Starting with the BBC

This week, I had my first informal, but official meeting about my new job. I haven’t yet signed a contract yet, but decisions need to be made about the project, and so I was called in. It was really the first time someone had sat down and explained, in detail rather than abstract, the design of the project. And I’m excited!

Up until now, the most I’ve known is that it’s about getting girls into school, using radio. I’ve had all sorts of ideas about the ways in which that could happen, mostly based on other Media Action programmes which use a combination of radio dramas, call-in shows and public service announcements to deliver behaviour change messages.  But this, my project, is so much cooler than that!

We will train 10 reporters, 1 from each of South Sudan’s 10 states, and embed them in a school for a couple days a week. Each reporter will follow a couple of students and their families; teachers, members of the PTA (yep, parent-teacher associations are a big thing here) and also families who do not send their girls to school, or girls who have dropped out for what ever reason, and do a weekly documentary. Think The Archers set in a South Sudanese school, or for podcast listeners, This South Sudanese School Life. I will be in charge of recruiting our trainees, working with them to develop story and programme ideas and chasing them to make sure it all gets done on time. I imagine I will be spending a lot of time travelling to visit our schools and to make sure our reporters aren’t using their mates as fake students (not unheard of here).

I have been doing a lot of reading about girls education and schools. From the outside, it appears that the basic challenge is convincing families that it’s worth investing in their daughters’ education, that an educated woman has more value than an uneducated one. In terms of dowry, one girl can be worth between 500 SSP and 5,000 (4SSP =$1), depending on the family, the state, and the education etc.. Usually this payment is made in cattle. 

But it’s not that simple. The average South Sudanese family lives a subsistence life. Daughters and cattle are their only assets.  And school costs money; for uniforms, for shoes, for books and school fees. Many families cannot afford to invest for the long term, and prefer to cash in their investment when it stars to mature (ok, I’ve obviously been thinking about my investments too much).  But the point is, they can get a substantial amount of cattle for a young, uneducated girl, some of which can help to pay for their sons’ marriages.  

There is another aspect that I did not know too much about. School is not a particularly safe place for girls. The journey to school, often sometimes two hours each way, can be dangerous. It’s common for girls to be “carried off”, by men looking to either find a wife, or just have sex. This risk of “early pregnancy”, results in a community-imposed fine on the man who raped the girl, or maybe he will marry her. Once a girl is pregnant, it’s likely she’ll drop out of school.  In discussions with girls in some of the schools, researchers found that while most girls did want to attend school, they also wanted to get married, move out of the family home, and have their own independence and have a family. No difference really from the West then.

Some girls admitted to trading sex for homework help, and some girls started affairs with older men or became prostitutes to earn extra money so they could buy mobile phones and “nice” things.

So, I guess you have to look at it from a family’s perspective.  If we use my investment analogy, we’re often encouraging families to put their most valued asset in a high risk fund with a poor manager (teachers are paid so little, many don’t show up for work, let alone pay attention to learning outcomes or behaviour of school girls).

So as my country manager said to me today. We know education of girls is a good thing, but why is it good for these families? How do we show them that it’s worth sending a girl to school?

Good questions. I think the government should just make it mandatory and fine parents who pull their daughters out of school before the age of 18. But then I’d be out of a job!