A project developed by Daniel Perlman, a medical anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and implemented by the Centre for Girls Education (CGE), in Abuja, is working with community leaders to encourage girls to stay in school and, as a consequence, to delay marriage. Now, a study involving more than 1,000 girls by Perlman and his colleagues suggests that the strategy is working. Co-author Maryam Abubakar at CGE says that the success of the programme, which is called Pathways to Choice, had a lot do to with the involvement of local religious leaders. 'We had meetings with them, we introduced the project and we were lucky that they accepted it,' she says. 'They were involved in the programme from the beginning.' Some 41% of women under the age of 35 in northwestern and northeastern states have ever attended school. Reasons why families might not enrol their daughters in school and instead opt for early marriage include scepticism about education quality and fear of...
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