Helping Girls Stay in School
Education is the most powerful tool for poverty reduction, ensuring peace and stability, and advancing a people. Education has a desirable control over rural individual, family, community, and society development, leading to poverty reduction, income equity, and controlled unemployment. It plays a key role in supply, production, marketing, staff maintenance, education, health care, and governance systems in rural areas. Education functions include bringing about social change, improving individual social status and living standards, activating participation in rural and cultural development, increasing rural people’s critical ability to diagnose their needs, asserting their rights and taking greater control of decisions affecting their lives, providing skilled labor in rural areas, linking rural and urban areas.
Educating communities means developing schools and educating children and leaders. By doing so, rural communities will lead to a healthier and more sustainable future. An education system in rural communities has the opportunity to build capacity and knowledge in the rural populace, helping them to make informed decisions about their farms and to innovate in agricultural affairs.
It is important to understand the need for good quality education in rural areas, as it helps keep rural areas populated. Young people move to urban areas for better opportunities in education and employment, improved rural education is one possible strategy for keeping them in rural areas.
Quality education is a pertinent tool for enhancing quality of life, creating awareness and capability, increasing freedom, and improving overall holistic human development for the people and the World. Education is considered a vital element in the development of a society, a system, and a country. We are convinced that a well-supported, easily accessible education system is an efficient means to make people economically conscious, and thereby, make them actively participate in their economic prosperity and cultural development.
In the long term, education in a rural setting should be focused on making rural people responsible for their participation in the following elements of rural development.
We believe that no girl should miss school, just because they are on their period.
We are also training teachers to run menstrual hygiene classes, where girls are taught how to make reusable sanitary towels. In the classes, they have open discussions about periods, which is helping to reduce the stigma and makes girls feel more comfortable.
Without access to clean water, good toilets and sanitary towels, girls can miss up to a week of lessons every month when they are on their period. They fall behind in class and can be forced to drop out of school altogether.
Without desks and books, children who are in school will not be able to learn.
When classrooms don’t have enough desks, children are either forced to sit five on a bench meant for two students or sit on the floor. This can be extremely uncomfortable and distracts them from their learning. Imagine sitting on the floor, surrounded by other students, being bitten by dust mites, trying to write on your lap, and straining your neck to see the board. It’s an impossible situation.
Children also struggle without access to textbooks. In many cases, classrooms don’t have any books at all. This makes it hard to follow what the teacher is saying and means that children are far less likely to leave school knowing how to read.
More than 260 million children worldwide are out of school, yet more than half of those in education are not learning, the World Bank has warned.
“If you take the average [figures] from developing countries for which we have data, about 56% of the kids who are in school are not learning. In sub-Saharan Africa, the number is about 90%. It’s an overwhelming problem.”
The Global Partnership for Education – a multilateral organisation comprised of governments, foundations and private donors – is also expected to push poorer countries to increase their domestic education expenditure to 20% of national budget.
We’re supplying desks and books to support children with their learning. It is the first time young students have had access to age appropriate reading books, written in both English and their mother tongue. We’re also supporting teachers with training so that they can give children the best possible education.
The impact cannot be overstated – now children can learn to read, making them far more likely to complete school.
The cost of food, clothing, stationery and books means families are often unable to afford to send their children to school even if tuition is free, said Lucy Lake of the Campaign for Female Education (Camfed), a Cambridge-based organisation dedicated to the education of girls and young women in Africa.
Lake said: “The notion of free secondary education can overshadow some of the costs that are still very real for the most marginalised children – especially girls – and unless there are targeted mechanisms to ensure those needs are met, those girls will continue to be excluded from the system, or, if they are in the system, marginalised within the system.”
Children’s lack of access to school, the failure of schools to retain their students, and the “learning crisis” are key problems that the global community needs to address to meet educational targets, say campaigners. According to Unesco, 264 million children are out of school for the third year running.
“Low-income countries have made meaningful progress in ensuring primary education, but secondary education still remains out of reach for millions of children,” said Elin Martínez, children’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Supporting Parents
When parents live in poverty, their children suffer. Without a source of income, they are unable to provide vital medicine, food and clean water, or pay school fees.
Support parents
Across sub-Saharan Africa, families are living in poverty. When you are struggling to survive, education is not a priority. School fees are expensive, and so children are forced to drop out of school and earn a living. The vicious cycle continues.
We’re helping parents start their own businesses through Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs), so that they can break the cycle of poverty.
We are providing farmers and their families with the skills to grow, sell and store more food, to support their children’s education.
We’re also supporting young mums with life-changing literacy and numeracy skills, as well as access to valuable health and nutrition services, so they can help their children not just survive but succeed.
Build A School
