The Need
Did you know?
95% of girls in Tanzania don’t finish a high school education.
The annual Tanzanian government grant is $5 per student.The U.S. government spends over $9,000 per student per year.
When girls get educated, they are three times less likely to contract HIV/AIDS.
An extra year of primary school boosts girls’ eventual wages by 10-20%. An extra year of secondary: 20-25%!
When girls go to school, they marry later and have fewer, healthier children. Also, if an African mother has five years of education, her child has a 40 percent better chance of living to age 5.
In a country like Tanzania, where illiteracy is so highly correlated with AIDS prevalence, obtaining an education can literally be a life and death matter for both individuals and entire communities. And for many girls in Tanzania, going to school has never been an option. While the ratio of girls to boys in primary school in Tanzania is relatively equal, the number of girls relative to the number of boys in secondary school is quite small. Only 5% of all females in the country are able to complete secondary school, and it’s an extraordinary feat that this 5% is able to make it as far as they do.
Why only 5%?
The average girl who does make it to secondary school comes from classrooms with no textbooks, few desks, and only one teacher for every 50-100 students. The average school life expectancy for a Tanzanian student is five years, which is not surprising given that the average annual governmental grant is equivalent to less than $5 per Tanzanian pupil. To compound the problem, many parents will choose to send their male children to school over their female children, keeping the girls home in order to help the mother with household tasks such as fetching water and gathering firewood.
The prohibitive costs of a secondary education in Tanzania make it even less likely that a girl will have the opportunity to attend school past the primary level; if there is enough money to send a child to secondary school, the parents will almost always choose to send a male child over a female one. Girls that live in remote parts of the country face even greater
challenges in trying to obtain an education. The farther the school is from home, the less likely it is that her parents will allow her to attend: the greater the distance, the less time the girl is home working, and the greater the chance that she will experience some form of sexual assault on her way to school.
The Girls of the Maasai
While most girls in Tanzania are unable to attend secondary school for monetary reasons, the girls of the Maasai tribe have even fewer opportunities to attend school than most. The people of the Maasai tribe, one of the indigenous groups of Tanzania, are well-known around the world for their tall, slender figures draped in bright red fabrics, and for their nomadic way of life, herding their cattle from one watering hole to the next. The Maasai are fiercely independent and have fought for centuries to retain their traditions and culture in the face of increasing globalization and homogenization.
Maasai women have traditionally not been allowed to attend school past the primary level because they have long been viewed as individuals whose primary purpose is to marry and to care for their children — typically six to ten in number. They are subservient to their husbands, and they are often just one of many wives. As a result, the men of the Maasai community have been reluctant to send their girls to secondary school, because they see 
education as an affront to their authority, their wealth, and their customs.
Gaining a Voice
Ultimately, however, the Maasai chiefs have begun to recognize that their way of life is slowly being forced to disappear. They are starting to realize that, in order for their culture and their people to survive, they need to be able to have a voice in their future — the type of voice only an education can provide. As a result, secondary schools, such as those that AfricAid helps support, are now empowering these, and other women throughout Tanzania, to have a voice in their own future, and, at the same time, it is giving the Maasai tribe a fighting chance to survive.
These girls’ schools are also working within a broader framework, as well, one that is playing a part in helping to lift Tanzania out of poverty. Countless studies have shown the enormously important role that the education of women plays in the development of impoverished nations. In its recent “State of the World’s Children,” UNICEF reported that “135 million children in the developing world between the ages of 7 and 18 had no education at all, with girls 60 per cent more likely than boys to be so ‘educationally deprived’.
Educational deprivation and poverty go hand in hand. Gender disparity in education is significantly greater for children living in poverty. Thus, girls are in double jeopardy, affected by both gender and poverty.”
The report goes on to say that “Girls’ education is inextricably linked to other facets of human development: the health and status of women, early childhood, nutrition, water and sanitation, and community empowerment. Girls’ education will help reduce child labour and other forms of exploitation.” Therefore, in Tanzania, where more than half of the population subsists on less than $1 per day, education is vital in the long-term fight against poverty, AIDS, and economic deprivation.
