Press Centre 2006/07/13 (2): Girls’ Education

Girls at the heart of a global campaign

Best friends Nergiz (12) and Hanım (13) have come to school to meet us, willingly interrupting their summer break. To the outsider, the empty corridors and classrooms may seem ordinary and charmless. But for two girls from Van, in mountainous Eastern Turkey, they are the scene of fairy tales and a source of happiness and hope.

School is great if you ask me, says Nergiz. When a person comes to school, she learns about everything and she has friends.

Two years ago, neither girl was expecting to get an education. Like many others in the region, their families did not bother sending them to school. We are not very well off and I used to help in the home, recalls Nergiz. My big brother said girls don’t go to school, adds Hanım, who has ten brothers and sisters.

Opportunity knocked in the form of a visit from trained volunteers working for the girls’ education campaign Haydi Kızlar Okula! which was launched in Van and nine other disadvantaged provinces in 2003, and which has since spread throughout the country. The campaign is led by the Ministry of National Education (MONE) in cooperation with other government agencies, UNICEF, private donors and non-governmental organisations. The European Union (EU) and the World Bank also have initiatives in support of girls’ education. In Van, 14,000 girls have so far been enrolled who would otherwise have been out of school. As a result, the difference between numbers of boys and numbers of girls in primary education have been reduced by 26% since the beginning of the Haydi Kızlar Okula! campaign.

Face to face

Amid widespread publicity, the campaign enlisted the support of local government officials, village headmen and Muslim clerics. New schools and classrooms have been built, including boarding schools for children in far-flung rural areas. Conditional cash transfers have been made to poor families who send their children to school. In some cases, transport, educational materials and stationery have been provided free of charge. A catch-up curriculum is being developed for children who are approaching their teens without ever having been to school or who have dropped out.

Central to the campaign’s success is the face-to-face persuasion of unwilling fathers. For this purpose, some 2,700 trained civil servants (teachers, school principals, imams, muhtars etc …) and volunteers have repeatedly visited over 700 settlements in the province of Van alone. They have endless anecdotes to relate: the opponents of girls’ education who became its greatest champions; the entire village that registered for school in a single day; the girls who had already learned to read and write by themselves with the aid of newspapers and television.

Getting girls into school is not only of benefit to the girls concerned. It means that future generations will grow up in a more equal - and healthier - social environment. There is a strong correlation between the educational level of mothers and child health indicators. Strikingly, national survey figures suggest that infant mortality among children of mothers with no education is twice as high as it is among children of mothers who have benefited from at least five years of basic education, and three times as high as it is among children of mothers who have attended school for eight years or more.

Happy ever after?

I like reading stories best, says Nergiz. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is her favourite. But too many of Turkey’s Cinderellas are still waiting to be invited to the ball. Hundreds of thousands of children of primary school age, mainly girls, are thought to remain out of school. Most are simply never enrolled; others drop out without completing the eight-year primary curriculum.

Fathers and traditional community leaders resist sending their girls to school for fear of losing the absolute power which they have hitherto enjoyed within their own clans and families. Not all are equally well disposed towards cooperation with the government. Rural families are also frequently unwilling to let their daughters mix with boys on school buses. In rural and urban settings alike, poverty often obliges small children to work within or outside the home when they should be attending school. Since paid female employment is low outside agriculture, even public officials are not always fully cognisant of the importance of educating girls. To meet these challenges, human and physical resources need to be increased, procedures streamlined and statistics improved.

Millennium Development Goals

For us it’s all part of a world-wide campaign to reduce disparities and achieve the Millennium Development Goals, declares UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Kul Gautam.

The campaign shows what can be done. We want to see Turkey taking a leadership role that we can cite elsewhere … Turkey is already a leader in many respects but with more effort it could be exemplary.

Previous page  |  Next page

ARCHIVE

Search UNICEF Turkey
   

• Advanced Search

 * How to use RSS …