Episode 52: Teach a Girl, Uplift the World With Habiba Mohammed and Maryam Albashir

“if [girls] are educated and we are given that opportunity the sky is not our limit, the sky will be our starting point.”

-Habiba Mohammad

Episode Summary

It’s hard to imagine in the western world, but in Nigeria, girls as young as ten are married and four out of every ten girls are married before the age of eighteen, eight out of ten in the northern region. When a girl is forced into marriage, sometimes to a man old enough to be her grandfather, she often cannot continue her education unless her husband allows it, she is likely to live her life illiterate, and she faces a higher risk of death from childbirth due to being neither physically or emotionally ready.

In this episode, we speak with Habiba Mohammed and Maryam Albashir, the co-director and deputy director respectively of the Centre for Girls’ Education in Nigeria. These women have dedicated their lives to helping girls through educational programs, safe spaces, Gender-based violence prevention, vocational and leadership training and other mentorship programs through the Centre which has helped thousands of girls since it opened in 2007.

Until this interview, we did not understand just how far reaching the issue of child marriage was in the Sahel region of Africa, and we were blown away by the incredible impact these women have had in improving the lives of so many girls.

We believe that if we want to see more peace in this world, it starts with empowering the girls and women and Habiba and Maryam are showing all of us how.

Highlights

2.08: Marital Age in Northern Nigeria
7.23 Education of Habiba Mohammed
8.17 “My mother, she always tells me that the schooling is not for anybody but for me. So I should understand that I am not doing anybody a favor by going to school. I am doing myself. So I need to know that I want to change my life, I will be who I want to be, if I go to school. It can influence the husband that I marry, it can influence the friends that I have, and it will influence the way I want to live my life.” Habiba Mohammed
9.24 Maryam Albashir´s Story

12.20 A Mother to All

13.00 Arranged and non arranged marriages
15.00 Going to the communities
16.31 “At the safe spaces we encourage the girls to go back home and discuss what they are learning in the safe spaces to their mothers and their aunties and their other siblings. So this helped us to get very acceptance in the communities.”  Habiba Mohammed
16.57 Number of girls they have helped educate
20.00 Things the girls learn at the safe spaces

20.30 “What we do at the safe spaces is also to empower her, for her to know her self worth, for her to be able to identify what she wants to become in life. Some of these girls, depending on the category of project that we enroll them into, we empower them with vocational skills. So along the line, if they start earning an income it gives them an upperhand in their homes, it gives them a voice to say who they want to be or what they want to become in life.”  Maryam Albashir
23.00 1st story of success, story of Sakina
27.30 Favorite part of their job
29.50 Their message to the world
“Every girl, wherever she is, needs an education. And she needs to be empowered and she needs to be who she wants to be in life. So if we are educated and we are given that opportunity the sky is not our limit, the sky will be our starting point.” Habiba Mohammed

 Jai Guru Deva