Turkish Association Successfully Promoting Secondary Education for Girls

The Turkish Association of University Women has received European Union (EU) funding for “I am the Future”, a mentoring project encouraging and enabling girls to continue their education beyond primary school. The project is taking place in Yozgat, the Turkish city with the highest rate of early marriage for girls. Its goals are to raise parents’ awareness of the need to educate girls, to offer girls’ supportive training and guidance, to introduce role models to encourage girls to consider careers in business, and to assist girls to succeed in placement tests. The project is being funded through the EU Human Resources Development Operational Program under the goal of raising awareness about the importance of education, and increasing enrolment rates, particularly of women, with a view to developing human resources and entrance into labour market.

To date, the project team has visited 120 families in the surrounding villages to raise awareness of the importance of quality secondary education for girls. These include the parents of 38 girls currently participating in the project and other parents they hope will send their daughters to school in the future. Some of the visits have been made with teachers from the Çay?ralan Hayri Y?ld?z Regional Primary Boarding School, where the project is taking place. The school is located in an outlying district of Yozgat, 140 km from the city centre. The project has provided girls in grades 6, 7 and 8 with 24 hours of classes each week in Turkish, Mathematics, Science, Social Sciences and English. In addition it has funded the renovation of two classrooms and a dormitory building and equipped the classrooms with computers, projectors, bookshelves, tables and chairs. The team has also been visiting local stakeholders to evaluate scholarship opportunities for girls who successfully pass the placement exams.

Another long term goal of the project is to promote more women in business. Families and girls from surrounding villages have been invited to attend a series of seminars where different business women speak as successful role models and personal development experts share their knowledge. More than 200 participants attended the first seminar in May 2011. Another is planned for November 2011.

Despite the bureaucratic handicaps of being the first EU funded project in the region, the project team is already seeing the first signs of success. The school’s 41% success rate on the placement exam of the previous year, increased to 63% during the project implementation period.

Nazan Moro?lu, President of TAUW Efrah Ceyhan, Coordinator of the Project; Esra Karaka?, Co-coordinator