It’s time to end the assault on girls’ education

 

Pakistan is today counting the cost of a week of carnage in which teachers and pupils have been violently attacked simply because they want to go to school.

As secondary school pupils gathered at a school in Baldia Town in Karachi for an awards ceremony on Saturday morning, grenades were hurled into the building and shots rang out.

The school’s head teacher, Abdul Rasheed, died on the spot and five school children are now in hospital.

Three of them are in critical condition and fighting for their lives.

While no one has yet accepted responsibility for the carnage, the perpetrators are thought to be from a Taliban terrorist sect known as TPP.

Their campaign of violence against the education of girls has moved from the tribal areas into the country’s largest city.

This latest attack follows the murder last week of Shahnaz Nazli.

The 41-year-old teacher was gunned down in front of her son only 200 metres from the all-girls school where she taught in the Khyber tribal district, located between the north-western city of Peshawar and the Afghan border.

This wave of terror attacks, orchestrated by opponents of girls education, is provoking a domestic and international response.

The news has been met with a groundswell of public revulsion similar to that which followed the attempted assassination of Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old activist who was also shot, simply for wanting girls to go to school.

Now, on top of a petition circulating on the Education Envoy website calling for a cessation of violence against teachers who are defending the right of girls to go to school , a scholarship fund in honour of Nazli is being set up by Education International  ,the organisation which represents more than 30 million teachers and educators around the world.

Education International has said that the Shahnaz Nazli memorial scholarship will support Pakistani teachers and students who are victimised for their support of girls schooling.

 

Fightback

The petition and the memorial signal a fightback against attempts to ban girls’ education and come in the wake of the intervention of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who, in a special communique , has spoken out against the shooting of Nazli and given his personal support to teachers persecuted for their advocacy of girls’ education.

However, these recent attacks are a stark reminder to the world of the persistent threats, intimidation, shootings, arson attacks and sometimes even murder that are the Taliban’s weapons in a war against girls’ opportunity.

Last October, shocked by the attempted assassination of Malala and pressured by a petition signed by three million people, the Pakistani government agreed for the first time to legislate compulsory free education and provided stipends for three million children.

Now authorities in Pakistan are under international pressure to deploy their security services to ensure the safety and protection of teachers and girls trying to go to school.

Last October saw demonstrations in Pakistan that were a spontaneous response from girls who identified with Malala’s cause as she fought for her life in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham in the UK.

Now these girls are being joined by a high profile campaign by teachers themselves, determined ,despite the threat to their lives, to stand up for girls’ education and to take their campaign to even the most dangerous of places.

 

Urgent

The protests are timely.

Achieving universal girls’ education will be one of the major themes of meetings in Washington DC on 17 and 18 April, when Ban Ki-moon and the World Bank President Jim Yong Kim – spurred on by the recent loss of momentum in meeting the Millennium Development Goal on education – will meet countries that are off-track in securing universal primary education.

Worried that the figure of 32 million girls still unable to go to primary school remains stubbornly high , they will consider plans to use legislation, investment incentives and reforms to move further and faster to full enrolment of girls by the end of 2015.

But if the cultural discrimination that keeps girls from school is to end, then a popular movement that challenges the prejudices of the extremists is urgently needed.

It can build on an increasingly vocal public sentiment against the exclusion of girls.

For example, even though the past several years have seen Pakistani Taliban militants destroy hundreds of schools in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, there is now a fightback under way led by the girls themselves and their teachers.

When I visited Pakistan in the wake of Malala’s shooting I saw at first hand the determination of girls wearing ‘I Am Malala’ headbands. No longer were they prepared to be part of a silent majority unwilling to speak up for girls’ education.

Instead, they were becoming an assertive voice on the streets – and also online – for their rights.

In the last few weeks in Pakistan alone, girls and boys who are out of school have signed a petition demanding education which now has over one million signatures.

 

Afghanistan

Defiance against attacks on schools is also growing in Afghanistan, where for years teachers and girls have been under pressure to stay away from school because, despite the removal of the Taliban from national government, they still remain powerful in the tribal areas.

It is estimated that as many as 400 schools have also been shut in Afghanistan as the Taliban have sought to impose their control in tribal areas.

Some parents have taken their children out of school because they do not want to be trapped in the middle of the crossfire between the Taliban and the security forces.

There have even been allegations that Taliban extremists were poisoning schoolgirls by infecting the water supply of local schools.

Yet, remarkably schools are being kept open and some are being reopened by determined teachers and pupils.

Some teachers have gone underground, sometimes under the guise of offering sewing lessons while continuing to teach girls. In total, four million Afghan girls are now at school.

Education International has a proud record in defending teachers against abuse, intimidation and harassment.

Their decision to intervene openly in Pakistan for the rights of teachers opens a new front in the battle to ensure that girls are educated.

It is a reminder that while our 21st century debates are about the empowerment of girls and their right to develop their full potential, in some parts of the world the 19th and 20th century battles for basic rights – freedom from violence, freedom from child labour, child marriage, child trafficking, and the right to an education free from violence – are still to be won.

But as the forthcoming teachers’ initiative and Ban Ki-moon’s vocal support both demonstrate, the voices in favour of these basic rights for girls can no longer be silenced.

As this is a movement that is now being forged at a grassroots level by girls demanding their human rights and by teachers organising in support of them, 2013 – which has started with so many violent attacks on girls schools – can still become the year when the cause of universal girls’ education becomes unstoppable.

 

An edited version of this article first appeared on Huffington Post.