Northern Nigeria: Approaches to Enrolling Girls in School and Providing a Meaningful Education to Empower Change
| Authors | Type | Stream | Full Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alice Bonareri Akunga, Ian Attfield | Open call | Poverty |  en |
Nigeria is a large, complex and essentially composite country, dominated by three large ethnic communities (Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba), is predominately Islamic in the North and Christian / Animist in the South and economically dependent on oil revenues. While federal legislation supports social inclusion and gender equality, implementation of these has been weak, with more exclusionary informal norms such as ethnic bias, discrimination based on indignity, gender, disability, and age being allowed to predominate.
Aim of Research
As a pre requisite for sustainable development, it is of paramount importance to ensure that each child has access to education and actively participates to excel and explore their potentials. However, from past experiences in Nigeria, a host of factors have negated accessibility for particularly the girl child, thereby denying them opportunities to enrol and attend school. To address this gender based disparities in education, a combination of interventions has been trialled and tested; where identified as successful efforts are being made to scale them up and integrate within sustainable government systems.
Participants or Sample Strategy
Since 2005 a partnership of the Nigerian government, DFID (UK) and UNICEF through the Girls Education Project (GEP) has been operational in northern Nigerian states which are characterised by the worst disparities between boys and girls’ enrolment in primary school. Statistics indicate there is very low school enrolment rates and a major gender disparity against girls in the North West and North East zones of Nigeria. GEP seeks to bring about social and economic changes in these largely poor traditional societies that have historically discriminated against girls and women.
Key among the strategic interventions to address the gender disparity is improving the supply of quality education (provision of books and other school requirements, water and sanitation facilities etc) through development of comprehensive, well costed and gender sensitive state education sector plans within which, gender responsive interventions are adequately provided for.
Initially six Northern States were selected for inclusion in the project and within these States a sub-set of 36 Local Government Areas (districts) and 720 focal primary schools targeted with a package of interventions. This amounted to less than 10% of the total schools. In 2008 the second phase of GEP while reducing the target States to four, have scaled up a limited package of activities using both donor and government funds to promote mainstreaming of the approaches under investigation.
Methodology
In order to evaluate the impact and outcomes from the GEP initiatives, considerable effort has gone into improving government data systems (principally Education Management Information System) to track rates and patterns of school enrolment and attendance with a focus on gender disparities. In addition a randomised learning assessment of primary students in both control and target populations was also conducted.
Other findings in this paper are based upon a series of stakeholder interviews an focus group discussions conducted as part of an evaluation study and findings from review missions and project reports. In addition a Civil Society Organisation has also been involved in conducting a sample of periodic spot monitoring visits to GEP schools to identify and ground truth the impact of various project interventions and illicit community reactions
Limitations
Quantitative data systems in Nigeria are notoriously unreliable, with gaps in data and distortions sometimes introduced to seek government finance. This had made it difficult to present time series of data on girls enrolment; for several year Nigeria has released little EMIS data and HH sample data does not lend itself to comparison of small area statistics. In general qualitative findings are presented that are considered applicable to other predominately Islamic Northern Nigeria States. Approaches found to be positive will probably have broader regional significance, if local context is taken into consideration, for example around cultural and urban:rural distinctions
The results of the student learning assessment mentioned above showed generally low levels of learning, but were not conclusive in terms of impact and are not reported in this paper.
Research Findings
GEP has evolved over time to promote more effective interventions such as advocacy with traditional leaders, female teacher training and community support modalities. It also seeks to mainstream improvements into the government education systems. A national component of the programme promotes the spread of best practice and gender education policy to other States. Through these modalities; media communications and advocacy on national policy, successful interventions for girls’ education are being more widely promoted across Northern Nigeria.
The trainee teacher scholarship scheme for women from rural areas with the worst teaching staff gender imbalance is considered significant. The impact on girls’ education in particular, when rural schools start to receive a steady flow of local qualified women teachers will be large for 100,000s of primary students. The introduction of decentralised finance to schools (grants) through school – community committees is also found to be a useful modality for raising quality in schools and promoting female inclusion.
Nigeria with an additional 32 States also offers a huge potential for wider replication of these initiatives.
