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| Zola and her family live in a makeshift home built from scrap |
Nigeria, which
is located in West Africa, has not only the largest population of any African
country, but is also the most densely populated country in Africa. Nearly one
in six Africans is a Nigerian. Despite
the rampages of AIDS, Nigeria's population continues to grow at about 2.6
percent each year. The Nigerian population is very young. Nearly 45 percent of
its people are under age fourteen. One of them is the 9 year-old girl Zola who
lives with her grandparents, her parents and her four younger brothers in a
makeshift home built from scrap in the dry, open grasslands of the Nigerian
savanna. A single room shack is home to the entire family of nine who sleep,
eat and live on the same small patch of floor.
Although Zola is the oldest child in the family, she still
does not attend school. Her labor is needed to either bring additional income
into the family or to help at home and take care of her youngest brother. While
three of her younger brothers, get up at 5 o’clock in the morning to reach
their school, which is located in the neighboring village 3 km away, Zola has
to be on the field at half past four to work until the sun goes down.
Afterwards she still has to take a 2 hours walk home, prepare meal, and take
care of all her younger brothers.
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| Zola has to work very hard in order to earn money |
Many children in this rural area of Nigeria do not attend
school. The reason for this are not only the associated costs of sending their
children to school such as uniforms and textbooks. The cultural bias is the
biggest problem. Most parents do not send their children, in particular girls,
to school and make them take care of their siblings instead. In the North the
gender gap remains especially wide and the average proportion of girls to boys
in school is 1 to 3. The Northern region is generally recording the lowest
school attendance rate in the country. It is estimated that about 4.7 million
children of primary school age are still not in school.
Zola would love to go to school in order to learn how to
read and write. Education is the only chance for her to find a way out of
poverty and to have a better live than their parents and grandparents do. Most
of the parents, however, do not want their children to break the “tradition” of
living in the poorest parts of the world. As Zola is the family’s only
daughter, she is already promised to a man in the village and she is expected
to give birth to several children after the forced marriage.
