On the side of a busy thoroughfare, our NGO office is tucked away in an under-construction building. Our mandate is to help girls in the Northern Region of Ghana get into school and that news has travelled quickly. By the time the heavy iron gates are unlocked every morning, girls and young woman have made their way to what they call the “storey building,” as it is the only building on the street with more than one storey. They hitch rides, perch on bicycle handlebars, carry the children that they care for and accommodate the pace of elders from their village. They take buses from other urban centers and walk for miles, in worn-out sandals, straps dragging behind, leaving clay huts to eventually reach dirt roads and finally concrete streets. They scrape together communal or family savings and invest in bus tickets to knock at this door. They return time and again to see if their textbooks are in, if they can get a battery operated lamp to study at night after completing farm work, a bike to make the 5-mile trek to school a little easier, or some financial support for their schooling. Girls and young women know the worth of their education and will struggle for years to claim a desk of their own.

Last year I moved to Northern Ghana to make short documentaries for a Canadian NGO. I met hundreds of girls in distant villages and huge boarding schools, who desperately want to define their own lives, be safe and independent and make decisions about their own futures. These girls want to be nurses, journalists, accountants, architects, hairdressers, police officers, seamstresses, teachers, development workers and politicians. Many of them will be. This generation of students will move their country towards development, which is equitable and sustainable, but first they must defend their own right to education. This is what I learned from speaking with and spending time with these girls.

Iyashimin, is a regular presence at the office and she is going to be a nurse. After her studies she will become the first professional in her family and the only person capable of providing medical treatment in her village. In a community where livelihood depends on the soil and the sun, she will earn a stable salary and provide for her father, who cannot walk, and her mother, who sells produce at the market. Her children will be raised with the securities and promises of health care and education and she will contribute to the development of her village. This is because when girls go to school they bring their skills, salaries, perspectives and potential for change back to their homes and help lift their communities out of endemic poverty and suffering.

Despite national and international guarantees of gender equality and the right to education, girls still face more obstacles to attending school, and being safe once there, than do their male counterparts. While many students in the impoverished Northern Region of Ghana don’t have money to pursue an education, girls here must contend with the assumption that they don’t merit one. From an early age, girls realize that education holds the promise of a new life. The girls who do finally make it to school have to contend with new perils -- perils that would be avoidable if their right to education was prioritized or even properly recognized by society.

The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that the right to education is universal and inalienable. This is supported by Article 25 of the Ghanaian Constitution. “All persons shall have the right to equal educational opportunities and facilities and with a view to achieving the full realization of that right- (a) basic education shall be free, compulsory and available to all.” This is followed by the declaration that “secondary education in its different forms, including technical and vocational education, shall be made generally available and accessible to all by every appropriate means, and in particular, by the progressive introduction of free education.”

While primary school is technically free in Ghana, and high school is technically accessible, there are many hidden costs that are borne by the students and their families. While tuition is not very expensive on its own, school fees and the cost of mandatory uniforms and books, can add up to ten times what the government considers to be the cost of education.

It is these hidden costs that keep girls out of school. The pains they undertake to both change the idea that they are not worth educating and to seek the means to attend school, render secondary school far from “generally available.” Also, girls make a huge contribution at home and in the fields.  When they go to school, they can’t put in the same amount of work elsewhere and face resistance from their families and communities.

    While foreign NGOs and donations from wealthy countries can help provide necessities for girls who lack the financial means to support their education it is the girls themselves who must challenge assumptions about their worth and role in society. In a region where people struggle just to survive, this is a much more difficult task.

In Tamale, Northern Region, the first glimpse of dawn over the corrugated tin roofs of the market illuminates the ceaseless movement of goods, vehicles and people. This is one of the poorest, least developed regions in the country. In villages, girls wake up as early as 3 a.m. to fetch water from miles away and return with huge drums on their heads. They venture into the forest or brush to collect firewood, then return to pound maize they harvested themselves, cook, feed the family, clean the compound and tend to the fields. This is all before they make it to town to attend class.

In Tamale, at the intersection of rural and urban, people sell their crops on the sidewalks outside of electronics shops. Tro-tros, motorcycles and cars speed along the highway, competing for space with farm equipment and herds of sheep. Toddlers wander along the divider of an eight-lane highway as their mothers try to sell tomatoes to drivers rushing to the office.  Tribal issues are communicated via text message and teens blog about their personal experiences dealing with high school, crushes, female genital mutilation and soccer. School children run in uniformed flocks down the side of the road while other school-aged children work in basic goods shops, pull carts, carry goods and sell everything from peanuts and plantains, to perfume, oranges, fabric and burned DVDs. Girls at the bus station announce their wares in two words they repeat constantly everyday, dragging out the vowels in “pure water,” as they fight their way through thick crowds with heavy bowls full of water satchels balanced on their heads. Fires and lanterns replace the light of the sun and the struggle to survive continues in pools of light. I cannot understand the worlds that people inhabit here or the ways that they move between them. The only person who can lend some perspective to the competing needs here, is the backbone of the NGO, Eunice Akpeere, a woman who has seen members of her family struggle in many of the same ways as the girls who visit our office.

Eunice grew up in a family of strong women and benefited from their guidance and support. Her mother is the headmistress of a school in Tamale and her daughter is growing up with parents who work in development and cannot wait to send their little girl, Charlene, off to university. Not all children are so lucky, Eunice says “Education continues to be a privilege rather than a right for girls in Ghana and more especially those in the Northern Region, where poverty and illiteracy rates are still very high.” She notes three factors that keep girls in the Northern Region out of school.

“Culturally, a girl would have to get married one day and belong to her husband’s family. As such, families prefer to educate the males whom they think will remain at home and build their own families and so their own families would ‘reap what they have sown.’ Girls education is considered a waste of resources in some communities. Even girls who stay in school may drop out before they climb higher since their traditional roles at home give them less time to study and as such they may not attain the grades needed to further their education.”

According to Eunice, illiteracy and poverty in communities work against girls in particular. If parents have never been to school, they will not understand the benefits of education, especially as it pertains to girls. If they are poor they will need the girls at home and if they can only send one child, it will be a boy.

Nafisa, a secondary school student I spoke with in Tamale, thinks that her mother is old-fashioned. She says that her mother is influenced by her friends and thinks that the only path for her daughter is to get married. Girls who are in school refer to this as “early marriage,” and know that it spells the end of their educational careers. Girls become mothers in their early teens after being married off to men who are easily 4 times their age and may have other wives.  

Nafisa’s father also doesn’t understand why she should attend school. “Fathers think that ladies are not important in the society or what they normally say, is that we are made for the kitchen. There are some bad perceptions in what they say about us. So, what we have to tell others is to let us be serious and also to have something in mind that what the men can do, we the ladies can also do as well. So they shouldn’t think that just because we are women and just because we will be married that we cannot also educate ourselves.”  

Although many girls do have the support of both parents, and sometimes the entire community, there are also many girls whose childhood was marked by the loss of both parents.

“In Ghana,” a student named Sylvia explains, “ we, the female ones try to help ourselves through education. Most of our parents died early and when they should die at the age when you are still in the primary or junior high- how to climb up to secondary school is always a problem. You tend to be a beggar for other people to help you and when you fail to get this money and when any man just approaches you or says something, you will follow and in the end he won’t even give anything to you but succeeding in getting you pregnant….”

Universal Primary Education initiatives on the part of the international community and increased government spending have seen a rise in the enrollment rate of Ghanaian primary school students up to 93.7 per cent in 2006/2007.  However, only 35.8 per cent of students will continue to high school. Not only is it hard for girls to get into school, but the fight to stay there gets harder with every year. Pressures mount to contribute to the community through everyday labour and girls get married instead of going to junior high school. By secondary school the ability of girls to pay higher fees and keep up with schoolwork and domestic duties can be insurmountable.

Sylvia continues, “The culture demands that we should just be in the kitchen or be in the house working all the time for the men…The school fees, they are high and you cannot afford them, so you will be compelled to sit back…”

When girls are forced to “sit back,” society suffers.

Binti Mohammed lost both of her parents when she was very young. After Binti finished junior high school, she didn’t have the money to pay her secondary school fees so she went to Accra to “do Kayayo”.

Kayayo refers to the thousands of girls, some not yet in their teens, who travel from impoverished rural villages in the north to earn small sums of money working as porters and carrying heavy loads of goods in big cities in the wealthier south of the country. They are separated from the only community and family they know, but it is the only way that they can earn the money to pay for their own school expenses.

Thousands of girls form this desperate migration every year. In communities where subsistence farming is the norm, the promise of money and opportunity in the unknown city can be enough to send a 12-year-old down the highway to live in the capital. Girls spend weeks, months and years working days and nights for about a dollar a day, in the hope of earning enough money to go to high school. They carry heavy concrete blocks and huge bags of produce for miles in 40 degree heat and then return to overflowing lodging arrangements where they may be forced into prostitution. Some girls don’t return, others return sick from abuse and overwork, carrying the children of strangers and forever marked in their communities.

“I suffered a lot,” Binti says, “and I couldn’t get enough money to return so I decided to go to my aunts and when I went there she was doing like she never knew me or something…..” Binti eventually convinced her aunt to help her get back to her village, but once there she still didn’t have money to pay her school fees.

The hot season is ushered in with the Harmattan winds that blow red dust in from the Sahara, covering every leaf in a fine rusty coat. The heat follows the wind and in northern Ghana, the hot season means suffering for boarding students in the Sub-Saharan Meningitis Belt. Students in Ghana are subject to much-celebrated boarding policies created to diminish tribal alliances -- however being separated from family and contained in grossly overcrowded dormitories often results in sickness and death.

Wasila Issah died last February, after spending years fighting to get into secondary school. She was boarding at Naliregu Secondary School and was too far away to ask her family for help when her head started to hurt so badly that she missed class. At a school with 1500 students there is still no nurse on site and the government did not deliver the inoculations that they had promised. She stayed in the crowded and unventilated dormitory because she didn’t know what else to do -- health insurance costs ten dollars and she could not afford it so she didn’t see a doctor. After three days of extreme pain, Wasila was brought home. She slipped into a coma and died of cerebrospinal meningitis. She was seventeen and she had just started high school.

The girls dorms are overflowing with meticulously organized supplies. The kids have secured their backpacks to the walls, hangers attached to the metal grates over the windows keep uniforms crisp. There are stacks of mattresses leaned up against walls and bunk beds and stacked on top of trunks. At night 87 girls will sleep here, often two or three on each single mattress - laid like tile to cover every inch of floor space.

These girls have emerged from villages without electricity or water, worked eighteen hour days and kept their grades high, fought dominant cultural practices and stayed strong in the face of community opposition, rejected early marriage, learned to read in illiterate communities, worked for years to earn school fees, travelled to cities and survived Kayayo, suffered, sacrificed and railed against every obstacle to earn a place in a classroom. They are the women who have the strength, courage and will to lift an entire country out of poverty. These women will create more equitable, peaceful and sustainable places and change the world for the better. Except that right now, they’re still girls fighting to make it to class.

Wasila’s teacher, Jonas Zitaba Yidana is responsible for 600 students, including 120 girls. Over the course of a weekend we spent working together on a documentary, two female students died at his boarding school due to preventable causes beyond his control. The blood drains from his face when he gets the call. With a strained voice, he decries the lack of sanitation, water, food and dormitory space and how it is always the girls, who only make up a quarter of the student body, who bear the brunt of any lack of resources. Jonas asked me to do one thing for him after Wasila died. In a strained and urgent tone he asked me to let people in Canada know how hard these girls struggle to claim their right to education and how much more they deserve when they get there.