Showcasing girl-child education
In northern Nigeria, where the least number of girls go to school, individuals and organisations speak, for or act, to make a difference.
From Onimisi Alao, Jos
Dr Maryam will see you when she has answered the patient with her right now,” the hospital record clerk told Hajiya Maimuna Sani whose reference and record card the clerk had just paired and placed before Maryam Bello, a young female medical doctor engaged newly by the hospital.
Hajiya Maimuna, an old patient of the hospital, had never been attended to by any female doctor in the four years that she had been a regular outpatient there and was curious to see just what Dr Maryam looked like.
In the North where lots of men typically prefer female doctors to attend to their wives, female doctors are unfortunately few compared with their male counterparts. And this has been attributed, in part, to a gender disparity in education delivery that favours the boys.
The Chief of Nigeria’s ‘D’ Field Office of UNICEF, Dr Abdulahi Kaikai, while speaking at an advocacy meeting in Jos, Plateau State capital, recently, said education policy makers in northern states need to use their vantage offices to promote girl-child education and bridge existing gender gaps.
Addressing education managers, comprising commissioners from ministries of education and finance as well as chief executives of relevant agencies and departments who attended the meeting from Bauchi State, Kaikai said: “We need urgent actions to address the situation (gender inequality in education attainment) and our distinguished policy makers have a major role to play. You are in strategic positions to influence policy formulation and allocation of government resources in favour of girls.”
The girl-child education highlevel advocacy meeting in Jos for Bauchi State policy makers on girls’ education was meant essentially to address issues regarding Girls’ Education Project and to identify mechanisms to remove bottlenecks to girls’ education.
First launched in 2004, the programme is a joint undertaking by the Federal Government of Nigeria, the Department of International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom, as well as UNICEF, to address the gender disparity against girls.
The first phase of the programme spanned 2005-2008 and covered six states of Bauchi, Borno, Jigawa, Katsina, Niger and Sokoto and helped 423,000 girls into primary schools.
The programme is being implemented in five states: Bauchi, Katsina, Niger, Sokoto and Zamfara and is running from 2012 to 2020 with expectation that respective state governments would be cosponsors.
Northern states, eight in particular, have Nigeria’s worst girlchild education profile. A group of non-governmental organisations: Africa Health, Human and Social Development Information Service (Afri-Dev. Info); African Coalition on Maternal Newborn & Child Health, and Pan African Campaign Against Forced Marriage of Under Age Children which did a research on the situation listed the eight states as Bauchi, Gombe, Jigawa, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto, Yobe, and Zamfara.
The eight states, the report of the research indicates, project statistics which could only end up in high female illiteracy level. The states, for effect, have Nigeria’s highest adolescent girl marriage, highest under-15 child bearing rate, and highest risk of maternal injury and death.
Low girl education and similar poor indices are, however, not restricted to the north. The report which adds this, mentions Ebonyi State in the South-east, for instance, as being at number 12 in the list of states with the highest percentage of girl-children not in secondary school. For number of adolescent girls in marriage, Bayelsa State came 13th, doing worse in that wise than Adamawa, Benue, Taraba and Nasarawa states. In the indicator of females aged 20 to 24 years who gave birth before age of 18 years, Bayelsa again placed 13th. In that category, Adamawa, Taraba, and Niger states scored better than Delta, Rivers, and, Anambra states, the report shows.
Mr. Rotimi Sankore, Lead Advocate for the report’s publishers, said of the report: “These are the kinds of problems that the Governors’ Forum should be giving its most urgent attention to, as this poor educational attainment for girls is not a regional or religious issue, but a national problem.”
Painting the situation of girl education in the north in a different colour the other day, a leading light from the region and Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, said 93 percent of female children in the region lacked secondary education.
Specifying Jigawa State, where he said school completion rate among females was as low as seven percent, Sanusi said: “In the North-west, 70 percent of women between 20 and 29 are unable to read, compared to 9.7 per cent in the South-west. Only three per cent of females complete secondary education in the Northern zone.”
And he asked this rhetorical question: “How do you build the country when 93 percent of the girls in the most populous region of the country do not complete secondary schools?”
Another northern leader and former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Malam Nasir el-Rufai, brought out some factors, some of them cultural and attitudinal, which he argued, count greatly against girl-child education, chief among which he mentioned is the case of the many fathers not considering it wise to educate their female children.
The former minister said in a newspaper column of December 6, 2013: “For many in my generation from the northern part of the country, the issue of girlchild education (or lack of it) is something we have seen every day manifesting as street hawkers and child brides, and experienced in our families when our sisters do not go to school while our brothers do, and on reflection – we see half of our population being forced to live sub-optimally by not having access to education.”
He said poor girl-education is more harmful than is readily recognized, explaining, “Illiterate mothers tend to produce uneducated and vulnerable children that are willing recruits of insurgents, ethnic bigots and sundry criminals.”
While Sanusi believes women should do more to help their own gender, Nasir el-Rufai feels the womenfolk deserves equal treatment to maximize their potentials and raise the uninspiring female education status.