Understanding Secondary School Girls' Dropout Using Selected Concepts from the Social Relations Approach: A Review of Evidence from Hurungwe District, Zimbabwe"

Girls' secondary school dropout remains a chronic obstacle to gender equity and social development across Sub Sahara African countries. . Although socio-economic and household-level barriers are heavily covered in literature, the school as a gendered institution has not been theorised in dropout literature. This study, employed the Social Relations Approach (SRA) by Naila Kabeer (1994), operationalising concepts 1(social relations); concept 2(institutional analysis) and concept 3 (institutional gender policies) in examining how the school systematically filter out girls from education. The expected outcome is an innovation in the form of a gender equality model called the Cognitive Transformative Model for Gender Equity in Education (CTM-GE) .The aim is to improvr the retention of secondary school girls in Hurungwe district and in districts with similar dropout problems in Zimbabwe and in Sub-Sahara Africaan countries.