YARINYA is an hausa (one of the popular spoken languages in Nigeria, the northern part) word meaning young girl.
The young girl child in this part of the country are mostly raised to be wife's at a very young age taking away most right from them including right to good education, and also the right to select their own spouses as most are promised to another for marriage immediately they are born.
In the traditional Nigerian society, there exists the degenerate believe that women are second class citizens (Bakari,
2001). A woman is considered as a man's property or pleasure object. She is also considered as a 'machine' meant for producing children. This situation has resulted in unfair treatment of women especially with regards to education.
The average rural Nigerian parent would rather invest in the education of the son rather than the daughter
This cultural
practice is amplified by the tradition of dowry or bride price, which leads parents to monetize
their daughters through early or forced marriage (Aja-Okorie, 2013; Cammish & Brock, 1994;
Guinee, 2014). In some sub-Saharan African countries, families are likely to remove their
daughters from school for marriage when they reach puberty, or even to deny them the chance to
enroll in school in the first place, for fear that they might not accept early marriage if they
become educated (Tuwor & Soussou, 2008). Therefore, educating girls has emerged as a
strategic solution to ending the practice of early or forced marriages in developing countries. In
addition, educated girls are more likely to delay their marriage until they complete school,
especially in communities where marriage is not compatible with continued school attendance
due to seclusion and/or the burden of household responsibilities. It should also be noted that
parents’ decisions to remove their daughters from school early, or not enroll them at all, do not
necessarily mean that they are unaware of schooling’s benefits. Rather, these decisions can be
due simply to demand for their daughters’ labor at home (Hartmann-Mahmud, 2011).
