Nine-year-old Ndey Abi sits in the front row of her predominantly-female class in Yeumbeul. She is wearing a neatly-ironed light blue top and white jeans. Her face is partly covered with white chalk marks from the blackboard in front of the class. She is one of the most intelligent kids in her class. When I ask her what she likes most about her school, she looks at her teacher, grins and says “I like my Physical Education class because I go out with other girls to run and play games in the field. I like that a lot”

 

Yeumbeul is one of the poverty-stricken suburbs of the Senegalese capital, Dakar where the government’s famous ‘Education for All’ campaign never existed. For decades, all the primary schools in Yeumbeul and other suburbs had more boys than girls. In one case, there were up to 410 boys out of a school population of 500. Worst, schools had seen more and more girls being withdrawn by their parents for financial and other reasons.

"Poorest of the poor"

This is what motivated Dodou Badji, an enterprising Senegalese teacher to set up a school in 1999 for the ‘poorest of the poor’ that would later make a big difference. He had taught at various public and private

schools across Senegal for 19 years. During this period, he had seen girls being taken regularly out of school either due to a lack of funds on the part of the parents to keep them in school or they didn’t feel that girls needed schooling anymore.

 

"On many occasions, parents would come to my classroom and tell me politely that they had a son and a daughter in the class but they could afford to keep sending only one of them to school. They would always keep the boy," Badji said with a broad smile.

 

Sensitisation

Badji embarked on a house-to-house campaign to talk to parents about why their daughters needed schooling. He even charged lower fees for girls, lower than the cost of almost all primary schools in Dakar and its surroundings. At times, he even supported some of the kids from his own savings.

 

Within a year, Badji’s school enrolled nearly 300 pupils almost half of which were girls. Today, the school has 700 pupils with more than half being girls.

 

“Just six, seven years ago, we had almost 30 boys in classrooms of 40 in almost all the schools across the country. But that has changed over the years thanks to aggressive sensitisation at national level.” says Fatou Pene, a prominent Senegalese educationist.

 

“Right now in most schools, there is either fifty-fifty ratio or more girls than boys because the parents who were reluctant to send girls to school were finally convinced of the significance of girls’ education because of the ‘education for all’ campaign launched by the government’.

 

Cause for concern

But Pene is worried that because of the ongoing financial crisis and high cost of living in Senegal, girls might be withdrawn from schools. “It will break my heart. But when parents find it more and more difficult to afford bread in their households, they would certainly consider using their children’s school fees for food and often times, girls are the victims’.

 

Badji is also worried that his achievement in Yeumbeul might end in failure unless Senegal does something to address financial crisis and the high cost of living.

 

"Let’s face it… there’s a limit to my generosity. The country is going through difficult financial times and I’m worried that I might not be able to continue paying for the girls and that means they will be taken off," Badji lamented.

 

When I asked young Ndey Abi whether she’s worried that her parents might withdraw her from school one day, she looked at me straight in the eyes, with her beautiful smile disappearing, and said “my parents told me that I would stay in school and when I grow up I would become a doctor. They will not take me out."

 

Unfortunately, it might just be a matter of time before ambitious girls like Ndey Abi are taken off the school bench.