'If we wait for aid, we wait for ever'
01 May 2007
The Guardian
The women of the Sabiyel community crouch on matting in a hut made from clay, discussing what women the world over talk about: men. The hut is gloomy but for the haze of the burning sun outside and the technicolour patterns of the women's traditional African wraps.
Outside, the men of this northern Nigerian village community lie under trees in hot stupors, talking and chewing nicotine from bright orange kola nuts. Darting between them are busy kids: harvesting chilli peppers, frying rice cakes and then hawking them on the street, and fighting furiously over discarded plastic bottles.
In the classroom on the edge of the village, boys outnumber girls four to one. Girls in Sabiyel don't traditionally go to school.
Before they turn 10, their parents are talking about marriage. They work hard to save money to buy the luxury mattresses and dinner sets the girls must take to their husbands' homes on their wedding day. They will marry before their first period, Inshallah (god willing), say the women. It's just the way it is.
"Men make the decisions and we do all the work. This is our culture and that's the way we've been brought up; it's a way of life here," says one of the women in Hausa, via a translator.
They immediately identify their lack of education as one of the main reasons why they have no power. "If a woman is educated, the way they live with their husband will be different, and they will be able to negotiate better. There will be peace," says another woman, her eyes resting on the baby feeding at her breast.
The women are clear why girls are not educated. They talk about the religious preference to educate boys, how powerless they feel, as women, but most of all they talk about poverty. Their experiences provide many clues to this global problem, as some of the most powerful men and women in the world prepare to meet tomorrow to decide their children's fate.
Gordon Brown is due to represent Britain at a major donor conference to set out the final, and crucial, push to meet the Millennium Development Goals on education: the promise that every child will get a primary education by 2015. Campaigners say this is the last chance for them to come up with the goods.
Last week, the Africa Progress Panel, headed by the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, reported that the G8 countries had so far contributed only 10% of the target they committed themselves to at the Gleneagles summit in 2005, when they agreed to boost aid to $50bn a year by 2010.
To meet that goal, they cannot ignore Nigeria. It is Africa's most populous state, with 140 million people; one in five Africans comes from this sub-Saharan state. Official figures suggest there are 8.1 million primary-aged children out of school, more than in any other country in the world; 60% are girls and the biggest problems are in the impoverished Islamic north.
The struggle for universal basic education here - which faces problems ranging from the poverty of parents to the corrupt distribution of education funding - tells us something about the painstaking work taking place all over the world to meet the commitments on education, and how far places like this have still to go.
|
