Grow to Serve: How culture, education, and faith converge and influence young women’s capability development as they prepare to transition out of secondary school in Karamoja, Uganda

Abstract

Whilst there is a plethora of research that studies the impact of education on historically marginalised peoples, the concept of education is socially constructed in each unique cultural community, in each school community. Whilst macro approaches provide a global perspective, this study focuses its attention on one specific school in one distinct cultural community. This thesis explores how education, faith, and culture converge and influence young women’s capability development as they prepare to transition out of secondary school into unknown futures. This study is based in a Roman Catholic all-girls secondary boarding school run by an international congregation of women religious in Karamoja, Uganda. This thesis fills gaps in the current literature across education, anthropological, theological, and gender studies by adding an understanding of faith-based schools in the Global South, addressing the lack of qualitative study of education quality, and adding to the under-researched world of women centring Karamojong women as the primary focus for the first time in depth in available literature. The study implements Mudimbe’s concept of an intermediate space to understand agents and levels of power in the local situation that affect students’ own values and aspirations. The utilisation of Nussbaum’s Capability Approach (CA) within this ethnography allows for an open, iterative process in which analysis can be framed without forcing emerging findings to be tested against any external or predetermined theory. The thesis demonstrates how education changes the sixteen young women at the centre of this study, the 1% of Karamojong girls who complete upper secondary school. It describes how young women make sense of themselves and their place in their communities as they develop educationally and spiritually through their schooling experience. In this particular case, the thesis elaborates, through rich description, how girls’ education expands and diversifies personal aspirations, increases future economic and educational opportunities, and allows for religious and spiritual well-being. Students are also confronted with new pressures such as the responsibility to support one’s parents and family and different risks such as new exposure to gender-based violence. Whilst it has been demonstrated that these students are receiving the necessary resources in place whilst in the temporal and physical space of the boarding school to achieve well-being, the combined capabilities are threatened at and after the point of transition out of school. Discourses (relating to gender, cultural group) and power agents (individuals like fathers and institutions like NGOs) restrict student choice and reinforce students’ economic and social marginalisation. As a result, students upon transition out of secondary school are commonly found merely functioning with a diminished sense of self outside the school walls. This study explores and identifies the religious congregation’s unique theological praxis as integral to achieving a fulfilling educational experience that builds students’ capabilities and maps theological concepts to the CA. This study builds on Burke’s study of women religious and concepts of motherhood by documenting a new, expanded definition of motherhood with school alumnae becoming mothers to and within the school and cultural community. This expanded and situated understanding of mothering provides students with role models, mentors, and a viable path forward in visualising what well-being can look like in a dislocated intermediate space as a small sub-community of educated women in Karamoja. The study elaborates on the ways in which education and religion can be liberative and enrich cultural communities whilst identifying the oppressive forces of marginalisation that have historically and continue to restrict capability development of Karamojong women.