Embassy News
Africa Education Initiative: Ambassador’s Girls’ Scholarship Program Replaces Child Labor with Homework in Liberia
December 21, 2007. Montserrado County, Liberia
Beatrice Roberts has an intense gaze for a 6th grader and stands erect at the podium of a small church next to her school in the Soul Clinic community of Paynesville, a rural suburb of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. She speaks words of thanks for the Ambassador’s Girls’ Scholarship Program, part of the $600 million, nine-year Bush Africa Education Initiative (AEI) run by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2002 through 2010.
In the packed congregation is US Ambassador Donald Booth who with Acting USAID Mission Director Rick Scott presented 37 scholarships and stuffed backpacks with an enthusiastic handshake captured in a snapshot each girl will receive. Also looking on as Beatrice speaks are the Principal of her school, the Maggie Lampkins Institute, Soul Clinic community leaders, the managers of the scholarship program, the media, classmates, 36 other recipients of scholarships and school supplies on this day and their families, and perhaps, most important of all for Beatrice, her grandmother.
When you meet Phebe Joe Roberts you understand where her granddaughter gets the intense gaze and stoic pose. She is raising eight grandchildren as their parents, her children, were all lost to the 14-year war that ended a few years ago. The education system and the entire country is rebuilding from ruin, as is her family. She breaks rocks to eke out a living. Beatrice used to help out by selling fire coal. The case of the Roberts family is typical of others in the audience, there to see their girls receive scholarships on this day.
In Liberia, the new year will see 1,070 girls, like Beatrice at risk of dropping out of school, receive scholarships to cover school fees, textbooks, copybooks, backpacks, uniforms, 
shoes, pencils and pens. Also at the awards ceremony, Ambassador Booth announced that, partly due to overwhelming demand from communities and local government, for the first time 619 boys will be eligible to receive scholarships in 2008.
Students in nineteen schools, largely public, except in areas where there is no government school, participate in the program. For girls who have more than an hour’s walk to school, the scholarships provide bicycles. Boston-based World Education manages the program for USAID’s Africa Bureau with local partners Children Assistance Program Inc. in Montserrado County and Development Education Network-Liberia in Bong County.
Since the program began in the 2004-2005 school year, a total of 2,642 scholarships have been awarded to primary school girls in these two of the fifteen counties in Liberia. The scholarships are awarded competitively by a board consisting of representatives from the Ministries of Education and Gender and Development, USAID, UNICEF, NGO partners, community leaders, teachers, and health workers. Students from very poor households or who are disabled, orphaned or impacted by HIV/AIDS are invited to apply and go through interviews and screening.
Selection means the children can go to school and stay in school. As Beatrice tells an inquiring visitor after the ceremony, “I don’t have to get up in the dark and sell coal anymore.” Her classmate and co-awardee, Jasmine Yarziah, eagerly chimes in “I’m so glad I don’t have to pick and sell potato greens anymore to get the school fees. I had to walk all that way before going to school”. Asked what she liked best about the program Beatrice shyly grins for the first time and says “the uniform”. For her it is not only a source of school pride, but also personal dignity, “I don’t get kicked out of school anymore for not paying the fee or not having the supplies”. While they appear to be 11 and 12, Beatrice is 15 and Jasmine is 16, and making up for the lost years.
Poster board signs prepared by the students with obvious “guidance” from the teachers surround the speakers at the event: “Thanks to the US government through USAID. God bless you”; “Long live Ambassador Booth and delegation”; “Education is better than silver or gold”. A more spontaneous expression of the children’s excitement at the visitors and the awards erupts after a group photo outside their school, too small to accommodate the day’s crowd, as they sing multiple rounds of “We wish you a Merry Christmas!” to the American delegation. It is the Friday before Christmas and the New Year looks promising to the girls, their families, and the community of Soul Clinic, Liberia.
Margaret Sancho-Morris is USAID Education Team Leader for Liberia and Gib Brown is Basic Education Advisor.
