adminI BELIEVE every girl child should be given the opportunity to attend school and have full access to good education. Education is important for everyone, but I will mostly touch on the effects it has on the girl child. Education is especially significant for girls and women, this is true not only because education is an entry point to other opportunities, but because the educational achievements of women can have ripple effects within the family and across generations. Investing in girls’ education is one of the most effective ways to reduce poverty and I am talking from what I have seen happening around me.
I personally believe investing in secondary school education for girls yields high results and it helps boost a safer environment for girls to claim their rights and create a more sustainable economic flight path for the world. I have noticed that girls who are educated usually marry later because they spend most of their time in school as they go right through university and college education and most of them when they do marry they have smaller and healthier families.
Educated women can recognise the importance of health care and know how to seek it for themselves and their children. It helps girls and women to know their rights and to gain confidence to claim them.
It is for this reason that Boko Haram must be quaking in their boots, because we have joined the “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign which has exploded across social media, powered by a desire to reunite more than 200 kidnapped Nigerian girls with their parents as well as a strong sense of outrage.
Facebook and Twitter are buzzing in protest as people join hands in the “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign. The schoolgirls that were abducted in Nigeria are in the hands of a group which is extremely irrational and difficult to deal with and utterly merciless in the example it has shown in the past. Boko Haram is said to have admitted capturing the girls, saying they should never have been in school and should get married instead. The group has also threatened to sell the girls as “slaves”. The name Boko Haram means “Western education is forbidden” in the local Hausa language, and the group has been engaged in a violent campaign to create an Islamic state since 2009.
I believe this group has really lost it because they are depriving girls who had hope for a greater tomorrow through education, as their dreams are being shattered by selfish men who feel a woman’s place is in the kitchen and not school.
In the weeks since the kidnapping of over 200 girls in northern Nigeria, people from across the world have condemned the terrible attack. The international community is rightly offering assistance and we hope and pray the girls can be brought safely back home and their kidnappers brought to justice because it is old fashioned for someone to think that in this day girls should be forced to marry and not acquire education.
As I was doing my research I realised that there are over 14 million adolescent girls in Nigeria today, and only one in 10 finish their secondary school. In the north of the country, where Boko Haram has carried out most of its terror attacks, fewer than one in 20 girls complete school. Most are even given a “graduation” ceremony after completing the early years of secondary school and are not expected to go on to finish their education. I find it disturbing that more than half of all girls in northern Nigeria are married by the age of 16. Parents in the region keep their daughters at home rather than send them to school, partly because understandably, well only to a certain extent they fear for their children’s safety. The same fears lead parents to give their daughters to be married while they are still children in the hope that a husband will protect them. I am still yet to understand this part though but all the same I think something should be done about Boko Haram. I think marriage is far from keeping those girls safe, because child marriage can only restrict their future and even endanger them.
After these forced marriage arrangements the girls are expected to give birth within a year of their wedding, often so young that their bodies are not even ready to bear children. This is not only true in Nigeria, it is happening in some countries too though it is not always the case of forced marriage. The leading cause of death for girls age 15 to 19 across the developing world is pregnancy and childbirth.
Everyday girls around the world drop out of school, are married young, are subject to assault. Their future is lost, but this isn’t just a personal tragedy in Nigeria. It’s a generational crisis. If we cannot unleash the talent and potential of the 250 million adolescent girls living in poverty today, how will we end poverty tomorrow? Because these forced marriages cripple the brains of innocent children.
This is tragic, both for the opportunity lost and for the millions of girls who cannot exercise the most simple and basic of rights – to attain education, to choose when and who they marry, and to leave their homes without fear. It is time for the entire community to take action, not only in responding to the abductions, but also to prevent more tragedies. I read an article on Michelle Obama who posted on twitter and added her voice to the global campaign to bring home the missing Nigerian girls.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have done an amazing job of marshalling global resources for development but by not prioritising girls they missed a generational opportunity that can help deal with the current situation. As the MDGs are replaced in 2015, what follows them must put girls first in order to achieve the kind of transformational economic development that the world will need to end poverty by 2030.
I believe when a girl is able to finish her education, stay healthy, delay marriage and stay safe, she not only escapes poverty but her children in turn are more likely to be educated and healthy, and less likely to be poor. If this can happen for many girls, they not only break the intergenerational cycle of poverty for families, but also for communities and nations. Isn’t northern Nigeria missing out on the brilliance of their girls, potential scientists, engineers, artistes and musicians who do not fulfil their potential because of barriers that they cannot overcome? With the hope that the Boko Haram sees this I say: “Bring Back Our Girls”.
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