Press Centre 2005/04/26: Girls’ Education

They won’t need to be pushed anymore …

Lynn Levine

Feyat, a day labourer in Turkey who moved to Aydın from Ağrı ten years ago is struggling to feed his wife and seven children. His eldest daughter, fourteen-year-old Feray, is the only one of the girls attending school but she will have nowhere to go at the end of term since it is the last year of the compulsory period of education. Only one son has completed primary school, while a second will probably not return after his third year.

The reason, Feyat says, is that the children’s income, earned mostly by picking cotton, is necessary for the family’s very survival.

His concerns were reaffirmed when he sought advice from the school principal: Feyat just didn’t make enough money to support his family and school was an unaffordable luxury. Apparently the principal was unaware of the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) scheme, a government programme aimed at the poorest families as an incentive for sending their children to school.

Sabihe Hanım’s family live in a crumbling whitewashed cement cube-house in the village of Ovaeymir, one of the poorest districts in the province of Aydın. Asked why none of her five daughters were going to school, she gave a series of knee-jerk responses -- as an immigrant from the southeastern town of Bitlis, she does not speak Turkish.

According to Sabihe, her husband who works in construction (when there is work) does not have the money to pay for additional school expenses. When told that financial help in the form of CCT was available, she said that her family did not want to have contact with any official government institutions.

Özlem, a child of migrant parents from Mus and now living in Manisa, has never been to school.

Her mother, who accompanied her to school for a UNICEF field visit at the request of the school principal, says that Özlem is too young to attend. When reminded that the age for compulsory attendance is six, the mother admitted that they were too poor to send their children to school.

The overall impression one gets from these personal accounts is that money is the main obstacle. The reality, however, is much more complex.

Although money is definitely a concern for these families, in Feyat’s case, their guest livingroom has three modest but comfortable sofas with bright new paisley covers and they also own a television set. While Sabihe’s desire to maintain a low profile is understandable given the hardships of having lived through the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) insurgency, the family house stands incongruously in front of a schoolyard. The fact that all of her sons attend school conkradicts both her arguments. As for Özlem’s situation, her mother finally admitted that her husband would not let their children go to school and she confessed that as a child herself, even her parents pulled her oft of the second grade.

So the question remains: why don’t these families send the girls, and for that matter the boys, to school?

While the obstacles to girls’ education in Turkey are many and complex, other issues relating to tradition seem to provide the common denominator. In traditional Turkish families, parents as well as influential grandparents simply do not see any added value in educating a child. And if they see no benefit in sending their sons to school, they most certainly see less value in enrolling their daughters.

Similarly, in a culture where individual status is derived through obedience to a parent or family elder, school is viewed as an unnecessary luxury and a distraction from the more important familial and community processes.

A second obstacle to girls’ education is the imposition of marriage. In Turkey’s traditional societies, the primary responsibilities of a married girl are to take care of her husband, attend to domestic needs and to bear and raise children. She must also work to provide income for the household.

Because of these traditional priorities, it is rare if not completely unlikely for a girl to begin, let alone continue, her education.

The lamentable practice of child marriage serves to exacerbate the entrenched roles ascribed to girls and women that promote female illiteracy.

The concept of females as custodians of the family honour presents one of the more intractable barriers to girls’ education in Turkey, resulting in their being sequestered within the confines of the household. A less stringent application of this cultural phenomenon is to permit public interaction only under the strictest conditions involving supervision, close proximity to the home and appropriately modest clothing.

Whereas a girl’s honour is in jeopardy in an integrated environment such as a school bus or a co-educational classroom, conservative parents might allow their daughter to attend a school near the family home so that they are able to maintain a degree of control. They are also less likely to accede to schooling when it would require commuting across long distances.

Parental fears for their daughter’s vulnerability are greater when the only option to a scarcity of schools would be to send their girls to boarding school. But even local schools have the potential to fall short for many parents -- particularly when they lack segregated classrooms, proper supervision and toilet facilities.

One of the main issues related to tradition, a hot-button issue in Turkey, is the wearing of the headscarf. For conservative families in favour of educating a daughter, this could very well be the pivotal issue -- no headscarf, no school.

But in Turkey’s strictly secular society, it is illegal to wear a headscarf ih public institutions, including schools. So there is a high dropout rate among girls nearing the age of puberty when failure to wear a headscarf could result in the apparent loss of family honour.

Haydi Kızlar Okula! the girls’ education campaign launched by the Ministry of National Education (MONE) and UNICEF in 2003 responds to shared objectives of Education for All (EFA) and the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) that emphasise the fundamental importance of girls’ education and gender equality.

By targeting the most intractable families, located primarily in the southern and southeastern provinces, Haydi Kızlar Okula! aims to close the gender gap in primary education by September 2005.

The 2004-2005 phase of the campaign emphasises the grassroots approach whereby volunteers are going from door to door in order to address the specific concerns of parents and to persuade them of the benefits of educating their children. In August 2004, UNICEF trained and deployed nurses, midwives, social workers and other volunteers armed with ‘blue books’ full of counter arguments to the traditional objections for not enrolling girls at school. Volunteers would also discuss the availability of the CCT monthly stipend and the benefits of educating girls, including better family nutrition, lower infant mortality rates, higher potential family income and a more significant contribution to the household and the community at large.

The most direct approach, employed in the province of Şanlıurfa and elsewhere is that eight years of schooling is compulsory -- otherwise you are breaking the law.

In the second half of 2003, similar mobilisations succeeded in enrolling 40,000 girls. By the end of the campaign, MONE and UNICEF expect that 600,000 girls will have enrolled at that the gender gap in primary education in Turkey will have been closed.

While it is too early to report statistically on the success of the campaign, the MONE and UNICEF joint initiative has taken significant strides forward. In the province of Bingöl, 25 teachers, forfeited their summer vacation to travel around 72 villages using vehicles provided by the Governor’s office. They had significant success when 400 children, three fourths of them girls donned their uniforms and schoolbags and went to school in September.

The success of advocacy is less easy to measure. At the Girls’ Education Campaign Forum in İzmir in August 2004, Governor Yusuf Ziya Göksü spoke of declaring a state of emergency to target the children who are out of school in his province. He also pledged that there will be no school left out of school in İzmir.

UNICEF also successfully enlisted the support of the Head of Religious Affairs for Haydi Kızlar Okula! The head İmam preaches daily sermons reminding parents that theyy obliged as followers of İslam to see that both their girls and boys are educated.

UNICEF Country Representative, Edmond McLoughney says that:

Sending a girl to school is a way to transform society and generate progress among the poorest, most marginalised and socially excluded children and families of the country. Just getting families into the habit of sending their girls to school every morning can break the practice of generations. It may not do an awful lot to change the fundamental attitudes of the present generation of parents but if their daughters get an education, they will want to send their own daughters to school. They won’t need to be pushed anymore.

Lynn Levine worked with the UNICEF Turkey Country Office on the Haydi Kızlar Okula! campaign during the summer of 2004.

Download the latest update on Haydi Kızlar Okula! in pdf format. [PDF 404KB]

Read more about Haydi Kızlar Okula! in our Programmes section. The full text of the Provincial Governors’ Declaration in support of Haydi Kızlar Okula! can be found in the UNICEF Turkey Press Centre.

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