By Lois | Director of Operations
"We have seen changes already in the last few months, with many more girls returning to school. We know that education is our greatest weapon against child marriage and early pregnancy, so we will continue to push for even more children to return to the classroom". Head Teacher, Matambo Primary School.
On #GivingTuesday we held an online event with our supporters to raise money for a new Boys and Men Alliance project. We raised an incredible $3,084 on the day, which benefited from an additonal $1,800 in bonus funding from GlobalGiving. The following week we received another donation from T.Rowe Price for £1,000 which meant that we nearly reached our initial fundraising target of £6,000!
Our Boys and Men Alliance project which aims to reach 500 boys and men over the next year, was designed to address the gaps that we had identified from our Comic Relief funded "Own your Destiny" Girls Football League. More than just a sports based project, this initiative is tackling the key barriers to girls' education, that we have seen first-hand from over a decade of working in rural Zambia. These include a lack of access to sexual reproductive health rights, low literacy and numeracy levels, poverty and deep-rooted geneder inequalities.
What is preventing girls from returning to school (according to the girls on our project)?
Taking the above into consideration we have now designed a series of workshops that will be held in partnership with the Ministry of Education and the Minstry of Health, starting from this Friday 24th February at Siankoba Primary School. We will be inviting 50 husbands and fathers of the girls taking part on the project at each of the 10 schools (500 in total to be reached). The Ministry of Education for Sinazongwe has also began to offer more flexible hours of schooling, which enables girls that cannot attend full-time education to still access classes and progress to the higher grades.
Since GivingTuesday, we started some initial informal discussions on these barriers through focus groups with the 245 girls taking part on this years project and over 100 girls returned to school with the new school year in January. In November when the schools closed for the Christmas break, less than 30 girls had returned but at the time of writing this report 128 girls on the project are now thankfully back in education! We know that this number will only continue to grow as we begin our formal workshops through the Boys and Men Alliance project at the 10 schools.
Thank you to everyone that donated and made this essential step in addressing some of the challanges girls in rural Zambia face in completing school possible.
We very much look forward to keeping you updated as the project progresses and we start to see more of an impact on each girls' chances of a life free from child marriage and early pregnancy.
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