Run the World

My time in Liberia is quickly drawing to a close and as I find my days increasingly filled with intense writing sessions punctuated by bursts of distracted procrastination, it has been hard to get in all the blog posts I envisioned.  I had big plans to write two posts entitled "Let's Talk About Sex" and "Desperately Seeking: Positive and Committed Role Models", but alas. 

I am finishing the report that will by my final deliverable for my summer research consultancy and it is turning into a half fulfilling conclusion to my two month experience and half frustrated abbreviated form of so much more that I want to say.  Basicallyy the major themes that I was able to pull out of the data on what is needed to better support girls to stay in and thrive in school are: academic success, positive support networks, building confidence and speaking out, life skills development, health promoting schools, and sustainable transformation.  These themes form the basis of the case studies and report I am developing for the project and also build the beginnings of thesis brainstorming. 

But for now, it is enough. (Especially as North Carolina summer beach nights beckon).  So instead of posting some sort of nicely summed up thoughts on what I have learned this summer or how this experience has inspired me down new paths of inquiry...I post this.  Beyonce really does say it so much better.

 

The Challenge of Educating Girls: A Seven Part Series*

*Yea so, I had big, and I am talking BIG plans for this post.  But as with most things, I got overly ambitious and a seven part series just ain't gonna happen.  So a condensed, somewhat stream of consciousness summary below...and if you were so stoked to uncover these mysteries that a this light treatment won't do, get in touch with in a couple months and you can read my sure to be thrilling thesis.

Remember that time when I told you IT was complicated? And by IT, I mean developing quality and equitable education systems in post-conflict contexts. Well I wasn’t kidding.  Hence the seven part series I intended to embark on (before I got lazy/busy).  There are about a bazillion challenges to implementing a comprehensive, dependable, and quality education system in countries.  Many of these challenges are experienced by the majority of countries in differing degrees but each can be broken down further into challenges and potential solutions that are unique to specific contexts.  Hopefully breaking up the myriad of interrelated challenges to improving education opportunities and outcomes for Liberian girls will help shed light on why it is nearly impossible to encapsulate the major reasons why girls education into punchy sound bites that fit inside of catchy You Tube videos and advocacy campaigns, matter how compelling the Girl Effect (www.girleffect.org) videos.  But, in the interest of expediency - a bulleted list of the major barriers to getting girls to get in school, stay in school, and thrive in school:

·         Poverty: This is fairly obvious and affects all the other barriers.  Grinding poverty makes it hard to prioritize uniforms and school shoes over finding something to put in your kids belly.  Poverty rates are in flux in Liberia but it is generally accept that between 50-80% of the population is struggling to fulfill their daily needs.  For some this means a meal twice a day but for most this means only eating once a day.  If your worried about where your next meal is coming from, worrying about how to buy a copybook so your child has something to write can seem frivolous. 
·         Legacies of war:  This is complicated and varies by person and location.  Almost 75% of the population was displaced during the years of fighting.  For the lucky, this means they were displaced but got to go back to their original house or plot of land and resume their life.  But many many more are permanently displaced, lost their land rights, or their communities were so destroyed both socially and physically that there is nothing to go back to.  Girls are disproportionally affected by war related poverty because they are seen as needing to be in the home or in the field to earn and income, while only boys have the luxury of being important enough, or seen as smart enough, to make school worth the families time.  And even others are just too scared to have their girls walk too school because of the high rates of gender based violence and the continued possibility of ritual killings in some parts of the country.

·         Low Capacity of the Education Sector: This is a polite way to say low levels of education and competency, but also very very related to mad amounts of rampant corruption that is treated with impunity at every level of the sector.  I am talking Minister of Education down to the volunteer teachers.  If there is a way to personally gain, it is being done and if you are not skimming you are seen as very very stupid.  The impunity with which corruption is treated here has a lot of root causes but some are related to the historical manipulation and state encourage dependency - it is easier to control the masses if you are paying off the bosses and holding them down - and a cultural of survival that took over as a result of 14 years of war and an even longer time of fear and oppression.  There is an elaborate system of kickbacks here that boggles the mind. 

·         Traditional Gender Norms:  This is the classic reason that underlays all others.  People will say "our girl is not in school because we are poor" or "education brings man business and she will get pregnant" but these reasons are colored by deep held beliefs about the place and value of men and women in society.  Like many societies, girls are seen as intended for the home - farm work, house work, caring for children, caring for men, obeying and following the lead of others who "know better."  Boys are seen as productive labor that is to be sent outside the home and sometimes even village to earn a living.  Much like Europe and America in the early 20th century, girls are just not seen to be as intelligent or capable as men - so why bother educating them? Also, many families here are large with foster children folded in so even if a family does value education, there is only enough money to pay school related costs for one or two children.  The family chooses the child most likely to use education to benefit the child.  Girls get married off and "are for another family", ergo boys go to school.

·         What’s health got to do with it?:  Healthy kids are happy kids.  Proper health and nutrition are prerequisites for learning and thriving in school yet many children are woefully under-nourished due to intestinal worms and chronic malaria.  Learning algebra is hard for healthy kids, learning algebra when your brain has not fully developed because it has never received enough nutrition or has been ravaged by cerebral malaria is even harder.  In addition, an utter lack of sexual and reproductive health education (because of taboos and also because there is no one willing or able to teach it) means that children do not understand even the basic functions of their bodies.  This gets kids in trouble, and especially girls in trouble.  This is compounded by a culture that overwhelmingly accepts the right of a man to fully abandon his children and take multiple mistresses while girls are left to support kids on their own, with little education and no skills. 
·         The Schooling to Skilled Work Gap:  This is a major barrier for both girls and boys.  Basic education is undoubtedly important and needed.  But the current state of education is so dire in Liberia (due to underfunding, corruption, low capacity, lack of teachers, etc.) that education does not necessarily mean someone has the skills to be employed.  It does not even necessarily mean someone can read - many 12th grade students graduate reading at a 5th grade level.  Furthermore, even educated people lack skills that are needed in the present economy.  People (the few that are lucky) are graduating college with history degrees when the country needs engineers or health professionals.  Therefore there are masses of unemployed yet "educated" young people and even more uneducated and unemployed youth forced to struggle in the informal economy hawking t-shirts or baking bread.  Our ever present friend corruption also influences this: the buying of grades and even degrees is so widespread that possession of a high school certificate starts to loose value.  Merit, even when you can proove you are capable, means nothing when it is easier for someone to just hire their cousin (which is also seen as a family duty).

·         Need for Public Education for All:  When it comes to education, the focus is often on children and youth, but there are huge education gaps in Liberia across population groups.  Adults, youth, and children alike need to gain knowledge and skills in leadership development, civic education, human rights education, community advocacy and peaceful civil action.  They need these skills to understand and claim their rights and demand accountability of their government.  There are billboards all over Monrovia saying "corruption ends with you!" but how can people end corruption if they don't even know it is their right to challenge the decisions of their local government or advocate for their land rights?  Similarly, how can a girl know where to turn for help protecting her right to education if she doesn't know that she has a right to say no to being married off at 14 years?

So there is my condensed version of the major barriers to education for girls.  Most, if not all, of these barriers also prevent boys from getting a quality education.  More focus needs to be of finding viable solutions for girls and boys to work together to demand their right to a quality and equitable education for all.  To do that, I think its important that people start working for gender equality and empowerment for boys as well as girls.  Focusing solely on girls only alienates potentially valuable male partners and reinforces that belief that gender is "wome's work" further ghettoizing gender and development work (as fancy PhD's like to call it).  There are already too many barriers, we don't need to create more by reinforcing artifical silos.

The Airfield

I pass it everyday.  The airfield.  I sit in the slow, jerking, tedious traffic of Monrovia as I travel the short distance from my office in the what passes for swanky portion of Sinkor, beach side  - made up of the towering walls and barbed wire of NGO offices and upper class homes - to my decidedly more humble neighborhood of Old Road made of a combination of middle class Liberian households and slums.  The distance is less then 2 miles but it often takes 15-20 minutes in the car. This leaves a lot of time for observing.  The normal everyday is there: motorbikes stacked with people weaving precariously through traffic, police idling, lazily pointing traffic in more or less the right direction, billboards asking citizens to please, for once, pay their taxes, pedestrians bravely risking life and limb to cross the street or smash themselves into a taxi.  Monrovia is a small city, there is not the crushing smog of Accra or the chaos of Dakar.  Things are quieter, friendlier.  Drivers are religiously stop to allow pedestrians to cross, or other cars to turn.  Street sellers ask if you want to guy something, instead of pushing their goods in your windows.  It's an okay commute.

With all these sites, the one that catches my gaze most consistently is the airfield.  It is a large mass of scrub grass and dirt with homemade football posts marking every square inch into a distinct field.  The airfield sits at the end of an old private airstrip that is no longer in general service, but still gets sparse use from the UN.  No matter what time of day I pass - if the sun is out, football is being played.  I've been told most are organized teams that play inter-league games as they pretend to be their heroes from Man United or Barca.  There are also small boys playing, just for the love of the game.  The Liberian Amputee Football league also plays here - a team that grew out of a reintegration and rehabilitation program for ex-combatants who had lost limbs in the wars.  The national amputee team are world champions - the best at what they do, a source of pride in the lives of ex-combatants that is hard won and rare amidst daily lives that are marked by stigma.   

Every day, early morning, late evening the airfield is crowded with boys passing time the way children do everywhere - with play.  But yesterday, off to the side, I spotted a makeshift football pitch and girls.  Lots of girls, playing a solid game of football as other girls watched and ran through drills on the side.  It was the first time I had seen girls playing football at the airfield.  I smiled inside, happy that these girls were able to find the time (free time is hard to come by for Liberian girls) and the confidence to head out to the field for a game.  They looked quite good as well - smiling and laughing as they tugged on each others shirts and dribbled toward the net.  It made me smile, that awesome kind of happiness that warms you from the inside out.

The airfield.  Not too long ago, in a time and place that seems so distant to the present day Liberia, this field was anything but the happy, carefree mass of football pitches.  It was a notorious killing field, the place of unspeakable atrocities.  Despite this dark past, it has been reclaimed.  Repurposed for a better time.  A brighter future.  A place where children have the time to play, and no longer the pressure to kill.

The Case for Gender Equality in Education

Lately, it seems that girls’ education is all over the news.  Even lay people, people outside the world of people that think obsessively about development assistance and humanitarian aid, know that a girls’ life is healthier, happier, and brighter if she has at least a primary education and brighter still if she is able to complete secondary school.  Educated mothers have healthier more educated children – the cycle of poverty and illiteracy can be broken.  Healed families - led by economically, socially, and politically empowered women - can lift nations.  Women spend money on their families; men spend money on themselves (which is just a polite way to say prostitutes and liquor).  Education is a pathway to sustainable development for entire nations - homegrown, citizen initiated long-term change. And so the mantra goes: all you have to do is educate a girl…and she will do the rest. www.girleffect.org

In large part, I agree with all these things.  I believe passionately that girls’ education is a key to larger, long-term social and economic development in any nation.  I also believe education is a human right and gender equality should be something every nation aspires too, even as we realize that no nation has yet achieved it. But at the same time…it’s so much more complicated than it sounds. Call me Jekyll and Hyde but I have two sides when it comes to development advocacy: a) Development Practitioner Side: oppression, poverty, and human rights abuses are bad and people should know so they can do something! and b) Theoretical Academic Side: oppression, poverty, and human rights abuses are complex outcomes of intersecting inequalities that are the result of unique historical, economic, political, and cultural realities and it is wrong to essentialize people or problems by treating these challenges as simple.  Development Practitioner Side applauds the work of campaigns like the Girl Effect and celebrity activists for using the power of money and visibility to raise awareness of real and substantial problems facing the world’s poor and marginalized = Girls do need more and better education opportunities!  Theoretical Academic Side thinks that these campaigns are reductionist and oversimplify complex problems by proposing silver bullet solutions that result in short term projects instead of long term and integrated development initiatives = Giving a girl a cow is not the way to do it!  Both sides are nerds, which side comes out really depends on the day.  But ultimately, I am a blend – I both value and take interest in the space between theory and practice, or as Paulo Friere called it praxis – informed action.  We have to take what we know from theory – that structural violence in the form of political oppression based on race, gender, and class exists – and what we know from practice – that you have to focus on solutions that will work in the specific context for the specific people that need it, even if that means ignoring the class implications in favor of focusing on the problem that girls of all economic classes are underrepresented in schools and the workplace.

So why does it matter then – girls education?  Boys undoubtedly matter and are in need of attention too (that is a whole other discussion), by why all the fuss about girls?  Why not just focus on improving education for everyone – if you take the egalitarian approach and just focus on improving the system, girls will be included by default. Improve the teachers, stamp out corruption in schools, make sure that the Ministry of Education is able to administer a decentralized system competently, improve curriculum and testing, make sure schools receive and use textbooks appropriately, and the demand for education will increase. Ensure quality education – and equality will follow.  Parents will actually want to send their kids, all their kids, to school if the schools are seen as working.  Right?  I would say yes, all those things are vitally important but a focus on gender equality can be done alongside each and every one so that while you are improving the system, you are also acknowledging the historical disadvantage of girls and ensuring that it is taken into account as you move the education system forward.  Girls cannot and should not have to wait the years if not decades it will take for countries to get their education system ducks in a row.  If you train teachers, yet they still think girls are only capable of housework; if you revise the curriculum, but the lessons reinforce the legitimacy of male power and domination; if you stamp out corruption, but fail to also eliminate teachers and administrators that prey on young girl students for sex, the corruption you cannot see on ledgers and roll calls – have you made the system a place where parents will send their girls? Have you made the system one where girls will feel safe and be able to learn?  Have you made a system that is truly offers and quality education to all? 

One of the things I hear time and time again in my interviews with rural Liberians is that “education brings man business.”  It is simply not safe for parents to send their girl children to school because school = pregnancy.  This forces families to hold back their young girls because they are too small to walk by themselves and the thought of a 10 or 11 year old getting pregnant is abhorrent.  This fear, combined with the lack of understanding of the importance of early childhood education, results in 13 year old Grade 1 students that ironically are more susceptible to drop out precisely because they are adolescents and have reached the age of man business (puberty).  It forces families, even the ones who believe their girl child is capable of learning, to send her to the farm or to sell in the market where they can keep an eye on her because at least that has an obvious and immediate benefit to the family.  Education is simply too large of a risk. 

Until education a safe space that it is intended to be, inequality will thrive and girls will continue to be second class citizens that look longingly at the books or newspapers they will never be able to read, the better jobs that will never come their way, or the simple bookkeeping practices that can improve their business and make the lives of their families healthier and happier.  So, yea, I think girls’ education matters.  It is a big, complicated mess to accomplish but it truly cannot wait.

The interior* is where it’s at!

One of my primary objectives in coming to Liberia for the summer was to get out into rural communities and see what is going on in the schools.  When I first got to country I had some time in Monrovia to get my head wrapped around what policy papers say should be happening in Liberian schools but I wanted to actually get out there and see what was occurring in reality.  I was able to do this through the support of the wonderful people of a project working to research girls’ access to primary education that let me tag a long on their two week trip to conduct teacher training workshops on school records management and data collection.  While the team conducted exciting data management workshops that were highly appreciated, and sorely needed, by teachers and principals, I conducted in-depth interviews and focus groups with girl students, parents, teachers, and principals in six schools across three counties.  Members of the team also helped me out with translation when needed (standard Enlish to Liberian English and back again as well as English to Bassa and Kpelleh), which was enthusasitically appreciated.  The schools I visited were program schools for the project I am working for this summer and the counties where they work have some of the lowest primary school enrollment and retention rates for girls in the country. 

The trip around the counties was absolutely great.  I got to do some really interesting work conducting interviews and collecting datat helped me gain insight into the challenges to girls education here, was able to see and appreciate the beauty that is rural Liberia as well as the experience the infamous road system, spent lots of quality time getting to know my amazing colleagues, and even met some friendly Peace Corps volunteers and UNMIL police along the way.  All from the comfort of the ubiquitous white land cruiser (which I love and appreciate, I got all desire to be one with the people through mass transit during my Peace Corps days).  Emmanuel, our fearless and always optimistic driver diligently provided the soundtrack to the trip: the indubitable Akon, local Bassa music, and lots o' gospel – on repeat.  Beer rest stops included: the repair bay of the Total gas station (apparently a popular local hangout), White and Black night club/brothel, Paulma’s bar (epically loud music + 90’s movies) and an UNMIL police compound. Glorious waterfalls visited: one.

Throughout the trip I was found myself constantly comparing what I was seeing, hearing, and tasting with my experiences in other West Africa countries but by the end I think I learned to appreciate Liberia for what it is: distinctly West African but also uniquely Liberian.  There are definite similarities with other countries in the sub-region.  I found these commonalities strangely comforting because they are all things that I love about this region: the warmness of people, the strong importance placed on sitting down to just be in each others company and/or chatting awhile, extended family bonds that can overcome anything, the emphasis on joking and the powerful, life affirming laughs that result from even the simplest of jests,  unbelievable optimism in the face of persistence struggles, and the devotion of parents to their children’s education and hope for a better future.  But even with these similarities there are some things here that I encountered for the first time.  Things about Liberia that has to do with the countries unique, and often tormented, history: towns that were once one split in two due to ethnically driven massacres, bombed out school buildings next to functioning classrooms, rampant alcohol abuse – even by teachers in school, being unable to find even one girl in a rather large village because every single one of them was farming even though school was in session, the strong command of English by adults and the elderly next to 11 year olds that can barely speak standard English, eighteen year old girls in second grade, and the widespread but misguided belief that America will one day, finally, save Liberians. 

The trip was certainly enlightening: mostly great experiences and conversations punctuated by sobering realizations of the odds the country, the school system, and the youth are up against. Yet, as always there are glimmers of optimism that can be found if you look hard enough or just happen to be in the right spot at the right time.  At the last school I visited, in a county that was devastated by the war and in a town that is struggling to adequately feed its children let alone send them to school, I found hope in the form of a warmly eager and talkative old Pa with whom I chatted for hours and a bright and inquisitive four year old girl that understood my English, recited her alphabet and toddled around the school grounds with a constant look of glee.  She was the first child I met that is on-age for school.  She is one of the lucky few girls actively attending pre-school, a vital step in early childhood education and development that prepares children to be ready to learn.  When she enters Grade 1 at the age of 5 years, most of her classmates will be 15 years old.  She will go far, I feel it.

*Offical government documents and loads of Liberians refer to the rural areas of the country as the hinterland, or more commonly, the interior.   Both are a little colonialistic for my taste, especially since there are long standing urban and rural tensions due partly to the use and meaning behind these words, but when in Rome...