Current drive for women's education and training
By the mid-20th century, religious authorities, be they Christian or Muslim, admitted to the positive impact of education and work on women's life reflecting that this helped assert their personality and financially support their husband. However their advice to women was, on the whole, to fulfil their calling as home makers rather than as working women, in order to sustain a couple founded in understanding, love and cohesion. In the following decades, the major socio-cultural changes affecting women shifted some of these authorities' discourse towards a more egalitarian vision of their rights and duties in the public realm. At the close of the Second Vatican Council [1], a message was addressed specifically to women. The Church recognised women as capable of a degree of power and influence, which could not be wielded without a high level of education. One generation later, Pope John-Paul II paid homage to women in all their roles. Just as much as men, women thus remain responsible for the core of society, for their families, the education and sustenance of which they must provide. Women's education and work is no longer to be stigmatised, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, so long as the ultimate goal is the family, the “fundamental sign of the human community”
As such, this conception partly chines in with that promoted by UNESCO[2] , according to which an educated woman prepares better the up-coming generation and a working woman helps her spouse answer better the family's financial needs while stimulating the economic cycle and reducing world poverty . With the importance of the right to education in mind, especially in Arab countries, UNESCO set up in 2002 a network promoting gender equality in education in Asia (GENIA : Gender in Education Network in Asia); it proposes gender neutral, high standard education, and literacy programmes promising lasting outcomes as a part of poverty eradication programmes. The same organisation has established a Gender Parity Index (GPI) with which to compare literacy levels; this index is designed to measure the relative access to education for both genders in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors.
Drawing on a study conducted in May 2012, this chapter addresses the data concerning Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Mauretania and Yemen. The charts suggest the following: Iran and Iraq count among the countries having achieved gender equality in literacy among adults as well as youths; in the other countries, the progress towards parity has patently evolved, notably after 1977, that is long after the end of French and British colonisation. Women's education in the Arab world is thus relatively recent. The first further education school for girls opened in Cairo in 1925. Primary schools for girls followed suite in 1829. The first girls' schools in what became Lebanon in 1835 and in what became Iraq in 1898. Queens and first ladies have played a major part in these developments and still do.
