Religious groups ‘spending billions to counter gender-equality education’

Extreme religious groups and political parties are targeting schools around the world as part of a coordinated and well-funded attack on gender equality, according to a new report.

Well-known conservative organisations aim to restrict girls’ access to education, change what is on the curriculum, and influence educational laws and policies, according to Whose Hands on our Education , a report by the global affairs thinktank ODI

Tactics include removing sex education from schools, banning girls from learning, reinforcing patriarchal gender stereotypes in textbooks and rejecting gender-inclusive language in schools.

Ayesha Khan, senior research fellow at the ODI and one of the authors of the report, said: “Education is a key enabler for gender equality and has the power to shape lives.

“This research shows how a small group of highly financed anti-rights organisations and politicians and militant groups are intent on disrupting the transformative opportunities that education provides,” she said.

These organisations have received billions of pounds in funding to advance their agenda, according to evidence in the report. At least $3.7bn (£2.8bn) was channelled to anti-gender equality organisations globally between 2013 and 2017.

In Africa, more than $54m was spent by US-based Christian groups between 2007 and 2020 to campaign against LGBTQ+ rights and sex education.

Funding, from sources that include Russian oligarchs and political parties, has led to the creation of new organisations and encouraged existing ones to campaign against sexuality education and LGBTQ+ rights, the report found.

For example, donors from Britain, the US, Germany and Italy spent more than $5m from 2016 to 2020 on projects run by or benefiting Ghanaian religious organisations whose leaders have campaigned against LGBTQ+ rights.

Islamist funding across the Muslim world is hard to trace, the report said, but Pakistan has received billions in Saudi loans and direct aid, along with private funding from Gulf states, to promote Wahhabism, a fundamentalist and puritanical movement within Sunni Islam. One estimate put Saudi state funding for this at $75bn from 1979 to 2003. Textbooks in the country portray women as guardians of traditions, culture and morality, and sex education remains taboo.

Related: How Saudi Arabia’s religious project transformed Indonesia

Organised efforts have also blocked sex education initiatives in South Africa, Brazil and the Philippines, removing material on homosexuality and replacing it with content that promotes sexual abstinence and “traditional family values”.

In Chile, Catholic schools have used educational material that portrays men as heads of households with messages on the importance of wives being submissive, as well as stereotypes of men as being more intelligent and capable than women.

The report also outlined direct political power in countries around the world that enables the most regressive policies, such as the Taliban government’s exclusion of girls from all but primary education in Afghanistan.

“We’re dealing with a global anti-rights movement and resurgence of patriarchal norms,” said Khan. “We need to understand how the education sector is a site of really severe contestations.”

• This article was amended on 12 September 2024. An earlier version called the ODI the Overseas Development Institute, which is no longer its name.