Success Stories

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Genet

Kembatta Women’s Self-Help Center
Kembatta, Ethiopia

Genet Hadero is ten years old. She is slender yet strong, smiling yet determined. Even as a very young girl growing up in the rural village of Zato Shodera in Kembatta, Ethiopia, Genet had a dream.

“There is a girl who lives in our village and she is a university student. Whenever I went to her home, I would see her reading books and I envied her very much,” Genet remembers. Since then, she says, “I always dreamed of reading books rather than seeing them.”

Genet’s dream came true two years ago when Kembatta Women’s Self-Help Center (KMG, for Kembatti Mentti Gezzima-Tope) opened a nonformal learning center in her village. She and 120 other boys and girls attend basic education classes at the center ten months a year and also receive training in AIDS prevention, health, and human rights. Genet is learning to read and write, and she speaks passionately about her favorite subjects, history and math. Most importantly, she and her parents now believe that educating a daughter can bring benefits to the whole family.

“After I joined the class, my father and mother were proud that I could read their letters from the government offices,” Genet says. They support her desire to become a math teacher, “because they know what the other girls who graduated from universities do for their families.” Yet throughout Africa and particularly in poor, rural areas, girls’ education is still controversial. According to KMG, more than half of the girls who begin primary studies fail to complete grade four, even though education makes them more likely to raise healthier families and be healthier themselves.

In cultures that rely primarily on oral traditions, literacy commands great respect, and literate girls often become informal teachers and information sources for their families and villages. Yet parents frequently pull their daughters out of school at an early age. Girls like Genet are needed to haul water, fetch firewood, care for siblings, and help with housework. The few schools that exist are often located far from home, so when girls reach adolescence they face the very real danger of being abducted for forced marriages on the long walk to school.

No one understands these obstacles better than Bogaletch Gebre, KMG’s founder and executive director. Born in Kembatta in the 1950s, she became the first girl from her village to study beyond the fourth grade at a missionary school six miles away. She escaped four attempted forced marriages and won scholarships to attend high school in Addis Ababa and pursue university studies abroad. Eventually Gebre returned home to build a tin-roofed house for her father’s family—the first in the village—and become the first Ethiopian woman to join the science faculty at the University of Addis Ababa.

Gebre founded KMG in 1997 with a simple conviction: when women and girls are empowered and their talents and intelligence nurtured, the quality of life for women, men, and children improves. Support from the Global Fund for Children helped to build the learning center in Zato Shodera, but KMG also works in villages throughout the region to improve reproductive-health awareness and practices, restore the environment, and strengthen local infrastructure.

Basic education is the cornerstone of all of the group’s activities, and ten-year-old Genet believes it is also the key to her future. “My studies will help me be the person I want to be,” she says. “After joining this school, I feel I can fly like a bird.”

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