Lighting Up Girls’ Education (LUGE)
Only one in ten (6% percent) girls completes primary education in South Sudan. The country remains Poverty, child marriage and cultural and religious views all hinder girls’ education.
In spirit of the saying “educating a girl is educating a society”, our objective is to create an environment in which girls excel and prosper in education and career fields. We are breaking barriers to girl child education and empowering school going girls to rise and talk truth to power. We believe that in order to correct the prolonged injustices that women and girls faced for centuries in the patriarchal South Sudan, there is urgent need to equip girls with the most powerful empowerment tool ” education.” Because when girls are educated, the entire society is educated.
Our approach towards realising the objective of creating an environment in which girls prosper academically recognises that all school going girls in South Sudan are burdened with additional home chores and care duties immediately they get home from school based on the societal assigned gender roles. These gender related tasks are significant barriers to girls’ education. As most girls are left tired and unable to either open their books or study while at home. On the other hand, their male counterparts have all the after school hours to read, revise, understand, and master academic concepts they learned earlier. As a result, girls are generally performing poorly.
The situation is further exacerbated by disregards for girls education and poverty. In most South Sudanese communities, girls are discouraged from enrolling in schools as they are primarily being raised to become wives and generate wealth through dowry payments. Many girls are forced into marriages in their early teenage, taught to be submissive to their husbands, and required to put up with various forms of physical and emotional abuse resulting from domestic violences. Poverty is also a massive barrier to girls education as poor and most vulnerable households are unable to pay for electricity, or procure reading lamps to use for reading post sunset after they complete their home chores. Many girls equally drop out of schools due to lack of sanitary towels. For a very long time these societal injustices have negatively impacted girls education in South Sudan.
We are working to increase the enrolment of girls, improve their learning outcomes, and decrease their drop-out and repetition rates in South Sudan.
To enhance this we:
a). Providing academic support to girls. We provide the most vulnerable individuals with solar lamps they can use for studies in the night to make up for time lost doing home chores.
b). We offer free tutoring and coaching sessions for girls to improve their academic outcomes and performances. We are creating a platform on which girls will build confidence in Mathematics and Science to be able to compete and deliver in the STEM sector globally. W are working with schools to initiate Mathematics and Science (M&S) Clubs to offer extra lessons and guidance for girls in Maths and Science subjects.
c). We support girls with sanitary towels to reduce the number of school days missed and eliminate the chances of monthly drop-outs due to menstrual hygiene management issues.
d). Leadership and Talent Development.We are building the capacity of girls in leadership through our capacity building workshops and trainings. These trainings are designed to sharpen girls’ leadership skills including publish-speaking. These includes conducting retreats, conferences, and meetings for exposures and interactions with role models and successful women.
We also know that not every girl will be gifted in books “traditional education”. We therefore invest in girls success beyond the traditional academic paths. We are supporting girls to nurture their talents and interests to excel in their various non-academic fields of choices. We organise for group coaching as well as one to one mentorships.
Through education, we are empowering girls to break barriers, become the changes they need, and live their dreams.
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