Introduction

Writing shortly after the launch of the SDGs as a paradigm for more equitable development, Cornwall and Rivas (2015) identified the urgent need to ensure that the Goals deliver a gender-transformative agenda of change, going beyond practices simply of ‘inclusion’ and instead taking account of the need to rebalance unequal power relations. This would, they suggested, create ‘a tool for identifying laws, behaviour and institutions in which one class of people are treated differently to others’ (Cornwall and Rivas, 2015: 410). Education and work are essential elements within the package of radical reforms to government policies that would permit the start of a gender-transformative agenda of equitable development. We therefore explore here how these two critical issue-areas have fared during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Long-standing socio-economic inequalities and gendered social norms have meant that women and girls have faced heightened challenges in finding employment, especially ‘decent work’, outside the home and receiving compensation and respect for unpaid social reproductive work (see Rai et al, 2019 for a discussion of the limitations of the ILO ‘decent work’ agenda in relation to women). Women's entitlement to work is consistently undermined, in direct contravention of SDG 5.5 on women's right to full participation in society and 5a on women's right to economic resources. However, this situation has been exacerbated with the arrival of the pandemic where women and girls have taken on increased amounts of unpaid care work in an effort to sustain families and communities because governments are failing to deliver on their promises – codified in SDG 5.4 – to recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work by improving public provision and social protection.

Meanwhile, the right of girls and women to education – SDG 4 and 4.5 on the elimination of gendered inequality in education – has gone unprotected by governments’ failures to take girls’ experiences into account. Boys and girls experience school very differently. Some girls, especially those from poor families, do not even experience schooling at all, with families choosing to invest in the education of boys before girls (UNICEF, nd).