The Role of the Grandmother Reimagined

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Adolescent girls in Mali confront a host of barriers to educational access. Although enrollment rates for boys and girls have risen over the last 20-30 years, a gender gap has persisted nationally, with girls enrolled at a lower rate (63.4% gross enrollment rate in lower primary school) than that of boys (74.8%). As such, the USAID-funded Mali Girls’ Leadership and Empowerment through Education (GLEE) project seeks to increase access to education for adolescent girls (10-18 years) and enable them to obtain greater educational attainment.

GLEE’s theory of change posits that to increase girls’ enrollment and success at school, change is needed at the level of girls themselves and within their social groupings and institutions: their peers, families, schools, healthcare facilities, communities, and the structures that support them. During program implementation, the following objectives strive to be achieved for adolescent girls: decrease their barriers to quality education, improve their safety in schools and their communities, and increase their knowledge and adoption of positive health behaviors.

Through a formal panel presentation, representatives of the GLEE project team, including key stakeholders and changemakers, will highlight one of the project’s recently established strategic approaches that has proven to be effective in an ever-changing socio-cultural Malian context. Engaging Grandmothers in the communities as role models and agents of change in supporting girls’ educational attainment has not only resulted in significant strides toward achieving the project’s goals, but has also established an innovative approach that is changing the attitudes and behaviors toward harmful practices that restrict girls’ access to education. In effect, the GLEE Grandmother Approach highlights this year’s CIES theme, “Beyond the horizon – reimagining everything.”

The Grandmother Approach is an adaptation from the project’s original recruitment and training of GLEE Mentors and Youth Ambassadors who serve as peer educators and student advocates to girls in the project. Whilst the mentors are effective and continue to provide needed peer-to-peer support, there are still opportunities for further support of girls’ lived experiences and reducing the barriers they face when trying to access opportunities. These barriers specifically relate to harmful gendered attitudes and cultural practices that, as peers, mentors do not have significant leverage in changing within community structures.

GLEE introduced Grandmothers into the project to play the role of intermediaries with community elders, provide support in the communication outreach of activities, and directly work with adolescent schoolgirls. This approach was established through Grandmothers training girls to manufacture their own menstrual hygiene pads, and in doing so, allowed for girls to gain autonomy of their own bodily experiences and create a space to discuss issues pertaining to the barriers that girls face including school-related gender-based violence, family planning, forced marriages, and menstrual hygiene and safety. In the last quarterly reporting period of Year 3 implementation alone, 5,094 girls were trained to produce their own menstrual pads. This number exceeded initial estimates below 5,000 girls, resulting in a 102% achievement rate. During the same reporting period, Grandmothers and Mentors organized 103 training activities in Social Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) messages as an effective means of fighting against violence and encouraging healthier behaviors, reaching over 4,700 youth in the communities. In this regard, the Grandmother approach has elevated the project’s outcomes and established a support network that will ensure the sustainability and future prosperity of the girls that the project serves.

Engaging Grandmothers in the GLEE project was based on the premise that Grandmothers hold influential roles in Malian society. In Malian culture, Grandmothers are respected for their age and consequent years of life experience. As such, Grandmothers are agents of change in their communities with established communication between youth, elders, and community leaders. Along these lines is the influence that Grandmothers have on adolescents and their behaviors. Grandmothers are most often left to take care of their grandchildren whilst working parents seek an income. With this role, Grandmothers are responsible to educate their grandchildren on norms, values and practices of society. Through GLEE’s interventions on adolescent girls, Grandmothers expressed their interest to partake in project activities and collaborate with the girls – a request that the GLEE program team facilitated and developed into a primary component of the project due to the willingness of the community.

In addition to maintaining a respected status in Malian culture, traditionally Grandmothers also play the role of nurses and midwives in their communities, and as such, are often the only means to information on family planning, reproductive health, and healthy hygiene practices. In this regard, the project sought to engage Grandmothers by providing them the skills to teach girls how to make their own menstrual hygiene pads. There is a mutually reinforcing relationship between adolescents’ health and their educational attainment. Quality education is effective in empowering women to make decisions that improve their health and that of their families. Access to education, in turn, is impacted by girls’ health status. Through this lens, empowering girls in their own menstrual hygiene production, reduces some of their barriers to accessing education. In establishing a support mechanism between Grandmothers and adolescent girls, learning with and advocating for the needs of those girls began culminating. In doing so, Grandmothers have also mobilized community efforts to supporting the needs identified.
Engaging Grandmothers to support girls’ access to education is utilizing an already existing intergenerational power dynamic that exists within Malian society. Grandmothers are valued in communities and have the leverage to not only highlight the needs of girls and create safe spaces for their continued growth, but are also able to change attitudes and learned behaviors that contribute to the barriers girls experience in attaining an education.

The hope of the Grandmother Approach is to create a future of unlearning harmful behaviors and adopting new positive ones. Education is the access point through which girls’ positions in society can be transformed in order to seize opportunities, and utilizing the untapped potential role that Grandmothers can play in this space is truly transformative in adopting new ways of thinking when “advocating for an educational future that speaks for all.”

Sub Unit

• Africa SIG

Chair

• Caitlin Vaka, Winrock International

Individual Presentations

• The Role of the Grandmother Reimagined - Sidi Ouar Toure, IntraHealth International; Caitlin Vaka, Winrock International; Aboubacar Coulibaly, Winrock International

• Reimagining Grandmothers- Identifying Contextual Solutions - Caitlin Vaka, Winrock International

Discussants

• Aboubacar Coulibaly, Winrock International

• Sidi Ouar Toure, IntraHealth International