According to UNICEF,  13.5 million children in Nigeria do not have access to free and quality basic education, and a mjority of this number constitiute girls in Northen Nigeria. For the girls that are fortunate to be enrolled in schools, an estimted 1.3 million of them drop out of school each year before reaching the last year of lower secondary school (aka Junior secondary school 3).  Of the girls that dropout out of school, 69% of them are from northern Nigeria, and the major driving forces include insecurity, armed banditry, kidnaping, sex trafficking, and early marriage. The age-long traduitional belief that the education of a girl child ends in the kitchen, and that the boy child is more dominant than the girl child further creates an gender-based educational inequality. This problem is particularly common in rural areas.

As part of the efforts to achieve sustainable development goal 5 (gender equality), Michael Manja Williams of the BiotaCHF and our humanitarian team are working to improve the accessibility and quality of education for girls in rural areas of northern Nigeria. Mike is a science teacher himself and has been in the academia for nearly two decades. Michael Williams Manja and the team are adopting several strategies to provide solutions to these problems. The strategies include:

-Sourcing grant (majorly a global teacher award small grant awarded by the International Research and Exchanges awarded by the USA embassy to Michael Williams Manja) and donations to build schools and class blocks in rural communities.

- Mobilization and orientation of teachers in rural communities.

- Volunteering to teach in rural communities.

- Sourcing and donations of books to support learning in rural schools.

- Establishment of  educational advancement centers across rural communities where students are provided with internet- enabled computers to facilitate easy and efficient learning.

- Organization of cultural re-orientation programs across the communities. 

NB: Details of the work can be found here: https://youtu.be/CpTc39dNv70