Educate girls

Is it necessary to exaggerate the importance of girls’ education?

 The answer is yes, oh yes it is, and do you know why? 60% of African women did not step into a formal classroom in the early 20^th Century due to poverty and discrimination against the girl child. In those days the education of girls was considered a waste of family resources since they are bound to leave the family for their husbands’ homes. It was the boys to be educated because they were heir to the family lineage. One of the women in this statistic is my mother, Nikolina Okaru, but you know what? My mother said to herself, “yes, I did not go to school but I want all my four girls to go to school and complete their education. True to her word, she embarked on petty business in order to raise funds to implement her project.

Her first born Virginia Ezia (RIP) branched off to Teacher Training College and soon became a primary school teacher. She and her mother then joined hands to educate the rest. So here we are. Three of the girls of Madam Okaru, with a nun among them, became teachers. One, Clara Ejoru (RIP) became a nurse who after several years of quality service to the Ugandan Ministry of Health was named the best nurse in Uganda in the year 2004. This was no mean achievement. Clara would not have achieved this recognition had her education been nipped at the bud.

Well, this is what an uneducated girl could do to her children and she would have done more if she had completed a program of schooling. It is said that if you educate a man you educate an individual; but if you educate a woman you educate the whole nation. The Okaru products tell us they are educating their children.

The United Nation Convention on the rights of the child (UNCRC) has given a common international language for the children’s rights. Among the rights are the right to quality education and the right to be protected against all forms of harassment, abuse and discrimination.

Girls in many parts of Uganda in particular and Africa in general are underprivileged due to abject poverty and the related social trends. Poverty forces parents to marry off their daughters at an early age, between 13 to 17 years. The girls drop out of school and get married because the parents cannot afford to keep them at school. The situation forces some girls to look for school requirements from wrong people and in the process accept sex from the donors and get pregnant, and thus drop out of school.

They become child mothers at their parents’ homes. They depend on their parents for livelihood and so they are not able to make decisions for matters concerning themselves or their babies. The category of the poverty stricken parents, are happy to earn income from the dowry brought by girls.

That pertaining situation was not helped by the 20 years of civil war in northern Uganda which was another drawback for girls’ education as people were forced to live in camps for safety from the rebels. Many girls lost chances of accessing quality education due to insecurity in northern Uganda.

Education in other regions of Uganda was too expensive for a community that was unproductive at that time and as such parents could not afford. This situation inevitably produced illiterate women who in turn did not see any importance in quality education for their children.

This state of affairs is a vicious cycle in Africa particularly Uganda and from the aforesaid story Northern Uganda and other war zones in Africa. Uneducated mothers bring forth uneducated children particularly girl children. An uneducated woman cannot earn much because she cannot be employed with upscale companies and/or organisations because she does not have marketable skills to compete in the job market. She thus remains poor. This situation can change by improving access to quality education to this marginalized society in this region.