When our children are not kept busy at school, we expose them to harm — OMAN community member.
When a child is not going to school, you can expect the worst. It means that at the time when he should be collecting wood fuel for the household, he could be anywhere else.
As part of the Child-Friendly Commune Initiative that the Commune of Bikok is implementing with technical support from UNICEF, five batches of community diagnoses were held in the commune.
On each of the five days, the village delegates from 12 to 14 villages met to discuss what they felt about the development in the Commune in general, and about their children who are at the centre of the vision to become a Child-friendly Commune.
Madame Amougou hails from the village of ESSAZOCK 2, which is part of the NYOMO cluster of villages. She has 8 children under her care, but her farming activities do not provide her with regular income.
Even when our harvest is good, we cannot sell them the way as we expect. The roads are in a bad state and make it difficult to get the crops to the market, so we are unable to sell at good prices … So, what happens?” asks Madame Amougou rhetorically. “We give priority to those who have made it to the secondary school level. That means maybe 2 out of the 8 or 10 children. What we expect is that those two, when they complete school, will be the ones to take care of the others.” Unfortunately, these plans do not always unfold to expectation.
For a start, there aren’t many secondary schools around and the one in the municipality is quite a distance from some of the villages. One adolescent girl in EVINDI SI village recounts that while she was away from home in secondary school, poverty, and the lure of money got her pregnant in her third year. She managed to go back to complete her secondary school after delivering her baby. “If you have relatives in town, you can live with them, and they can monitor where you go and or how spend your time. Our parents usually warn us to be careful of the dangers and attractions in the big towns. But once we get there, we forget all about the school which sent us there in the first place.”
Education featured prominently among the priorities for all the five groups that met in the Commune. They also agreed it was a protective environment for children.
