The King’s Village is providing opportunities for girls and women
In Northern Ghana opportunities for girls and women are limited but improving. Few Grandmothers would have attended school, they typically married early and had seven or more children. I recently spoke to one, who had her first child at 20 and her last at 42 amounting to 12. In the Dagomba tribe, men often have two or more wives and each will have many children meaning that one household could have 30 or more family members. Jobs around the home are extensive for girls and women, for example:
Fetching water, sometimes walking for miles with a bucket on your head in dry season when water is scarce or waiting for hours for your turn at the village pump.
Sweeping the compound and rooms
Caring for babies and young children
Buying ingredients and cooking meals for the whole household 2 or 3 times a day.
Collecting fire wood for cooking, this may mean climbing high into trees to cut down branches.
Collecting shea fruit in season and processing it into oil.
Many mothers of our students at the King’s schools did not attend school and are illiterate. They are predominantly subsistence farmers or petty traders with little hope of an improved lifestyle that education would bring. Yet they have dreams of a better life for their daughters.
Ghana Education Service is encouraging families to send their girl child to school and numbers of girls taking their Basic education certificate exam (BECE) and moving on to Senior High school and even further onto university, are increasing. At The King’s Village Ghana we strive to have equal numbers of boys and girls in our schools and to offer equal opportunities in every way. In 2022 BECE’s the girls on average did better than the boys. In 2023 one of our past female students who grew up in a poor rural area, went to do a Masters degree in Agriculture in KNUST University in Kumasi.
We also have many female staff as good role models, some are in leadership roles such as our Primary Head Teacher our child assessment centre manager (Ruth), our nurse manager (Mavis) and one of our nutritionists (Portia), and you can find out more about them on our social media channels.
If you’d like to sponsor a girls education for £15/month, then please DONATE above.
