Educar a los adultos en Zacatecas. Equidad y empoderamiento de las mujeres

Abstract

Since 1993, the General Law of Education states that the Mexican Federal Government and its different entities have the responsibility for establishing conditions to achieve equity in the opportunities to access the educational systems. As part of this policy, governmental compensatory programs have been established to diminish the causes of education backwardness and to promote human development. In this context, beneficiaries in educational backwardness of the social program “Oportunidades” of the states of Zacatecas, Jalisco and San Luis Potosí were included in an Improvement Plan: Incentive for Education, Human Development and Capacities of Adults (EDHUCA), applied form May 2011 to April 2012. The evaluation of this Improvement Plan was oriented towards the identification of the fulfillment of the operative guidelines as well as of the general goal of the pilot project: selecting from all the beneficiaries of the Oportunidades program, men and women who were active in the National Institute of Education for Adults (INEA), and encourage them to finish a scholar level in this subsystem. The effort and success of the adults were compensated with an economic incentive given in agreement to the scholar level accomplished and their gender. The results of the evaluation showed that the effort to shrink the educational vulnerability in the context of poverty, marginalization and migration that these three Mexican states suffer, demands the operative decentralization of the compensatory programs, the reduction of the bureaucracy and the increment in the quality of the educational services given by the INEA. It was also demonstrated that women have a remarkable position in the generational transition of culture, as alphabetized women attract more women from their homes to the schools, and became alphabetizers of their communities. The economic incentive given for EDHUCA impacted in the amount of women attending the programs of the INEA and in the empowering of women, because it strengthen their self-esteem and promoted the making of better decisions in their homes and in their communities. Some women challenge themselves to continue their educational process in the non-schooled high school programs. They stepped out from scholar backwardness, but they still belong to the inequity world of poverty and social marginalization.