More girls in rural Bihar, India are going to school after mini-grid-powered household lights give mothers and children two extra hours of evening work and study time. Experts say that when girls receive prolonged education this reduces HIV prevalence, child marriages and sexual violence. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Carmen Arroyo
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 26 2018 (IPS)

Better and prolonged education can bring down high rates of illiteracy, sexual abuse and early marriage among girls.

“When girls stay in school, HIV goes down, child marriages go down and sexual violence goes down,” shared Alice Albright, chief executive officer of Global Partnership for Education, a multi-stakeholder partnership and funding platform that aims to strengthen education systems in developing countries.

She was speaking at the side event ‘Keeping girls in school: What impact on the fight against HIV, tuberculosis and malaria?’, during the 2018 High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, this July.

Agreeing with Albright, the spokesperson from the international NGO Camfed, or Campaign for Female Education, told IPS: “the cycle of poverty and ill health is perpetuated when girls don’t have access to quality education.”

The relationship between health and education among females has long concerned member states as an issue to address using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. The panel, which included Brian Flynn, deputy permanent representative of Ireland to the U.N.; Jens Frølich Holte, deputy minister, ministry of foreign affairs from Norway; Marijke Wijnroks, chief of staff at the Global Fund; Sonita Alizadeh, champion, Girls not Brides; Mohamed Sidibay, a youth representative; and Albright, emphasised a critical issue: keeping girls in school.

The U.N. Women’s report ‘Turning Promises into Action: Gender Equality in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Action’ revealed that 15 million primary-school age girls don’t learn to read or write in school (10 million boys don’t either); 15 million girls between the ages of 15 and 19 have been forced sexually; and 750 million women were married before they turned 18. These numbers can only go down with better and prolonged education, highlighted Albright.

Issues like child marriage, sexual abuse, lack of healthcare products, and responsibility for household chores create a greater disparity between boys and girls when it comes to education.

For Camfed, the reason these issues affect boys and girls differently seemed obvious. “Girls are different from boys in their level of vulnerability to sexual exploitation, especially in a context of rural poverty, where pressure to have transactional sex to raise money for food and school going costs can result in life threatening infections, early pregnancy, the life threatening complications resulting from this, early marriage, and domestic violence.”

With 2.4 million women between the ages of 15 and 24 living with HIV, addressing this issue seems more urgent than ever for political leaders.

“Girls and young women face widespread social, cultural, political and structural barriers in accessing their right to health, particularly around sexual and reproductive health and rights,” Nazneen Damji, U.N. Women policy advisor, stated.

A year of education can change a girl’s life completely. According to the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), an extra year of secondary school can increase a woman’s income by 15 percent in the future, generating a virtuous cycle. However, it is very hard for a girl to access that extra year. She would have less time to study, as her household chores might occupy most of her time and families will count on her daily work, which can be interrupted if she attends school.

“Secondary schools are few and far between in rural areas, and the long and tiring walk to school can also be dangerous for girls (sexual exploitation, dangerous rivers to cross, wild animals). In addition, most schools in rural sub-Saharan Africa are ill equipped to support girls while they are menstruating,” the Camfed spokesperson told IPS when asked what other obstacles a girl child has to overcome to access education.

But once that education is accessed, the consequences are hugely beneficial.

“We know that educating girls, especially adolescent girls, creates cascading benefits, producing a ripple effect,” explained the UNICEF spokesperson.

“Educated girls are less likely to marry or have children early; they are better able to protect themselves from HIV and AIDS, from sexual exploitation and abuse. Educated women are far less likely to die in childbirth and far more likely to have healthy babies who survive their infancy and thrive,” he added.

Safeena Husain, founder of Educate Girls, an NGO in India that has helped 200,000 girls to return to school since 2007, also shared her organisation’s experience with girls’ education with IPS.

“We do see that with more girls in school they are getting married later. These educated girls feel empowered to make informed decisions and stand up for their rights,” she said.

As an example, Husain commented: “Some girls who we managed to enrol and stay in school through primary education made a conscious decision to call off their engagement to boys who were less educated. It’s a brave move for a girl living in a rural, patriarchal society where she has seen women covered under the veil all her life.”

Most importantly for her, the effects of education are long-term and affect society as a whole.

“The big multiplier effect with educating girls is that they will become the decision makers of the future. It will be the women who choose how to look after the next generation and if they know how to look after themselves during pregnancy, and when bringing up their children there will be an immediate impact on the health of the next generation,” she said.

What can be done?

As to who should be the stakeholder leading these changes in girls’ education, the answers vary. National governments, civil society groups and the private sector—through investments—all have a role to play.

For the UNICEF spokesperson, the key lies within national political leadership.

“We help countries build stronger education systems that deliver quality education to boys and girls,” he said, adding that making sure that national education plans and policies consider gender was key to ensuring that girls and boys alike enter and succeed at school.

Gender could be taken into account, he explained, by removing gender stereotypes from learning materials or educating teachers on the importance of gender biases.

Damji, from U.N. Women, believes civil society is crucial. While Camfed believes that both governments and civil society must interact: “Policy needs to be driven by the expertise of girls and young women who face these barriers, and we need local coalitions to break them down, holistically, with all duty bearers involved: parents, schools, local and traditional leaders, local and national education authorities, social and health workers,” the Camfed spokesperson concluded.

It is Hussain, from Educate Girls, who advocates for the collaboration between these three political actors, including the firms and enterprises.

“The private sector can bring funding and a risk-taking appetite to help fuel innovation and evidence building about what works. Civil society is closest to where the problems lie, they have the community access and know the community voice.

“Once solutions have been found, real scale will only happen when the government gets involved and either integrates the change into policy or funds the delivery of solutions at scale.”

When asked whose responsibility is it to lead the change, she replied: “Essentially it is the responsibility of everyone.”

When Anoja Wijeyesekera, an aid worker with the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, received her new assignment in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan back in 1997, her appointment letter arrived with a “survival manual” and chilling instructions: write your last will before leaving home.

“It was an exercise that helped me to mentally prepare myself for Afghanistan,” she told IPS during a recent visit to New York to launch her just-released book titled “Facing the Taliban”.

The 331-page book details her memorable experiences in a country where “women were reduced to objects of lust.” It not only savages some of the hardcore Islamic fundamentalists but also lambastes the United States for indiscriminate bombings that killed many civilians.

A former UNICEF representative in Bhutan, the Sri Lankan national headed an all-male office in Jalalabad, located in what the U.N. calls a “hardship non-family duty station,” where she “came close to making enemies of the Taliban and getting jailed or shot by them.”

She recounts meeting Taliban mullahs who were “absolute tough nuts” and recalls stories of women covered from head to toe in a country “where animals had greater freedom than these women.”

She speaks of one minister with four wives; of a Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice; and the tragic story of about 85,000 Afghan children under the age of five who died of dehydration resulting from diarrhoea.

After serving four years as Resident Project Officer (RPO) in an ultra-conservative patriarchal society where Taliban officials initially refused to have face-to-face meetings or even shake hands with her, Wijeyesekera says by the time she left Afghanistan in 2001, there was a dramatic change in girls’ education.

The Taliban, which subjugated women by depriving them of formal education, did not object to UNICEF’s strong support for home-schooling.

As a result, Wijeyesekera said, the number of girls in home-schools rose, from about 10,000 to over 65,000 during 1997-2001.

Although they could have disrupted home-schooling, she said, the Taliban did not (perhaps because they wanted an education for their own children).

UNICEF also successfully launched a campaign to vaccinate some 4.5 million children against polio – under the watchful eyes of the Taliban.

She said the mainstream media worldwide had failed to make the clear distinction between the relatively moderate Taliban in Afghanistan and its more vicious offshoot in Pakistan (which was responsible for the 2012 shooting of the 16-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai for promoting girls’ education).

According to the United States, the government of President Hamid Karzai – which took over after the ouster of the Taliban government following the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 – continued reinforcing the education of children.

Speaking before the General Assembly last week, U.S. Ambassador Rosemary Dicarlo told delegates there were marked improvements in livelihoods in Afghanistan over the past 12 years.

“Today, nearly eight million children are in school, more than a third of them girls. In 2001, life expectancy had been 42 years; today it is 62, and rising,” she said.

Dicarlo, who is U.S. deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, said 60 percent of Afghans were now within an hour of basic health services, and while there had been virtually no cell phones in 2001, now there are 18 million.

But Manizha Naderi, executive director of Women for Aghan Women (WAW), a New York-based advocacy organisation, said she did not see any radical improvement in the treatment of women in Afghanistan.

She told IPS that President Karzai “has been nothing if not two-faced about the situation of women in his country”.

“He made one forward move when he signed the Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, but he has since turned a blind eye to its non-implementation,” said Naderi, who was born in Kabul and raised in New York.

She said Karzai tried to hijack the many shelters run by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and deliver them to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, whose minister, probably under Karzai’s orders, immediately proposed to return all women in shelters to men who came to claim them (“a death sentence”).

He also endorsed the calamitous Ulema Councils’ recent Code of Conduct, which radically curtails the gains women have made in securing freedom of movement and makes them the official property of men, she added.

And Karzai’s Ministry of Justice recently proposed reviving the law that sentences men and women convicted of adultery to death by stoning, said Naderi.

“A huge outcry caused the ministry to back away from this sadistic plan, but the intention tells us that Taliban-style tactics are just around the corner,” she warned.

After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the administration of President George W. Bush not only invaded Afghanistan but also continued a barrage of air attacks in its desperate hunt for Osama bin Laden, described as the brains behind the terrorist bombings.

UNICEF’s Wijeyesekera told IPS: “By simply bombing people out of existence, I don’t think you can solve any problem.

“What was needed was a long-term approach. You kill a hundred, another hundred will join the Taliban,” she added.

She was told by Afghan staff that several U.S. drone attacks were directed at wedding convoys because of the customary celebratory firings in the air (which was probably mistaken for enemy fire).

The New York Times said last month the United States had spent over 43 billion dollars in weaponry and military training of Afghan forces since 2001.

But Wijeyesekera said she saw no evidence of any expenditure on reconstruction, rehabilitation, recovery and development during her four-year stay in Afghanistan. She also said there was no attempt to cultivate some of the more liberal elements in the Taliban who were more receptive to the outside world.

“The Taliban was [mistakenly] perceived as a homogeneous organisation, but it was not,” she added.

When the centuries-old Bambiyan Buddha statues were destroyed back in March 2001, one of the Taliban officials, who knew she was a Buddhist, apologised to her.

She was also critical of some of the sanctions imposed by the Security Council because it undermined the humanitarian mandate of U.N. agencies.

As she flew out of Kabul in 2001, she wrote, “I thought of my four years in Afghanistan, a country I came to love and a people I had grown to respect and admire, a people whose future was hanging on the cusp of uncertainty. My heart went out for them. I felt so guilty to leave them behind.”

Between 2001 and 2011, Niger’s overall rate of enrolment for girls rose from 29 to 63 percent, according to the Ministry of Education. Credit: Alessandro Vannucci/CC BY 2.0

By Souleymane Maâzou
NIAMEY , May 20 2013 (IPS)

A decade ago, less than a third of school-aged girls in Niger were in class. Today, though significant cultural and religious opposition remains, nearly two-thirds of girls are enrolled in school.

“Back in 2003, we had only 15 girls at my school, out of 150 students. Now, we have 103 girls out of a total of 175 students,” said Ibrahim Sani, who has taught for 17 years in the town of Agadez, in the northern part of this West African country.

This story is repeated in other parts of the country. Salouhou Adou teaches in a village on the outskirts of Tahoua, the capital of the central region with the same name: “When I came to Kollama in 2003, there were only 29 girls out of 113 students. Today, the number of girls has tripled, to 87 out of 137 students,” he told IPS.

The rate of enrolment for girls in Tahoua has more than doubled, from 21 percent in 2001 to 45 percent in 2011, according to the regional directorate for primary education.

Between 2001 and 2011, Niger’s overall rate of enrolment for girls rose from 29 to 63 percent, according to the Ministry of Education.

Concerted effort

The dramatic improvement is thanks to the combined efforts of administrative and traditional authorities, teachers, parents and civil society to raise popular awareness of the importance of giving girls an education.

“Our intervention has meant the gender imbalance in terms of school registration in our area has been reduced,” said Hadiza Moussa, a teacher in Téssaoua, in the south of the country where official statistics also show the enrolment of girls rising: girls made up 45 percent of students in 2012, compared to just 21 percent in 2001.

Weddings and baptism ceremonies are two occasions often used by campaigners to raise awareness of girls’ education. But some ordinary citizens have taken up the cause on their own.

“I have gone door to door to talk to families who were against education for their daughters,” Maman Zakari, a trader in his sixties in the town of Maradi, in the south of the country, told IPS. “I myself was against enrolling girls in school in the past. But I came to understand the importance of education for girls through public awareness campaigns and radio programmes.” He has enrolled two of his five daughters.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is also supporting various incentives.

“Teachers in rural areas who take part in these campaigns get some material support from UNICEF, in addition to their salaries,” Kadri Yacouba, director of primary schools in Maradi, told IPS. “And women who send their daughters to school get money to start small businesses.”

Despite the growth in enrolment of girls, there is still a large gap in school attendance between girls and boys. Between 2001 and 2011, enrolment for boys rose from 36 to 86 percent.

This gap is explained by the fact that in rural areas, many families don’t send their girls to school because of social and cultural beliefs.

“There are many parents who think that school is a destabilising factor for girls. For them, a girl’s destiny is to become a good wife to her husband and a good mother for her children,” retired school inspector Aboubabcar Amadou told IPS.

In both urban and rural areas, parents frequently withdraw their daughters from school to marry them off. “Even in families where the girls go to school, parents are more interested in boys’ education. Fetching water, doing laundry and cooking are still the daily lot of young girls,” said Nana Hadiza, a member of a cluster of civil society organisations working for universal access to education.

Setbacks

The campaign faced a setback in November 2012, when a draft law intended to keep young girls in school ran into strong opposition from the ulamas – Muslim clerics – and associations of Muslim women. These groups put pressure on legislators not to pass the law, instead sending it back for review.

The bone of contention was Article 14 of the draft law which stipulated that anyone agreeing to the marriage of a young girl in school without prior approval from a judge, would be liable to a prison sentence of between six months and two years, a fine of 500,000 to 1,000,000 CFA francs (between 1,000 and 2,000 dollars), or both.

According to the Muslim associations, this is not acceptable in a country like Niger where around 99 percent of the population is Muslim.

“Islam grants parents all rights and authority over their children. A father does not need a judge’s permission to give away his daughter in marriage,” said Malam Abdou Garba, a preacher in Niamey, the Nigerien capital.

“The draft law needs to be modified, to remove everything that is not in line with Islam. These articles could lead young girls to insubordination and disobedience towards their parents, and it could also lead many parents to refuse to enrol their daughters in school,” Mamane Sani, from the Nigerien Association for the Defence of Human Rights, told IPS.

But Hadiza Saley, from the “We Can” campaign (a movement of women’s associations in Niger which fights violence and discrimination against women), called for even more far-reaching legislation. “We must go beyond thinking about girls in school here, to include all girls. In its present form, the draft law discriminates against young girls who are not in school.”

Violence against women is on the rise in Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, Oct 17 2012 (IPS)

Bangladesh, often cited as a model of progress in achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), appears to be sliding backwards when it comes to dealing with violence against women (VAW).

Police statistics and assessments by non-government organisations (NGOs) working to establish women’s rights show that there is in an increasing trend in VAW.

According to police records, while there were 2,981 cases of dowry-related violence in 2004, the figure has already hit 4,563 in the first nine months of 2012. Also, where there were 2,901 rape cases recorded in 2004, the figure for the current year, up to August, stands at 2,868.

Farida Akhtar, an internationally known rights activist, told IPS that the disturbing aspect of this rising trend in VAW is that it is “taking on different deceptive forms that go beyond the statistics.”

“When women are better aware of their rights through education, and want to assert them, they suffer violence,” said Akhtar, a founder of the NGO, ‘UBINIG’, acronym for ‘Policy Research for Development Alternatives’ in the Bangla language.

With school enrolment at 95 percent, Bangladesh is well on track to achieving the MDGs that deal with gender parity in education by 2015. But gender equity and women’s empowerment are another matter.

Akhtar said there is evidence that Bangladeshi women are now facing more mental torture than before. “Unfortunately, mental torture cannot be quantified and often goes unreported. But, the fact that suicide is the biggest cause of female deaths in this country is telling.”

Women’s rights leaders say that atrocities go unreported because of fear of harassment by religious or political leaders and, of the cases that are registered, a large number end up being dismissed as false allegations.

Police data show that 109,621 complaints of various forms of VAW were lodged during the 2010-2012 (up to August) period.  Of these, 18,484 complaints were taken into cognizance, but only 6,875 cases were deemed ‘genuine’ and fit for further proceedings.

Mohammad Munirul Islam, additional inspector-general of police responsible for dealing with crimes related to VAW at the police headquarters, told IPS, “On many occasions our investigations showed that the law was used to harass the accused. It does seem that not all complaints are genuine.”

Afroza Parvin, executive director of Nari Unnayan Shakti, a women’s rights NGO, told IPS, “Due to better awareness female victims have learnt to raise their voices, but stop short of seeking police help. During our 20 years of experience on VAW we have found that police often do not cooperate with victims and favour the accused.”

Leading women’s movement activist Shireen Huq says that the main difficulty is that of “establishing a prima facie case for lack of eye witnesses, evidence, etc., with the result that the accused are easily acquitted and cases are recorded as false.”

Huq, who is also a founder member of Naripokkho, a local NGO, told IPS that “no matter what the offence or what the form of violence, police and lawyers find it convenient to file the complaint under ‘torture for dowry’, and since this is a non-bailable offence we often hear of the elderly parents of the accused being arrested.”

Failure to fulfill dowry demands is a major cause for VAW in Bangladesh. On average 5,000 complaints of dowry are recorded annually. In 2010, police reported 5,331 cases of dowry, which jumped to 7,079 in 2011.

Despites the debates, official statistics show that VAW continues unabated and many complaints are dismissed without justice. Data from Bangladesh National Women Lawyers’ Association (BNWLA) show that of the 420 recorded rape cases in 2011, only 286 reached the prosecution stage.

Salma Ali, executive director of BNWLA, told IPS that one of the difficulties in establishing the rights of women is the fact that Bangladeshi society is strongly patriarchal. “This means that women suffer discrimination in respect of matrimonial rights, guardianship of children and  inheritance – often through religious injunctions or directives,” the prominent lawyer said.

Hameeda Hossain, chairperson of Ain-o-Shalish Kendra, a leading women’s rights  organisation, told IPS that if  “women are still suffering socially, culturally and politically” it is due to “social acceptance of women’s subordination, discriminatory laws and poor law enforcement.”

“Crimes against women within the family are often ignored, and the women  silenced,” Hossain said. “There is social tolerance of domestic violence and limited intervention.”

To its credit the Bangladesh government has taken a number of legal steps to  improve the situation of women, starting with the Suppression of Violence against Women and Children Act in 2000. In 2009 the National Human Rights Act was passed followed by the Domestic Violence Act in 2010.

Bangladesh is also signatory to international conventions designed to protect women and their rights. Yet, very little is being done on the ground to ensure a secure and safe environment for them, rights activists say.

Though illegal, Nepali girls are often married off in their teens. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Oct 11 2012 (IPS)

Social activists in Nepal agree that the one reason why this impoverished country will miss the gender-linked Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the United Nations is the persistence of child marriage.

Nepal’s marriage law stipulates 20 years as the legal age for marriage for both sexes, but current records at the ministry of health and population show at least 23 percent of  girls getting married off at 15 – 19 years.

“Early marriage should be stopped because it not only affects girls’ education but also their health,” Sumon Tuladhar, education specialist at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), tells IPS.

While MDG 2 pushes for universal primary education, MDG3 seeks to promote gender equality and empower women. Child marriage works against MDG 4, that is concerned with reducing child mortality, as also MDG 5 that aims to improve maternal health.

“We certainly need to strongly lobby against early marriage, but we are hampered by a very poor monitoring system to implement the existing law,” Dibya Dawadi, deputy director-general in the department of education, told IPS.

But, for both the government as well as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) concerned with child marriage, enforcing the law is a dilemma because legal action means prosecuting the parents.

“Sticking a mother in jail is not helpful when she may have other young children with no one to feed and protect them,” Helen Sherpa from World Education, an international NGO, tells IPS.

Activists, however, believe that change should tackle the root of the problem – their economic situation, because daughters provide valuable help in the household and on the farms in the rural areas.

“Our biggest challenge is the family’s attitude towards educating their girls,” says Dawadi.

Many rural families marry off their daughters at the age of 11 – 13 because the older a girl gets the higher the dowry demand.

Kamala Chepang was married off at 13 because her parents could not afford to educate all their children.

“I see my young siblings going to school and this makes me happy,” Kamala told IPS in the remote Shaktikhor village of Chitwan district, 300 km southwest of the capital.

Thousands of young girls like Kamala, especially from the most marginalised communities like the Chepangs, are unable to continue their education due to poverty, social barriers and a lack of schools in the remote rural areas.

Although the trend of sending young daughters to their husbands’ home has changed and most of them stay with their mothers till they reach 16, their lives change drastically after marriage and they rarely return to school.

“After marriage, these girls rarely come back to school and even if they do, their performance is very poor,” says Tuladhar from UNICEF. “Early marriage negatively impacts their self confidence.”

According to UNICEF, 51 percent of Nepalese were married as children. Nepal’s 2006 demographic and health survey found that among Nepalese women in the 20 – 49 age group, 60 percent were married by the time they reached 18.

Nepal scores poorly on gender disparity. In 2011  Nepal stood 126^th out of 135 countries in the ‘Global Gender Gap’ index of the  World Economic Forum.

“Early marriage changes a girl’s life options because parents no longer want to invest in ‘someone else’s property’,” says Kaman Singh Chepang, an activist from Nepal Chepang Association, an NGO working for the Chepang community.

Dire poverty and lack of government initiatives to get girls to school are among reasons that Chepang cites for the situation of girls in Nepal, a country where more than half of a total population of  30 million people live on less than 1.25 dollars a day.

Chepang believes that if child marriage is to be eradicated there should be close coordination among government sectors dealing with health, education, poverty and culture and also give priority to basic schooling. “But the government is unready for any such initiative.”

In the remote villages, girls may have to walk hours to reach their classrooms, and by the time they return home they are too exhausted to do their homework. In the end, they just drop out and help their parents until they are married off.

Child marriage not only denies girls an education, it often makes them vulnerable to a cycle of discrimination, domestic violence and abuse. By being made to bear children when they have barely attained puberty, they are forced to put themselves and their babies at risk, activists say.

“Child marriage is extreme denial of children’s rights. Many girls also suffer from abusive marriages as they are married to older boys,” said Sherpa from World Education.

Dongria Kondh tribal girls. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
RAYAGADA, India , Sep 18 2012 (IPS)

The deafening din of the lunch gong is sweet music to the 200-odd tribal girls rushing down the stairway, clutching stainless steel plates and tumblers.

Sikhsya Niketan (House of Education) in Chattikona administrative block of Rayagada district is a residential school meant exclusively for girls of the Dongria Kondh tribe in eastern Odisha state. The school is part of the federal government’s intensified efforts to take universal education to extremely marginalised groups in India.

Odisha’s 62 tribal communities make up 22 percent of the total population and account for 50 percent of people living below the poverty line in the state. They are partly responsible for Odisha’s low human development indicators as compared to other Indian states.

The Dongria Kondhs, who number about 8,000, live in 120 villages located at an altitude of 5,000 feet above the sea level on the Niyamgiri hill plateau, coveted by mining companies for its valuable mineral deposits.

Till date, only two Dongria Kondh girls have managed to complete school. The first, Kasturi Melaka, did so as recently as in 2010.

Literacy among the Dongria Kondh is less than 10 percent, with female literacy at just three percent. This is when the national tribal literacy stands at 47 percent and Odisha’s general literacy close to the national level of 74 percent.

Rina Wadaka, 14, one of the 28 girls from Khambesi village is in class five. Inspired by Kasturi Melaka, she wants to be a teacher, and that is considered progress because Dongria Kondh girls are rarely interested in jobs and careers.

This exclusive primary school, which started in 2008 with 123 students, has grown to have 225 girls aged 6 – 16 years. “Every year, around 20 girls take admission, while 15 drop out,” Simadri Trinath Row, special officer with the Dongria Kondh Development Authority (DKDA), which manages the school, tells IPS.

Primary school dropout rates in Odisha’s tribal communities is 6.4 percent – more than twice the state dropout rate of 2.8 percent,  according to the government’s ‘Annual Plan 2011-12’.

One problem is language. Dongria Kondh speak the Kuvi language which is of Dravidian origin and unrelated to Oriya, the state’s official language which is derived from Sanskrit.

“Lessons are taught in the similar Kondh dialect, which many Dongria students cannot follow. Dongria girls with better language skills help translate the lessons into Kuvi,” Jayanti Sabar, a teacher at the school, told IPS.

Though government regulations specify that Kuvi-speaking Dongria Kondh teachers be hired, “it is difficult to find a qualified one,” says Row.

According to Sabar, the students score a poor 30 – 40 percent marks in examinations, but teachers try to be lenient while marking answer sheets. Last year, 16 girls passed class five with support from two male tutors who come in to support the female staff.

Getting Dongria Kondh girls to join the school is not easy. DKDA employs multi-purpose workers (MPW) as motivators. “Weekly markets, when the Dongria Kondh people descend to buy and sell farm products, are the best time to catch them,” says Gola Sikkaka, an MPW in Khambesi village.

The community relies on witch doctors and knows little about modern medicine. “I tell parents that their daughters will know about medicines to cure brain malaria and tuberculosis (the witch doctor’s remedies don’t work for these) if they go to school,” Sikkaka tells IPS.

The sex ratio among Dongria Kondhs is 1,352 females per 1,000 males against the state average of 978 females for 1000 males. Girls are highly valued in economic terms, as they gather forest products and help with household chores, and command a bride price on marriage.

Given such tangible benefits sending a girl to school becomes irrelevant. “Parents often ask MPWs questions such as who will do the farming? What if, after being schooled,  they decide to marry outside the tribe?” Suryanarayan Patra of Khajuri village an MPW, told IPS.

“Dongria Kondh culture and tradition cannot go parallel with development objectives,” Row told IPS. “The older girls who have been in the school for some years now see their traditional costume as fancy dress,” he added.

“On the other hand, when they return to their hilltop homes during festivals, sowing and harvest periods, they are reluctant to come back to the school. Accustomed to roaming free, they find it suffocating to stay within the four walls of a classroom,” says teacher Srimati Nundruka.

Female teachers residing in the school must stay constantly alert to stop the girls from running away. “Sometimes, younger girls get homesick and try to quietly slip away home, but we get them back,” Nundruka tells IPS.

“We are caught in a cleft stick,” says Row. “The school cannot deny the girls home trips because they might otherwise leave school altogether – yet we don’t want them to lose lessons by staying away from classes for too long.”

The government is doing its bit to keep Dongria Kondh girls in school. With grants-in-aid of three million rupees (54,000 dollars) yearly, they are given two dollars as monthly stipend for regular classroom attendance, while most other costs including medical expenses and school uniforms are borne by the government.

Government schemes to encourage tribal girls to attend school include providing them with bicycles to commute and fixed bank deposits of 54 dollars that become accessible on entering secondary school.

The efforts are yielding results. According to the annual Odisha Economic Survey 2010-11, the dropout rate at the primary school level for tribal girls has steadily declined from 66 percent in 2000 to six percent in 2010.

India’s planners are keen to attain the United Nations Millennium Development Goal- two that seeks to ensure that children everywhere are able to complete a full course of primary education by 2015.

India’s net enrolment ratio in primary education has already crossed the 95 percent mark making the 2015 goal within reach. Getting Dongria girls into classrooms is among last mile efforts.

At the launch of a helpline for women in Peshawar. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Sep 7 2012 (IPS)

Samina Afridi, a lecturer at the University of Peshawar, regrets that down history the leaders of the Pashtun (also Pakhtun) tribes have conspired to keep them away from education and literacy. The Taliban are only the latest example.

“Education was a soft target through 19th and 20th centuries. The only thing that has changed in more recent times is the modus operandi used to scare people away from schools,” Afridi, a gender specialist, tells IPS.

Pashtun tribes straddle the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and number about 40 million. Their traditional homelands extend from Oxus river in Afghanistan to the Indus river to include Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

Afridi says Pashtun tribesmen have been made to believe that sending children to schools is a sure way to invite the wrath of Allah. “Systematic campaigns against education have deeply impressed the gullible tribal population,” she said.

Pashtun leaders often get clerics to urge their congregations to stay clear of modern education as proof being true Muslims.

A proverb in the Pashto language, designed to create revulsion for literacy, goes thus:  Sabaq Da Madrase waye, Dapara Da Paise Waye Jannat Ke Be Zai Na We, Dozah Ke Ba Ghoopoay Wye  (Those who study in schools are for money. They will not find a place in paradise, but will sink in hell).

Former KP lawmaker Nasreen Khattak says that even in times of peace – rare in the Pashtun homeland – no serious effort has ever been made to promote education. The people of the FATA were neglected even during the relatively benign British rule over the territory.

“The Taliban militants have the worst record as enemies of education because their systematic efforts to dismantle education by blowing up schools with explosives have proved a real setback to education,” said Khattak.

In a campaign against education that began in 2005, Taliban militants have destroyed about 700 schools in KP and the FATA. The Tehreek Taliban Pakistan and other jihadist groups operating in the tribal areas proudly claim responsibility for destroying schools and disrupting education.

“The anti-literacy campaign launched by Taliban militants has deprived more than 20,000 students of a chance get educated and kept the literacy rate in these territories at about 22 percent against the national literacy rate of 54 percent,” Khattak said.

Girls have been the worst victims and in areas under Taliban influence there is no concept of female education, Khattak said. “Taliban militants, according to their own interpretation of Islam, regard educating women as un-Islamic.”

The provincial governments of KP and the FATA have been doing a fire-fighting job by setting up tents as makeshift classrooms.

“We feel let down at the government’s apathy towards the declining educational infrastructure, but realise its helplessness,” says Shahabuddin Khan, a businessman from the Safi area of the FATA’s Mohmand Agency where not a single school building has been left standing.

Now living in Peshawar, capital of KP province, Khan says he and his family members, including three daughters and two sons, feel homesick but cannot go back for fear of having to deprive their children of formal education.

But, very few FATA families can afford to move to Peshawar just to educate their kids. Unsettled conditions spilling over the border with Afghanistan, over the last 25 years, have all but destroyed the economic base of the Pashtuns – agriculture, forests and livestock.

“The Pashtuns have sunk into poverty and many cannot afford to educate their children even if they wanted to,” Sitara Ayaz, KP women development minister, told IPS.

One answer to the problem would be to mainstream women into national politics, she says. “If we invest in educating women in the FATA we can reap dividends.”

But, that is easier said than done. “There is not a single woman leader or politician in the whole of the FATA, while half of the territory’s 10 million people are women,” Ayaz argues.

The federal government is aware of the problems in FATA but lacks resources to find solution. “We have been urging the international community to help rebuild Taliban-damaged girls schools in FATA,” Ayaz said.

Shagufta Malik, another female lawmaker from the KP, says that women in FATA were, in living memory, modern and liberal. “Things changed dramatically when the Taliban appeared on the scene.”

“We remember that the women of the FATA would shake hands with their male guests and cover their heads only with a simple chadar (shawl),” Malik said. “Now they cannot be seen in public unless they are in burqa (completely enveloping outer garment).”

Afridi at Peshawar University says that except in FATA, women in four provincial assemblies, one Lower (National Assembly) and Upper House of Parliament (Senate), have 33 percent representation. “There is not a single woman among the 16 parliamentarians from the FATA.”

Even in KP province, the literacy rate for women is only 30 percent, Afridi says. Over the years, discrimination against women has increased and they lag far behind men in education and have little chance of finding decent employment.

Akhunzada Muhammad Chittan, a lawmaker from FATA, says the government has launched several programmes aimed at encouraging women to take vocational training as a route to economic empowerment.

“More than six billion Pakistani rupees (63 million dollars) have been allocated for social welfare and women’s development in FATA,” Chittan told IPS.

Chittan says the government is aware of the problems faced by women in the FATA and firmly believes that the empowerment of women through basic education and literacy is the best route to a permanent, gender-friendly solution in the troubled territory.

Patience was also expelled from school along with Patricia Kollie, because they had both fallen pregnant. Credit: Winston Daryoue/IPS

By Winston Daryoue
Gbarnga, LIBERIA, Jul 5 2012 (IPS)

Patricia Kollie should be at school today but instead she is at home in Gbarnga, Liberia, pounding a pile of cassava leaves in a wooden mortar. Her entire body is slightly swollen. Her dress fits a little too snug at the stomach.

Kollie’s house is a few minutes walk from the St. Mark Lutheran High School in the city of Gbarnga, Bong County, 164 kilometres away from this West African nation’s capital, Monrovia. Kollie is 21 years old but attends grade 11. This is because she missed out on school during the country’s 14-year civil war, which only ended in 2003, but during which time the education system had collapsed.

The end of the war should have provided her with an opportunity to start her studies again. But last month she was expelled for being pregnant.

“We were five who were pregnant. They called us in the office. They said ‘You are pregnant. Since you feel you’re big, go home. I can’t keep you in my school,’” Kollie explained.

Kollie said she begged Peter Jutee, the principal, to let her stay at the private school but he refused claiming getting pregnant and then remaining enrolled is a violation of the school’s handbook. Private schools draw up their handbook and the education arm of the Lutheran church in Liberia developed the one at St. Mark Lutheran High School.

“We took the decision in line with our own handbook,” said Jutee. “Article 10.2d states that we can’t keep pregnant women in school. When they give birth, we readmit them.”

Kollie and the other four girls appealed to the administration to complete the school year, but the appeal was rejected.

The Liberia Education law is silent on what should happen to girls who get pregnant while enrolled.

Pregnancy and subsequently dropping out of school is just one of many problems limiting access to education for girls in Liberia.

Girls in the rural areas have even more obstacles in their paths. Traditional practices along with a lack of schools and financial support are some of the challenges they must overcome.

In April, more than a hundred schoolgirls in Mah District of Nimba County in northern Liberia were forcibly taken from school for traditional initiation. At the traditional school, the girls are circumcised and “prepared for marriage life”.

The situation in Mah District resulted in the complete closure of the entire school and the county education officer withdrew the teachers for reassignment elsewhere.

The challenges in educating the girl child are indisputable, but equally, their ability to contribute to Liberia’s growth is unquestionable.

At the launch of the Girl’s Education National Policy in April 2006, Liberia’s and Africa’s first democratically elected female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, spoke about how “the education of girls will become a cornerstone of development in Liberia.” Sirleaf said that Liberia is working “to see a new country with a shared vision for girls’ education…to free humankind from poverty, discrimination and disease.”

A Free and Compulsory Primary Education Policy was instituted by Sirleaf’s government as a means of achieving progress towards the Millennium Development Goal two, which calls for universal primary education for all children by 2015.

The policy is achieving its primary objective, which is increased enrolment. For the past three years school enrolment, especially at the primary level, has increased by 50 percent.

However, a challenging and troubling indication is the question of quality delivery; this includes adequate physical space for learning to accommodate the growing number of enrolled students and adequately trained instructors who are available to teach on a regular basis.

Sirleaf’s clear vision about education is still a long way from being achieved. Poverty, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy and rape are taking their toll on the lives of Liberian young women.

British Charity Save the Children reports that one in three Liberian girls will give birth before their 20th birthday – one of the highest rates of teen motherhood in the world.

A February 2012 report by the group Defence for Children International indicates that rape is the most frequently reported crime in Liberia, with girls aged 10 to 14 as the most frequent victims.

Kollie’s situation exemplifies the challenges faced by girls seeking an education. She said she got pregnant because she needed the man’s financial support.

“The man who impregnated me was only helping me,” she said. Now in an ironic turn of events, because she is carrying his baby, Kollie can no longer benefit from the school fees the father of her child gave her. Private school tuition fees cost about 7,000 Liberian dollars or 92 dollars; the monthly salary of a Liberian Civil servant.

Rape and sex for grades are not uncommon here. A study by Save the Children found that as many as four out of five schoolgirls in war-scarred Liberia resorted to having sex for cash so they could pay for their education.

Another 2011 survey by Action Aid Liberia entitled “Women and the City” found that transactional sex or “sex for grades” is a major problem across three top universities in Monrovia, with many female students having encountered some form of harassment from male tutors.

As Kollie continued to pound the cassava leaves under the breezy shades of mango trees in her yard, she says she would never compromise herself sexually just to guarantee she remained in school.

“Me, I don’t have any one to go and beg for me or tell the authorities here’s something for you,” she said. She recalled how nine female students became pregnant last year but some of them were not expelled.

“I don’t know what they pass through to remain in school last year,” she said, looking distressed.

When asked about this, Jutee insisted that the students were only pardoned because they were graduating seniors.

Founder of the Liberia Women Media Action Committee, Tovian Estella Nelson, said that Kollie’s expulsion underlined the complexities of keeping Libera’s girls in school. The committee established Liberia’s first women’s radio station, the Liberia Women Democracy Radio F.M. 91.1.

“Poverty in Liberia is a chronic, deep-rooted problem confronting most grassroots families, and exposes girls to sexual violence and other risks, even in schools,” she said.

Nelson said that programmes intended to increase girl’s enrollment failed to adequately address issues surrounding retention and empowerment.

“While there is a law on girl’s education, there is no proper mechanism for effective implementation and monitoring. Also, the national budget does not respond directly to the learning needs of Liberian students from a gender-based approach, leaving girl’s education policy issues on the margin.

“Sadly many girls, like Patricia, will continue to engage in premature and unsafe sex just to survive and remain in school, until policy makers recognise and take appropriate actions to address the interaction between poverty and girl’s education.”

Meanwhile Kollie and the four other expelled grade 12 students had already paid their fees for the entire year. When they are readmitted after they have their babies, they will have to begin the year again and also, more critically, find money to pay the school fees once more.

“I had already paid my school fees and the junior and senior prom fees,” she said.

Kollie expressed disappointment that school officials took a long time to expel them. According to her, the administration was aware she and other girls were already pregnant, yet allowed them to clear all their financial obligations and then expelled them, just weeks before the end of the academic year on Jun. 30.

Jutee claimed he was simply following the rules of the school’s handbook, and insisted the girls were not being punished for getting pregnant.

But regardless next year the girls will have to source new funding to cover the same fees they already paid this year.

Germaime Umuraza, a delegate for the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts Association at the Rio+20 conference. She co-founded the project "One Tree Per Child" in Rwanda in 2011. Credit: Busani Bafana

By Busani Bafana
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 19 2012 (IPS)

On a wall in the Rio conference centre is an unusual, brightly coloured tree. It is made of sticky notes, arranged so that the tree’s branches extend down and out. On these notes, delegates passing by the World Association of Girl Guides and Girls Scouts (WAGGGS) have been asked to write down the futures they envision.

Some of the notes mention a green future, sustainable finances, justice, more food and business and civil society partnerships. But for young girls and women, an ideal future contains the opportunity to go to school. It is this message that WAGGGS delegates bring here to the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, frequently referred to as Rio+20.

The delegates have been heard, too, at least by some young people who have pasted notes on the wall.

Brendan Schoenman, a student from Colorado in the United States, envisioned a future as a participatory world where every voice is heard. WAGGGS agrees.

“A degraded environment stands in the way of girls getting an education,” Germaime Umuraza, part of the WAGGGS delegation, told TerraViva. “I feel a heavy responsibility to be in Brazil as a voice for millions of girls who could not be here to speak for themselves about the importance of education, because when the environment suffers, girls and young women are affected.”

In her home country of Rwanda, for example, soil erosion affects agriculture and the availability of forest products such as timber and firewood, Umuraza said. A shortage of firewood means that the young women who collect it for cooking are often forced to spend more time searching for firewood and less time on schooling.

In an effort to combat erosion, Umuraza and a group of 50 other young women decided to take action, starting the “One Tree Per Child” project in Kigali in 2011. They bought and distributed seeds to students in primary schools as part of a reforestation project. Just over 1000 trees have been planted. For Umuraka, who is studying to be a civil engineer, this particular initiative is an opportunity to teach young people about conservation.

Grace Olarubofin, another WAGGGS delegate who is from Nigeria and is the state commissioner for the association in Plateau State, has started a project to train young girls in vocational skills such as sewing, farming, animal husbandry and baking. 200 young women who have no formal education have benefited from the program.

But WAGGGS has also embraced the idea of informal education on a larger scale and in a more abstract way. “WAGGGS is promoting informal education,” Umuraka said. “Informal education has been recognised in the text of the Rio negotiations, our voice has been heard and our lobbying has paid off.”

“Rio+20 is an important platform to give a voice to environment issues that affect girls,” said Olarubofin. “Girls are more affected by the environment more than boys. For example, in the Northern State, when a girl is 18, they have to marry and will not go to school. That is why we have decided to teach them self-help skills so that they can look after themselves.”

Founder of the Energia International Network in Zimbabwe, Sheila Oparaocha believes environmental degradation and unsustainable use of environmental resources have a major impact on the lives of women who depend on it for food, water and energy.

“When it comes to managing energy, girls and young women have to look for firewood for cooking,” Oparaocha told TerraViva. “This has a lot of implications for their educational opportunities. If they spend more than five hours collecting firewood, they have little time to go to school.”

“By solving the problems of energy access and energy efficiency we will open up education opportunities for girls and young women.”