Education for All

 text based on this article

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.

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.