Rwanda joined the rest of the world on Tuesday to celebrate the International Day of the Girl Child with activities organised in every district. The aim of this occasion is to give proper education, healthcare and opportunities to girls and women. It’s also an opportunity to encourage them to pursue a passion without limiting or choosing for them. The youth in Rwanda take up 61% of the population, over 3 million of whom are female, this shows the importance of girls’ issues and why their protection is such a critical agenda. Adolescence, especially for girls, is a dangerous stage of life in many countries. It is common to find girls as young as 12 being married off because some parents regard them as unnecessary burdens or commodities to be exchanged. There was uproar on social media in August when a video emerged of men kidnapping a 15-year-old girl in Uganda to marry her off after her mother was reportedly given money in exchange for her daughter. That is just one of the several problems that Girls face. They are also subjected to trafficking and are the primary victims of sexual exploitation. Rwanda has made giant strides in ensuring that the girl child’s rights are protected and has ensured that more girls enroll and stay in schools. The government has also partnered with stakeholders to establish centres of excellence like the Rwanda Coding Academy which admits 50 percent women and aims to resolve the shortage of engineers through a focused engineering program at high school level. Other Centres of Excellence in ICT, including Carnegie Mellon University-Africa, the University of Rwanda, and the AIMS, have dedicated scholarships for female candidates. However there are still problems like the rise of teenage pregnancy in Rwanda over the last few years. Statistics show that 17,337 teenagers conceived in 2017, 19,832 in 2018, 23,544 in 2019, 19,701 in 2020, and 23,000 last year. Such challenges and more are what led the United Nations General Assembly in 2011 to adopt the International Day of the Girl (IDG) to be marked every October 11. Protection of the girl-child should therefore not be limited to the government but needs concerted efforts of everyone in our society.
