Constraints, opportunities and challenges in gender mainstreaming in education planning. Case of Education and Culture Regional Office of Bangka Belitung Archipelago Province, Indonesia

Gender mainstreaming has been promoted by international organizations as the strategy to achieve gender equality as well as to promote gender empowerment. Gender equality is addressed in the Millennium Development Goals, as well as the call to empower women, to improve maternal health and to achieve universal primary education. The focus of gender mainstreaming is mostly on women since women are likely to be subordinated in social constructions and are prone to be in the worst off layer of the poor. Gender mainstreaming also means to promote participation and accountability in good governance by exercising gender analysis in development planning and implementation. Education is one of the sectors that is considered strategic to promote gender equality, because it is likely to change social status as well as the existing values within society. In Bangka Belitung Archipelago, Indonesia, the education attainment of women as well as their economic attainment is statistically low, and this province had been in the lowest index of gender related development index in Indonesia in 2002. The provincial government has started the effort to improve the low quality of the life of women by establishing Gender Focal Points (GFPs) in its working units, and building the capacity of government officers to perform gender mainstreaming by conducting gender trainings and socializations. The research focuses on the constraints, opportunities and challenges of applying gender mainstreaming in the Education and Culture Regional Office (ECO) of Bangka Belitung Archipelago (BBA), by employing a qualitative case study. The data are primary and secondary which were collected through a desk study, in-depth interviews, questionnaires and participatory observation in ECO of BBA in August _ September 2007. The data was collected by interviewing 30 respondents with a questionnaire, and 12 in-depth interviews. The respondents were purposively selected. The in-depth interviews were conducted to cross check the data collected by the questionnaires, and the documents on the policies are studied using content analysis to weight gender issues addressed in them. The aspects studied in this research are the organization, the structure, and the objectives of ECO, the perspective and the capacity of the personnel working in ECO, by assessing the inspiration, commitment, guidance and control within the organization, and the planning system in ECO that consists of collection and analysis, decision making, and application and evaluation, which is not sterile from an external environment. The study concludes that a) the tasks conducted within ECO are gender neutral; b) there is lack of capacity in conducting gender mainstreaming in ECO, and the personnel working in ECO are of the opinion that gender inequity hardly exists in ECO as well as in the society; and c) gender mainstreaming is poorly performed in the planning process in ECO. This is not merely the result of the internal factors within ECO, but also because of the external environment influencing the planning process in the Provincial Government of BBA. The research also maps the constraints, the opportunities and the challenges to employ gender mainstreaming in ECO BBA, as well as recommends provincial government to a) use the compulsory training to build the capacity of the officers; b) conduct gender training continuously; c)create an enabling environment so that the Gender Focal Point is involved in the whole planning process; and d) provide necessary authority to the Gender Focal Point to employ stick and carrot mechanisms to ensure that gender mainstreaming is conducted in the planning of development programs.