Girls' Education Campaign in Turkey.

Feyat, a day labourer in Turkey who moved to Aydin from Agri ten years ago, is struggling to feed his wife and seven children. His eldest daughter, fourteen-year-old Feray, is the only one of the girls attending school, but she will have nowhere to go at the end of the term since it is the last year of the compulsory period of education. Only one son has completed primary school, while a second will probably not return after his third year. The reason, Feyat says, is that the children's income, earned mostly by picking cotton, is necessary for the family's very survival. His concerns were reaffirmed when he sought advice from the school principal: Feyat just didn't make enough money to support his family, and school was an unaffordable luxury. Apparently, the principal was unaware of the conditional cash transfer (CCT), a government programme aimed at the poorest families as an incentive to sending their children to school.

Sabihe Hanim's family lives in a crumbling whitewashed cement cube-house in the village of Ovaeymir, one of the poorest districts in the province of Aydin. Asked why none of her five daughters was going to school, she gave a series of knee-jerk responses--as a migrant from the southeastern town of Bitlis, she does not speak Turkish. According to Sabihe, her husband who works in construction (when there is work) does not have the money to pay for the additional school expenses. When told that financial help in the form of CCT was available, she said that her family did not want to have contact with any official governmental institutions.

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Ozlem, a child of migrant parents from Mus and now living in Manisa, has never been to school. Her mother, who accompanied her to the school for the United Nations Children's Fund's (UNICEF) field visit at the request of the school principal, says that nine-year-old Ozlem is too young to attend. When reminded that the age for compulsory attendance is six, the mother admitted that they were too poor to send their children to school.

The overall impression one gets from these personal accounts is that money is the main obstacle. The reality, however, is much more complex. Although money is definitely a concern for these families, in Feyat's case, their guest living room contains three modest but comfortable sofas with bright new paisley covers; they also own a television set. While Sabihe's desire to maintain a low profile is understandable given the hardships of having lived through the PKK (Kudistan Workers' Party) insurgency, the family house stands incongruously in front of a schoolyard. The fact that all her sons attend school contradicts both her arguments. As for Ozlem's situation, her mother finally admitted that her husband would not let their children go and confessed that as a child even her parents pulled her out of the second grade. So the question remains: why don't these families send the girls, and for that matter the boys, to school?

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While the obstacles to girls' education in Turkey are many and complex, other issues relating to tradition seem to provide the common denominator. In traditional Turkish families, parents as well as influential grandparents simply do not see any added value in educating a child. And if they see no benefit in sending their sons to school, they most certainly see less in enrolling their daughters. Similarly, in a culture where individual status is derived through obedience to a parent or family elder, school is viewed as an unnecessary luxury and a distraction from the more important familial and community processes.

A second obstacle to girls' education is the imposition of marriage. In Turkey's traditional societies, the primary responsibilities of a married girl are to take care of her husband, attend to domestic needs and bear and raise children. She must also work to provide income to the household. Because of these traditional priorities, it is rare if not completely unlikely for a girl to begin, let alone continue, her education. The lamentable practice of child marriage serves to exacerbate the entrenched roles ascribed to girls and women, which promote female illiteracy.

The concept of females as the custodians of family honour presents one of the more intractable obstacles to girls' education in Turkey, resulting in their sequestering within the confines of the household. Less stringent application of this cultural phenomenon is to permit public interaction under strict conditions, such as supervision, close proximity and/or appropriately modest clothing. Whereas a girl's honour is in jeopardy in an integrated environment like a school bus or a co-educational classroom, conservative parents might allow a daughter to attend a school in close proximity so they could maintain a sense of control. They are also less likely to accede to schooling when it would require a relatively distant commute. Parental fears of a daughter's vulnerability are greater when the only option to a scarcity of schools would be to send their girls to boarding schools. But for parents, even local schools have the potential to fall short, particularly when they lack segregated classrooms, proper supervision and bathroom facilities.

One of the main issues related to tradition, a hot-button issue in Turkey, is the wearing of the headscarf. For conservative families in favour of educating a daughter, this could very well be the pivotal issue. No headscarf, no school. But in Turkey's strictly secular society, it is illegal to wear a headscarf in public institutions, including schools. Thus the high dropout rate among girls nearing the age of puberty when not wearing a headscarf could result in the loss, or seemingly the loss, of family honour.

The Girls' Education Campaign initiative, launched in 2003 by UNICEF and Turkey's Ministry of National Education (MoNE), responds to the "Education for All" framework (see page 63) and the UN Millennium Development Goals, both of which emphasize girls' education and gender equality as fundamental goals. The Campaign aims to close the gender gap in schools by September 2005 by targeting the most intractable families, primarily located in the southern and southeastern provinces. The 2004-2005 "push" emphasizes the grassroots approach: volunteers are going door to door to address parents' specific concerns and to persuade them about the benefits of educating their children. In August 2004, UNICEF trained and deployed 13,000 teachers, nurses, midwives, social workers and other volunteers armed with "blue books" full of at-the-ready counter-arguments to the traditional justifications for non-enrollment of girls. Volunteers also discuss the availability of the CCT monthly stipend and the benefits of educating girls, including better family nutrition, lower infant mortality rates, higher potential family income and more significant contribution to the household and community at large. The most direct approach, employed in the southeastern province of Sanliurfa and elsewhere, is that eight years of schooling is compulsory; otherwise, "you are breaking the law".

In the second half of 2003, similar mobilizations succeeded in enrolling 40,000 girls. By the end of the campaign, UNICEF intends to enroll a total of 600,000 girls and achieve gender parity in Turkey's schools. While it is too early to report statistically on the success of the 2004-2005 campaign, the UNICEF/MoNE joint initiative has made significant strides. In Bingol, 25 teachers equipped with vehicles provided by the Governor's office forfeited their summer vacation, trudging door to door through 72 villages, pre-school blue books in hand. Their success was measurable: 400 children, three fourths of them girls, donned their uniforms and bookbags and attended school in September.

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Less measurable is the success in advocacy. At the Girls' Education Campaign forum in Izmir in August 2004, Governor Yusuf Ziya Goksu spoke of declaring a "state of emergency", targeting the unenrolled children in his province. He added that "there will be no child left out of school in Izmir". UNICEF has also advocated and successfully enlisted the Directorate of Religious Affairs in support of the Campaign. The head Imam preaches daily sermons that reinforce the obligation to education under Islam for both girls and boys. UNICEF Country Representative Edmond McLoughney says "sending a girl to school is a way to transform society and generate progress among the poorest, most marginalized and socially excluded children and families of the country". He further states: "Just getting families into the habit of sending their girls off to school every morning can break the practice of generations. It may not do an awful lot to change the fundamental attitudes of the present generation of parents, but if their daughters get an education, they will want to send their own daughters. They won't need to be pushed anymore."

Lynn Levine is the author of several travel guides, including Frommer's Turkey. She worked with the UNICEF field office in Turkey in the summer of 2004 on the Girls' Education Campaign.

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