Inclusion That Excludes: Eligibility Rules, Donor Dependence, and Gendered Schooling for Disadvantaged Girls in West Sumatra, Indonesia

Abstract

Economically disadvantaged girls in Indonesia often depend on faith-based residential institutions that provide schooling, care, and skills training together. Such institutions are widely regarded as inclusive responses to disadvantage, yet the rules by which they allocate support can also be exclusionary. This article asks how one foundation's eligibility rules and resources both enable and constrain girls' continuation in education in West Sumatra, and how students and staff navigate these rules and resources. The study used a qualitative case design, drawing on participant observation, documentary records, and a traceable corpus of interviews with one administrator, four students, and seven alumni, and applied Giddens's duality of structure as an analytic framework. Three findings emerged. A state-set age ceiling on assistance coincided with the move from senior secondary school to higher education and, together with contracting donor funding, meant that the same rules enabled some students and excluded others. Students' occupational aspirations toward medicine, health work, and enterprise predated enrollment and did not align with the gender-typed skills the foundation offered. That gender-coded provision narrowed the choices students could act on. The study specifies a boundary condition for structuration in the analysis of intra-institutional exclusion, showing how an inclusion-oriented institution can reproduce exclusion within its own walls. It makes no causal claim about social or economic mobility; it aims at analytical rather than statistical generalization