MDG 3 – Women empowerment, basis of achieving all 8 MDG goals

(Part 1 of a series on How Congress & Local Gov’t can Meet UNMDG)

The official UN definition of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) strategy incorporates gender equality and women’s empowerment prospective. Thus, all targets and indicators would be gender-responsive and “sex-disaggregated”, enabling the “concerns and experiences of women”, as well as men, to be an integral part of the entire MDG process.

How women are marginalized

An estimated 759 million adults – 16% of world population aged 15 and above – lack the basic three R’s needed in everyday life. More than half live in South and West Asia (391 million). Almost two in every three adult illiterates are female.

There is a strong interconnection of women empowerment to all the eight MDG goals. So long as women are allowed free time to acquire quality Basic Education, she will persist in protecting her family from poverty and hunger (MDG 1). However, women are still seen in the traditional role of staying at home; baby-sitting for younger siblings, keeping house, cooking and farming. Even parents disregard the importance of schooling for their daughters so they are frequently absent. They consider it more important for their sons.

Being more biologically vulnerable compared to the males, women cannot properly assert their human rights to secure reproductive health and bear healthy and intelligent babies (MDG 3, 5, and 6). “Gender disparity” also exposes them to domestic violence.

The UN Millennium Taskforce on Education and Gender Equality

The EFA Global Monitoring Report 2010 foresees the inability of the Philippines to reduce both maternal and infant mortality by 2015. UNIFEM, a part of the UN Country Team, upholds the Convention of Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Its UN Millennium Task Force on Education and Gender Equality has identified seven interdependent strategic priorities for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment:

(i) Strengthen opportunities for post-primary education for girls (Goal 2); (ii) Guarantee sexual and reproductive health and rights for women and girls (Goals 3, 5 and 6); (iii) Invest in infrastructure to reduce the time spent by women and girls on unpaid household and care work (Goals 1 and 2); (iv) Guarantee property and inheritance rights for women and girls (Goals 1, 2 and 7); (v) Eliminate gender inequality in employment by reducing women’s dependence on informal employment (Goal 3); (vi) Increase women’s share of seats in national parliaments and local government bodies (Goal 3); and (vii) Eliminate violence against girls and women (Goal 3).

Three target groups of women require special attention: poor women in the poorest countries; adolescents who can improve the rest of their lives; as well as women and girls in conflict and post-conflict situations.

Teach the mother, teach the nation

In 1986, right after Martial Law when Madame Corazon Aquino was elected president of the Philippines, Foreign Affairs Minister Salvador Laurel appointed me to represent the Philippines in the UNESCO Executive Board in Paris, where I was elected for a two-year term. This was exactly 20 years after I started the Operation Brotherhood Montessori schools as a non-stock, non-profit institution, first financed by Operation Brotherhood International which medically helped refugees of Vietnam and Laos as well as relocated 3,000 squatters from Intramuros to Sapang Palay and refugees of Taal Volcano.

The cross-cutting theme then of UNESCO was the eradication of poverty through literacy. The Asia Pacific literacy campaign was named APPEAL. Its objective was no longer to achieve just plain reading, writing and arithmetic but “functional literacy” as well.

By coincidence, in the same year, I had then been collaborating with sugar planters in Cadiz and Sagay, Negros Occidental in providing Mothercraft literacy training for the village mothers. Part of it was a well-equipped dining-living room, kitchen, bedroom and toilet-bath outside, which served as training rooms for personal grooming, housekeeping, child care and food preparation.

At that time, there was a drastic drop of sugar price in the world market which caused the unemployment of the Negrense farmers. Assisted by Punay Kabayao Fernandez and Cadiz Mayor Rowena Guanzon and Mayor Joseph Maranon, I set up two non-formal literacy schools in Cadiz and Sagay. Fourteen plantations sent mothers from their plantation providing transport and lunch allowance. This allowed them to learn proper cooking and meal service.

Mayor Guanzon built a huge multi purpose bahay kubo (nipa hut) that housed the twin literacy training program for mothers and their preschoolers. She enlisted the help of the Cadiz Normal University in recruiting teachers so we could give them a proficiency course to be Pagsasarili preschool teachers.

Punay’s daughter, Tamsi, and Paz Babalcon, one of my senior OB Montessori preschool teachers, worked with this project until 1988. They assisted me in writing an illustrated English-Tagalog literacy manual, which was published 20 years later. The most prominent Chapters were on Pre-Natal and Post-Natal Care and the Literacy section.

A systematic literacy cours for parents and children

To help launch the first Pagsasarili Mothercraft Literacy Twin Center, Secretary of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports (MECS) Dr. Lourdes Quisum-bing traveled by Roro to Bacolod then to Cadiz from an Education event in Iloilo to witness the graduation of 20 village mothers. All dressed in white, several borrowed from friends, they demonstrated Personal Grooming, Housekeeping and the use of the Language, Math and Geography materials. Some worked together with their preschool children. (Yearly since then, Pagsasarili preschool graduates do the same demonstration on stage.) Dr. Quisumbing watched with delight. She remarked, “This is so innovative – ‘mother and child learning together’. This is the real revolution, a daily and real exercise of good work, not a one-day EDSA revolution.”

The Pagsasarili principles of work were easily implemented. Work is a recipe complete with ingredients and step-by-step procedure. For Personal Grooming, a housewife using a tray with baby powder, comb, lipstick and eyebrow pencil started to comb her hair into a bun (pusod). After powdering her face, she outlined her upper lips with lipstick and pressed both lips. With short strokes of the eyebrow pencil, she traced the curve of her brows avoiding a strong outline, which would give her a strong look. Then she dabbed the high point of her cheeks with lipstick and rubbed the spots giving her a rosy blush. Voila, a pretty village mother. The husbands were amazed by their wives’ transformation.

Work is made up of small steps, which must follow each other in an orderly sequence; example laundering starts with wetting a garment, soaping until sudsy, rinsing, squeezing, and hanging over the laundry wire.

Error is a friendly reminder. One mistake of mixing black garments with white ruins the whole laundry work. Next opportunity makes one isolate black clothes to wash.

At Stanford University in California, this type of work with precision is called “engineering of movement”.

Mayors helped replicate Pagsasarili literacy projects a hundred times

Between 1983 to 1985, Mayors of Cubao, San Juan, Pasay, Caloocan, Pasig and Las Pinas signed MOAs with the OB Montessori Child and Community Foundation to provide part of the barangay hall as Pagsasarili Preschool sites – rent free. Teachers recruited from the vicinity with the help of the Community Relations office of the National Housing Authority were trained in the Pagsasarili system. To make the project economically sustainable, parents paid an affordable monthly tuition fee of P20 which increased yearly. Now, after 27 years, enrollment is in full swing and parents pay between P500 to P800 providing better salaries for two to three teachers per site.

In 1990, the Philippines ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) which emphasized the Filipino child’s right to quality parenting and schooling. UNESCO also launched Education for All (EFA) program in Jomtien, Thailand. In 2000 after 10 years, EFA evaluation in Dakar showed increased enrollment in developing countries, but quality teaching was missing. The OB Montessori Foundation piloted the Pagsasarili EFA-DAKAR Grade School at the Pulung Bulu Public School in Angeles, Pampanga. My husband Max invited five donor companies to reconstruct a lahar-damaged schoolhouse within the campus into nine classrooms adding a second floor for the integrated high school. Mayor “Tarzan” Lazatin helped provide salaries of some teachers who had no items.

From 2000 up to 2003, seven Mayors of the Rice Terrace sites in Ifugao cooperated with the Foundation to use the Pagsasarili system charging only P200 to P350 monthly tuition fee. Between 2005 up to the present, Vilma Santos Recto, mayor of Lipa, had 59 day care centers converted to Pagsasarili preschools. Now as Batangas governor, she has added 55 more.

The treasures within

Parents and public school teachers in these provinces marvel that this preschool education has made the preschool acquire third grade competence. These children’s love for work, order, self-confidence and independence are treasures that will last a lifetime. Both men and women can easily be empowered with quality education starting with preschool. With the right system, strong character is spontaneously ignited in the first six years of life. –Preciosa S. Soliven (The Philippine Star)