IU program to help women in South Sudan

IU has been awarded $4.2 million for a 2 1/2-year project to promote women’s participation in higher education in South Sudan.

The U.S. Agency for International Development through Higher Education for Development granted the award.

The project, through the Center for Social Studies and International Education, will be headed by Terry Mason, a professor in the IU School of Education, and Arlene Benitez, interim director of the center, according to a press release.

IU will partner with Virginia Tech and two South Sudanese institutions to promote gender equality and empower women by creating a supportive environment for women to pursue secondary and higher education.

The grant is part of USAID and HED’s new Women’s Leadership Program targeted for South Sudan as well as Armenia, Paraguay and Rwanda, according to a press release.

Heading the project in the country will be Julia Duany, a Bloomington resident and South Sudanese native. Duany and her family fled her country when civil war broke out in 1984. She earned her bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. from the IU School of Education and has been splitting time between Bloomington and Sudan, most recently serving as the South Sudan undersecretary for parliamentary affairs. Concerned with social justice issues within her home country, she founded South Sudan Friends International and wrote a book, “Making Peace & Nurturing Life: A Memoir of an African Woman About a Journey of Struggle and Hope.”

“Education is the soul of whoever is going to become a leader,” she said in a press release. “It has to be within education. In this program, not only will we work with the universities, we will also work with the secondary schools and have programs that can enlighten young women and help them finish their education. They have to seek more capacity-building programs so that they can become leaders of tomorrow.”

Mason said the project would focus on building education from the ground up.

“They have enormous needs in terms of materials and curriculum,” he said in a press release. “We’ll be conducting classes. We’ll be bringing in computers and software, with databases to enable people there to do various kinds of curriculum development and research.”

The program also seeks to better prepare women in secondary school for higher education by linking secondary schools to universities.

Duany left last week to return to South Sudan. She will travel between the offices of both partner universities. Despite continuing headlines about conflict in the region, the battles that have torn the country apart are now largely contained in areas far away from where she’ll work, and she is confident about the power of her work in the area, she said in a press release.

“The challenges are logistics, which somehow people can overcome,” Duany said. “I think the project will be viable, and it will make a lot of difference in South
Sudan.”

— Kathryn Moody