Safe Spaces for Adolescent Girls
Safe Spaces are mentored groups proven to delay marriage by keeping girls in school. Teenage girls connect with peers, gain critical life skills and bridge gaps in academic learning—especially reading, writing, and math. The program was developed based on deep ethnographic research and in partnership with the communities where we work.
How does it work?
The core components of the safe spaces program are designed to address parents’ and daughters’ concerns about poor educational outcomes. Based on the successful model of our partner, the Centre for Girls Education in northern Nigeria, we engage communities, train girls in literacy, numeracy, and critical life skills, and enhance female teachers’ skills in order to:
Quadruple rural girls' secondary school completion rates
Enhance rural girls' aspirations, agency, and voice
Increase the age of marriage by at least 2 years
“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
Centre for Girls Education
The Centre for Girls Education (CGE) 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. Their programming now reaches over 50,000 girls across seven states in northern Nigeria.
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.
Hilin Mu
Hilin Mu (“Our Space” in Hausa”) was launched in Maradi, Niger in early 2019 in partnership with the Centre for Girls Education (CGE) and L’Initiative OASIS Niger. 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. The Hilin Mu safe spaces are mentored groups designed to delay marriage by keeping girls in school. Teenage girls connect with peers, gain critical life skills and bridge gaps in academic learning—especially reading, writing, and math.
“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