THE LANDSCAPE OF GIRLS EDUCATION IN SUDAN PRE AND POST CONFLICT

Abstract

ABSTRACT This thesis offers a critical feminist analysis of girls' education as discursively constructed in two Sudanese national policy documents: the Girls' Education Sub-Sector Strategic Plan (2014–2016) and the General Education Sector Strategic Plan (2018–2023), both produced during the final years of the Al-Bashir regime. While existing scholarship has documented barriers to girls' education in Sudan, no prior study has critically analysed these foundational documents a significant gap, given that they are routinely cited as evidence of state commitment to gender equity. Drawing on critical feminist theory situated knowledge, intersectionality, and discourse analysis the study asks: How is girls' education discursively framed in Sudanese education policy? The methodology combines Qualitative Content Analysis and Reflexive Thematic Analysis within a feminist epistemological framework. The researcher's positionality as a Sudanese woman educated within the system under critique is treated as an epistemological resource rather than a limitation. The results show that both documents construct girls not as rights-bearing subjects but as untapped human capital. Education is framed as an automatic pathway to empower an instrumentalist assumption that depoliticises gender relations and obscures structural inequality. Cultural barriers are acknowledged but contained through discursive distancing, leaving the state's complicity in patriarchal structures unexamined. The honour code governing girls' school withdrawal is never named. Interventions favour technical fixes over ideological confrontation, and budget structures 90% to salaries, 6% to learning materials reveal political priorities over policy commitments. Together, these findings demonstrate that Sudanese education policy manages gender inequality rather than dismantling it. Written amid a war that has displaced millions of children from formal education, this thesis insists that understanding why policy frameworks fail is essential to imagining an education genuinely worthy of Sudanese girls.

Date of Award	2026
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Humanities and Social Science