Scholarships for girls

Written Thursday, 17 April 2008


Peace Corps Senegal's "SeneGAD" program, which focuses on gender issues in development, offers scholarships for girls in middle school to help them stay in school and encourage girls to continue their education.  This past week my volunteer neighbor Fonsa and I have been carrying out our part of the program, having the girls with the best grades at the middle school in Dialacoto (the only middle school in the region until Missira, 40 km away) write essays about their plans for the future and then interviewing the girls individually.  The essays and interview information we'll send to Dakar, where a committee of Peace Corps volunteers will choose the scholarship winners.  (The number of winners varies depending on how much money SeneGAD has been able to fundraise, but should be at least one girl from each participating school).

This is a simple process for Americans, but for girls here, especially those from small and isolated villages, I think it is strange and intimidating.  Many of the girls have probably never been asked before "What do you want to do when you grow up?"  It is just a given – they will farm, get married, and have babies.  The girls who have made it as far as middle school – which is above the average education level in Senegal, although I think that is changing slowly – have probably been more exposed than the average girl to the idea of having a job when they grow up, but I think our questions were still hard for them.  They also seemed pretty intimidated by me and Fonsa, toubab authority figures  (which I find really funny – I have no authority at all here, where I am treated like a child most of the time because of my inability to speak the language properly and incompetence at cooking and other women's work).  So it was hard to get the girls to talk much at all, although two of the girls – one my host sister, and the other the host sister of a former volunteer – did much better.

Here are some of the girls' answers: they all said (except for one girl, who said she might be a doctor) that they want to be teachers when they finish school.  I am not sure if this is because of their lack of exposure to other sorts of jobs, or if their teachers coached them on questions we might ask and how to answer them, or if there is some other reason.  We also asked the girls if they could travel and go anywhere in the world they wanted, where would they go?  Most of the girls gave predictable answers of America or European countries, where they would find work, but one girl broke my heart, saying she just wants to visit Kedougou and Tamba because she has never even been that far away from home – and Tamba is only a 2 hour, $2 car ride away.  (Fonsa and I are now cooking up a plan to take her to Tamba this summer for a girls' leadership camp that another volunteer is organizing).  American parents will be jealous to know that most of the girls said one of their parents was their role model, but I was excited when one girl said her role model is a woman who used to be Minister for Families, because she fights for women's rights.

Overall, they were a great bunch of girls, and I wish we could do more to help them stay in school and not be forced into early marriages.