Changing the Gendered Dynamics of Refugee Classrooms in West Africa

Refugee schools in West Africa tend to be dominated by men, with even early years classes taught mostly by male teachers. There are very few female teachers and even fewer female head teachers or education administrators. Although enrollment in the lower classes is more or less gender balanced, by the upper primary level, many of the Liberian refugee girls studying in Sierra Leone and Guinea have dropped out of school and boys greatly outnumber girls. Since 2002 the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has been implementing an innovative program of training and deploying female classroom assistants (CAs) in the refugee schools it supports in West Africa. In the long term it is hoped that there will be more women completing teacher training and entering classrooms as teachers, but in the meantime, the classroom assistants are a female presence in Grade 3-6 classrooms.

After a brief introduction to the CA program in IRC schools in Sierra Leone and Guinea, the article discusses how the CAs are helping to create more gender equitable and particularly more girl-friendly school spaces. Then highlighted are some of the challenges of trying to bring about such changes in the school environment.The article draws on data collected during fieldwork in Guinea and Sierra Leone in October/November 2004 for IRC's Healing Classrooms Initiative. A feminist theoretical framework is used to analyze the ways in which the CAs impact the gendered space of the classroom within the school as a whole.