WUNRN
KENYA - SOMALI REFUGEE CAMP - CULTURAL PRACTICES CONTINUE & DEPRIVE GIRLS OF EDUCATION, RIGHTS
Photo: Moulid Hujale/IRIN
Only 1 in 20 girls aged 14 to 17 in Dabaab Refugee Camp
goes to school.
DADAAB, 11 April 2012 (IRIN) - A
mix of cultural practices, such as early and forced marriage, as well as child
labour, are depriving girls of education in the Dadaab refugee complex in
eastern Kenya. considered one of the largest refugee camps in the world.
Out of Dadaab’s estimated population of 463,000 mainly Somali refugees, more
than half are children under 18; of these about 38 percent attend school.
The proportion of girls in the camps’ primary and secondary schools is 38
and 27 percent, respectively, according to the UN Refugee Agency. A third of girls
aged between 5 and 13 in Dabaab go to school; for those aged 14 to 17, only one
in 20 are enrolled.
Hawa Ahmed, who arrived in Dadaab about seven months ago with her six children,
told IRIN that only her sons attend school.
Her two daughters stay at home cooking, washing utensils and fetching water.
"[These are] already enough lessons as they learn how to keep a
family," said Hawa as she plaited her daughter’s hair.
While boys are generally encouraged to attend school, barriers to girls’
education remain. A local saying among Somalis in Dadaab, for example, is `Gabar
ama gunti rageed ama god hakaga jirto’ (a girl should either be married or in
the grave).
Halima, 19, was married off to an older man in 2011 forcing her to drop out of
high school at Dadaab’s Ifo camp. The now divorced single mother of one, said:
"I am very disappointed. My life is almost destroyed. I can no longer go
back to school because I have to take care of my child; I [have] lost my
pride."
Many young girls at the camp are married off against their will to Somali men
who come back from the
Female
genital mutilation/cutting and sexual and gender violence are also a
problem, according to Faiza Dahir, an official with the gender and community
development unit of NGO CARE.
A traditional Somali justice system known as ‘maslaha’ makes it difficult to
trace the perpetrators of gender violence, "since they are protected under
the traditional council, which solves all cases and withdraws complaints to the
police."
Incentives
Meanwhile, aid agencies are coming up with incentive projects to help encourage
girls to enrol at, and stay in, school.
The UN World Food Programme, for example, is providing tokens of half a
kilogram of sugar to girls who attend 80 percent of classes every month. CARE
is also supplying adolescent girls with sanitary pads to minimize drop-outs
during menstruation.
Windle Trust
Those who make it to school in the Ifo-2 and Kambioos extension camps (opened
in 2011 to accommodate an influx of Somali refugees fleeing hunger and
violence) face congested classrooms with limited facilities, with some forced
to sit on the ground due to a lack of desks.
"We have struggled to solicit a learning space for the children and
immediately established some primary schools in the Ifo extension camp to
accommodate as many children as possible," Fanuel Rendiki, ADEO's
education coordinator in Ifo camp, told IRIN.
Aid agencies such as CARE and Save the Children have also started an
accelerated learning programme to train the refugees in basic numeracy and
literacy.
The refugee youth umbrella organization is also helping to provide stationery.
"We have distributed over 2,500 exercise books to children in Kambioos; we
are also planning to do the same in Ifo-2," Aden Tarah, a member of the
youth committee, told IRIN.
_____________________________________________________________________