Support To Primary Schools
While Drop in the Bucket has drilled wells at hundreds of schools across sub-Saharan Africa, we also work with schools to support girl education. To answer the question why girls and not girls and boys, you have to look at some of the cultural factors in Uganda and South Sudan. While paying their children’s school fees is a important to most parents, there is a common tendency to prioritize educating their male children over their female children. If a parent has both boys and girls, but does not have the money to keep all of their children in school, they are often more likely to just pay for the boys and keep the girls at home to help with chores such as cultivating crops, helping with their siblings, preparing food and fetching water.
Studies have proved that the fastest and most effective way to reduce global poverty is educating girls, and at Drop in the Bucket we see the difference that educating girls makes both in terms of finance and the societal benefits.
Educated girls tend to marry later in life and have fewer children.
Educated girls earn more money in the workplace
Educated girls are less likely to contract HIV/AIDS
Educated girls are more likely to raise healthy, educated kids
Educating girls is a proven strategy to reduce starvation, malnutrition and poverty. In 2015, Drop in the Bucket started working in a group of primary schools to identify promising students who were receiving little or no support from their families to get a secondary school education. We were looking for highly intelligent girls who had the potential to become future leaders. Students who had the potential to do great things with their lives, with the goal of supporting them through secondary school. As we watch the program grow, we are seeing the test results in the whole district rise and we watch the strength and resolve in these girls grow as they start to see their dreams become realistic goals.
