By Hindaty Traore, Girls Project Manager

One of the Girls’ Project goals is to have more girls graduate from middle school. To achieve that goal, we must first make sure that girls make the leap from 6th grade (primary school) to 7th grade (middle school). As part of our strategies to help girls make that leap, we have been talking to the families of the girls who were in the 6th grade and are now supposed to be enrolled in 7th grade in January 2021. These meetings are focused on trying to convince parents to keep girls in school, but also to see if there are any obstacles that would prevent girls from moving on to 7th grade. In December 2020, we talked with 18 families.

Each family had a different reason why they were considering removing their girls from school. One common issue is that families think that when a girl turns 15 she must be married. This belief makes it much more difficult to convince families to let their daughters continue in school, and perhaps into vocational training to get a job.

As an example of this work, we visited with Assetou Samaké’s family. Assetou is a sixth-grade girl. She is 12 years old and she lives with her parents in N’Tentou, which is home to our Trujillo Family Middle School. Born and raised in a family of farmers, she is a hard-working student who wants to become a teacher. Her favorite subject is French.

Assetou wakes up every day at 5 am to fetch water from the pump for her family. She heats up water, cleans the yard, and washes her little brother and sister before getting ready herself and heading to school.

According to Assetou, it makes her happy to do all of these chores by herself, as it is a way to get a lot of blessing from her parents. However, all she wants is to be able to finish her studies and become a great teacher like the village teacher Ms. Sanogo, because she thinks that Ms. Sanogo dresses well and speaks French all the time.

She fears her dreams will be unrealized because of her parents’ decision to send her to marriage. She would like to be independent and be a good example for the girls in her village. But according to Assetou, the girls in her family get married before graduation. She thinks her mom wants her to finish school but her father does not think so.

When we met with the families, often the women let us know that only men can answer our questions. This is because in small villages it is the fathers, the older brothers, and even younger brothers who decide what to do when it comes to planning these young girls’ lives. This is why we ask who makes the decisions within the family as soon as we arrive for our meetings, because we know that we need to convince this person. In Assetou’s case, this means we decided to go and meet her father, Chiaka Samaké.

After listening to us carefully, he told us that if Assetou wants to finish her studies, she must have good grades and prove that she cares about her studies. If she does this, then she would be an exception in the family. We wrapped up the interview with this sentence from Chiaka, "The wish of all parents is to see their children succeed but we also preserve our customs.”

When we carry out these sensitization actions with the parents of young girls, we try to stress the importance of school and work, by insisting on the fact that girls can quickly earn more than their parents earn, and increase the income of their entire family, sometimes after only a few months of vocational training after their middle school graduation.

We also talked to mothers a lot, because they are often the ones who want a different life for their daughters. They have often had to stay at home all their lives themselves, doing household chores and looking after the family, and know that the older her daughters grow, the more difficult it will be for them to find decent work.

When I look back over all of our meetings with parents this December, it emerges that there are many obstacles to the achievement of educational goals. For example, the social status of women in the community means their voices are often not heard. We noticed that women are not involved in making any decision in families, even when it comes to their own children.

However, thanks to our various interventions, we are often able to change the ideas of ​​parents positively concerning girls’ education and must keep these discussions with parents going to see change happen. For example, I am happy to announce that Assetou is going back to school when it reopens later this month! Change for the better…one girl at a time!