To improve girls’ education, West African governments must adopt national policies addressing all aspects of violence against schoolgirls - who face rape by teachers, verbal abuse by male students and forced early marriage by parents - a grouping of policy makers, teachers’ unions and civil society organisations has said.

“For all girls to go to school, the question of violence against girls must be solved,” said Victorine Djitrinou, international education, advocacy and campaign coordinator for ActionAid International, which organised a conference in Saly, Senegal, on violence against girls in school from 1-3 December.

“Governments must take this on as a problem. Until now, that hasn’t happened,” she said.

West Africa is home to most of the countries with the worst educational gender disparities in the world. Across the region, there are more than eight million girls out of primary school - a figure 1.6 million higher than that for boys, according to the 2008 Global Monitoring Report of the Education for All movement.

For several years, ActionAid has been insisting that violence against girls constitutes a major obstacle to their education.

Yet participants at the conference, grouping French-speaking states of West and Central Africa, said most countries do not have specific policies to fight violence against girls; laws punishing it are rarely applied; and ministries of justice, women and education officials often do not collaborate.

“There are not many actors working on this question,” Adam Ahanchede, head of Benin’s Ministry of Nursery and Primary Education, told IRIN. “And each works independently of the others.”

He said Benin was currently drafting a national policy on the education of girls, but “this question of violence is not included in it”.

A neglected issue

In Senegal, a law exists to punish rape, female genital mutilation/cutting and sexual harassment, but it is “never applied” and people resort to backhand deals to resolve crimes, according to Ndeye Astou Sylla of the Senegalese Ministry of Family and Female Entrepreneurship.

She said Senegal needs a national policy that would make the law known in every village and designate someone in every school to take on the issue. She said so far it has been neglected.

“We always act around violence against women, but not around violence against girls [specifically],” she said.

In Burkina Faso, it is the same story.

“The concept of violence against girls is not visible. It’s not expressly written,” said Marie-Claire Guigma Nassa, director of promotion of girls’ education at Burkina’s Ministry of Basic Education and Literacy. “We have recognised that weakness in the texts.”

A holistic approach

Actors in the field of girls’ education have increasingly been broadening the interpretation of “violence”. In addition to gang rape in the schoolyard and extra points for girls who sleep with their teachers, many other violations of a girl’s right to education take place, and often on a much more regular basis. In many societies, school directors send home girls who are pregnant, mothers force their daughters to do housework while their sons study, and parents pull their daughters out of school to marry them.

That is why the executive director of the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) says a simple law against rape - even if applied - will not be enough to solve the problem.

“Both at the policy level and in the actions of individual organisations, there’s just not been an integrated approach to the issue,” Coudou Diaw told IRIN.

Such a holistic approach should address paedagogical issues like teacher training, as well as issues surrounding the perception of women, sexual maturation and puberty, and violence and safety - including the physical makeup of a school building, she said.

“We have had girls pulled out of schools because there were no gender-specific toilets,” explained Senegalese Minister of Education Moustapha Sourang. “Parents refuse to have their daughters share toilets with boys.”

Taking steps

ActionAid has developed a model national policy on violence against girls called Making the Grade, which governments can adapt to their needs. It encourages governments to consolidate all policies with respect to violence against children in order to create “one piece of comprehensive legislation”.

It also states that governments should collect sex-disaggregated data on violence in schools. Such information is crucial as cases are rarely reported to the authorities and gauging the magnitude of the problem is almost impossible.

“Governments are not even aware that they should be tracking these things,” said Diaw, of the organisation FAWE.

The model policy also suggests governments ensure a gender-sensitive curriculum, check the criminal records of teachers before hiring them, and create nationwide campaigns against violence against girls in schools.

According to the UN Children’s Fund, “the challenge the world faces in order to meet the [Millennium Development Goal] of universal primary education by 2015 is greatest in West and Central Africa.”.