Digital Gender Atlas for Advancing Girls' education

India has achieved high enrollment rates for girls at primary and upper primary levels of schooling. However, at the secondary level girls' enrollment remains low. Pockets of low performance persist across the country in many states. That all girls are not in school yet, is amply reflected in the low rural female literacy rates, the prevalence of Special Focus Districts (SFD) and Educationally Backward Blocks (EBB), low attendance rates and the number and proportion of out of school girls. What the data reveals about girls’ needs further analysis to identify the bottlenecks for targeted planning, for effective implementation and monitoring.

In this scenario, a Gender Atlas for the country has been developed to highlight the issues, geographies and social background of girls that are still a concern and require urgent attention. The Gender Atlas is based on existing data and highlights problem areas to serve as pointers for intervention priorities. It is seen as a management tool that can focus on 'demand' and 'supply' side issues alike that impinge on girls' education.

Digital Gender Atlas is a Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Human Resource Development initiative with support from UNICEF.

Objectives

• To identify low performing geographic pockets for girls,particularly from marginalised groups such as scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and Muslim minorities, on specific gender related education indicators.
• To ensure equitable education with a focus on vulnerable girls, including girls with disabilities, the Gender Atlas has been developed as a hands on management tool to enable critical decisions and action in pockets where performances are below par.

Salient features

• The architecture of the Atlas enables dynamic navigation between geographical representation and numeric data that presents State, District and Block level status on key parameters for girls' education at primary, upper primary and secondary levels. Thus, upon making a change in either the Search/Geo Search Tabs, the maps on the screen automatically change.
• The Atlas provides a comparative composite index based on quartile ranking of gender related indicators at National,State, District and Block levels.
• The Atlas enables a trend analysis and tracking of performance of individual gender related parameters across periods of time.
• The Atlas is constructed on an open source platform with an in-built scope of updating data by authorized persons to retain its dynamic character.

Components of the Digital Gender Atlas

The main components of the Gender Atlas are :

• Composite Gender Ranking - Selected gender related indicators have been identified for primary, upper primary and secondary education. A composite gender index has been developed using the formulae that are used for calculating the EDI in DISE. Accordingly, the selected gender indicators have been grouped into four – Access, Infrastructure, Teachers and Outcomes. The Atlas provides an aggregated picture of performance through a comparative visualization of composite gender index based quartile ranking of gender related indicators at National, State, District and Block levels.
• Trend Analysis of Gender Indicators - The Atlas enables a trend analysis and tracking of performance of individual gender related indicators (that have been used for the composite gender ranking) across a period of three years.
• Vulnerabilities based on educational indicators in districts with substantial tribal, schedule caste, minority population in educationally backward blocks and in left wing extremist districts, and the low sex ratio districts selected under Beti Bachao Beti Padhao programme.
• Spatial Display of Pockets with Multiple Disadvantages Related to Education: Spatial identification of pockets in states or blocks in districts where juxtaposition of key relevant gender indicators reveal maximum disadvantages, viz., education development
• Vulnerabilities: This component of the Atlas visualizes the vulnerability status of an area based on a composite index of three broad indicators
• rural female literacy – from Census 2011
• percentage girls/boys married below the legal age of marriage – DLHS and
• working children (bifurcated by gender and age groups of 5-14 years and 15-19 years – Census of India 2011. These maps are available up to the district level.
• Children with Disabilities: This part of the Atlas visualizes the performance status of a single indicators related to children with disabilities, particularly girls, based on quartile ranking across three years i.e. 2011-12, 2012-13 and 2013-14. The performance status of an individual indicator can be visualized at state and district level.

Source : Digital Gender Atlas for Advancing Girls' Education