Girl Power in Malawi

In the Kasungu district of Malawi, CARE Canada is working to keep girls safe—in school

For patricia banda, one giant leap forward began with one brave step, one average afternoon. Walking home from her school in the Kasungu district of Malawi, the 15-year-old was approached by a male teacher who began harassing her for sex. “After [he] made his love proposal to me, I thought of my dream that one day I want to become a teacher,” she says. Then she remembered what she had learned a few weeks earlier at a seminar organized by a local CARE Canada project. “I thought of the importance of school to the girl child, the dangers of teenage pregnancies, making the right choices and being assertive.”

A wave of confidence came over her and she boldly declined the teacher’s advances.

For Patricia, like many African girls, learning to assert yourself takes practice—something CARE Canada is giving her with its Partnership in Addressing Gender in Education (PAGE) project running in Kasungu since 2007. In this rural area of Malawi, a southern African country where tobacco farming, a national industry, is an enticement over education, PAGE is trying to keep girls in school and teach them to stand up for themselves in the face of oppression and abuse. Working with teachers, government officials, parents and local ‘traditional leaders,’ the project organizes activities like discussion forums, student clubs and teacher workshops, and is tackling head-on the issue of violence against girls, or gender-based violence (GBV)—a pervasive problem in the developing world, and especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

GBV is sexual, verbal, social and psychological in nature, says Valerie Machakaire of CARE, and “is intended to create a submissive, voiceless girl.” In Africa, girls are bullied and abused walking to or from school (usually a great distance); the abuse is often perpetrated by teachers who threaten to fail them if they don’t acquiesce to sex. Parents often collude with teachers in hopes “the affair” will lead to marriage, the Women and Law in Southern Africa Research and Educational Trust (WLSA) reported in 2007; and as female teachers remain rare here, girls “have no one to protect them in school,” says Anderson Kumpolota, project coordinator for PAGE in Kasungu. Gender-based violence is a big reason many girls in Africa drop out so early in life.

CARE’s effort in Malawi is right in line with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Among seven other objectives, they aim to cut global poverty rates in half, largely by setting development targets all countries are to meet by the year 2015. Another goal is to achieve universal primary education so that every child, boy or girl, will be able to attend school.

How important is education to female empowerment in Africa—where poverty, food security, health and violence all compete for their energies? Extremely, according to the Africa Women’s Forum, which bluntly told the UN last September that “post-primary education has the greatest impact on women’s empowerment.” Yet, only 23 percent of girls in sub-Saharan Africa go beyond primary school. In Malawi, says the WLSA, the number is slightly better at 28 percent, but girls here still only make up about 26 percent of the post-secondary school population.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 11:41 am and is filed under Travel Cares. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.