Happy International Women’s Day! Today, we’re excited to highlight the incredible work of our students at COEC Model Schools in Samaru Kataf, Kaduna. Recently, our students created inspiring posters advocating for girls’ education, drawing inspiration from a chapter in Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s novel, Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree.
In the chapter titled “Thank God,” the protagonist, Ya Ta, learns from her Mama to stay positive and be thankful for everything because “everything happens for a reason.” Mama expresses gratitude even when her ninth child is another boy, despite her prayers for a girl. She says, “Thank God, because it is better to have more boys than one boy and many girls. Or worse, to have no boys at all” (p.12). Ya Ta, like her Mama, learns to be thankful and appreciates that her father values her education: “Unlike many other girls in our village whose parents do not think that sending a girl to school is important since she will end up getting married and taking all her father’s years of investment to another man’s house, Papa wants me educated.”
To delve deeper into this chapter, we engaged our students with thought-provoking discussion questions:
- Is Mama right to say, “It is better to have more boys than one boy and many girls…Or worse, to have no boys at all”? What does this tell you about gender discrimination?
- Why is Ya Ta grateful for her father’s desire to educate her?
- How do you think Ya Ta’s education will impact her future compared to other girls in her village?
Our students passionately shared their views on why girls’ education should be as valuable as boys’. They then participated in a poster activity to reflect on the impact of girl-child education. Working in groups, they created posters exploring how Ya Ta’s education could shape her future and benefit her community compared to other girls in her village without access to schooling.
The students’ posters were both beautiful and meaningful, highlighting the critical need for educating girls from marginalized rural communities. This activity was particularly significant as it provided these young people with a platform to advocate for issues relevant to their experiences. In their community, many young girls drop out of school to get married due to cultural assumptions and socioeconomic circumstances. Through this activity, the students challenged these norms, asking, “What if we remained in school? We’d impact a lot more people, beyond our homes!”
One student creatively used the novel’s title and the metaphor of the baobab tree to emphasize the importance of girls’ education. Their poster featured a poem:
“A woman is like the baobab tree
that is, the Tree of Life
that protects, shields, cures,
covers, sacrifices, bears fruit,
supports, accumulates and hides
people and secrets and encourages
So she needs to be educated”
As we celebrate International Women’s Day, let’s remember that investing in a girl’s education today empowers tomorrow’s woman.Stay tuned for more updates on our Literacy Amidst Violent Conflict program and check out our detailed guide below on how to conduct this activity with your students.
Happy International Women’s Day! #AccelerateAction
