With little opportunity for formal education, vocational education is important to young girls in Makoko, a coastal slum community in Lagos State. However, even that training does not come easy because of various factors, reports SAMPSON UNAMKA.
The Makoko waterfront community in Lagos State is plagued by under-development. Houses in the community (which the Lagos State Government tried unsuccessfully to evict in 2012) are make-shift shacks on stilts sunk into the Lagos Lagoon. The community lacks basic amenities like potable water, well-built houses, roads, power, healthcare facilities and schools. Transportation in, around and out of the community is by boats over dark, murky waters polluted by refuse and human waste.
It is common for girls in the community to miss out on formal education. Coupled with cultural and religious beliefs that relegate the girl-child to reproduction and kitchen duties, the next best thing for girls from the area is vocational education.
However, providing skill-based training for girls in the area is not easy as Kindle Africa, a non-governmental organisation, discovered, working in the community in the last five years.
Its founder, Mrs. Olorunfunmi Adebajo-Olafimihan, said the foundation had offered training in fashion design, hair dressing, catering, barbing and shoemaking to over 4,000 members of the community, mostly women and girls.
Challenges
To get the various trainings done, the foundation has to overcome many barriers, including language, cultural and religious beliefs, as well as tribal sentiments, which impede progress.
Language
In Makoko, English, the language of instruction in the formal education space, is not popular. The people speak mostly Egun, Yoruba and even French.
“Language barrier slows down our work,” Adebajo-Olafimihan told The Nation. “A lot of them only speak Egun language. That was why we had to incorporate numeracy and literacy in the fashion designing course.”
Shedding more light on how teaching numeracy and literacy helped to address the language barrier, Kindle Africa’s Fashion teacher, Esther Eboserebhen, said the foundation had to use model alphabets and numbers shapes used for teaching pre-schoolers to teach Makoko girls fashion design.
“You know these numbers and alphabets they buy for kids in nursery and primary schools? We bought it and started telling them this is one, two and three.
“It was supposed to be a class of 9a.m-4p.m, but from 9a.m to 11a.m, we do basics like one, two and three. Then after that, we teach them how to measure one inch and explain the measuring tape rule to them and how to use your tape rule to bend and calculate,” she said.
Using an interpreter helped. However, Esther said it also slowed them down.
“It kind of slowed down the process a bit but it helped them because when I say something in English the interpreter interprets in Egun/Ilaje to them and they understand. So what was supposed to take us two weeks, took us two months. After the first month, they got conversant with the tailoring terminologies,” she said.
Cultural, religious and tribal sentiments
It is one thing for Makoko girls to enroll for vocational programs, it is another thing to stay long enough to complete it. Adebajo-Olafimihan said some girls stopped the program because they got pregnant or got married pretty early, while others were stopped because of tribal sentiments.
“Some people don’t believe that their girls should learn; and then early marriage. So a lot of our girls start and get pregnant along the way and they are unable to finish. One other challenge is tribal influence. For instance, we had a lot of Hausa students at the beginning and all of a sudden they stopped coming, one of them said she had to wait for her father to go out before coming for the training, later she stopped coming and the instructor said her father had found out she was coming to learn from us and we are not Hausa and it is very painful”, she said.
Nevertheless, Adebajo-Olafimihan said the students managed to learn before they were forced to stop.
“One thing we are grateful for is that all of them can take a skill away. At least if you come for the first two or three weeks, you have learned how to make bags. So we always try to ensure that no matter how short the duration is you can take a skill away,” she said.
Some members of the Makoko community do not also appreciate the value of empowerment projects done by organisations like Kindle Africa. The issue of value was put to test Saturday last week when the foundation held its first graduation for fashion designers who went through its one-year programme. The students had spent six months training to sew and the remaining six months interning with established fashion houses before the graduation.
Adebajo-Olafimihan said the Kindle Africa discovered that the graduation was important because the community regards the cultural practice of celebrating ‘freedom’ as significant. Non-formal vocational education is incomplete without ‘freedom’ – the ceremony that marks the end of training under an expert, and the start of the professional career of the trainee.
“We had sponsored close to 200 students here and then we realised that without a proper graduation – like freedom – the people we trained will not be recognised by the community. They also need our certificates to be placed at the entrance of their shop to show that they learned from a good organisation. So we decided to give them a very befitting graduation in the presence of their family, friends and community,” Adebajo-Olafimihan said.
Last Saturday’s ‘freedom’ was about the presentation of certificates to some of the latest fashion design trainees. The event featured 13 graduands modelling beautiful attires they had made by themselves in the course of the training, to members of the community, family and friends.
However, the ‘Freedom’ ceremony was cut short by a group claiming to be an association of tailors of Sogunro, one of the communities in Makoko. The members claimed they were not aware of the training and should be ‘settled’ before the graduation could continue.
While the graduands modelled their beautiful clothes before the audience, Chairman of the group, Mr. Paul Aderoba, followed by three others who said they were the vice chairman, secretary and treasurer, instructed the Disc Jockey to switch off the music, while they held a conversation with organisers of the event.
After almost 30 minutes, The Nation observed that the beneficiaries and some members of the community went on their knees to beg the intruders to allow the event continue.
The leaders were heard telling coordinators of Kindle Africa that only the payment of N10,000 and a carton of malt drinks would solve the problem.
Rather than given in, Adebajo-Olafimihan cut short the event to present certificates and take photographs with the graduands. They could not even do the planned presentation of sewing machines to the graduands for fear of violence.
Aderoba told The Nation that his association was not aware a programme of such was being organised for young girls in the community.
“We should have been informed,” he said. He also faulted the period spent on the training, saying it was too short compared to about five years members of his group spent training their own apprentices.
“Fashion designing is a skill we teach interested persons for five to six years but they (the graduands) are being taught within six months. When the organisers leave, the beneficiaries will still come back to us for more training,” he said.
However, having learnt to sew in four months herself, training instructor, Esther, disagreed with Aderoba’s claim that the training had to last years.
“We had some persons come to say that you cannot have the knowledge of fashion designing just for four months; that it should take six years. It really baffles me because I am a graduate of electrical engineering and I studied fashion designing for just four months and after that I was able to grow,” she said.
Talking about her students, she added: “I tried to start from the basics with them and then one thing about fashion designing is that if you understand the foundation and you understand how the pattern comes together, and then use your imagination you can explore.”
On her part, Adebajo-Olafimihan said the self-made dresses the students wore for the graduation were evidence they were well-taught in six months.
“As you have seen all the girls did their fashion parade and they all cut and made their dresses themselves so that is proof that we have given them quality education,” she said.
Contrary to Aderoba’s claim, the graduands were happy with what they had learnt in one year of training with Kindle Africa. They said most of the five, six years in the conventional apprenticeship is usually spent doing menial tasks for the masters while learning at snail’s pace.
Twenty-two-year-old Sarah Tinsheme who dropped out of school in Primary Six, said she learnt to sew in no time.
“I am so happy because I dropped out of school in Primary 6 and since then I used to help my mother smoke fish. But later on when I learned about this fashion designing I enrolled and I thank God I did and now I know how to sew and I can make extra money. You learn how to operate a machine in no time and after that learn how to sew and draft a pattern with speed. I didn’t have any experience in tailoring from the outset but I learned very fast, even while I was learning many people told me I could not achieve it, they doubted the process, saying I couldn’t achieve it in six months. But see me now I was able to overcome and now I can sew very well,” she said.
She said the tailoring group was against them because they could not understand the training process.
“It is because they do not know the secret that is involved. In their own training they will first train you on how to use the machine and then they will give you buba to be doing,” she said.
Another beneficiary, Ayomide Ogundere, is so confident in the training he got that he expects to explode in five years.
“I thank Kindle Africa for turning me into a fashion designer. In the next five years, I see myself being a CEO of my company and I will name the company IremidebyJadesola,” he said.
Despite the ugly incident, Adebajo-Olafimihan said the foundation would not just pack up and leave. She said some parents in the community had expressed willingness to enroll their wards in some skills acquisition programs.
Source: The Nations newspaper