School's in.

They mix a traditional Quranic curriculum with English, maths, science and social studies – but Nigeria’s Islamiyya schools are proving a quiet revolution in bringing education to girls who would otherwise miss out. Malcolm Doney reports. Pictures by David Pratt.

Hang a right off one of the teeming thoroughfares of Kano, Nigeria’s principal northern city, where a combination of desert dust and two-stroke from the ubiquitous Chinese-manufactured Jincheng motor bikes catches the back of your throat. Then drive through a gap in what remains of the ancient, softly eroded mud-built city wall that has stood for centuries. Turn down a tiny side street, and walk into a small three-sided compound of two-storey concrete buildings. What sounds like chanting – an adult voice, answered by the reedy sound of children repeating – comes faintly from some of the rooms.

We have reached Yakasaid school, a privately funded Islamic primary school. Inside each Spartan classroom children crowd the benches looking intently at a teacher who stands, classically, at a large blackboard. The boys are dressed in white, the girls’ faces are circled by pink headscarves. One thing is immediately obvious. Girls outnumber boys by roughly two to one.

If this is remarkable in a school anywhere in the developing world, it is particularly so in a predominantly Islamic city in an African country. Yet this phenomenon is repeated in school after Muslim school across the north of Nigeria – a stark aberration which stands against the tide of developmental statistics.

There is a global problem in education – not enough girls are going to school. Around 58 million are missing primary education, let alone secondary schooling. This was recognised when the Millennium Development Goals were set and gender parity was given greater urgency over the other aims and targeted for 2005, as opposed to 2015. A target, all the same, missed by around 75 countries.

The reasons why so many girls don’t go to school is well rehearsed: parents think boys are a better investment because they are more likely to get jobs; mothers keep their daughters at home to help with the chores; parents assume girls will simply marry and don’t need schooling; girls are vulnerable to attack on the way to and from school.

And, in a largely Muslim culture like that of northern Nigeria, there are additional factors. Muslim parents often believe that the secular education offered in Nigeria’s public schools is harmful to their religious traditions, and will corrupt their children. “People believed going to school was as good as going to hell,” quipped one senior Nigerian development expert, himself a Muslim. In particular they want to bring up their girls to be good religious wives and mothers but, as Dr Aminata Maiga of UNICEF says, “people are not convinced that what is taught and the way it is taught is relevant and in harmony with their values”.

As a result, Muslim parents, especially in conservative, rural areas, boycotted public schools. But they would send their daughters to Quranic schools. Known as Islamiyya schools, these institutions are privately owned, often started by a local religious figure or businessman, and are set up to teach children Arabic and the Quran and, occasionally, Islamic studies – a heritage that goes back as far as the 11th century. Traditionally, few of these schools taught any other subjects, and were completely beyond the reach of the Ministry of Education.

Their advantages lay in that they were trusted, founded on religious values, usually set in the midst of the community (avoiding long journeys), charged low fees and, at the highest level, teachers or ‘ulamas’ were well educated in the science of the Quran and Hadith and highly respected.

On the downside, they were often primitively built, overcrowded, had no clean water or sanitation, used untrained teachers and were unaccountable in their curriculum.

But, importantly, parents were prepared to send their girls there. In the wake of the 1999 launch of the Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme and the drive towards the Millennium Development Goals for education, the Nigerian Education Ministry (supported by UNICEF, DFID and USAID) have tried to draw Quranic schools into a wider educational commonwealth.

In return for help with resources and training, Quranic schools are being persuaded to add four core subjects: English, maths, science and social studies (history, geography, health etc) to their Islamic curriculum – with these making up at least 30 per cent of the school’s teaching. Those that do so to the required standard are registered with their local board of education and can take their students to the level where they can sit the common entrance exam, which will qualify them to graduate to secondary school.

This “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach recognises that this may be the best way to ensure that girls in northern Nigeria receive an education. Great care is taken to reassure parents and teachers that these additional subjects help form ‘modern’ rather than ‘Western’ education. And it is meeting with astonishing success.

“Enrolment in Islamiyya schools in Kano State (the region surrounding the city of Kano) has doubled,” says the region’s Director of Schools Services Aminu Tafida. “There are 741 newly registered schools this year, and the board has received 57 applications in the last month. Every day we get new applications.” In the vast majority of cases, girls are greatly outnumbering the boys.

The upsurge seems to be due to a number of factors. The country’s political liberation in 1999 from years of military rule appears to have provided an environment where people feel they have more of a stake in the country and where education has more value. Mr Tafida concurs, “The acceleration began four or five years ago with the new government”. There is also less suspicion of the dangers of western style education per se, particularly from those parents who have received some education themselves. “Now they are realising that education doesn’t have to change someone’s religion,” says Mr Tafida, and continues, “You can have the benefits of both a western and a Quranic education. It gives you more choice.”

Audu Grema, DFID’s Nigerian born regional co-ordinator for Northern Nigeria, believes there has also been a modest but significant “mind shift” in understanding Islam. “Quranic teachers command a tremendous amount of respect in their communities and they themselves are encouraging parents to give their children a broader education. People have noticed the difference it has made to their children”, he says. “There is a recognition too that respectability, blessing and standing in society changes for those who’ve been to school. They make good elders. They have a voice.” All of which makes sense in a more liberalised Nigeria.

Dr Aminata Maiga, whose brief with UNICEF is girls’ education in Nigeria, believes that there is a tendency at present for the four core subjects to be tacked on to the the Quranic curriculum, but is confident that “over time, schools will develop a version of integration that’s more balanced”. Though she adds the rider that “You can’t do it all in one generation”. Nevertheless, she is also convinced that this integration programme works for Muslim communities in Nigeria. “Most people are happy with convergence” she claims, “It’s holistic, it makes families more at ease than a dualistic system which ignores religion”. It is certainly difficult to ignore the reality on the ground, especially in the northern region of Sokoto, where there has been an even greater take-up than in Kano.

Questions have been asked, however, over just how much equality that gender parity in education can deliver. The principal reason for sending girls to Islamiyya schools was trotted out so often it became almost a cliché, and, in composite form, went something like: “Parents want their girls to marry and most men want a religious, literate wife who can help teach her children, but who won’t cause trouble.” Hardly development speak.

But Dr Maiga is untroubled by people’s motivations for educating girls, pointing at the consequences, intended or otherwise. “More than 20 years of research in Africa shows that the children of educated mothers live longer”, she says. “Their kids do better at school. Educated women have less children – no one told them not to. Educated women tend not to get their daughters circumcised. No one tells them, they just understand, it’s a consequence.” And the legacy continues, “The same way women pass gold onto their daughters, educated women pass on the knowledge and all the social capital… Girls generally being closer to their mothers are never disadvantaged in this regard.” She tells parents, “If you want your daughters to be taught by a woman teacher and seen by a female doctor, then you’d better send your daughters to school or there won’t be any”.

But education in an Islamiyya school isn’t just one way traffic. In Kano, Compass, a USAID supported educational initiative, is focusing on building effective Parent Teacher Associations around these centres of learning. Traditionally parents have left their children’s education to teachers and not interfered. But Compass is encouraging PTAs to help support and resource schools and to bolster their children’s levels of attainment. At Yakasaid school, they have recently started a mothers’ section of the PTA (being an Islamic institution men and women will not meet together).

Hadiza Bashir Yakasai, a teacher at the school says this is now almost “a school for mothers”. She says, “we teach them basic English phrases, some basic facts and show them how to help their children to do homework – so they become teachers at home”. The parents welcome this, adds Baffa M Sani, the school’s head teacher. “They see for themselves that education is important. It gives you independence and choices, and it’s a way out of poverty”, chips in Aminu Baba Ahmad, father of two children at the school.

In their classrooms, the girls in their pink headscarves wriggle and fidget on the benches – all energy and eagerness. The education may be elementary, and the conditions rudimentary. But they are here and they are learning.