What Matters for Marginalized Girls and Boys in Bangladesh: a capabilities approach for understanding educational well-being and empowerment

Ensuring the education of marginalized children has become an important agenda in order to reach the goals of universal primary education and gender equality. Education policies and projects aiming to target marginalized children often do so on the basis of demographic variables, such as sex, ethnicity, poverty and geography. We argue that this approach to defining marginality does not sufficiently address underlying discriminatory conditions and norms that perpetuate inequalities. In this article, we employed a capabilities approach as an analytical frame to understand what girls and boys in a rural district in Bangladesh reason affects their educational well-being and empowerment. We draw on critical feminist perspectives of empowerment to illustrate how gendered inequalities are perpetuated in the structures and norms in communities and schools. We argue that specific conditions can differentially marginalize or empower, and these conditions have persistent gendered patterns. Conditions of a safe, supportive, and quality educational environment foster possibilities for empowerment and well-being, and conversely, a lack of these conditions can marginalize children from achieving well-being through education.