Browsing by Subject "case study"

Equal education is a fundamental human right that each child is entitled to. Education and gender equality benefit all individuals and promote both social and economic development. However, despite numerous legal instruments and practical measures taken by the international community, as well as by national governments, the right to education remains unclaimed universally for all children and inequality in education is pervasive all over the world. As a legacy of colonization Peruvian society suffers from persistent multifaceted inequalities that are manifested and reproduced in the education system in multiple ways. These inequalities are seen, amongst others, between genders, but also intersect with other individual characteristics such as poverty, rurality and indigeneity. This Master’s thesis explores gender equality in education in Peru and how gender is mainstreamed in the country program of Save the Children Peru. To do so, it explores how legal instruments, policy documents and the country programme of the organization address gender (in)equality and attempt to mainstream gender; and analyses how an education project that the organization implemented among indigenous Aymara adolescents between 2015 and 2018 managed to mainstream gender. This thesis is a qualitative case study. It follows the rights-based 4A framework by Katarina Tomaševski, which encompasses availability, accessibility, acceptability, and adaptability as key aspects of quality of education. The data for it consists of normative documents, literature on inequality in education, institutional documents of Save the Children International and transcribed interviews with key informants from Save the Children Peru. These were analysed by using interpretive analysis and then considered in the light of the model of Caroline Moser on different stages of gender mainstreaming. The results of the study demonstrate that despite recent achievements, gender inequalities in education persist in Peru, but focus has shifted from quantitative to qualitative disparities. Many stakeholders consider gender mainstreaming a rather ambiguous concept, and challenging to both implement and assess, which is why it often remains on a rhetoric level. This yields in a need for the organizations to provide the necessary tools and capacity building, not only for the monitoring personnel but for the whole staff. Promoting gender equality across the whole program cycle must be an institutional commitment, gender mainstreaming must permeate the whole organization and adequate resources must be allocated for it.

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a political process where individual citizens are given the opportunity to express their preferences and interests in public forums, along with the right to vote on specific policies, thereby affecting how the budget is allocated. Participatory budgeting is often seen as a potential solution to the challenges faced by representative democracies. It provides an opportunity for new voices to enter the political arena and promotes social justice by enabling citizens to express their preferences and interests. It also enhances bureaucracies by opening new channels of communication between city experts and citizens and by creating new tools and processes for enacting policies. Since its first appearance in Brazil in 1989, participatory budgeting processes have proliferated, with approximately 8,000 rounds conducted worldwide. In this thesis, I analyzed Helsinki's OmaStadi participatory budgeting process, which took place from 2018 to 2020. It was the first of its scale in Finland, with EUR 4.4 million allocated to various projects proposed by Helsinki residents. Over 1,200 proposals were submitted, and nearly 50,000 people voted for 44 projects to be realized. In the thesis, I first examine the background and theory of participatory budgeting and then discuss the methodological tools used in my analysis. I then move on to the analysis itself, where I compare material coded from the final evaluation and examine it through the lens of the four principles for enacting social change in participatory budgeting programs introduced by Brian Wampler: voice, vote, social justice, and oversight. My goal was to determine to what extent the pilot project succeeded in enacting social and political renewal through this framework. I approached this task by conducting a case study and using content analysis as my tool for analyzing the final evaluation of OmaStadi conducted by BIBU, the research project funded by the Strategic Research Council of the Academy of Finland. In my analysis, I also offer various suggestions and pointers for the development of the next rounds of OmaStadi. My findings suggest that, in addition to its many successes, as a pilot project, there is still a lot of potential for further developing OmaStadi to better achieve the ideals set by the four principles for successful PB programs.