For many girls in Senegal, going to school is often a short-lived experience that gets replaced with doing chores and taking care of siblings. 

By Kelly Di Domenico

Mornings in Dakar are characterized by the rhythmic melody of straw brooms beating against tiled doorsteps. Back and forth, the little brooms sweep away the sandy tracks of people’s comings and goings from the previous day. The musicians of this domestic tune are almost always girls, some as young as 10. This is just the beginning of their day, in the capital city of Senegal in Western Africa. 

Next, they will lug buckets of sudsy water to clean the tiles, then scrub and rinse a family’s dirty clothes before peeling vegetables for the day’s lunch. 

Whether a Senegalese girl lives in the city or a rural area, her daily routine of chores often pushes education to the sidelines. While Canadian children are attending school and pursuing studies that will one day allow them to work, young people in Africa face a far different future.

As I discovered last year during an eight-month internship with the United Nations, educating African children is key to eradicating poverty, but it is also fraught with difficulties, particularly when it comes to girls.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 76 per cent of children are enrolled in elementary school. However, less than half of them will actually complete primary school. And the statistics for girls and women are even worse, with only 64 per cent of young girls enrolled in school and a female literacy rate of 20 per cent. 

The Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) is a grassroots, non-governmental organization that tries to sensitize parents to the benefits of girls’ education and provide incentives such as scholarships and school supplies. They go door-to-door, meeting with parents to get their message across. But pushing back is the heavy weight of tradition and poverty. 

“Parents are ignorant of the importance of education,” explains Anta Fall Basse Konte of FAWE who is also a teacher at a local high school. Girls often drop-out of school because they have no role models, so they don’t see the point of education. 

There are also economic issues, Konte points out. Many parents struggle to pay registration fees that amount to just over $10 or to buy supplies like notebooks and pens. When parents can afford to school a child, they frequently show a preference for sending their sons. Girls are often needed at home to help with younger siblings while their mothers go sell at the markets. Sometimes, the girls are sent out to work too. 

Few girls attend high school
If girls attend school, the likelihood that they will be plucked from the classroom only increases as they get older. The enrolment rate for girls in secondary school in Senegal is only 13 per cent. Many parents fear that their daughters will become promiscuous if they stay in school where they will study side-by-side with young men. 

“Parents are very concerned that their daughters will become sexually active. If they become pregnant [out of wedlock] it’s shameful, so parents try to marry their daughters young,” Konte says, adding that girls are sometimes forced into marriage as young as 12.

The difficulty of educating young women hit home when I visited a rural village in the central part of Senegal. The women and girls could only speak their native dialect, not French, which is taught in school. 

A 20-year-old woman, Kewe Thiam, offered to translate for me. I asked why she alone could speak French. She told me that she had been able to finish high school, while her friends spent their days helping with chores, fetching water from the well and watching over the younger children. Kewe considered herself lucky. She loved learning and had managed to convince her parents that education was important. 

She said that her father and his four wives had to pool their money so she could complete her studies. Since graduating, she has been attending accounting classes and hopes to work in a bank, which will allow her to help her family out financially. 

But it is not just economics that make education important. Standing next to Kewe, I noticed how the other girls huddled around her, peering over her shoulder at me and asking Kewe to translate what I was saying. She was their link to an outside world they had rarely seen, or imagined, but through her they could begin to dream about new possibilities. Perhaps through this young woman, others would see the benefits education could bring. 

How Montrealers can help 

The enormous challenge of eradicating poverty can make it hard to know what we Montrealers can do. One way is to support non-profit organizations that focus on education. The holiday season could be a good time to talk your children about how fortunate they are and how we can help those with fewer options.

Unicef Canada has made girls’ education a priority and provides funding for various initiatives to help young women receive an education.
www.unicef.ca

Aide et Action is based in France but it is still possible to make a contribution to their efforts, which are solely aimed at education. Through the organization, you can also sponsor a child’s education.
www.aide-et-action.org

World Vision Canada also has a child sponsorship program. You can select the country of the child you would like to sponsor and can specify if you would like the child to be school-aged.
www.worldvision.ca

Education Without Borders is a small, Vancouver-based non-profit organization that works towards providing educational opportunities, especially through raising funds to build learning facilities.
www.educationwithoutborders.ca