In Nigeria’s Muslim-dominated north, the issue of religion and tradition are often top of the agenda. By far the most popular state is Kano, the famed ancient city which has strong traditional and industrial history.
Yet bedeviling the north in general and Kano in particular is poverty and general infrastructural deficit. The United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund, UNICEF; captures the educational crisis in its overview of education for the country.
“States in the north-east and north-west have female primary net attendance rates of 47.7 percent and 47.3 percent, respectively, meaning that more than half of the girls are not in school.
“The education deprivation in northern Nigeria is driven by various factors, including economic barriers and socio-cultural norms and practices that discourage attendance in formal education, especially for girls.”
For successive federal and state governments the defense has often been that the crisis is known and that efforts are being continually undertaken to remedy it with infrastructure investment and more budgetary allocation.
But the sub-50% enrollment for girls means that there are those that get to go through the educational system. Many others lucky to make the primary level fall out before secondary with the numbers dwindling further post-secondary.
Such girls are the focus of an Information and Communication Technology, ICT; training center. The Paradigm Initiative LIFE program.
About PIN’s LIFE program
The LIFE program falls in PIN’s digital inclusion mission and is focused generally on young Nigerians with the view to equipping them with relevant ICT, entrepreneurial and life skills to make them competitive in the job place or self-sufficient.
Paradigm Initiative runs three LIFE centers across Nigeria, the pioneering Ajengunle center in Lagos State, the Aba LIFE center and Dakata LIFE located in Kano State.
Dakata, the youngest of the LIFE centers was opened in 2016 and in the past few years continues to churn out graduates – most of whom have gone on to start businesses. L. I. F. E. is an acronym for: L – Life skills, I – Information and Communication Technology, F – Financial literacy, E – Entrepreneurship.
The planned focus on female beneficiaries
When the LIFE centers compared enrolment in 2017, they found out that the Dakata LIFE centre was getting less girls. One could safely point to the educational challenges in the north as the reason.
But for leader of the team, Amina Idris, there was the need to act and to act fast. There needed to be a plan to get more girls in and not just that; but to ensure they run the full course.
“It was a bit difficult at the beginning because considering the nature of the northerners, the girl child’s education is not considered as important as that of the male child,” Amina admitted in an interview.
The figures since 2018 have improved drastically, Amina adds crediting the improvement to sustained advocacy and assurances to parents and guardians of these girls.
“Some of the challenges where gu
