Mr. Ahmed Ali Dirshe:

We have come a long way in getting that number of girls into school. Initially, when we started the programme in 1993, we had a very small percentage of girls attending school. Mostly, it was that the civil war was at the peak at the time. The understanding of the people of sending girls to school was very low at the time. Also, people in our culture were not used to sending girls into school. From there we have tried our best to encourage parents onto CECs. Initially we built the community education committees who were managing, because at the time there was no government at all in Somalia. We were dealing directly with the community. We established community education committees. We gave them training and then we also gave them awareness so that they encouraged parents to send their girls.

There is still a long way to go but we have reached the point that some 40% of girls are now attending the schools supported by Concern. One of the approaches we used was to recruit female teachers, which was not done at the time. When we were recruiting the teachers, I remember we advocated that a proportion of female contenders apply. We set the number at 50% of the school teachers. That is how these teachers became models for the girls and parents started sending their girls to school.