A 3-day regional conference was organised by Jaslika in partnership with RELI Africa between April 16 and 18, 2024 in Nairobi convened under the theme “From data and commitment to action: Creating a regional movement for girls’ education”. The gathering  was honoured to have Hon. Beatrice Elachi, Member of Parliament for Dagoretti North to open the conference. Dagoretti North   is one of the 11 electoral constituencies of Nairobi. The conference, which brought together over 100 participants from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, centred around the findings of a research conducted by Jaslika  on “Creating impact at the local level for girls: Learning from girls’ education interventions in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda”.

Good morning. Thank you very much and indeed it gives me great pleasure to join you this morning to discuss a topic that I normally take very dearly as a woman, and not just a leader. I always say that if it is not for education then I don't think you can even have the privilege - to have the opportunity - to serve or to do whatever we do today. So for me, education always comes as one of my great pillars and very key in terms of everything that I do. And I think in many of my speeches I don’t go away without saying education, because I know it is indeed education.

But then, having listened to what Dr. Sheila has presented and just to appreciate that - today we are here to create impact at the local levels for girls for education within East Africa. Indeed now we come to the subject of why we are here today and to appreciate the research that Jaslika has done with all the stakeholders - that when I look at the girl child across Africa and having run even a campaign with a few of my friends within the church, that we look at the girl child and the challenges they face. They are the same in the whole of Africa as it is in Kenya.

We only differ in very few issues - maybe on how we've put in the curricula, how we are trying to push governments to create that infrastructure, and how we ensure that as a government we have to ensure that we have three pillars that we carry them on - and that is where now we start having different ways of how to do it. So you find that within Africa - I'll talk across and come regional then I'll close with Kenya based on the baseline that we have. So within Africa, [we have] the same challenge that we face across the board. Now when we come and look at the girl child in terms of whether she has reached a level of giving consent herself that she will get married. So you find across Africa we believe at the age of 13, 14 this girl is able to decide that or she's pushed - that you can now be a mother in a family or have children and get a husband and they decide for you. It is done across the West African countries, all our Muslim countries. Now, we come today, in Kenya, we are now there. So we are the same across.

And then we come and we find ourselves with a few countries with the similarities of FGM to the whole of West Africa. Then a few in East Africa, Central Africa very high and then Kenya we are here. We practise it. Now we look at all those and then you realise in terms of domestic chores. I think now we are the same. We believe that as a girl from a young age, you are supposed to emulate what your mom is doing and be her, when she's in absentia you become her. And you have to take care of the whole family. So it is there, it's within our culture.

So when we look at the research and the findings you realise we still have those norms. These are norms that we have to still continue not really fighting, advocating about it and making sure that now we normally say culture is not static. It evolves. So it has to change based on the times we have today.

Then, we come now when we are entering education. And that is where many governments have not clicked on; how the challenge a girl will face and a challenge a young man or a young boy, my son will face in school. So today because of the different genes that we have, not like our days. In our days I think we were very lucky that you would be close to form 4 and you have not realised you are in your menstrual period. So you are lucky you finish without even using pads. You will come to campus. Some will start early but most of us will start a bit late. In our children today across Africa the age of 8, 9, 10, standard 5 they are there. Nobody is there to train. Nobody is there to start empowering them earlier. That when you reach this time you will find yourself becoming a woman and this is the first sign that comes in. So your menstrual period will come in and you will need a pad and all that. So what does this girl do? Immediately she starts that cycle, definitely one week every month, she will never be in school. She starts losing from there. So that I may be a person who is lucky that I have no cramps. Those who have cramps are sick. In the beginning they don't even understand. So you find - and if your mother also did not go through a cycle that had a lot of strains - she also doesn't understand. So you find yourself alone in that.

So in school today, we fear that we do not want to talk about sexual rights. We are being pushed because of how within the age you are supposed to speak about it. Speak what is right and speak what is wrong for them to understand before they use the digital platform to understand everything that a parent fears. And I think that is what we are trying to push the government and say look fine they are not saying bring sexual rights as you say. No, but we are saying it is important to inform because they also have informed themselves beyond, as why they realise as parents being very conservative we are very quiet.

And we assume our children are not learning. They learn from each other and they learn now beyond what you would have at least trained them to understand. And now they go beyond because they are testing for themselves. So the research again comes back and tells us that for the many years we fought for education for girls, a better environment, better infrastructure, we still have barriers that we must address today.

Then now we come to the issues that were raised - teen pregnancy. When you look at the research and you realise when we went through Covid. I think as Kenyan we have to understand the pregnancies of young girls during Covid time. It just went to another century that has never been. It's only that we don't go deeper to do this research but if you do it you will feel very sad on how many girls are out there with young babies and also children. I will give you an example of Kawangware: When I walk in, when I find the young girls when I'm trying to take them back to school. It's not as easy as we are thinking that you just carry this girl and take her back to school. And especially when you have girls from the informal sector and I know it's across East Africa it's not just Kenya. But these girls whenever you find out - even you, as a woman, when you give birth your whole mindset changes. So don't assume she's a girl anymore.

The mindset has changed. So we have to look over different ways to ensure they still go back to school but which is the best way. So that you also don't encourage the ones who are in school to think this was the best way of doing it. No, it's not the best way. It's not even the right way. So I always say the government has to come up with a different way which I've always proposed. We have the days we used to go for adult education. And this adult education guided everyone who wanted to just finish school and you would finish and you'll do the same exams. And you'll finish and now go to high school and proceed.

Or if you were in high school then you finish and you move on and you'll find and I know there are many girls who are now in campus, a few of them who have children. But they just decided we are going back to school but you give them a safe place also for them to feel a bit comfortable. Because when you go back to the same school where you were, then you feel stigmatised. So when we are looking at the research we have to always remember, how do you deal with that barrier? And how do you make it work for this girl who you want to take back to school to feel comfortable? Not to think so much about what she did was wrong but to know you have wronged her first. Never repeat. Finish until you get to where you want to go. So that's another thing.

And then today we have very serious rape cases, especially incest. Where in these families and especially again during Covid time we had very unfortunate challenges of girls’ living with their step fathers, living with their uncles in the houses that we normally say have one room - it is the bedroom, it is the sitting room, it's the kitchen and everything. And we have those girls who I know; I have picked a few of them. They have their story. The biggest challenge these girls face is the trauma of imagining that every day you must see your father who you believed was your father, but now has a tendency of just raping you every time and what will mom do? Mom will protect it. In fact, you become the enemy because mom feels I am a mother. I got married with these children. I have no other place to go. I have to survive with this man. So you become the burden. Or they feel you have to go and stay back home with grandma because now, they will save you and they will never talk about it.

So if the girl is not brave enough to come and talk about it then it becomes very difficult. But you will always - if you are a teacher - you will look at this girl and you realise something somewhere is not very right, and they become very aggressive. And they become very angry when they see any man in front of them. And you wonder in class why you have anger so much in men or in everyone? So if you do your counselling slowly by slowly you find now they are able to open up, some of them. But most of the girls within Africa, do you know? They keep the same way our mothers did; they are the same way we are. We keep it in our hearts. We never speak about it, but we behave in a manner - when you look, when I'm angry you realise there is a challenge or something that I went through in life. That I use this way to portray that.

So in that, we have to go back again and ask ourselves, how do we deal with this barrier of teachers, parents and even our own brothers? So it was still there during the 90s. We still have it today and it's even worse today than in the 90s. You know, in those days I think we believed in family as the African culture. We believed a family is a family, an extended family with everything. Now with the cultures that we have borrowed, we have lost it completely and we are back to this nuclear family where we feel you deal with the nuclear family first but when you look at those days whoever was able, used to take everyone to school. And then in those days also people feared so much to get pregnant because it was a taboo that time. It was very rare and even the men that time respected that. Now today is so different. Today is very sad that even at what age, even at five, six they are speaking about it. So we cannot fear, as teachers, as civil society and as legislators, to speak about it. We have to speak so that we assist our children to understand where and how life will be in the years to come.

And maybe that is why today we are facing a lot of challenges even for young people who are getting married. Why? Because also when you start sex early, which we have refused to tell our girls, it is very easy to get cancer when you get to the age of 38 going higher. Sorry for cancer you will get, especially when you start at the age of 13. Those are some of the risks that bring in. So we have to tell them and they have to understand.

The other thing we are facing when I look at the research is the invisibility of children with disabilities which I know also is something that we have to do. In Kenya we are trying to push. I know you will find, when I went to the West African countries in fact because they feel like it was witchcraft. We still have all these beliefs, we have. So you find they keep these children at home. If they were unable to kill earlier, now you are put completely isolated and that is where this child will grow up in a very sad way. So it is something we must create awareness to bring out these children because all of them are our children.

The other thing is we have normalised gender-based violence.In fact it is not an issue anymore and the most sad part is how we just see things happening. And as I said we left our culture of Africa where those days when your mother was being beaten everyone will come and ask why are you beating her. Today we say ‘Don't interfere, it's a family matter’, which is very sad and that is why it has become a very serious norm. It has become something that we must start asking ourselves how do we go back to African culture to take care of some of these things. As much as some of the African cultures are bad, some are very good. Some were very good and we need to ask ourselves how do we go back to deal with gender-based violence which is so high because of poverty, because of economic poverty and jobs and employment the mother becomes the one who takes care of everything and then now we are here.

As I finalise I think the other thing we need to ask ourselves is now, how do we go back to government. I know the African Union has said they want to see every government coming up at least, with a budget of 27% of their budgets to go to education to support. How do we start that campaign, do advocacy and ensure we present a paper to the AU presidents when they are at the AU and say: ‘Look we have looked at Kenya, we have this percentage, Tanzania, this percentage Uganda, this percentage’? We want these countries during the budget time, this is what we are pushing for - the education sector to be at this level. We have to do a campaign we must advocate and as we do that, show them now the infrastructure of girls and say look, as much as you see girls in school they reach at this level why they reach at that level is because of the issues now, the findings we find.

That yes, you start at lower primary. You are there, sort of going, but after you have done your exams, half of them might go to get married and that is why now you find boys are coming in. After form four is now even worse because that is where many of them now go into marriage and you start losing them as they go to campus.

So how do we follow through, have a good framework to say I'm moving with these girls to this level and this level and this level? What have we been trying to do of late? First of all, to deal with teen pregnancies and I've realised the only way is to work with form fours in all my schools. So I have to do it quarterly; I must sit and have a meeting with all the students from all the schools we have within Dagoretti North. Girls? Where did we start in January, how many were we? Is anyone at home? or has transferred to another school? If transferred to another school fine, if at home where at home? Have they gone to be married? Is it the lack of school fees? So we have to walk that journey. It's a tough journey but that is what I have decided myself and you know in Nairobi you have public schools you have ABETschools.

I don't know whether in Tanzania and Uganda you also have what we call ABET schools. Schools that are in the informal sector where there are no public schools but we have schools that are there assisting children the same way a public school would. So we have so many of them in Nairobi. Why? The lack of public schools in Nairobi has taken us to that route. And for me it is to push the government.

We moved back to Kenya and now we've gone to the CBC. Now this CBC can be a very good system for our children today, yes but this CBC needs a lot of all of us stakeholders to work together to achieve what the government is trying to do, to make it work, because our children of today are not the children of yesterday who believed in reading so much. Our children of today have been given a gift to use their mind and think. Now because of digital technology, and all this platform you ask me, if your child is right now in form one when the time he or she will be going to campus what type of education does she find there?. Because if they have charged GPT 4 today going 5, that's what they are using to do everything. And then they saw that it has come in, and so it will be even more advanced. It can do a movie; you can remove a movie from Hollywood and just show it here. It means if we don't change that system we will never be closer to them. They are always ahead of you.

When you look at them, a girl of standard three is very ahead. First of all she is very fluent in what she is thinking, how she wants it to be, and she tells you. Number two she will stand and tell the teacher ‘What you have said is wrong, teacher, it is not that way’. They are very open so they are not like us. Even when we were in class, you know the teacher is Mwalimu, you know. And whether you can see it is wrong or right Mwalimu is right. Now this one they don't even call them Mwalimu anymore; I don't know if they call them ‘miss’ and you're like, ‘what is ‘miss’? They say, ‘That's how we have to call her and you're like, ‘Okay’. The system that we went through was so different, so for them they are ahead of their teachers and they can even stand and lecture and say ‘Mwalimu I think it is this way’ and that's why CBC now comes in to help us to mitigate that fastness.

And I know parents are feeling the pain but it is not anybody's wish. Even in your house, children of today while you are doing your domestic violence they will say it outside, they will talk about it and say they don't like it. For us, mom would be beaten, wake up in the morning and cook for everyone. Nobody will speak about it. That's the difference.They go to school and they ask you ‘Where is my father?’ Even when you have decided you're a single mother you have to explain why you are single and if you joke she will ask you.

So that's where we are in that education system with our children and so when we are doing these researches they help us to identify more of the gaps that we have. And that is why I want to finalise by thanking the team for that research and to agree that whatever call to action you will bring in we are willing. I'm willing to walk a journey with it to see where we can push in government. Speak about it outside there as you said the media had misinformed - definitely when we are on the platform, we will still be informed and say a few weeks ago we had this. This is now the real thing, what is happening and so for that I want to wish you well.

And wish our brothers and sisters from Uganda and Tanzania. Karibuni sana Kenya. Muji enjoy. We want to thank you.

I think we've learned from both of the countries. We've walked a journey; we've learned together. Most of our systems are the same. Our children, some come from Tanzania. Kenyans go to Tanzania, go to Uganda. And so we always say we are one, as we move ahead in ensuring that impacting girls and creating that local level for girls in terms of their infrastructure in terms of even that education system. We are praying that we can have an education system that is similar. If we are serious about East Africa then we are able to work together without looking at many of the things.

Thank you so much. I wish you well in the deliberations. And I declare the conference open.