November 11, 2004 —For 13-year-old Askin Tavuz, going to school is a matter of life or death – literally. Just a few months ago, Askin threatened to kill herself if her family carried out their wish to keep her home from school in the city of Diyarbakir, in the south east of Turkey. For her family, it was a matter of simple economics. They are desperately poor, no-one has a job, and sending a girl to school seemed an absurd luxury. But for Askin, staying at home meant the end of her dream of becoming a lawyer. So in a letter to her principal, she threatened to commit suicide if her parents pulled her out of school. It was not the first letter from a student threatening suicide received by the principal, Oya Senvic, the head of the Celal Guzelses primary school. “Parents don’t see the point in sending their girls to school. They want the girls to stay home and do housework and get married. The families see schooling as a waste of time,” says Senvic. The principal was able to change the minds of Askin’s parents by offering an incentive – a monthly child support allowance of $10 a month if they left their daughter in school. The stipend is put into an account in Askin’s name, to be withdrawn only by her mother, Gulten Yavuz. A country where resistance to educating girls is high, Turkey has embarked on a program to improve the attendance of school children – and also to improve their health care – through a conditional cash (stipend) transfer program, with support from the World Bank. World Bank senior education specialist on gender, Mercy Tembon, says the stipends have had an impact on girls’ education. “A stipend brings something to the family,” Tembon says. “It compensates for the girl being away from the home.” Bangladesh Success A clear success story has been in Bangladesh, where the use of a stipend to help the families meet the cost of secondary education, has contributed to that country’s impressive progress in raising secondary school enrollment. Since 1982, the World Bank has supported a school stipend program in Bangladesh that subsidized various school expenses for girls in secondary school. Subsequent evaluation shows female enrollment rates in the pilot area rose from 27 to 44 percent over five years. Thirteen year old Musammad Akhtar is one of almost one million girls in Bangladesh receiving a stipend this year from the Female Secondary School Assistance Project, which is jointly funded by the government and the World Bank. A sixth grader in the Suapur-Nannar High School – about an hour and a half drive from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh – Musammad studies by keronsese lamp at night, after completing her chores. Musammad’s father, Alaur Rahman, a one time rickshow puller, is partially paralysed – the result of a severe fall two years ago. Her mother, Zohra Khatun, who’s illiterate, is the family’s sole provider, working as a cook in a roadside restaurant, earning less than $20 a month. But she has high hopes for her daughter. “An illiterate person is like a person without eyes or limbs,” she says. Musammad’s marriage is neither a priority nor a topic of conversation at home, she adds. The headmaster of Musammad’s school, Mohammad Ashraf-ul-Islam, says in the past three years the number of female students at the school has doubled from 200 to 400. “Fifty percent of our population is females. If you deprive them of education, the nation cannot progress. An uneducated mother cannot guide her child. I am glad we now will have more educated mothers thanks to the stipend program,” says Jan Manzoor, a teacher at the Kaliakoir Pilot Girls High School in Gazipur, northwest of Dhaka. New programs are focusing on improving the quality of teachers and school management through training programs. “Currently there are more girls than boys. But in the second phase of the project, we are not content with just pushing up the numbers. The accent is on quality,” Dr Gholam Rasul Miah, the project director says. And in another program in the country, the Bangaldesh Reaching-Out-Of-School Children Project, education allowances are being paid to mothers or guardians of newly enrolled, formerly out-of-school children. Sixty percent of the allowances are going to girls. Similar programs are underway in other parts of the globe: BRAZIL The population is predominantly young: 62% of Brazilians are under 29 years of age. Under the umbrella of its social program, Bolsa Familia, Brazil has used $500 million of $570 million World Bank loan to fund its conditional cash transfers. Families only get the money though if all children in the family between 7 and 15 years of age have at least 85 % daily attendance in school. It’s been a major success, according to the World Bank’s country director for Brazil, Vinod Thomas.
PAKISTAN More than 150,000 girls enrolled in grades six to eight in the poorer districts of Punjab are now receiving a stipend, an as encouragement to stay in school. The stipend initiative is part of a three year education reform program launched this year to address issues of high illiteracy, low primary enrollment, and high drop out rates. First year expenditures have reached $720 million, of which $100 million is a Bank loan. The program also aims to improve access and equity for all students through free distribution of textbooks. Mercy Tembon says similar programs are underway in Yemen and Chad, as well as in Africa, where bursary schemes are run in a number of countries by the Forum for African Women Educationalists. |
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