Her first years as a teacher have passed, and Miranda is now trying to sit comfortably on the professional seat to bring her contribution to the formal education of children in a village in the Eastern Region of Burkina Faso. As most young teachers posted in the remote villages the challenges are not only material ones such as the lack of infrastructures and basic goods, but especially deep rooted beliefs which have shaped behaviors and attitudes which stand on the way to formal education. The first female teacher ever seen in the village, Miranda who has received a Plan scholarship to attend the professional teacher’s school was, and is still perceived as the model that every mother wants her daughter to be like. She is now teaching the 3rdgraders, the very ones she started with in the 1st grade. Then, they were 46 children, but 43 are now in her classroom, having lost 3 on the way; these 3 students were removed from the school system by their parents. She left the village for the capital city in the last week of March 2010 with the threat looming low again on one of her most brilliant female student. The father had just sacked the mother from his home, because, to him, she dared lead the celebration of the international women’s day in a different village where she spent the night. He then decided that the daughter was to stay back home to cook and look after the house. Since, Miranda feels very concerned and is desperately seeking ways and means to bring back the little girl to school. In her school in the village, sensitization efforts have paid and filled her school, a “BRIGHT School” *, with 191 children, while a neighboring school only has 40 students. Not only children from the village attend the school. Others come from communities situated 6 to 8 kilometers away because of the child friendly conditions that the BRIGHT school offers: the school has separate latrines for girls and boys, a borehole providing drinking water, and encourages girls to attend school by giving them dry cereals as take home rations in addition to the canteen food which is served every day to all children. She is working in an environment where women have a very little say in the decisions concerning the homes and the future of children. When most men send their 2 or 3 children to school, then one can be certain that 6 to 7 stay back home to look after the cattle. People live from agriculture and cattle breeding and need immediate help from the children. Even though the women think differently and confide in Miranda, the situation remains difficult for most of them; children might stop school anytime, upon their husbands’ decision. With 4 classrooms in the school, Miranda now has workmates, and they try to also talk to the adults about the benefits of education. The exercise proves to be uneasy. The women are more receptive, and also want to undertake income generating activities. For that, they have asked Miranda to help them and she has been able to accompany them undertake some market gardening, growing and selling vegetables for the time being. At the professional level, she feels much at ease with teaching now, and she benefits good monitoring from the local teaching inspector. “Teaching is a very wide domain that I need to explore, and for that reason, I am seeking the opportunities to improve my own level of education and also know more about teaching”. Miranda is now a mother with a 16 years old girl. Her husband resides in a different region, visiting on holidays and weekends. She continues to care for her mother and her 4 brothers’ needs. She was able to pay for the driving license lessons fees of one of her brothers, and bought a motorbike for herself. Her pending project is acquiring a cow and a cart for her mother to farm; the old woman has so far been using a small hand plough to till, a very difficult and tiresome exercise that Miranda wants to put an end to.
*The BRIGHT project (Burkinabè Response to Improve Girls’ Chances to Succeed) was an education domain project which consisted in building 132 three classroom school complexes in 132 villages with funding from the United States through the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Plan Burkina Faso was the leading implementation partner of a consortium of Non Governmental Organisation which developed the project. A second part of the project has started recently, with the aim of normalizing the 3 classroom complexes into 6 classroom ones.