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Community Partnerships Form Cornerstone of Nigerian Education Project

By David Snyder

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Bauchi, Nigeria—When school principal Edimeh Yakubu Achile visits classrooms at the Imam Malik Islamiyya Primary School, the pupils leap to their feet and offer a greeting. It is tradition here, a way to show their pride.

Schools like this one are feeling a renewed sense of community as of late, thanks in part to the Northern Nigeria Education Initiative, a U.S. Agency for International Development-funded project implemented by Creative Associates International.

“The students we have in this school are from the community so there is full community participation,” says Achile. “As we are talking, now the community is building a place for us to reuse as a computer room and a school library.”

Selected as one of 200 pilot schools in Bauchi and Sokoto states, the Imam Malik School is just one example of how communities are rallying around their schools.

Launched in 2009 to build up the educational institutions in these two states, the Northern Education Initiative set out to build partnerships at all levels of society to improve schools.

“We created what we call the community coalition,” says Ayo Oladini of Creative, who noted that they also tapped into existing organizations. “We made sure we identified community people and talk to them, interact with them on how to do advocacy, how to be a compassionate community, and we get them on how to build community support.”

By training local school-based management committees—similar to the Parent Teacher Associations in the United States—the initiative has helped to teach community members both how to identify needs at the school level and how to have those needs addressed by local government.

Communities identify gaps

Abdul Hamid Yahya, Chairman of Community Education Forum, a non-governmental organization that seeks to advocate on behalf of Bauchi’s schools, partnered with the Northern Education Initiative when it started in 2009.

Twenty-four non-profits like the Community Education Forum were identified and then brought together to the program’s goals and methods. With their buy in, the Northern Education Initiative linked the NGOs with state ministries to identify gaps in the existing education system.

“The most important priorities we identified are classroom blocks, retention and enrollment of pupils, furniture, teaching and learning materials and qualified teachers, as well,” the Community Education Forum’s Yahya says.

The Northern Education Initiative helped all parties to collaborate to find resources to address their needs—like the computer center community currently being built at the Imam Malik School, funded by community members and local government.

Community members learned how to read and analyze state education budgets, looking for gaps and resource opportunities.

“It is because of the advance of NEI that annually [officials] will present to us the budget of the State Universal Education Board to us so that we scrutinize and contribute [to it],” says Gingery J. Garba, Chair of the Bauchi State Network for Civil Society Organizations, which represents 380 groups.

By training local NGOs in subjects like bookkeeping, financial management, and program design, the Northern Education Initiative helped these agencies from within, making each a stronger partner for the other NGOs in the network and the Education Ministry.

“It was NEI who taught us how to go and find out from the schools what they [needed], and how to prioritize issues,” Yahya says. “We analyze them…then we start going to advocate to other places where we know they will come to our aid.”

Fostering collaboration

The Imam Malik School is looking to a variety of sources for educational support.

“Today the world is a global village and people are now aware of the need to be computer literate,” says school principal Achile. “Since Imam Malik is a community-based institution, they have decided to contribute that in order to enable our children to be literate.”

The school is also one of 20 schools in Bauchi selected for water and sanitation facilities, built along with a well and hand pump installed by the Women Farmers Advancement Network, a partner in the Northern Education Initiative.

But in many regards, such facilities are only the most visible aspect of the changes that partnerships are creating, says Yahya.

Among those most in need of the aid are orphans and vulnerable children, a main focus of the program. By helping WOFAN and other organizations to identify and care for vulnerable children, the Northern Education Initiative was able to register 16,000 children in either formal or non-formal schools.

These children, often becoming at-risk through the loss of a parent or simply extreme poverty, were exposed to a curriculum that included literacy and math. Among them, more than 5,200 children received vocational training, with most communities taking on the responsibility of feeding and supplying educational materials for these kids, as well as leveraging resources from local governments to support their schooling long-term.

For Yahya and others who learned the value of partnership through the Northern Education Initiative, the lasting impacts of the project are perhaps less visible. Once too timid to approach high-level members of the community or the government to help fund educational needs, Yahya says his training and partnership experiences with NEI have bolstered his confidence and that of the others in his organization.

“With the help of the NEI we are able to meet whoever the person may be,” Yahya says. “It is not that I do it for my own benefit, but for the benefit of the young ones. [They] are the future of our country.”

Michael J. Zamba reported and contributed to writing this article

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Girls’ Education Affects Nigeria’s Future

By David Snyder

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Bauchi, Nigeria—The yellow stucco walls of the Adolescent Girls Program Center are decorated with the brightly colored garments of the day’s lessons. Students bend to the task of sewing using foot-peddled machines, developing the skills many will use to earn a living in the not too distant future.

They are the fortunate ones as millions of other teenage girls receive little or no education, let alone income-generating skills. The reasons are myriad and complex.

“[T]here are some believe within this community that it’s better to educate the boy child than to educate the girl child because the girl child after all will move to somebody’s house and whatever effort you put in there is going to be transferred to that other person’s house,” says Hajiya Larai Hammadu, Director of Child Development for Bauchi State.

She also cites other misconceptions that education should only be for men.

“Our people seem not to understand there is no religion that says you should not train a girl but that’s one of the misconceptions that we met on ground,” Hammadu says.

Still others, too poor to pay even basic school fees, simply cannot afford to send their children to school.

In the northern states of Sokoto and Bauchi—where on average 52 percent and 66 percent of children respectively have never attended a formal school—the task is daunting. For those who do attend school, national figures have girls in classrooms for an average of eight years, while their male counterparts complete an average of 10 years.

The Northern Education Initiative, a four-year project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and implemented in Bauchi and Sokoto by Creative Associates International, worked to change the situation—starting with the communities.

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Community-focused work

From the beginning, the Northern Education Initiative brought together state agencies, nonprofits and community-based organizations to identify barriers to educating girls, developed behavior change campaigns and opened special training centers as part of the Adolescent Girls Program.

“We partnered with 27 non-governmental organizations who were able to not only understand but master the art of providing all the necessary skills or education to these centers,” says Semere Solomon, who developed and oversaw Creative’s Northern Education Initiative.

Organizers knew that it would be an uphill battle, particularly since many of the parents of these girls had little education, held deeply entrenched beliefs or relied on the girls to generate income as street vendors.

The Federation of Muslim Women Associations was one of the 27 NGOs that partnered with the initiative’s Adolescent Girls Program, and its leader recalls the challenges she faced within the community.

“When we started it was a bit difficult because they were saying we wanted to take the girls off the street and deprive them of their livelihoods,” says Fatsume Mohammed. “But slowly, but steadily when the community were involved they do so willingly, and at the moment the enrollment drive at least the girls that graduated are also ambassadors of enrollment.”

The Adolescent Girls Program took off, and Creative opened 19 training centers that offered a curriculum that combined marketable skills with basic literacy and math classes.

Creative’s Solomon says, “These local organizations are based in the district, they are able to work closely with the communities and not only is the success major by the fact that we were able to set up Adolescent Girl Programs but the fact that they have become so popular that the communities started supporting them.”

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Building Skills & Literacy

A primary objective of the Northern Education Initiative was to improve basic education through greater access to classes via non-traditional methods, including these centers.

By combing basic math and literacy classes with vocational skills like sewing, knitting, tailoring, and soap and pomade making, the program provides a solid foundation upon which girls can learn to support themselves.

“When NEI came into being in Bauchi, they even supported girls that have never been to school, and they offered classes for them,” says Miriam Yilila of the RAHAMA Women’s Development Program, which partnered in the initiative. “And those girls have learned basic education and they have learned vocational skills to support themselves.”

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From the Alcaderi Center, one of the 19 AGP training centers established by the Northern Education Initiative since 2009, Mohammed and the staff have graduated 70 girls. At the end of the course, each graduate was provided with a sewing machine that they can use to start their own small business, a critical component to its sustainability.

“We have success stories where graduates get married but continue training other girls to sew, to knit, to generate revenue-generating activities at home instead of letting the younger one go out to hawk,” Mohammed says, referring to the practice of selling goods on the street.

Self-sustaining program

From the moment the Northern Education Initiative started in 2009, it was upfront with its partners: the project would end and that the community organizations would have to continue on their own.

To ensure the long-term sustainability of the project, the Northern Education Initiative provided yearly training for agencies like RAHAMA and FOMWAN in proposal writing, teaching them to access future funding to support their girls’ education activities.

Miriam Yilila says the preparation is essential to her agency’s ability to support the girls.

“Every year in any USAID project you have to write a proposal to win before they will fund you,” Yilila said. “They will increase your capacity [through] all the trainings that they give you.”

As scheduled, the Northern Education Initiative ended in March 2014—with a very successful track record in the states of Bauchi and Sokoto. The Adolescent Girls Program graduated 860 students.

“It’s been very, very successful,” says Bauchi’s Child Development Director. “You know that women, we are the engine of homes of our families. No mother would like to see her child wasted. If these girls have the opportunity to have what it takes to live and survive and be comfortable their children will also be comfortable. They will send their children for school.”

Back at the Adolescent Girls Program center, the girls are wrapping up today’s two-hour session on tailoring. Earnest and eager, they pay careful attention to the instructor, who was trained through the Northern Education Initiative. These girls are the face of a new future in Nigeria, one where girls are valued, appreciated and educated as much as boys.

Michael J. Zamba reported and contributed to the writing of this story.

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