#IStandForGirls! Bringing Education to Girls in Mozambique!
On September 1st, Kurandza launched the #IStandfForGirls campaign to bring education to 100 girls in Mozambique!
Why girls education?
When a girl gets an education, she’s able to dream…
In the rural villages of Guijá District in southern Mozambique, it’s rare for girls to complete high school, let alone primary school. College isn’t even an option. Many girls drop out of school because their parents can’t pay for school costs or because they get pregnant.
Studies have shown that when girls go to school, they have less of a chance of contracting HIV, becoming a child bride, or having early pregnancies. They’ve also shown that when girls go to school, they have more confidence, higher self-esteem, better access to health care, and increased income.
After working in the rural villages of Guijá District for 6 years (3 years with the Peace Corps, and 3 years with Kurandza), I’ve seen first hand the difference that an education makes. The women artisans of Kurandza were able to send their kids to school, pay for all school supplies, books, uniforms, backpacks, and transportation, and now these kids are flourishing. They are continuing to study, learning the national language, Portuguese, and are passing their classes. They are also learning life skills and positive behaviors related to responsibility, respect, and work ethic. Since Percina and I have seen such a success with these children going to school, we wanted to help even more children through a new educational project.
We decided to start with the goal of bringing education to 100 girls. We chose to focus on girls because when parents have funds for only one child to go to school, they often choose to send the boys. We chose to start with 100 girls because that’s the number of the most vulnerable girls—orphans or children of unemployed parents, it’s a manageable number with the size of our grassroots non-profit at the moment, and the sponsorship of 100 girls will employ 10 local women to run our holistic education program.
The holistic education program will include after school tutoring, empowerment workshops, health education, parent-teacher conferences, and extra-curricular activities like art, sports, and theatre. The empowerment workshops will talk about gender equality, self-esteem, and self-defense. We wanted to include a holistic education program to create a safe, supportive space for our girls. Often times girls don’t find support with their parents, since they themselves have never gone to school. When their children want to drop out because the classes are difficult, their parents support that decision and tell them that they can get married instead. When our girls feel difficulty, we want to be there for them, and help support them through the hardships through counseling and tutoring. We also want their parents to be on board, that’s why we’ve created parent-teacher conferences and activities to include the parents more in their child’s education.
If you would like to join our movement and send a girl to school, you can become a monthly sponsor for $20/month here: www.kurandza.org/take-action
XOXO,
Elisabetta