“Every girl no matter where she lives deserves the opportunity to develop the promise inside of her.” – Michelle Obama.
Education is very crucial to nation-building. Quality education gives individuals a wider scope to life and their person, and in the long run encourages innate creativity. Connie Loo once said, “Education is an investment essential to empowering individuals to reach their full potentials and make their own positive impact in the world”. For any country to progress, there is a need for investment in human capital, because a knowledgeable workforce helps to increase productivity.
One objective of the FAME club is to improve the capacity of all our beneficiaries including female children, who are often neglected in society. During the FAME club session, we teach our beneficiaries to look inward and utilize their innate creativity to provide solutions to problems in their environment like poor access to education for the girl child. In one of our sessions, it was interesting to see that when the case of Malala, a Pakistan girl who challenged the system so girls can go to school in her country was mentioned, one of our female beneficiaries was so moved by it. She said “I can’t believe a community exists that won’t let girls go to school. I promise to use my gifts and resources to speak up for change in my own community.”
The Nigerian society is often rigged against female children, limiting their potential. This reality has translated to a half-baked country where half of the citizens are unable to fully contribute their quotas to the development of the country. This calls for a critical need: the girl child education. Girl-child education is a catch-all term for a complex set of issues and debates surrounding primary education, secondary, tertiary and health education in particular for girls and women.
The girl child education is central to improving the country`s dismal development situation. It is also a powerful equalizer. Denying the girl-child access to education implies making her a dysfunctional member of the society, preventing her from contributing to the nation’s growth- and on an individual level, prevents her from reaching the point of self-discovery.
We live in a society that for decades, has determined how a person should live, to gain validation and thus has limited its members from realizing their true identity. Society deems it fit for the girl-child to live in the shadows, and for women to excel as long as it does not intimidate a man. For so long, the girl child has been made to see marriage as a definition of success and to believe her value lies in the kitchen, without the freedom to be her fullest self.
Due to this, the girl child is usually deprived of the learning experience. Statistics show that many girls are not enrolled in school. According to the United Nations Department of Economics and Social Affairs, “Girls face more barriers than boys at the primary level. Globally, around 5.5 million more girls than boys of primary school age were out of school in 2018. The disadvantage girls face is more prominent in sub-Saharan Africa, where there were 128 girls for every 100 boys out of primary school that year.”
Awareness has been made in recent years and we have had exemplary women like Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (Director-General of World Trade Organization), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (a Nigerian writer), who though were persistently underestimated by the society, have broken the stereotypes and soared on eagle’s wings while proving to the world that the girl child can be an embodiment of value, purpose and greatness. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once said, “We teach girls to move into shapes to make themselves likeable, to think about what other people think about them. It’s so important to teach a child, particularly a girl, that your job is not to be likeable, your job is to be your fullest self.”
At FAME, we believe that everyone is deserving of education irrespective of gender. Over the past 4 years, the FAME Foundation has helped thousands of girls find their true identity, purpose and take the lead. We have equipped girls with skills to make them stand out and stand tall in a society structured to limit them, to dream beyond what they see and create a future full of possibilities. This is why our beneficiaries like Abigail, Gladys, Aisha can dream and aspire to be pacesetters in their fields. We are dedicated to bringing quality education to not only boys but also girls because the common problems of the world are not gender-specific; they affect all and sundry.
You can help us reach over a thousand girls this year by partnering with us today. Together, we can make the world a better and inclusive place!
