THE GIRL CHILD AND EDUCATION IN SOUTH SUDAN.

BY JOHN GACHIE.

Petronas Dutt, a petit and lanky 12-year old girl is all smiles as she answers questions in halting broken English as her classmates giggle with amusement. At her school in Akot in the Lakes Province of South Sudan, she is one of the 80 girls in a school with 220 pupils in a good day and she was enjoying herself.

Clad in skimpy threadbare navy-blue skirt and greenish sweater, a size or two smaller than her slender shoulders, Petronas gives nothing away that she is one of the lucky few girl child in South Sudan. Unlike many other parts of South Sudan, Akot and surrounding areas have been relatively peaceful since1998.

In the period since 1998 however, her lot like those of other girls in her school has improved. She has managed to move up from grade one to three. She has also escaped from following her elder sisters and brothers to the cattle camps as is the tradition of her Dinka people and most important, has as yet to be sought of as a wife.

With all the telltale signs of impending puberty, she is indeed, lucky than most of her peers elsewhere in South Sudan. If tradition and culture were to be followed and mercifully it won’t in her case, Petronas Dutt would be counting her days as a free spirit. For in South Sudan the girl child has to live each day at a time like most of the people, but more so because she is a girl child.

In most African societies, the lot of the girl child is determined by a host of traditions, culture and taboos that have continued to penalise her on account of her biological attributes and functions than her ability or potential.

Their lot therefore is from the beginning more often than not predetermined or pre-ordained.

Few are the girl child that seek to break out of this societal straight-jacket and even fewer are those who fight to enjoy their full potential as human beings.

Again, few are the governments that have sought to put in place policies or facilities to redress the situation for social-political reasons.

In this regard, the plight of the girl child like Petronas Dutt, especially in Africa is one of societal discrimination and a life of struggle. The circumstances might differ, but their lot is many ways almost certain beholden to external issues that pay little to the girl child’s needs, capacities, potential and abilities.

In the case of Sudan and in particular South Sudan fate has a way of catching up with reality and the consequences are more often than not stark and brutal. For Petronas Dutt, the situation is further complicated by religious edicts and practices.

In South Sudan, the problem is even more complex as it is also informed by a pastro-agricultural tradition and culture of the people of the South. Which for most part treats the girl-child as an extension of their wealth.

For petit and lanky Petronas Dutt and her girlfriends, theirs is a life on borrowed time for fate and circumstances could put paid their young enthusiasm. In the meantime, it is full steam ahead.
Coupled with these traditions and culture is the decades long war that has made the plight of the girl-child even worse. Taken together, all these aspects have had much more negative impact on the girl child more than the boy child. This is more pronounced in education where the ratio of girl-child enrolment and completion of school is less than 15 per cent in the South Sudan.

According to figures presented by the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLA/M} Education Secretariat, the total enrolment figures for the girl child in the Liberated areas of South Sudan excluding Abyei are 26 per cent or 55,168 out of a total pupil enrolment of 214,000.

These figures have been collaborated by a UNICEF baseline survey of 1998 which together with others provided by a consortium of Southern Sudanese educators. These figures though illuminating, do not reveal the real plight of the girl child in Southern Sudan.

There is a cultural explanation to this low enrolment of girls in South Sudan. This cultural view is rooted in the patriarchal ethos that dictate that girls as they mature are encouraged to marry and become housewives and mothers.

In Bahr el Ghazal province of South Sudan, the percentage of girls in schools is 16 per cent while in other two provinces of Western Upper Nile and Equatorial are 27 per cent and 37 per cent respectively.

In the same statistics, Bahr el Ghazal province recorded the lowest per cent age of girls enrolment in grade one at 22 per cent while it recorded the the greatest loss in proportion to girls by grade five perhaps illustrates the cultural attrition rate against the girl child.

It is also instructive to note that in liberated South Sudan, less than one in ten teachers are women. Cumulatively, there were 364 female teachers in the three provinces out of a total of 6430 or seven per cent of the total.

The ratio of boys to girls enrolment in lower primary in the best of schools was one to one but, by the third, fourth and fifth year grades, the ratio changes dramatically in favour boys with a one to eight per cent while the ratio quadruples from one to 12 in secondary school enrolment.
To some experts, the figures could also obscure the fact that out of 10 people in South Sudan, nearly 70 per cent of the illiterates are women and that the drop-out rates could be higher than 60 per cent in primary school level and well in excess of 80 per cent in the secondary school level.

Granted that there are over 1000 primary schools in liberated part of South Sudan and over 20 secondary schools, the need for education in the South is urgent and will require massive infusion of resources and capital. However, the plight of the girl child in the South will have to be tackled swiftly and urgently if the current trends will be maintained.

In the interim however, the lot of the girl child in South Sudan is one like that others in Africa and other parts of the world one of misery. It must also be accepted that in South Sudan, the circumstances are more stark and bleak and the fate of the girl child even more precarious than in anywhere else in the world.

For Petronas Dutt, and her girl friends in Akot fate is at the moment smiling on them and the future looks bright and who knows, all things being equal, she might one day hold the world in her hands. It is furlong hope but again, life is nothing but a dream, and for Petronas it is dream of a bright future. The international community has a duty and obligation to ensure that her dream is not turned into a nightmare.