Married at the age of fifteen, nearly all of them illiterate, Nigerien women give birth to an average of eight children.
Wearing a bracelet of coloured pearls and a pretty necklace, Aïssatou presents herself coquettishly. She will soon be thirteen, and in two or three years will be of marriageable age.
For now, here on the rugged, windswept plateau of Toulouare in the Niger basin, some thirty kilometres from the capital Niamey, her work is elsewhere. She is busy helping a group of women construct stone toe protection to prevent water overflow during the next rainy season, which will be here in less than three months.
Wouldn’t she rather go to school than perform hard manual labour under a blazing sun? The question takes her off guard. It is clear that Aïssatou is unaccustomed to people asking for her opinion. She hesitates a moment and then confesses that yes, she would have preferred school, but like her older sister who was married at the age of fifteen, the opportunity was not given her. Her younger sister, however, does go.
There is an 80% rate of illiteracy among of the population in Niger, where girls at school are the exception.
Mamadou Ibrahim, headmaster of the school in Roubire, a village of 2,000 inhabitants three kilometres away, counts only nine girls in a class of thirty-three students that groups the first three primary grades. There is but one girl for the 4th and 5th grades. “But I have to admit that she isn’t very motivated,” admits the headmaster. “Her father forced her to come, but her mother doesn’t support the idea.”
The population of Niger needs to be made more aware of the benefits of educating girls; this is perhaps the greatest challenge faced by the country over the next thirty years. Providing girls with higher education, equipping them with greater independence and pushing back the marriageable age will decrease the number of children per woman. With demographic growth rates in excess of 3% annually, an average of eight children per family, the country will soon be powerless to feed its inhabitants.
