This is an essay about hope. In our first years of sponsoring girls to protect them from FGM, many dropped out of school or could not concentrate on their studies. Many did not perform well enough for us to send them on to tertiary studies, which would have prepared them to support themselves. Of course there were many personal reasons for the girls' lack of persistence. After a few years, however, many of them became outstanding students and were qualified for university study. When I asked some of the girls, they told me that they had not initially believed anybody could help them. Once a few brave and motivated girls showed the way up the mountain that lay in front of them, resisting being cut and studying successfully, the others were also able to believe in themselves and forge ahead.

In 2005, the Ugandan government announced the launch of Universal Secondary Education, intended to serve the graduates of the Universal Primary Education program started in 1997. Uganda was the first African country to attempt to provide universal education, and everyone was excited about it. From the outside, an ideal state of affairs seemed to appear on the horizon. Educating all the girls (and boys) in Uganda would change the country enormously. In particular, from our perspective, if young people in the Sabiny and Pokot areas had free access to secondary school, the power of female genital mutilation in their cultures would naturally diminish. FGM would eventually disappear with exposure to the world, just as other harmful traditional practices had. I vividly recall speaking to girls at Ugandan secondary schools and hearing their gasps of amazement when I told them we did not practice FGM in America, and many of us had not even heard of FGM.


With free education, student sponsorship from outside the country would no longer be necessary, I thought. In my crystal ball, I thought I detected the end of the need for the Godparents Association's education-sponsorship project.


When I suggested my view of the future, our wise Uganda country coordinator (and Godparents co-founder) shook her head and pursed her lips. And she was right. Ideal education has not yet arrived in Uganda. We are still climbing the mountain.


The Universal Secondary plan was started without enough planning or funding. Only 800 government-aided secondary schools (compared to 1,898 private schools) are currently participating in the program because of the low tuition paid by the government and the other restrictions imposed. But in 2009, 11,850 primary schools had already signed on to provide Universal Primary Education, and it was easy to see that the 800 publicly funded secondary schools could not possibly absorb all of the students who graduated from Primary 7. The government promised to build a new secondary school in every sub-county, but that has not happened. So the secondary schools remain overcrowded, operating double shifts taught by exhausted and discouraged teachers with inadequate facilities. An automatic promotion policy is also in place, undermining achievement and perhaps raising expectations unrealistically. 


Parents are still responsible to provide the required uniforms, books and school supplies, lunch and transportation, a financial burden many families cannot manage, especially for daughters. As a result, a third of the first USE cohort -- more girls than boys -- dropped out before reaching their S4 (O-Level) exams this fall. Shadow Education Minister Alice Alaso called even those students who finished S4 "half-roasted potatoes," because of the low quality of their education.


At the same time, private secondary schools announced in February they were raising their entrance requirements, and their tuition, for prospective A-level students who wanted to continue after S4. This means that fewer hopeful students will be able to continue their education, and many will join the very large number of unemployed and discouraged youth. This is the most painful part -- to have had hopes raised and then dashed. To have been turned back halfway up the mountain.


The Godparents Association will continue to help some young people with their education into the foreseeable future, increasing the number of pioneering young people from FGM-practicing cultures. But we have no answer to the lack of jobs for graduates, the next step in helping them build successful lives. We are thinking about ways to approach the problem, though, with our eyes still fixed on the horizon.