Empowering Girls in School

Songtaba consider education a fundamental human right and a core element of our work because it enables people to access and enjoy other rights. This is why we work with excluded groups and stakeholders in education to challenge duty bearers to establish gender friendly schools to ensure an effective learning process so that all children have free access to quality education and ensure that the government fully assumes its obligations to provide a quality basic education to all.

With this vision Songtaba over the years as we have indicated in our previous two reports have adopted the girls club approach as a way of mobilising and strengthening these girls who over the years have suffer gender discrimination both at home or in school.

With your support, the total number of girls clubs that have been mobilise stand at 28 in 16 schools. These girls have drawn up their activity plans and have started implementing some of them including community outreach, quiz competitions, dramas among others.

However, during the last quarter of the 2016, the focus of these girls were holding interactive sessions with government agencies mandated for the protection of the rights of every Ghanaian. These agencies included the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative justice (CHRAJ) and the Social Welfare Department.

These meeting provided an opportunity for the girls clubs to learn and know about the mandate of these institutions and how as well as by what process can they access their services should their rights be violated in any way. To total ensure that these girls stay and complete their basic school education, Songtaba with the support of the government introduce what we call the community child protection teams (CCPT). These CCPTs include the CHRAJ and Social welfare and other community leaders, and they are tasked to monitor and intervene to rescue girls whose parents wants to marry them off at the detriment of their education. The issue of child/force marriage is on the rise in the communities that Songtaba works in and thus needs a bold step to end it or it will destroy the lives of many of these young girls we have been working to build a bright future for.