In an environment where young girls who, for lack of education or work opportunities, get into premature marriages and in which women enjoy little consideration
in comparison with men, we want to offer some of them education and professional training which will ensure self-reliance, mind broadening and a job which will guarantee dignity and respectability.
There is today a phenomenon that is expanding in DRC in general and in the Grand Kasai in particular. This is known as “girl mothers”, that is, unmarried young girls with children. Many of them have been made pregnant by irresponsible partners and then abandoned by both these partners and by their own families because the latter feel dishonoured. The latter, too, are concerned with this project.
This project aims to achieve three objectives:
First: we would like to contribute in restoring women’s dignity in changing people’s mindset in terms of re-examining women’s role in the society.
Second: We wish to offer these desperate girls the possibility of having faith in their capacity, in teaching them to take their lives in their own hands;
Third: we are determined to fight ignorance and to improve, through professional training, women’s living conditions and of their households.
As far the methodology is concerned, training will be structured round 3 categories:
First, girls aged 12 to 18 who have never been to school, so cannot read or write, will receive a basic training in reading and writing. Then they will receive a practical and professional training, for example in dress making or as hotel maids.
Second, girls aged 13 to 20 who were compelled to stop their primary and secondary school for lack of money or other reasons. They can be trained as teachers and teach in nursery or primary schools. They can also be trained as nurses or mid-wives or another trade that can help them find a job and so help them earn their living and maintain their children
