Post secondary Education for Girls in Burkina Faso

Thanks to your very generous support over the past year,14 young village women in northern Burkina Faso are receiving scholarships this academic year for training as primary school teachers.  This is more than twice the number of scholarships we were able to offer last year in partnership with GlobalGiving donors! 

What does this mean for the individual scholarship recipients and for primary education in Burkina Faso?  For the young women who receive the scholarships, it is an opportunity they would otherwise never have had to receive professional training qualifying them to become primary school teachers.  For rural communities in particular in Burkina Faso, it enables the government to assign teachers to villages that have built simple classrooms out of local materials in hopes of giving at least some of their children the chance to go to school.   Every additional trained teacher allows for extending primary education to additional villages.  And most of our scholarship recipients are assigned to such village primary schools upon completion of their training. 

In a recent address to the U.N. on gender issues, Emma Watson (of Harry Potter film fame) stated that, at current rates, it will take until 2086 for all rural African women to achieve a secondary education.  We are proud to be part of a very successful program aimed at accelerating educational opportunities for girls and young women in Burkina Faso.

Photos of, and information about, the young women receiving this year's GlobalGiving/Friends of Burkina Faso scholarships will be forthcoming soon.  Association NEEED (who runs the program in northern Burkina Faso) is currently making the final selection of candidates and organizing the logistics of getting scholarship recipients enrolled and settled into their respective training programs.  We will post photos and information about the young women that you, our GG partners, have so generously supported as soon as they become available.

We are very proud of the outstanding progress of this project over the past five years and what it has meant to young women in Burkina Faso who have benefitted from our scholarships.  Beginning in 2010 when Friends of Burkina Faso offered 13 scholarships (the total for the program that year), our continued generous support of girls’ postsecondary education in Burkina has been a major driving force in helping the project to attract additional donors worldwide to support the education of more village girls each year.  In addition to the 14 girls receiving GlobalGiving/Friends of Burkina Faso scholarships this year, Friends of Burkina Faso is supporting scholarships for six additional young women to receive primary school teacher training, six young women to pursue university studies, and three young women to pursue midwifery training.  Of the 54 students to whom we have provided scholarships to date, 28 have completed their training and are working (as primary school teachers, nurses and midwives), 22 are entering their next year of training and four are awaiting results of year-end exams. 

We are most appreciative of the generous donations of our GlobalGiving partners since we teamed up with GlobalGiving in 2013 in support of this project.  We welcome your continued support.

Thank you!