There is no simple relation between education and gender equality. As with social class relations, schools both reinforce subordination and create new possibilities for liberation. Such is the case in institutions of higher education in Africa where gender imbalance is rife. African educational systems in general, and higher institutions in particular, have been characterised by highly ingrained structural inequality.
Yet these institutions are not only tasked with generating new ideas, but are also in charge of accumulating and transmitting knowledge for today’s information societies where knowledge drives economic growth and development. And while higher education remains the main source of that knowledge – its production, dissemination and absorption by society – women continue to be conspicuously absent in crucial fields of learning in these institutions.
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