Educating Women is the Key to Educating a Nation

Baku, 14 September 2007 - As Azerbaijan is undergoing its second oil boom, the country is challenged by some of the same issues that it faced during its first oil boom a century ago. One such issue is the education of girls.

A progressive attitude towards the education of girls was already visible in Azerbaijan a hundred years ago, describes a book of the well-known popular historian, Fuad Axundov, launched this morning in the Museum Center of Baku.

The book entitled "Educating women to educate a nation: the Tagiyev's school for girls" was produced with support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) within the framework of a UN joint programme. It is devoted to the history of the first secular school for Muslim girls in the Islamic world. Established in Baku in 1901 by an oil baron Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, the school proved to be a vivid example of transforming "the black gold" of oil revenues into "the human gold" of an educated woman.

"Mr. Taghiyev's idea of an educated woman as the basis for an educated nation remains equally relevant today in Azerbaijan", stressed the UN Resident Coordinator Bruno Pouezat in his remarks at the official launch of the book. "In recent years, he went on saying, the Parliament of Azerbaijan has ratified major international agreements on human rights, including the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. Azerbaijan is also a state signatory to the Third Millennium Development Goal "Promoting Gender Equality and Empowering Women".

Thanking the United Nations for supporting the production of the book, the Chairperson of the State Committee for Family, Women and Children's Affairs, Ms. Hijran Huseynova underlined in her opening remarks that women's advancement was the Committee's main mandate. This advancement was possible through empowerment and education of women. She said the UNDP/UNFPA-supported publication was a contribution not only to this cause, but also to the preservation of the history of Baku.

According to the author of the book, Fuad Akhundov, the very idea of the school was viewed by its benefactor as the only way "to bring to a Muslim woman a comprehension of her main human rights". He stressed that the fact that Taghiev's school was established half a century prior to the foundation of the UN and adoption of the international legal instruments of human rights made the whole idea all the more fascinating.

Mr. Akhundov drew three main conclusions from his history of the school. The first was that reforms in the Islamic society were possible provided that they were promoted from inside the society by persons capable of understanding the roots of existing problems. The second conclusion was that "secular and liberal education with equal opportunities for boys and girls is a key for any nation's prosperity and sustainable development". And finally, "oil revenues can only yield results if they are invested into the human assets of a given country".

Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism, Ms. Sevda Mammadaliyeva, also addressing the event, noted that the Taghiyev school for girls became an alma mater to the whole cohort of outstanding Azerbaijani educators and mothers of educated children. These women were capable of transmitting Taghiyev's ideas of enlightenment to the future generations.