Girls' Education

INTO Giving is standing up for girls' education through the Wulugu Project in Ghana

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INTO Giving is standing up for girls' education in the developing world through the Wulugu Project in Ghana, with £19,735 (US $25,300) of support over 2016-2019.

In 2016. INTO Giving completely refurbished the teachers' quarters at the Bawina Primary School. Having safe, welcoming accommodation for women teachers at the school means teachers stay at the school. This was essential work, as otherwise the teachers wouldn’t feel safe or appreciated and, quite simply, wouldn’t stay. Meaning, in turn, that girls wouldn’t have teachers and leave school.

In 2017, we refurbished Bawina Primary's sister school, the Tarabiat Primary School. The Tarabiat School, open since 2003, had fallen into great disrepair, owing to weather and termite damage. Until INTO Giving, there were no funds to repair it, and the school would either collapse or close. Without school, girls at Tarabiat faced entering the child labour market, or child marriage, or both.  

INTO Giving completely refurbished the school over the summer and autumn, including repairing the floors, walls, aprons, windows and repainting the entire building.

In 2018-19, INTO Giving is refurbishing a three-room primary school in danger of collapsing (and where parents are reluctant to send their children, given the dilapidation of the building) in Sankumpe in the Northern Region, where 180 children (50% girls) attend school. These works were completed in March 2019, and the school is now fully restored.

 

 

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT

Wulugu, a village in the far north of the Northern Region of Ghana, is extremely remote and difficult to reach by road. It's also tremendously poor: over 60% of the population live in poverty. Girls face a bleak future, and are forced to leave school and home to go and live in the Southern Region.  

There, they take menial jobs and face a lack of accommodation and food. They are far away from their families and vulnerable to human traffickers and men who offer housing, are forced into prostitution and to hand over their earnings. Many sleep on the streets. Many more contract terminal diseases and barely get back to their villages to die.

Teachers, meanwhile, assigned by the government to work in the Northern Region (an area about 27,000 square miles, thus larger than, for example, much of New England – or three times the size of Wales), often see it as a punishment. 

Teachers are expected to work without pay for considerable stretches. Food shortages are frequent, there is often no electricity, a lack of medical services, poor roads, and water comes not at all or in long-lasting and destructive floods.

Housing, too, is scarce. Women teachers assigned to the region can be forced to live with local men, taken as an extra wive and abused. Many run away. Without teachers, schools close and children lose their education. It spirals on and on and down.

THE GOOD NEWS

Refurbishment of six teachers' quarters at the Bawina Primary School was completed in autumn 2016.  Women teachers at Bawina now have have safe and welcoming accommodation, and have stayed on at the school, teaching more than 100 girls.

Girls’ education is, first and foremost, an issue of human or civil rights. It’s about equality.

But educating girls in the developing world also produces a great raft of benefits for everyone: a reduction in infant mortality rates, a lower risk of HIV/AIDS, a reduction in human trafficking, better political representation, and the fact that educated mothers are more likely to raise educated children.

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