How Women Choose Their Schooling in Their Life Course: The Case of Maale, Southwestern Ethiopia

抄録

Discussions of female education in Sub-Saharan countries often focus on ways to improve conditions and to achieve gender parity. However, a few studies have also examined the conditions under which individual women choose to go to school. The discussion of dropping out among female students has been focused on prevention and allowing more females to attend school, whereas there has been little discussion about education after dropping out or about those who did not enter school at customary age. This study used the community of Maale in southwestern Ethiopia as an example to investigate the process of female schooling with regard to how individual women decided to enter or return to school. To this end, I interviewed three women who entered or returned to school despite older than the usual school age. I identified two factors that enabled these women to enter or return to school: (1) the presence of a formal educational system and a community consensus in support of allowing females to make their own decisions about their education, (2) the relationships between the student and the people to whom she was close. Sustainable female education requires respect for the diversity of the decision-making processes by which individuals make choices.