WUNRN
UNGEI - The United Nations Girls'
Education Initiative
Egypt
- Drive to Boost Girls’ Education: Girl-Friendly Schools
©Dana
Hazeen/IRIN
Girls in Al Gomhorieh village,
Al-Fayyoum Province, at their "girl-friendly" school.
CAIRO,
5 March 2008 (IRIN) - Sahar Zeidan Abdel Wareth, who helps her father on the
land, could not attend school until she was 12 when a “girl-friendly” school
was built near her home in Assiut Province, some 375km from Cairo.
"I have
three sisters and four brothers. My father wanted me to work with him on the
land to support the family. When the [school] facilitator told him that
education, stationery and health insurance would all be free, he agreed to send
me to school," she said.
There are
thousands of girls like Sahar in poor areas who do not attend school for
numerous reasons, including lack of nearby schools, poverty, child labour,
perceived low financial returns from education, traditional perceptions of a
girl's role in society, early marriages, and the priority given to boys’
education.
However,
thanks to a government and UN-sponsored drive to build over 1,000
“girl-friendly” schools in seven provinces (partly in response to the UN
Secretary-General's Initiative on Girls’ Education launched in October 2000),
the situation is changing.
©
Dana Hazeen/IRIN
The classroom of Al Ghabah
"girl-friendly" school in Al-Fayyoum Province.
Task
force set up
A task force
including representatives from a number of ministries was set up in 2000.
"Once the plan was ready, the government allocated 157 million Egyptian
pounds [about US$29 million] for its implementation," Moushira Khattab,
secretary-general of National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM), a
government body, told IRIN.
"NCCM
took the coordinating role between the partners that included eight UN
organisations, led by the UN Children’s Fund [UNICEF], the national task force,
a local voluntary taskforce, non-governmental organisations and the private
sector," she said.
From
2003-2007 the initiative targeted villages and hamlets in the provinces of Bani
Suef, Assiut, Al-Menia, Al-Fayyoum, Sohag, Al-Beihera and Al-Guiza, which had a
disparity between boys and girls attending school gender gap of between 5 and
15.7 percent.
The plan was
to build 1,047 “girl-friendly” schools and enrol 31,410 girls aged 6-13. About
1,063 schools have so far been built and 27,784 students enrolled. The
“girl-friendly” schools also accept boys but their number should not exceed 25
percent of classroom capacity.
Scaling up
In 2008 the
initiative started its scale-up phase.
"The
first step for us now is to cover the seven governorates, then move to other
areas. I believe by 2011 we will be able to cover them [the seven governorates]
completely, and by 2015, we hope no Egyptian girl will be out of school,”
Moushira said.
Support also
came from the private sector: A number of local and international companies
operating mainly in the construction, oil and gas industries, have built
schools in different areas.
"When
private companies came to us to contribute money, we asked them to build a
school instead, after providing them with the specifications," said
Moushira.
"We
built 125 schools in Al-Fayyoum, 38 in Al-Giza and 39 in Al-Menia,” said Salma
Zaki, project assistant at Apache, an international oil company that
participated in the initiative along with other companies, including CEMEX,
Sawiress and Al-Hamza.
“Our role
does not stop here. We pay weekly visits to the schools we built and provide
them with stationery. We take care of maintenance issues as well,” she told
IRIN.
Challenges
Ronald
Sultana, director of the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Education, who wrote a
book on the initiative for UNICEF, said there were still challenges ahead.
“As long as
a project is small, people are still very enthusiastic and ready to work
without money and with a lot of ownership and commitment. As the project goes
now to scale, I wonder if they will keep the spirit,” he told IRIN.
Sultana said
that in some cases schools were built too fast before local communities had
fully accepted girls’ education. “Some of the people started sleeping at the
schools and using the toilets. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it means
that people feel comfortable in these buildings, but this is not the purpose
for which the schools were built,” he said.
These
schools can be replicated in other countries, according to Malak Zaalouk,
UNICEF regional education adviser. “At first glance one might feel these
schools are needed only in countries that have a wide gender gap in education
like Yemen or Sudan. However, there are pockets of poverty where girls are
denied their right to go to school even in countries where the gender gap is
narrow,” she said.
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