greatest salience in accounting for academic success. The empirical findings reported here also lend weight to pleas made by Datta (2007) to revisit notions of a deficit model of fatherhood, yet they also highlight the importance of context. The interviewees’ fathers and mothers played different roles in their daughters’ education; roles shaped and constrained by traditional gender relations. Yet as I have shown, traditional lines were crossed as some fathers were willing to undergo ridicule and criticism from other men for supporting girls’ education and prioritizing education over early marriage. Some mothers also stood out against traditional norms which labelled them as their husbands’ property and gave them few rights. This transcending of customary gender relations was often crucial in nurturing girls’ educational aspirations in their early lives and laying the foundations of their future success. In other instances, it was the recognition of gender inequalities and the determination to envision a different future that provided girls with the sheer drive, determination and persistence to overcome all the odds in pursuit of education. Yet I also argue for a broader conception of “parents” here, since whilst it was evident that fathers and mothers, separately or together, were instrumental in contributing to some women’s successes, other women reached unusually high levels of attainment in the absence of both biological parents. These women depended on “surrogate parents” or role models within their families and wider communities for encouragement, advice and practical support. Together, the women and their natural or surrogate parents were able to challenge the status quo: a situation where attending school was not thought to be necessary or even appropriate for girls. Yet these women did not just attend school but went on to complete primary, secondary and tertiary education, a relatively rare occurrence even today, with only 31% of girls completing primary school in 2006 (UNESCO 2011). Furthermore, every single one, irrespective of age and experience, continues to give back to society, with all of them feeling they act in some way as role models for young women in Uganda today. This is the case not only within their own extended families and communities, but through their employment, through voluntary organizations or as activists campaigning and advocating on behalf of young women. Thus the women actively engage in the kind of informal mentoring from which they themselves had benefited. In many respects rural conditions in Uganda have hardly changed since our interviewees were children, with distinct gender roles continuing to exist, and the barriers to girls’ education noted by Jones (2011) being in most respects the same
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as those affecting the women we interviewed. Yet in other respects Ugandan society is changing. Its population is becoming more integrated into the world economy and more exposed to global media, and, as Evans (2010) writes, the phenomenon of sibling-headed households, emerging as a result of the AIDS epidemic, represents a significant change in conventional patterns of care for orphaned children, albeit one which often reproduces conventional gender norms. Connell (2010) reminds us that “educational processes are about the development of human capacities for practice, both individual and social.” This research therefore carries with it a message for policy makers: that role models and mentors play a part in those educational processes and are needed more than ever. Their informal involvement in children’s education could, I contend, make a crucial difference to the educational outcomes of poor or otherwise disadvantaged children, wherever they might live. Acknowledgements I would like to express sincere thanks to the inspiring women who cheerfully and willingly made time during their busy schedules to be interviewed, and to Martha Muhwezi, Alice Merab Kagoda and Emmanuel Kamuli who recruited the interviewees. I am also grateful to my colleagues Alicia Fentiman who conducted some of the interviews and Susan Kiragu and Mike Younger who offered helpful suggestions on the first draft of this paper. Acknowledgements are also due to the Commonwealth Education Trust, whose financial support of the Centre for Commonwealth Education made this research possible.
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