Female Education
Ahfad University for Women is located in Omdurman. It originates in a school for girls created in 1907 by Sheikh Babiker Badri, the grandfather of the current president. The Sheikh saw that educating women was essential to improve nutrition, health, childcare and community development. After an inspection by Currie, then minister of education in the condominium government, the school received state funding. By 1920 there were five state elementary schools for girls. Expansion was slow, however, given the bias towards boys and the conservatism of Sudanese society, with education remaining restricted to the elementary level until 1940. It was only in 1940 that the first intermediate school for girls, the Omdurman Girls' Intermediate School, opened. By 1955, ten intermediate schools for girls were in existence.
In 1956, the Omdurman Secondary School for Girls, with about 265 students, was the only girls' secondary school operated by the government. By 1960, 245 elementary schools for girls had been established, but only 25 junior secondary or general schools and 2 upper-secondary schools. There were no vocational schools for girls, just a Nurses' Training College enrolling only eleven students, nursing not being regarded by many Sudanese as a respectable vocation for women.
During the 1960s and 1970s, girls' education made considerable gains under the education reforms that provided 1,086 primary schools, 268 intermediate schools, and 52 vocational schools for girls by 1970, when girls' education claimed approximately one-third of the total school resources available. Although by the early 1990s the numbers had increased in the north but not in the war-torn south, the ratio had remained approximately the same.
In 1966 Yusuf Badri, Babiker's son and the father of the current president, established Ahfad University College for Women. The two faculties at the university were Family Sciences (with an emphasis on nutrition education) and Psychology and Preschool education. By 1990 it had evolved as the premier women's university college in Sudan with an enrollment of 1,800. It had a mixture of academic and practical programs, such as those that educated women to teach in rural areas.
Read more about this topic: Education In Sudan
Famous quotes containing the words female and/or education:
“I wonder what subtle form of manslaughter is next on the program. Am I to be dropped into a vat of molten steel and become part of a new skyscraper, or are you going to ask this female to kiss me again and poison me to death?”
—Ernest Lehman (b.1920)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)