While stories of Boko Haram enslaving girls and burning down schools abound in Western media, counter-trends of local champions leading the way for girls’ education in the West African countries of Nigeria and Mali largely go unnoticed. Despite real challenges—like…

2015 could prove to be a pivotal year for development. In the discussions to come, supporting local leadership in development should be given high priority. Since the revolution of participatory development in the 1970s, local leadership has bubbled up as…

There is growing recognition that girls’ education is an important and fundamental precondition for human security. There seems to be a new commitment among Ministry of Education officials in countries ranging from Malawi to Nigeria to Jordan, especially as discussions…

The year 2014 holds yet another chance to eliminate the harmful traditional practice of child marriage in a long struggle that has consumed the attention of gender activists, public health practitioners and human rights advocates over the past 50 years.…

Twenty years ago, in the department of political science at Bayero University Kano, I came across a poster. “If you think education is expensive; try ignorance” it said. This was my first introduction to a popular Nigerian saying that captures the…

There is much to celebrate in girls’ education. Since the Education for All movement and the setting of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, the number of out-of-school girls at primary school level has dropped from 58.9 million in 2000 to 30.7 million in 2012 and the share of girls that make up the out-of school population has decreased from 58 to 53 percent.