Still, one must recognize that this community, that has made so much progress in accepting and supporting formal education, continues to face obstacles, mainly in relation to their own cultural realities. For example, the villagers must compete more and more with parents from the urban fringe who are looking to enroll their children in the school. The urban advantage? These parents are in conformity with the requirements for enrolment as, unlike their rural counterparts, they are able to produce a birth certificate attesting to the legal identity and age of their children.
The parents of Sinthiou Mbadane, on the other hand, often welcomed their children into the world at home, or at a local health center, and never went through the process necessary to obtain a birth certificate. Now, if they want to claim the limited amounts of spots at the school for their children, they must go through a longer, more expensive process of an audience foraine to obtain proof of age certificates. The time and funds, and even the involvement of the director to vouch for the child’s age, is too constraining for many parents. Some fathers were recently spotted leaving their herds mid-day to collect and then sell firewood, all in hopes of being able to pay the 2,000fcfa (~USD5) for the process. While the director has had to make some tough decisions – in the beginning of this school year, he had the village choose which 60 out of the 100 students on the enrolment list would be able to attend – he does believe that, in the long run, strongly encouraging that parents get birth certificates for each child, which will then be their key to passing national exams, voting, applying for loans, and so many other advantages.
In the past few months, out of the roughly 60% of the students who did not have birth certificates, half have now obtained them, thanks to the audiences foraines and a great deal of support from their parents and the school director. Yet, even when – or if – the remaining children receive theirs, the battle is not over. During the first few years after the school became functional, there were more than 20 girls who left their studies to go start a family. In traditional Pulaar settings, giving girls in marriage at 10, 11, and 12 years of age is rather common and, once married, these girls are then expected to stay at home, tend to the chores, and have children.
While the number of girls leaving school for this reason has significantly reduced, girls’ education continues to be a challenge. Many of the girls who were part of these first groups to marry and leave school are often asked to give testimony to the importance of schooling. They explain to families who want to withdraw their girls that “if I could do it again, I’d stay in school” and “I really wish I had more of an education.” The women teachers association for girls empowerment, SCOFI (scolarisation des filles) has also been called in on occasion to discuss with families the importance of education for girls. After all these efforts, success is starting to become apparent in the numbers: out of the 48 students in their first year of school, CI, 31 of them are girls.
Particular, though, to the Pulaar community is the necessity to promote boys’ education as well. In this majority herding community, families need boys to take the cows out to graze – a task that is requiring further and longer trips as local grazing land is being sold by the government and exploited as farms or construction sites. There have been “mobile school” projects in other areas in the past that attempted to follow herding boys in order to provide them with an education – but, according to the school director, these projects have failed, rejected by the communities as out of place and unnecessary.
The movement of the parents themselves is another challenge facing the communities. Girls keep house, boys follow cows, and mothers and fathers move in rhythm with the weekly markets in order to sell milk and meat. Thus, parents are away from the household for almost all of the waking hours of the day, if not longer. Their involvement, then, in their children’s schoolwork and in any activities supporting the school is very limited.
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