Girl-Child Education

Education has been proven to contribute greatly to increased quality of life that families enjoy. In particular, an educated woman is more likely to provide better nutrition for her children, delay early marriage, ensure the education of her children and increase health outcomes both for herself and her family. Therefore, promoting girl child education is one of the single most important factors to improving the well-being of nations.

As part of our efforts to ensure that girls receive an education, the Foundation conducted advocacy sessions with major gatekeepers in communities such as traditional and religious leaders as well as parents to enlighten them on the important role of education in the life of all children in particular girls. While some success has been recorded in this regard there are still major challenges hampering increased education access for girls in many communities. RAiSE findings reveal that many parents do not want to see adolescent girls to go to school for reasons other than those religiously inclined. These include:

• Lack of adequate sanitation facilities for girls only. Many schools do not have toilets and the few that do are either untidy and or are not separated by gender. Particularly distressing for the girls is the lack of facilities to cater to their needs and privacy during menstruation. To save themselves any embarrassment, the girls prefer to stay at home and miss school during their cycle days
• Lack of water for washing up as Muslims are required to wash after they use of toilets and as a health best practice.

RAiSE has developed and utilized a context driven solutions that respond to parent’s apprehensions to girl child education. Our intervention is using a Water for Education project to link school enrollment and retention of the girl child to guarantee access to water in school premises and homes as it is mostly girls who do the water fetching chore affecting their punctuality or even attendance at all, as well as income by a value chain of incentive and empowerment.

This project is multi-faceted in that it contributes to governments’ efforts aimed at increasing school enrollment and retention for girls. As well as contribute to the mitigation of key challenges of infrastructure and facilities in schools as it guarantees sanitation and privacy needs for girls. It also addresses the endless time spent by girls and their mothers in search of water for domestic use, time would be better managed for educational resources.

Improving access to education for girls will also tackle reproductive health challenges, improve household nutrition, delay and reduce prevalence of forced and early marriages all leading to better education outcome for girls.