It is yet another year for the commemoration of the girl-child to draw attention to the challenges she faces in order to address them for her to live a meaningful, successful life with opportunities devoid of abuse and other hindrances.
International Day of the Girl (IDG) is celebrated annually on October 11, making this year the 10-year anniversary. The theme for the 2022 celebration is ‘Our Time Is Now – Our Rights, Our Future’.
Sima Bahous, Executive Director of UN Women, said in a statement that inadequate investment in girls’ rights implementation was limiting adolescent females from fulfilling their potential.
She said, “In the past ten years I have seen girls’ interests and influence rise in global agendas and contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Whether in climate, education, mental wellbeing, gender-based violence, or sexual and reproductive health and rights, girls are propelling themselves forward as leaders, advocates and change makers.”
Women have a right to live, to think, to be educated and earn a living as human beings endowed by the Almighty to attain great heights.
However, due to some obstacles placed in the path of the girl-child even the religious education is not provided for her, so she may not even know how to worship God. For example, how to perform ablution and say a prayer, and know how to read the Qur’an.
The eagerness of the parents is to see them married. They give birth and the circle continues, though some people go into the hinterlands and try to persuade the parents or open Islamiyah schools, not necessarily a formal one. They can teach in a house where available.
Yet they are sent to hawk. From villages near big towns buses would bring them to the towns in the morning to hawk their wares and go back in the late afternoon or early evening.
They are exposed to all manner of people, especially unscrupulous men who take advantage of them. And if anything happens like pregnancy, it is almost certain that the man would go free. He may deny being responsible or go where she would not see him again.
With the coming of insurgency and banditry a girl-child is confronted by every woman’s worst fear and that is rape. These criminals raid communities; they rape women and girls there or abduct them and marry them while in captivity.
Even in boarding schools where they are put in safe keeping to the school authorities and the government by their parents, the schools are invaded and the young girls abducted by the bandits.
Nursery school, primary school and Islamiyya school pupils are sexually molested by their teachers. In fact, toddlers are not safe at home and the neigbourhood.
The latest such case is early this month of the 49-year-old man Baba Idi, who allegedly raped his neighbour’s daughter, a 3-year-old Khadija Adam where she subsequently died in Kano.
In some communities, widows are still ostracised, blamed for the death of their husbands and therefore not supported to raise their children, and where they are not treated like that many are not supported by relatives in raising their children and they withdraw them from school and sent them into hawking or sent out as house helps. Another generation of girls missing out on education.
While it is easy to detest the very notion of child labour, at times the parents have no option, perhaps the mother is a widow, nobody helps her and she has no means of making money to at least feed her family. Though the irony is that some are not widows, their husbands are alive and well but the poor women are the ones struggling to feed the family with the support of the children, but at the end of the day the Oga must have his meal!
Women practice prostitution and some are initiated in their early teens, so from a young age they are brainwashed into believing that they have a power to make money from men by ‘selling’ their body.
They don’t realise that they have become an expendable commodity. They should be encouraged to see themselves as worthy human beings and therefore not to be lured into prostitution and even taken abroad for it.
One can go on and on, however, education, empowerment, opportunities, protection from abuse can go a long way in the long, long way ahead of the girl-child.
At birth, some parents tend to call their daughters a princess, of where you may ask, definitely of the Kingdom of their Hearts. If only she lives up to the image of that. It is unfortunate how many ‘princess’ turn out to be.
The girl-child is, nonetheless, to be celebrated for she is the mother of the future, a nurturer and she is not to be left behind while the world moves ahead.
