Reports show how Christians, Catholic schools and Islamists in the United States combat equal rights, sex education and LGBTQ+.
According to a new report, extreme political parties and religious groups are focusing on schools around the world as part of the well-funded and coordinated attack on gender equality.
Whose Hands on Our Education, a report by the Overseas Development Institute, famous conservative organizations aim to limit girls’ access to education, changing the curriculum, and influencing the educational rules and policies.
Some of the tactics include banning girls from learning, scrapping sex education from schools, rejecting gender-inclusive language in schools and reinforcing patriarchal gender stereotypes in the textbooks.
Ayesha Khan, the author of the report and a senior researcher at the ODI, stated:
“Education is a key enabler for gender equality and has the power to shape lives.
“This research shows how a small group of highly financed anti-rights organizations and politicians and militant groups are intent on disrupting the transformative opportunities that education provides.”
According to the report’s evidence, these organizations have received billions of pounds in advance funding for their agendas. About $3.7 billion was directed to anti-gender equality organizations worldwide between 2013 and 2017.
The US Christian-based organizations spent more than $54 in Africa between 2007 and 2020 to protest against LGBTQ+ rights and sex education.
The report also revealed that funding sources, including political parties and Russian oligarchs, led to the creation of new organizations and motivated existing ones to protest against sex education and LGTQ+ rights.
Between 2016 and 2020, donors from the US, Great Britain, Germany and Italy spent more than $5m on projects run by benefiting Ghanaian religious organizations whose leaders have campaigned against LGBTQ+ rights.
According to the report, it isn’t easy to trace Islamist funding across the Muslim community. However, Pakistan has received millions from direct aid and Saudi loans. Also, they have received funding from the Gulf States to promote Wahhabism, a fundamentalist and puritanical movement within Sunni Islam. An estimate places the Saudi state funding for the Wahhabism project at $75 bn from 1979 to 2003. Women are portrayed as guardians of traditions, culture and morality in the country’s textbooks, and sex education remains a taboo.
Sex education initiatives are blocked in South Africa, Brazil and the Philippines by organized efforts, which resulted in scrapping materials on homosexuality and replacing its contents that promote “traditional family values” and sexual abstinence.
Catholic schools in Chile use learning materials that project men as heads of the household with messages on the position of wives being submissive. It also showed stereotypes of men being more capable and intelligent than women.
The study also outlined direct political power in nations around the globe that enables the most regressive policies, such as the exclusion of girls from higher education by the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
Khan said, “We’re dealing with a global anti-rights movement and resurgence of patriarchal norms.” “We need to understand how the education sector is a site of really severe contestations.”
