Educating Girls

Educating children is a major factor in raising standards of living around the world and returns for educating girls are especially significant. Women with a primary or secondary school education have lower maternal and infant mortality rates. Their incomes are higher which is good for their children because studies have shown that resources that women control are directed more to helping the family than are the resources that men control. When women are educated, they are more likely to invest in their own children’s health and education. Girls and women who have an education are more likely to stand up for themselves and take control of their lives and are less likely to have HIV/AIDS, for example.

In this context, it was touching to hear about girls from secondary schools in Muheza District in northeastern Tanzania appealing to the government to build a boarding school for them. They would rather be in boarding schools than live in their homes and villages, they said, because they were given little time to study at home and sometimes they faced pressure from male teachers in their day schools.

These are girls who have passed the exam to enter secondary school (grades 8 through 12), a remarkable feat considering that local primary schools often lack teachers and materials for entire areas of study. Primary school students sometimes are offered no instruction in math and other subjects for several years. Following the seventh grade then, they take a national test which covers all subjects, even the areas in which they have had no classroom instruction. The relative few who pass this test go on to secondary schools and it is girls in this category who are imploring the government to build another boarding school in their area.

It’s not hard to see why these bright girls want to leave their villages and homes to stay for months on end at remote secondary boarding schools renown for rules and discipline. We just want to study, they said, and it’s impossible to do that when family or relatives insist that we carry water, wash clothes, prepare food, and help in the family gardens from the time we get home until it is dark and the family is ready for bed. “I live with my aunt,” one said, “and she is very strict about house chores and makes sure I’m the one in charge at home after school.”

Moreover, in day schools, the line between the haves and the have-nots is stark. Sometimes the students are divided between those who can afford lunch and those who cannot. It’s not a “healthy situation,” one teacher said regretfully, “to see one student having something to eat while the others cannot.” So, they divide the students so that hungry students can’t see the others eating. In government-run boarding schools, there’s a better solution: everybody eats together in the cafeteria and the chores that students have to do allow them enough time to study every day.

In addition, the students said that girls’ boarding schools, where women fill more administrative roles, offer protection against predatory teachers. Sometimes male teachers in their local schools harass them, the girls said, and they were afraid to report it because the teacher would face no consequences and might flunk them. One girl was afraid to report a teacher “who often punishes her for making the slightest mistake after a failed attempt to score with her.” The irony of this is that a female student who becomes pregnant is automatically expelled from Tanzania’s schools.

Good for these girls. With the help of sympathetic teachers they got their story into the national papers here, no small feat given that they are rural girls in a remote area. Their region has only one boarding school for girls which is a pittance compared to what is needed.

I once visited the dormitory of a girls’ boarding school in Tanzania. The room was large and filled with bunk beds with a narrow space between them. The only personal space for each girl was the area on top of her single bunk bed. For most of them, I’m sure, it was the most personal space they had ever had in their fifteen years of living. It almost broke my heart to see how carefully each of them arranged that precious space. Each bed was neatly made and on top of each thin bedspread were keepsakes and mementos: a letter, a card, a book, a few hand-sewn crafts, a notepad and pen. That’s another reason a girl might want to go to a boarding school; a chance to have even a very small piece of a room of her own.