Lambs Support Village Girls' Education

Young village girls have inspiring stories about having the opportunity to go to school.  It’s also important to hear from the adults in their world, especially their leaders and their parents, about how they view girls’ education.  These adults are the focus of this report.

Burkina Faso President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, in a keynote address at the European Development Days, June 5-6, 2018, declared that “Education is the only way to fight against early marriage.  Education remains an essential vector for transforming the lives of young girls in all sectors of a nation’s life. Even more, it is an effective weapon against all practices that belong to another era. The world cannot afford to leave half of its human potential unused as it seeks to meet the sustainable development goals (SDGs).”   President Kabore’s open and candid declarations about the importance of girls’ education speak to very positive cultural changes in Burkina and to the growing commitment of government to promote girls’ education.

Ouedraogo Madi, President of the Village Development Committee and Chief of the village Bourbo. “Our sincere thank you to Association NEEED and its partner, Friends of Burkina Faso, for we know that behind all the work done by NEEED to encourage each village to send their young girls to school, there are NEEED’s partners who sacrifice in order to enable the education of our children.  NEEED’s support of school materials, lamps, uniforms and a lamb for our young girls has in fact propelled the education of all children in our village. As proof, we had to build a second school of mud walls and thatched roof.   We are very grateful to NEEED for helping us recently to replace this school by more permanent classrooms. 

Ouedraogo Zoenabo, Parent and President of PTA. “I speak for all women in Bourbo because there is not a single person here who does not have a family member who has benefitted from the Lambs Support Girls’ Education Project.  Before this project, parents were only able to send one out of four children to school.  The others stayed home.  In view of the school materials given our daughters entering primary school, and our ability to continue to provide them each year – thanks to the lambs our daughters receive the first year - even our daughters who are too young to go to school beg their parents to enroll them in school.  Before this project came to our village, many girls dropped out of primary school.  Now most of them go on to secondary school.  Our profound gratitude to Association NEEED and Friends of Burkina Faso for propelling the education of our daughters.”