COL & Gender and Development  

COL's Report to the Sixth Meeting of 
Commonwealth Ministers Responsible for 
Women's Affairs

New Delhi, April 2000

COL's Board of Governors reported at the sixth triennial meeting of Commonwealth Ministers Responsible for Women's Affairs.  The meeting was held in New Delhi from 17 - 19 April 2000.  The COL Report highlights the impact that COL's work has had in Gender and Development, current projects and potential future activities and services. 

The Executive Summary of the COL Report appears below.  

Report to Commonwealth Ministers Responsible for Women's Affairs
from COL's Board of Governors
April 2000

Executive Summary

I plant the seed, but I may not be there after the seed is planted to water, to weed, to harvest because it can be such a gradual process".    Woman in Zambia on gender

  COL is a unique Commonwealth agency mandated to mobilise knowledge and resources in order to extend access to education and training related to distance education.  Not only is it dealing with a means of delivering education and training that is relatively new but also one undergoing rapid change due to the revolutions in information and communications technologies.  Within this mandate, COL has emphasised the relationship of girls and women to the new communications technologies.  For this reason it has mounted a number of regional workshops on gender and technology.  It has also initiated other discrete projects related to gender such as the recent development of a UN and Commonwealth-wide system database on gender-related training materials.

Challenges continue to face girls and women in many parts of the Commonwealth whether in the lack of educational and economic opportunities or in the contravention of human rights.  Open and distance learning methodologies offer opportunities to address such challenges.  By making learning available at times and places suitable to the particular needs of the student, distance education overcomes many of the obstacles faced by girls and women trying to access conventional education systems.  Therefore, gender issues, especially with respect to equitable access to quality education and training, continue to feature prominently on The Commonwealth of Learning's (COL) agenda.

In addition to the appropriateness of applying open and distance learning methodologies to the expansion of access to education, there is a need to focus on content as it provides the means to tackle the critical and emerging gender-related issues such as single-parent households, 'male marginalisation' in the Caribbean, and health concerns like the HIV/AIDS epidemic at both the policy level and the in public education programmes. Distance learning methodologies incorporating effective self-instructional materials offer powerful means to address these concerns.

 COL has presented progress reports to the Ministers Responsible for Women's Affairs at their last three meetings in 1990, 1993 and 1996. Whereas these reports focused on highlighting COL's gender-focused programmes, this report endeavours to demonstrate how Ministers responsible for gender issues can engage the agency to further their objectives. The Gender and Youth Affairs Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat invited COL to demonstrate how education, delivered through distance and open learning methodologies, can be used as a vehicle for influencing and integrating the application of new policy approaches specifically in areas of critical, and emerging, concern.  These areas include poverty alleviation, male and female educational 'marginalisation', HIV/AIDS, violence against women, and the mainstreaming of gender in government policy-making, planning and service delivery.  In all of these fields, education and training can be key to change and distance education methodologies as a potent means to that end.  Adapting human rights education materials for use by teachers and educators; modifying innovative models of educating street children for use by non-governmental organisations; using radio broadcasts as a training medium to reach women agricultural workers in remote villages; developing models for educating AIDS orphans and the workers who support them; and developing specific modules to be integrated into an existing distance education programme for legislative drafters - are all examples of how distance education can be innovative in the delivery of formal and non-formal education.