AFRICA/NIGER – Female schooling is the way to give girls their rightful spot in society

Tuesday, 14 June 2022 


SMA
Niamey (Agenzia Fides) – “The university is an productive indicates to reduce early and compelled marriages, and to unfold loved ones preparing, freely preferred by the few, and not imposed by tradition”, reads a be aware sent to the Fides Agency by Fr. Marco Prada. “Parents usually complain that a girl retained at house to show up at university is just one more mouth to feed – carries on the priest of the African Mission Modern society -. To offer with this challenge, the French high faculty in Niamey, as properly as numerous other superior schools in the Nigerien money, have created boarding schools, wherever ladies obtain lodging and foodstuff, as effectively as a welcoming and supportive natural environment. The initiative offers a hundred ladies, born in poor and deprived families, especially in the inside of the nation, the prospect to enroll and go to instructional centers. “The academic challenge responds to the aspirations of the President of Niger, Mohamed Bazoum, who has placed instruction amongst the priorities of his mandate,” added Fr. Prada. “Amongst the government’s aims is earlier mentioned all the education of women. Dad and mom prefer to marry them at 15 years of age. In simple fact, 77% of Nigerien ladies are married prior to the age of 18, and 28% before the age of 15. And so, Niger has for a long time been the place with the best delivery fee in the earth: 6 children on common for every female. “When you struggle for the emancipation of girls, our chauvinist and conservative modern society straight away denounces you as being at the services of Western lifestyle and its values, which conflict with Islam. We are accused of ruining the common values of Niger”, says Nafissatou Hassane Alfari, director of an affiliation for the promotion of ladies in Nigerien modern society. In fact, even the jihadists, the Muslim extremists, have comprehended the power of change that faculties represent and that is why when they assault villages, the university is always amid the infrastructure they damage. Hadiza Maiga, who has produced a sewing university, is dependable for welcoming ladies who had to fall out of college since they have been forced to marry by jihadists and undergo genital mutilation. “These girls managed to escape. They can not go back to their family members in the village, mainly because they would be rejected. Hadiza welcomes them, gives them a home and the option to understand a job and generate a new life for them selves independently and responsibly”. In Father Prada’s account we also examine of a university professor who directs a system to overcome radicalization and violent extremism. “Professor Moulaye Hassane is anxious about the growing affect of Wahhabi fundamentalism, sponsored by the international locations of the Arabian Peninsula, which has imposed new rules of existence that especially penalize ladies. Wahhabi preachers regard women’s marketing associations as smoke in their eyes, and in their sermons accuse them of undermining the foundations of the Islamic religion”. (MP/AP) (Agenzia Fides, 14/6/2022)
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