Safe Spaces for Adolescent Girls
Increase the quality of evidence-based safe space programming and develop paths to scale in northern Nigeria, Niger and the Sahel.
Donate to support safe space programming in Northern Nigeria and Niger.
How does it work?
The Safe Space program engages communities, trains girls in literacy, numeracy, and critical life skills, and also works with female teachers to enhance their teaching skills. Safe spaces are comprised of a mentor and no more than eighteen adolescent girls, who meet for two hours each week, spending one hour on literacy and numeracy and one hour on life skills, such as reproductive health and negotiation. The program aims to:
Enhance rural girls' aspirations, voices, and sense of personal agency
Quadruple rural girls' secondary school completion rates
Increase the average age of marriage in the communities where we work by at least 2 years
The design of the program was informed by deep ethnographic research OASIS conducted in the communities where we work, and the experience of our partner in northern Nigeria, the Centre for Girls Education, which pioneered the safe space methodology.
Program Brief:
Safe Spaces for
In-School Girls
Program Brief:
Safe Spaces for
Married Adoclescents
“You could say the girls are being re-educated in the fundamentals they were taught in school but never learned. The mentors sit them down and teach the girls in a practical way, and when they get back home, they share what they learn with their siblings.”
-Father of safe space participant
Impact
Scaling up safe spaces in Nigeria
The Centre for Girls Education (CGE), with programmatic and financial support from OASIS, is a pioneer in the adaptation of the safe space methodology to meet adolescent girls’ need for basic literacy and numeracy skills, vocational training, and crucial life skills not usually offered at home or in school. 70,000 girls across seven states in northern Nigeria have now taken part in safe space clubs.
World Bank overview: Safe Space Clubs for Girls
Centre for Girls Education: Apprentice Based Vocational Training Safe Spaces
Centre for Girls Education: Married Adolescents Safe Spaces
Learn more about child marriage and girls’ education in West and Central Africa in the World Bank’s report “Understanding and Ending Child Marriage: Insights from Hausa Communities” co-authored by OASIS Program Director, Daniel Perlman.
Expanding safe spaces to Niger
Hilin Mu (“Our Space” in Hausa) was launched in Maradi, Niger in 2019. The Hilin Mu team, with programmatic and financial support from OASIS, established a local organization to run the program in 2020, called Lumière des Filles et des Femmes (LFF, Light of Girls & Women). We provide safe space clubs to girls at risk for early marriage as well as mobilize families and influencers to change norms around girls education and early marriage. Hilin Mu safe spaces focus on the transition from primary to junior secondary school as it is a critical time for school withdrawal and early marriage. Hilin Mu recruits girls in the last year of a primary school and organize safe spaces for them over the next two years. The overall goal of Hilin Mu is to promote the delay of marriage, nurture the agency and voice of rural adolescent girls, and help them realize their fundamental human and reproductive rights.
In the 2019-2020 Cohort…
Publications
CNN - How the climate crisis fuels gender inequality
The New York Times - Old World Young Africa
BitterSweet Monthly - Your inheritance is your education
VoxDev - Local solutions for combatting child marriage in Northern Nigeria
“I share a lot of my knowledge with my two friends who have not been to school … For my two friends, I want to learn all the arguments through Hilin Mu to convince families like theirs to free their girls to get an education, to let them choose. They don’t know how to read or write; every day I advise them to convince their parents to let their younger sisters go to school.”
- Nana Nazifa Laouli, age 15