Page 58 - EducationWorld March 2022

International News

AFRICA it introduced a new policy — dubbed “radical inclusion” —
Fair deal for pregnant girls that gives pregnant girls the right to remain in class until

they give birth and allows them to return to lessons as soon
as they wish. Local law considers girls who have sex be-
fore age 18 to be victims of a crime, says David Sengeh, the
education minister. Forcing them to give up their schooling
compounds the crime.
Many of these changes were ordered before the pan-
demic. But some 30 weeks of school closures in Africa have
made them all the more essential. The Mo Ibrahim Foun-
dation, an NGO, reckons the hiatus deprived pupils in 23
African countries of roughly an eighth of the learning they
would typically receive in their entire time in school. That is
all the more worrying because they do not receive as many
as pupils elsewhere to begin with.
Governments have more to do. Few of them maintain
policies as liberal as Sierra Leone’s. Uganda’s new guide-
lines require pregnant girls to leave school before their sec-
Sierra Leone minister Sengeh (right): crime victims ond trimester, for example, even if their right to return is
much clearer than it was. But countries with enlightened
ARAH DIDN’T KNOW SHE WAS PREGNANT un- rules often struggle to enforce them, says Elin Martinez of
til teachers told her. In 2020, her state-run board- HRW. Principals, parents and village chiefs have to be on
Sing school in Tanzania ordered tests for all the girls board. Sengeh says he still runs into activists, both male
returning after a three-month closure caused by Covid-19. and female, who tell him the new policy on pregnancy is a
When her pregnancy was confirmed, she was expelled and big mistake.
sent home. She was less than two years from graduating.
Sarah is one of thousands of girls harmed each year by TURKEY
a law that compels schools to expel pupils accused of “an More sackings at Bogazici
offence against morality”. These expulsions were celebrated
by the country’s previous president John Magufuli, who THE SACKING OF THREE ELECTED DEANS
declared: “After getting pregnant, you are done.” Magufuli from Bogazici University could signal a renewed
died last year, perhaps of Covid. The government of his suc- attack on institutional autonomy and freedom of
cessor, Samia Suluhu Hassan, relented in November, saying speech in Turkey’s universities, warn scholars. The dis-
it will let teenage mums resume their schooling. missal of Ozlem Berk Albachten, Metin Ercan and Yasemin
Sub-Saharan Africa has almost double the world’s rate of Bayyurt by Turkey’s Higher Education Council (YOK) fol-
teenage births. Only 40 percent of girls in the region in the lows a tumultuous year at Istanbul’s premier university,
15-17 age group attend school, compared with 45 percent of which has been riven by student protests since a loyalist
boys. This is partly because of policies like the one Tanzania to the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was in-
has abandoned. Such rules are self-defeating, since there’s stalled as rector in January 2021.
a strong link between the number of years of schooling that Since the appointment of outsider Melih Bulu, a member
girls complete and the number of babies they will subse- Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party who was accused
quently have. of plagiarising his Ph D, over 600 student protesters have
At least 30 African countries now protect the education been arrested, and some of them face jail sentences of more
rights of pregnant girls and young mothers, according to than 30 years in Turkey’s notoriously cruel prisons.
Human Rights Watch (HRW), a pressure group. Half a It is believed the deans were made redundant because of
dozen have made progress in the past few years. New rules their support for academics who criticised the appointment
in Uganda, where about a third of girls marry before they of Dr. Bulu — who was later dismissed. Scholars have held a
turn 18, allow parents to report school principals who refuse daily vigil to protest against his successor, Naci Inci, another
to enrol young mothers. Mozambique and Zimbabwe have Erdogan supporter.
also made schooling easier for teenagers with children. The The dean’s dismissal follows a sustained attack on aca-
last two holdouts still expelling expectant teens are Equato- demic freedom within Turkish universities in the wake of
rial Guinea and Togo. an attempted coup in 2016. In the years since that putsch,
The most celebrated recent reforms are in Sierra Leone. more than 6,000 academics have been sacked and about
In early 2020, the government ended a ten-year ban on 3,000 schools and universities closed over alleged links to
adolescent mothers attending normal school. A year later, the failed coup allegedly led by exiled preacher Fethullah

58 EDUCATIONWORLD MARCH 2022