A rural girls school — from 35% dropout at grade 8 to 6%

I visited the school on a Tuesday morning in November. The MTN team had arranged for us to meet the headmistress and a few of the girls. I did not know what to expect — I had funded sanitation projects before, read the reports, seen the numbers. I thought I understood what I was going to see.

I did not.

The headmistress took us to the new block first. Six stalls, running water, a separate room with a locked cabinet — she explained that the cabinet contained sanitary products, restocked monthly, free for any girl who needed them. She said this quietly, as though it were an ordinary thing. It was not ordinary. Before this, she told us, a girl who needed something and had nothing would simply go home. And sometimes she would not come back.

Then we met some of the girls. One of them — maybe fifteen, in her school uniform, flowers in her hair — told me she wanted to study medicine. She said it plainly, the way you say something you have already decided. I asked her what had made her want to. She said her mother had lost a baby two years ago because the nearest hospital was too far. She had decided she would be the one who was close enough.

I thought about what the headmistress had told us earlier: that two years ago, a third of the girls in this school were gone by grade 8. That this girl — this particular girl who wants to be a doctor — might have been one of them. That the thing standing between her and that outcome was a toilet block and a locked cabinet.

I went there expecting to see infrastructure. I came home thinking about what we almost let disappear — not a statistic, not a dropout rate, but her. Specifically her. And the ones like her in the other fourteen schools on this list who are still waiting.