From Sola Ojo, Kaduna
The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) sponsored Partnership to Engage, Reform and Learn (PERL), a governance programme in collaboration with Kaduna Basic Education Accountability Mechanism, Jalad Media Concept and Kaduna-based journalists are now in synergy to break some identified barriers to girls education in the state.
The United Kingdom through its Official Development Assistance (ODA) said it is working towards ensuring that the UK contributes to the global commitment to get 40 million girls into education and 20 million more girls reading by age of ten by 2030.
This UK’s target is in line with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of achieving inclusive and quality education for all reaffirms the belief that education is one of the most powerful and proven vehicles for sustainable development. This goal ensures that all girls and boys complete primary and secondary schools by 2030. It also aims to provide equal access to affordable vocational training, eliminate gender and wealth disparities and achieve universal access to a quality higher education
Addressing journalists at a two-day strategic session designed to deepen the conversation and increase awareness on girls education, holding in Zaria, Kaduna State, co-chair, Open Government Partnership (OGP), Citizens arm, Hadiza Umar, urged the participants to use their various platforms to ensure stakeholders play their roles effectively in such a way that more girls are not just enrolled but supported to stay in classrooms to finish their primary and junior secondary education.
According to her, ‘girls education is very important to us in Kaduna State and we know each of us has been doing one thing or the other in the past.
‘With this engagement, we want to move together as a team to see how we can collectively break the identified barriers to the education of girls in the state.
‘At the end, we will evaluate what we have been doing, what to do differently as media practitioners, what are the challenges and how to mitigate these challenges to ensure we have 40 million girls in school and 20 million of them being able to read and write seamlessly,’ she added.
State Partnership Facilitator, PERL, Istifanus Akau, said though the Kaduna State Government has been doing a lot of reforms in the education sector, media need to lead discussions around these reforms to bring both the demand and supply sides together to remove or lower the identified barriers.
‘The Kaduna State Government has a high-level commitment in terms of policy reforms in the state with a specific policy called inclusive education policy.
‘These policy reforms are also backed with a budget, receiving the highest budgetary provision since 2017. To us, any policy without budgets provision is not a good policy.
‘For example, the second chance education that aims at providing further studying opportunities for girls that dropped out of school due to domestic demands especially early marriage. So, media need to be on top of this discussion so that citizens are aware of them and take action in the overall interest of all,’ he said.
Some of the barriers presented and discussed at the strategic session with media practitioners are security, socio-cultural, economic, infrastructure and WASH as well as access to educational facilities.
The security barriers include but are not limited to banditry, engagement of any professional as school security, lack of perimeter fences in rural and semi-urban settings and communal violence.
Socio-cultural barrier especially early marriage has shown that girls who are forced into marriage are likely to drop out of school through Kaduna State Government has a second chance programme for girls in this category, but, the number of them who return to classrooms is low due to poor awareness.
Economic barrier especially the high poverty rate among rural and semi-urban dwellers is leading to child labour, street hawking and poor skill development for girls among others.
Poor infrastructural development and WASH barrier especially insufficient toilet facilities in some schools, weak hygiene supplies for girls during menstruation, on several occasions discourage girls’ willingness to acquire education.
Access barriers such as the weak implementation of policies and budgets, paucity of qualified teachers, change of location or relocation of parents, weak involvement of beneficiaries and state-level accountability mechanism (SLAM) in some of the reforms are lapses to be addressed.