Educating girls in Nigeria

The Female Scholarship Scheme is one strand of the Girls Education Project, with an aim to increase the proportion of qualified female teachers in rural areas.

Grace Bumba lives in Nigeria. Lack of money and a culture that expects girls to marry in their early teens means that higher education is usually an impossible dream for girls. But a special scholarship has enabled Grace to break the mould.
Photograph: Chris Morgan/UKaid/Department for International Development

The Girls Education Project (GEP) Female Scholarship Scheme, funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), aims to increase the proportion of qualified female teachers in rural areas who can act as role models and local mentors to poor rural girls.
Photograph: Chris Morgan/UKaid/Department for International Development

Grace says: "In my village, I’m the first person to get an opportunity to study at a higher institution. I will become educated and will come back to my village and others will learn from me, especially girl children. I chose to major in Agricultural Science because in our village everyone is a farmer. It has not been easy with my baby Miriam, but I have to just do it."
Photograph: Chris Morgan/UKaid/Department for International Development

“You know opportunity comes but once, you just have to use that opportunity with 2 hands. I’m going to help when I get home because I know some homes and I know some people who don’t like their children to go to school, I will go to that house, I will enlighten the parents, I will fight for the rights of those girls. We are in democracy, you are free, school is your passport.”
Photograph: Chris Morgan/UKaid/Department for International Development

When Habibah Yakubu was at primary school there were only 7 girls in the whole school. Today, having studied at teacher college, the school Habibah teaches in has over 100 girls in Year 1 alone.
Photograph: Chris Morgan/UKaid/Department for International Development

Habibah says that thanks to the DFID-funded Girls Education Project scholarship “I can represent my village. I can show them the happiness of education. I would like my education to go further, to make myself proud as a person who has achieved something with her life.”
Photograph: Chris Morgan/UKaid/Department for International Development

“Whatever it is that a person would hope to get from this life, if you are not educated you will not be able to get it.”
Photograph: Chris Morgan/UKaid/Department for International Development

For Asibi Abdullahi, primary school meant few books and “we did not have many teachers then, and no female teachers, not even one. I am the first woman to finish school in my community.” Asibi wanted to go to college but there was no money and marriage looked like the only option.
Photograph: Chris Morgan/UKaid/Department for International Development

“I heard about the DFID scholarship which meant I could go to college to train as a teacher. I told the person I was supposed to marry to be patient that I would be going to school. I had never known what electricity was all about until I went to the college for the first time. My best subject is biology and now I like going to the library.”
Photograph: Chris Morgan/UKaid/Department for International Development

“There is no other role for me than to return here and teach. I would teach the children and I would also encourage other girls like myself to get educated so that they would be as happy as I am”, says Asibi.
Photograph: Chris Morgan/UKaid/Department for International Development

As the community welcomes Asibi back to the village, she says “Things will change when I come back – people will see that a woman can have a job, so people will be encouraged and the community will move forward.”
Photograph: Chris Morgan/UKaid/Department for International Development