SECTION: STYLE; Pg. C13; JUDY MANN

LENGTH: 978 words

HEADLINE: Like Bringing Light to a Dark Room

BYLINE: Judy Mann

BODY:


Rep. Mark Green, a two-term Republican from Wisconsin, was frankly skeptical about going to Mali and Ghana in January to see schools that were educating girls. He and his wife had taught in Kenya in 1988 and had seen how the cultural bias against educating girls overwhelmed the best of efforts to provide them with a basic education.

But Green and Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.), who also went on the trip, said that what they saw in the schools they visited has made them believers in basic education programs that reach out to girls as well as boys. These programs, they said, are truly the building blocks for impoverished African families, their communities and their countries. Hope lies in the open-air classrooms and in the mud brick buildings, where 50 to 60 children listen raptly to the teacher. Green said that in the schools he saw, there were almost equal numbers of boys and girls. "That's a huge step in Africa," he said. In Mali, they saw classes in life skills being taught by teachers who had been trained to make their classrooms friendly to girls. Both the life skills and the girl-friendly approaches were developed by the Washington-based Academy for Educational Development (AED), with a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Khadiatou Coulibaly, senior adviser to AED's education program for girls in Mali, reported that teachers there had the same reaction as teachers here when they were first exposed to gender-equity training: "We ask teachers, 'Do you treat everybody equally?' and halfway through the training they said, 'Oh, goodness, we didn't know we were this biased!' " The program has trained 83 teachers in 44 pilot schools.

Coulibaly accompanied the congressmen to one school where the girl-friendly training had not taken place. "The teacher came to me and said, 'Can you explain to the boys why they should be doing the same chores as the girls?' " Coulibaly recalled. While the girls had been sweeping floors and watering plants, the boys had mostly been playing soccer.

"We talked to the boys, and they said, 'Okay, we understand,' " she said. "We are monitoring and hope to see a change in attitude."

Teachers are trained to call on girls more aggressively, and they have been introduced to teaching methods that give every student a chance to voice an opinion.

These pilot programs, for fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders, attempt to keep students in school by teaching them about things that are relevant to their lives, such as proper hygiene to prevent dysentery, instead of irrelevant information about France, which formerly colonized Mali.

"This produces something quite quickly of recognizable value to the parents," Pomeroy said. "They are more inclined to make sacrifices as a family to keep the child in school. That can be significant."

Often girls have the time-consuming jobs of hauling water to their homes and tending younger siblings. In one rural village, Pomeroy said, a parent told him that every family now has someone who can write a letter. Literate children are stopping cotton traders from tinkering with scales and cheating the parents. A member of the village's school council said that educating a girl is like bringing light to a dark room, Pomeroy said.

Pomeroy, who is serving his fifth term in Congress, said he and Green asked children dressed in rags in a small classroom in the capital of Mali what they wanted to be when they grew up. They answered soldier, police officer, teacher. "A little girl said she wanted to be a doctor, and a boy in the back of the room wearing a torn windbreaker said he wanted to be president," Pomeroy said. "These schools have allowed these children to have dreams they would not have entertained in a million years otherwise.

"If you invest in basic education, they are much more capable of steering their lives in the way they want. With five years of basic education, spacing of children increases, family size decreases, child survival increases, and malnutrition decreases."

Pomeroy added: "Microenterprise increases by a measurable amount each year after fourth grade. When [a woman] can make an economic contribution to the family, she achieves a lot more power within the family."

The basic education programs, he said, achieve "permanent, positive change. Once they have basic education, you can't retreat. Educated parents will not tolerate less education for their children."

Pomeroy and Green returned home resolved to lobby for more basic education support. Green said he has already spoken with Republican conference leaders "about the potential for doing good in this area." He hopes to talk with President Bush, whose willingness to listen might surprise many of us.

The Bush budget summary states that he wants more money for basic education and for AIDS treatment and prevention in the foreign-aid budget. The United States is spending only 5 percent of its foreign-aid budget on basic education, said Stephen Mosely, president of AED. "The current funding is now $ 150 million a year," he said. "You could double or triple that and be in the margin of what the American public would support."

Momentum is building among donor nations, international relief organizations and the poor countries themselves for making basic education and education of girls major forces for lifting Third World nations out of poverty. Advocates are making a direct link between basic education and the fight against AIDS and other diseases, which, as Green puts it, will never be controlled if families don't have a basic understanding of health.

Green and Pomeroy both spoke of looking into the eyes of children who were full of hope. They have committed themselves to helping fulfill those children's dreams. They came back crusaders for the world's poorest children.



LOAD-DATE: March 28, 2001