Adult Education: A New Chance for Rural Women
In March 2008 a small group of dedicated volunteers traveled to South Sudan in order to teach adult education workshops. Adult education became one of Project Education Sudan’s projects when a Sudanese woman approached Executive Director Carol Rinehart during a previous trip. The woman spoke to Ms. Rinehart about the passion adult Sudanese women have for basic education and how little opportunity there is for women to go to school. Upon hearing this plea, the Adult and Vocation Educational Committee was established with the goal of creating and implementing women’s adult education classes during the 2008 trip.
Adult education is a very promising, yet complicated, field of work in Sudan. The Adult and Vocational Education Committee worked closely with Sudanese to develop workshops that taught relevant subject matters to the students. For these workshops it was recommended that we teach rural Sudanese women how to write numbers, do addition and subtraction equations, use calculators, and perform basic accounting functions. Our objective is to teach the women of the community the skills needed to create a small business out of the grinding mill that Project Education Sudan donates to the village. We donate a grinding mill so that the women and girls of the community will be able to attend school instead of grinding grain by hand for their food. With basic accounting skills and ledger books, the women will have the ability to make a business out of the grinding mill and to use it to better their own lives.
The Adult and Vocational Education committee also had to research when and where workshops could be held in order to reach the most women. Women are responsible for many important tasks around the home, including caring for small children, fetching water and grinding grain for meals. These responsibilities make it a challenge for women to attend classes. In order to attract as many women as possible, Project Education Sudan held it classes on days that were possible for women to attend, as well as providing the food and materials the women needed during the day. Our teachers also spent one-on-one time teaching local women in the evenings that could not attend the workshops due to their household duties. We learned a great deal during our workshops of what worked well, in addition to ways in which adult education classes could be improved in the future.
Even in 125° heat, our Adult Income Literacy workshops were an overwhelming success. We had anticipated getting only 30 women to come to the workshops, so imagine our excitement when we counted over 120 women from four different villages in class on the first day of the workshop! These women came because they wanted a chance to become educated. They wanted a chance for a better life. We saw women escorted to the workshops by their husbands and their children in a display of support. We saw women come who were blind or disabled or nursing. We have all seen many things in our lives, but we had never seen anyone yearn for education the way the people of South Sudan do. We were all incredibly proud of every woman who came to our workshops to learn new skills, and are very thankful to all the people who put their time, expertise and passion into developing such empowering adult education workshops.
