‘ a 15 year old girl from South Sudan is more likely to die in childbirth than to complete her Secondary Education’.This often quoted statistic reflects on both the desperate state of education and health provision for girls in the new country of South Sudan.
Although statistics can also confirm the improvement of education for girls since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the reality remains that most South Sudanese girls are not even attending primary school.
The reasons for this are multitude; a long history in which girls are considered as the family ‘wealth’ and so need to be protected by the family to be married while they are still teenagers; the rugged living situations in South Sudan require a lot of labour intensive housework – which all S Sudanese tribes designate to women and girls as well as the shortage of water. Many families do not have access to water, let along clean water, and so girls are expected to fetch water – sometimes walking many kilometres in each direction to a bore hole – maybe twice in a day. In theory this can happen before and after attending school, but in reality if a girl cannot do homework from school due to the family demands for hard work, she will drop out because she cannot keep up with the rest of the students in her class.
The Harriet Memorial Fund is one attempt to address this critical situation. By sponsoring a girl to attend YTTC, she will be able to live in college residence and so free to study without the family demands for her to be involved in physical labour to support them. The small stipend of ‘pocket money’ will enable her to provide for her own personal needs rather than to expect her family to provide for this as well as ‘losing’ the labour she could be providing to them. In addition this means that there is another female teacher in South Sudan. Most teachers are men and this means that at puberty many girls drop out because there is no female teacher to relate to with her personal needs.
Even the presence of one female teacher in a primary school – can impact many other girls – beyond the girls she actually teaches herself. It is widely accepted that a female teacher becomes a role model to the girls in the school and an incentive for them to persevere to complete primary, secondary and even teacher training.
For around $2000 a year you could sponsor a South Sudanese girl to train as a teacher or a health professional.
is set up in honour of Harriet Jiraba who died tragically in a road accident in Northern Uganda in October 2010, along with her father and brother. Harriet was an outstanding student who qualified as a nurse in Uganda and then returned to South Sudan where she worked in Primary and Community Health as a nurse with verious agencies.