Leave my virginity alone, By Funke Egbemode

Have we finally reached the point where a girl’s virginity can potentially open the door to her educational future?

Somewhere in Rivers State, a controversy involving female students, virginity and educational assistance has got people talking. Before we even get to the moral arguments, I have a few practical questions for the people behind this idea.

Please, let us reason together.

First, what happens when a girl qualifies for the scholarship but has absolutely no interest in furthering her education? Will she collect the scholarship and use it to start a provision shop? Or will the community insist that she must go to school by fire and by force because, after all, she has successfully preserved the community’s most celebrated educational qualification: her virginity?

Second, what if the girl is academically dull? I mean, she is struggling with Mathematics, English and even the spelling of scholarship, but her virginity is intact. Does she automatically qualify?

Meanwhile, another girl is brilliant, hardworking and desperately needs financial assistance, but she does not meet the virginity requirement. Is she disqualified?

Who exactly are we trying to educate here?

Now, let’s move to the more interesting part.

Suppose our lucky scholarship recipient receives her award today. She is happy, her parents are grateful, and the entire community is celebrating her as a model of chastity. Six months later, love happens. Hormones happen. Life happens.

And then, one day, she is no longer a virgin.

What happens to her scholarship?

Will the scholarship committee convene an emergency meeting? Will there be a review of her eligibility? Will someone knock on her door to announce that her educational funding has been suspended because her personal life has changed?

Imagine a girl studying for her examinations while worrying that a change in her sexual status could change her financial status too.

Would she be reading for WAEC or preparing for a virginity renewal examination?

What if she becomes pregnant?

Does the scholarship disappear immediately? Does the community withdraw its support? Is her education suddenly less important because she is now a pregnant teenager?

If the purpose of the programme is genuinely to empower girls, then surely the support should not evaporate the moment a girl fails to live up to somebody else’s expectations of her private life.

Besides, pregnancy can happen under different circumstances, including contraceptive failure and sexual violence. Should a girl who needs protection and support be punished by losing her opportunity to learn?

Let us be clear: parents, communities and religious leaders can encourage young people to make responsible sexual choices. There is nothing wrong with promoting abstinence as one option for avoiding pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.

But encouraging a young person to make a choice is different from making her education conditional on that choice.

And there is another small matter we seem to be overlooking: virginity is not an academic qualification, and a physical examination cannot reliably establish whether someone has had sex.

So, what exactly are we measuring?

Her character? Her intelligence? Her readiness for university? Her financial need?

Or are we simply rewarding a particular claim about her sexual history?

Because if the goal is to reduce teenage pregnancy, let us provide proper sex education, reproductive health information, protection from abuse and support for young mothers to continue their education.

If the goal is to educate girls, let us give scholarships to girls who need them and are willing to learn.

We can promote good values without turning a girl’s body into a scholarship application form.

And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all is this: if a girl is considered worthy of educational investment because she is a virgin today, does she become less worthy of education tomorrow because she is no longer one?

A girl’s future should be bigger than her sexual history.

Her intelligence deserves investment. Her ambitions deserve support. Her mistakes, if she makes any, should not automatically become the end of her dreams.

So, with all due respect to everybody’s cultural intentions, can we please leave a girl’s virginity out of the scholarship criteria?

Educate her because she deserves an education. Support her because her future matters. And leave her virginity alone!

Because, honestly, if virginity is now a scholarship qualification, I have one final question:

When are we opening the scholarship office for virgins who don’t want to go to school?

*Egbemode (egbemode3@gmail.com)

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