The history of Niger women's education: From Qur'anic-based literacy to the Internet: Towards increased female empowerment

Girls' and women's access to education in Niger remains limited and their educational outcomes are low. This study explores recent education developments for women as it begins to move away from the traditional system, inherited from the age of colonization in various different directions. Recent trends include Qur'anic-based education and one derived from the new information technologies, trends this research finds to be allowing women to finally pursue their own priorities, raising the prospect that for the first time one may be able to look at women's education as something important to women's empowerment.; Chapter One takes a critical look at theories in history and education and their relevance to the issues raised by this research. Chapter Two attempts to establish the claim about the bleak nature of the context by a look at Nigerian women's education before independence. Chapter Three continues the discussion of women and education in Post-Colonial Niger. Chapter Four introduces the discussion of information technology and education as we find it emerging in today's Niger. Recent technological development in communication not only affects education for women in the conventional sense of providing new knowledge for them but also it facilitates their efforts at empowerment. Radio and television, it was found worked to reproduce the traditional patriarchal hierarchies already existing in the government schools and in the society at large. Chapter Five focuses on the case study around which this dissertation is constructed that of the Qur'anic/Islamic grassroots school cum family business developed by Zahara Abu Bakr Shaykh and Umm al-Khayr Niass of Kiota, a town in Niger, a kind of "bottom-up" approach to education. Chapter Six explores the wider implications of women not only as consumers but also as producers of their educations and literacies, of women employing non-formal and non-traditional forms of education, doing so in a sustained way.