Cote d'Ivoire: Girl Power, With a Paintbrush in Hand
Abidjan — Aminata, Ouly and Awa are all students at the Nord school complex. But the preadolescent girls have something else in common: the nickname 'last in class'. Not much longer. A successful empowerment programme is offering these slow learners the chance to improve their poor academic performance and, while at it, their brushstrokes.
Primary teachers and pupils across the Ivory Coast normally don't come to school on Wednesdays. But this Wednesday, at the Nord complex in Abidjan's populated Abobo neighbourhood, animated voices from a classroom echo across the schoolyard.
"Hope of the millennium," the teacher chants, to which a score of girls enthusiastically replies in unison: "We are the hope of tomorrow." Their mantra is inspired by the programme that brings them here: Fille-espoir du millénaire ('Girls: hope for the millennium'), which allows academically challenged girls to get extra help with their studies.
But that's not all. The programme uses art as a method to help the students focus and develop the habit of practising-till-perfect.
"On several occasions when I was unable to draw an image or colour in a picture on the first try, the teacher did not reprimand me. Instead, he always took the time to explain how it was done and allowed me to try again; and I eventually got it right. He realized that I am a slow learner," says a student named Aminata Ouologuem.
"The teacher explained that mathematics works the same way; the more problems you solve, the better your understanding," she adds.
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