British Embassy, West Point Women Sign Girls’ Quality Education Agreement
The British Government, through its Embassy in Liberia, has signed a grant agreement with a local community group known as the West Point Women for Health and Development Organization (WPWHDO) to promote quality education for Liberian girls.
The grant, recently signed in Monrovia, will support or facilitate girls’ acquiring 12 years of quality education in the country, mainly those who dropped out of school as the result of the COVID-19 pandemic or pregnancy.
The agreement was signed under the project, titled, “Promoting Girls’ Quality Education for Gender Equality.”
Signing the document, Kate Thomson, Deputy Head of Mission and Development Counselor at the British Embassy, thanked the executive director of WPWHDO for implementing such a project intended to help promote girls’ education.
She said the British Embassy wants to support this project in order to ensure that every girl in the world gets at least 12 years of quality education.
Thomson said the support for girls’ education is their foreign policy, vision, and number one priority for their government. She urged the beneficiaries that they have the right to quality education, whether they experienced pregnancy or not, or are encountering any difficult circumstances.
“If girls are not educated there will be more conflict, violence, poverty, illness, and disease,” she said. “It is not just your right, but you need that quality education. I was lucky to get 12 years of quality education, which has created so many opportunities for me in the world. And I want the same to happen to you. This is why the British government is financing this project,” she said.
Thomson believes that the more girls are educated, the more society will develop, become richer and more peaceful.
Earlier, Nelly S. Cooper, Executive Director of WPWHDO, said the project aims to encourage the next generation of women to be able to take on the mantle of going to school.
“So, we are saying that we asked the British Embassy to help us continue what we started in the past during the heat of COVID-19,” she said.
“Thus, the Embassy agreed to help us empower our girls who suffered during the pandemic to have some basic skills,” Cooper added.
However, she has called on the beneficiaries’ school principals to help foster this endeavor by encouraging the girls so that every one of them can make Liberia a better place.
“We are trying to encourage the girls who have dropped out of school because of pregnancy and have become baby mothers, for them to remain in school and complete their education. Some of us were baby mothers going to school, and we remained there and completed our education. And today we are helping society,” she said.
Isaac Saye Lakpoh Zawolo, Superintendent of the Monrovia Consolidated School System (MCSS), in his remark, lauded the British Embassy for the grant support provided to WPWHDO.
Zawolo stated that Liberia will be great not because of men but because of women, that is why, as a superintendent, he welcomed the girls’ education program.
According to him, an educated woman would most likely resist her child joining an extreme movement.
“We continue to do things in the MCSS that will make girls feel comfortable staying in school,” he said.