AFRICANEWS

Children Rights

Tanzania/Africa

Africa wakes up to battle girl-child and women marginalisation

The girl-child often does not have access to education for a wide array of reasons. They grow up to be women who have few skills and even less confidence to pursue income-generating activities. However, plans by the Tanzania government and non-government organisations to increase girls' access to school in Tanzania and other African countries are afoot.

Tabu Nyamweko is a young woman in one of Tanzania's rural villages. Two years ago, her parents forced her out of school when she was only in her second year of secondary education. They wanted her to marry so that they could get six cows and a few thousand shillings in bride price.

She reluctantly left school only to realise that she was going to marry a man of her father's age. She protested, but when the parents insisted, she ran away from home to the city of Dar es Salaam where she is earning a living through infamous means.

There are thousands of young women like Tabu in rural and urban Tanzania, who have been denied the opportunity to get education and manage their own lives just because they are female. Some African customs and traditions classify females as second-class citizens with no right to think, decide, and manage their own lives.

However, a move by the Tanzania government to implement its Education Sector Development Programme - in which half of the three million school age children roaming city streets and rural areas will be integrated back into schools from January 2002 to 2006 - may change this bleak reality. Sixty percent of the school children are girls.

In general, the girl child and women are hit the most by poverty and marginalisation, particularly in Tanzania. No wonder delegates to the recent international conference to challenge impoverishment breathed out fire in condemning the tendency.

'Men don't allow their wives to do business and women cannot raise their voices," Verdiana Kimanya, director of Mwanza, an AMREF project, wrote in her paper to the conference. "Men have inherited the position as head of the house and therefore they assume the role of decision makers. As a result wives are dominated and not left free to decide how to run their business."

Certain traditional customs hinder the fight against poverty. In some communities, women are taught since childhood that they must please their husbands and demonstrate their dependence on their husbands, who are the breadwinners of the family.

Since the girl-child is not given an equal opportunity to get an education, there are more illiterate young women than young men in Tanzania, and therefore women have less chances of getting employment. And because women are not well educated, they fail to undertake any business to support their livelihood successfully.

Says Kimanya: "The procedures for taking credit from a bank are still a problem for various social groups and these groups lack life skills. Information on how women can organise themselves to borrow capital is not commonly known. Bank assistance and information does not reach many, especially those in rural areas and especially women."

Because they lack education, skills, and capital for running businesses, women are afraid of taking risks and are therefore unable to undertake ventures on an equal footing with men, says Kimanya.

"The most frustrating thing for women, be it workers, traders or farmers, is that they do not hold the money; the men do that," says Kimanya. As a result, some women are unable to meet the demands of their women's development groups. This discourages them from participating in these groups further.

A woman from Serengeti in the Lake Victoria Mara region, where the bride price is as high as 20 cows, says, "We are [treated] like slaves."

According to an assessment by the Jijenge UNICEF project in Mwanza, funds designated to help vulnerable groups are often misallocated. Project enquiries showed that not all persons handling poverty alleviation money were committed to poverty alleviation.

"Referrals and bureaucracy frustrated widows, orphans and the poor," says Kimanya. "Sometimes people were not aware of what the government had contributed and where they should go for service." For example, villagers asked, where does one go to find out exactly what the government is offering to help them pay school fees?

However, all of these obstacles do not necessarily mean women are in a hopeless world. Hilda Olomi, director of Asilia Fruit Products in Dar es Salaam, is one example of a woman who has succeeded in breaking gender barriers as she established a food-processing factory.

Olomi started her business under a programme of the Small Industries Development Organisation (SIDO), which in 1993 began to train women from six provinces in Tanzania in fruit and food canning technology. The Austrian government sponsored the project through the United Nations Industrial Organization (UNIDO).

Due to good progress, the project received further financial support from Denmark to extend the training to six more provinces. Altogether, 1,650 women were trained and 70 percent of these have established their own businesses as Olomi has done, and half of the group are reportedly doing well.

Olomi produces fruit wine from bananas, and she is proud of her achievement. "High ranking government officials have been attracted to visit our winery and I was more impressed when Prime Minister Frederick Sumaye tasted and liked our wine," she says.

She is now planning to go for the production of red and white wine. "When we start red wine production, vine growers in Morogoro, Dodoma, and Singida regions will find a market for their grapes." Olomi hopes to provide employment to more people as the winery grows.

Meanwhile, the government is moving ahead with its Education Sector Development Programme. Tanzania Vice President Dr. Ali Mohamed Shein told the biennial meeting of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) in Arusha recently that so far the government had budgeted for 14,000 classrooms and an intake of 9,000 teachers for next year. The Ministry of Education and Culture is aiming to recruit 67,000 teachers by the end of the programme in 2006.

Apart from national governments, civil society organisations in Africa are also making efforts to support national governments to promote education, especially for girls. The Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) has established Centres of Excellence in four African countries to reverse the continued decline in girls' education.

The centres are situated in Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, and Senegal under a pilot scheme undertaken in collaboration with the ministries of education to tackle the problems of girls' education in Africa.

The institutions were established with communities to create an enabling environment to "clearly and effectively demonstrate a holistic, integrated approach towards addressing the problems," says Prof. Penina Mlama FAWE's executive director. She says the problems of girls' education in the continent are inter-related and therefore, require a holistic rather than piecemeal approach.

The centres are designed to foster in girls academic and social excellence, self-confidence, leadership and managerial skills, analytical and negotiation skills, and physical and psychological fitness. Mlama explains that FAWE set up some pilot projects to increase access to education for disadvantaged girls at the secondary school level, and to create an enabling environment through providing equipment, textbooks, boarding facilities, and laboratories.

The schools are also designed to expose students to new information technologies, libraries and resource centres, gender- responsive curriculum, safety and security, and the empowerment of girls.

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