Listening father: Girlsaide intensifies campaign to educate, empower girl-child

Girl children in Africa sometimes have a hard time communicating with their patriarchal minded fathers, particularly in patrilineal countries, like Nigeria. This rising trend deprives the girl-child of quality time with their fathers and complicates the already complex transition from adolescence to adulthood. To stem this rising tide, Girlaide.com, a not-for-profit organisation is organising series of workshops designed to help fathers understand and communicate better with their daughters.

During its recent workshop at the United States of America’s (U.S.A.) Consulate General in Lagos, Girlsaide brought together fathers and daughters to help them decipher what it meant to be a girl and the role a  father could play in helping the girl-child navigate her way through adolescent timidity to a superwoman.

“You cannot empower women, when you ignore the girl child’s education. We must start early. Fathers need to realise their daughters have ideas of their own ideas. Too many girls are not finishing high school, those who perchance complete high school do not move on to college or university for lack of resources” said Frank Sellin, deputy public affairs officer at the U.S. Consulate.

Sellin added “girls who are not able to attend tertiary levels of education should be offered the opportunity to develop other forms of industry relevant skills to enable them seize the opportunities all around them.”

Abosede Lewu, founder of Girlsaide, stated that it was important to create a forum that formalises this daughter-father conversation “my life has been defined by the conversation I had with my father. This ranges from my life choices to choice of career” she said.

On one hand, daughters at the event were quick to appreciate the platform offered them to express how they felt about the current state of their communication with their fathers. A negligible number acknowledged they could easily talk to their fathers about everything. However, the majority of daughters at the event said their fathers were unapproachable and hence the preferred to keep their life’s challenges to themselves.

On the other hand, fathers at the event expressed some concerns about the challenges of raising a girl child. Among the myriad challenges they raised were, discussing sexuality with their daughters, lack of control over the content their daughters accessed on the internet, what their daughters did on social media platforms among others.

Lanre Olusola, a life and emotional coach guided fathers present at the event through series of questions to a better understanding of what it means to educate a girl child. “You must start early. The time to start is at age zero. These girls and their generation live in the virtual world and the best way to teach them is by example” he reiterated. He insisted that fathers should spend quality time with their daughters.