LIFE SKILLS EDUCATION FOR MARGINALIZED GIRLS (Case Study in Indonesia) Siscka Elvyanti University Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia siscka_elvyanti@yahoo.com Abstract Life skills education for marginalize girls aims at exploring ways to empower poor and out-of-school girls in Indonesia by helping them to acquire appropriate technology-related knowledge skills, which would open the door to more job opportunities and ultimately increase their status in the society. Life skill education for girls become important because data from the Indonesia Ministry of Education shows significant gender gaps in school dropout rates, both at primary school and junior secondary levels. Girls are more likely to drop out of school than boys. In primary school, out of every 10 children who drop out, 6 are girls and 4 are boys. It is the same in junior secondary school. The gender gap slightly widens at the senior secondary school to 7 girls dropping out for every 3 boys This paper will suggest that promoting gender-equitable technical and vocational education can be a means of combating poverty. While recognizing that the girls and young women in poor societies are a particularly vulnerable group, this paper demonstrates ways in which they can be better equipped with training to seize income earning opportunities, thereby improving their living conditions. Implementation strategies for this problem include: creating a national movement for completion of basic education, involving communities, especially parents and community leaders, the private and industrial sectors; enhancing and strengthening existing essential programs for increasing school enrolment; using alternative education approaches and programs to reach previously unreached poor and remote communities and improve equity in access to basic education. Keywords Life skill, marginalize girls, empower poor, out-of-school girls. 1. Introduction “We are very poor and we cannot support our daughter’s schooling. We cannot pay for her uniforms, study materials, daily allowance and for her tutorial/private lessons”. “Parents always say that daughters do not need to study so much, just learn how to read and write, because they will be only working around the kitchen and may not do anything better than kitchen work”. “Parents would ask their daughters to stop schooling at Grade 6 or 7 to marry them off or sometimes the girls themselves would like to get married”. In the Asia-Pacific region including Indonesia, poverty undoubtedly has girls face. Two-thirds of the worlds poor live in this region. The majority of them are woman and almost two-thirds are of school age [1]. While many occupational barriers have fallen, in social communities especially poor communities is still almost entirely sex-segregated. Girls are clustered primarily in low-status and low- priority education [2]. Poverty seem to be rationale for adhering to gender traditions and restricting access of girls to school by letting them stay at home, and also a compelling reason to defy these same traditions by allowing them to leave the home and travel faraway to earn income in the name of family survival. In other side, research indicates that important personal, social, and economic benefits accrue from educating girls. In addition to increasing the duration of their own lives and improving the health of the children they bear, educating girls has been shown to further the education of succeeding