This article examines the educational lives of out-of-school Fulani girls living in semi-settled and peri-urban communities in southern Ghana, shifting attention from highly mobile pastoralist contexts to spaces where schools are geographically proximate, yet participation remains low. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 40 girls aged 9 to 21 who had either dropped out of school or never entered formal schooling, the study explores how they describe their everyday learning, how they value that learning, and how they imagine their futures. Guided by sociocultural theory, the analysis conceptualises learning as socially situated, relational, and embedded in household labour, religious practice, apprenticeship, and market activity. (I may compliment the theory section with recognition theory).
The findings show that the girls acquire substantial competencies through observation, participation, and intergenerational guidance, including food production, trading, sewing, caregiving, and Qur’anic instruction. These learning pathways are structured by gendered divisions of labour that shape girls’ time, mobility, and decision-making authority within households. However, these learning trajectories coexist with ambivalence. Some participants expressed satisfaction with skill-based pathways, while others expressed regret, unrealised aspirations, or a continued desire for formal education. Educational exclusion in these peri-urban settings is shaped less by extreme mobility than by economic precarity, gendered labour expectations, family decision-making, and fragile alignment between schooling structures and everyday livelihoods.
The findings show that the girls acquire substantial competencies through observation, participation, and intergenerational guidance, including food production, trading, sewing, caregiving, and Qur’anic instruction. These learning pathways are structured by gendered divisions of labour that shape girls’ time, mobility, and decision-making authority within households. However, these learning trajectories coexist with ambivalence. Some participants expressed satisfaction with skill-based pathways, while others expressed regret, unrealised aspirations, or a continued desire for formal education. Educational exclusion in these peri-urban settings is shaped less by extreme mobility than by economic precarity, gendered labour expectations, family decision-making, and fragile alignment between schooling structures and everyday livelihoods.
By situating these findings between deficit narratives and idealised accounts of alternative learning, the article contributes to debates on what counts as education in contexts of partial settlement and socio-spatial transition. It moves research on pastoralist education beyond explanations that focus mainly on remoteness and distance, and shows how recognition, aspiration, and opportunity are shaped in places where schools are nearby but full participation is still limited. The study suggests that policy should look beyond enrolment numbers and pay closer attention to how gender roles, everyday responsibilities, and future hopes influence educational experiences in semi-settled communities across West Africa and similar contexts.
This paper investigates the educational lives of out-of-school Fulani girls living in semi-settled and peri-urban contexts in Ghana. It addresses three interrelated questions. (1) How do out-of-school Fulani girls describe what they learn in everyday life? (2) How do they understand the value of this learning? (3) How do they imagine their futures, including what they think they may be missing by not being in school?
First, the article contributes to debates on pastoralist and nomadic education by focusing on semi-settled and peri-urban Fulani communities located at urban margins, rather than on highly mobile and geographically remote groups that dominate existing research. Much of the literature (Krätli, 2001; Krätli & Dyer, 2009; Dyer, 2016) explains educational exclusion through distance, seasonal migration, and limited infrastructure. This study instead examines contexts where schools are physically present and towns are nearby, yet participation remains limited. These communities occupy transitional spaces that are neither fully pastoral nor fully urban, and their livelihoods combine domestic labour, petty trade, apprenticeship, and religious learning in ways that do not always align with formal school routines. By analysing educational trajectories in these urban peripheries, the article broadens how marginality is understood, showing that exclusion can persist even in proximity to state services. This focus has relevance beyond Ghana, particularly in regions where semi-settled pastoralist populations increasingly live at expanding urban edges.
Second, by focusing on varying levels of mobility within Fulani nomadic communities particularly semi-settled and peri-urban households this research departs from dominant studies that concentrate on highly mobile, remote nomadic groups. Much of the existing literature links non-schooling primarily to long-distance movement and seasonal pastoral patterns. However, many Fulani families now live in contexts where mobility has reduced or taken new forms, even though aspects of pastoralist identity remain. By examining educational trajectories in settings where schools are geographically nearby and movement is partial rather than continuous, the study broadens the empirical basis of pastoralist education research. Its significance lies in highlighting the need to account for different levels of nomadism when analysing school participation, rather than assuming mobility as a uniform or singular condition.
Third, the paper contributes to education research by examining learning outside school in a way that recognises its complexity. Most accounts move in one of two directions: either out-of-school children are treated as learners falling behind, defined primarily by what they lack, or their everyday learning is treated as a meaningful alternative that works well in its own right (Maurer, 2023; Buckler, 2022; DeJaeghere, 2018). Neither position leaves much room for what this study finds to be a more common reality - that girls can be genuinely learning, developing real competence through daily life, and still carry a sense of what school might have made possible for them. Capturing that ambivalence matters because it points to a gap in how research currently frames non-schooling, and it suggests that the field needs more careful ways of holding both the reality of learning and the reality of its limits at the same time.
Fourth, the paper engages with debates on “mobile learners,” which have largely centred on students who move across borders or school systems and the administrative challenges this creates for enrolment and progression (UNESCO GEM, 2018). This study approaches mobility differently. Here, mobility is not only about movement between places but also about how learning is organised across everyday life. For the girls in this research, learning takes place through housework, small trading, apprenticeship, and religious instruction. It unfolds across different settings and relationships rather than within a structured, sequential curriculum. By examining this dispersed pattern of learning, the article adds nuance to discussions of mobility in education. It highlights forms of learning that do not fit neatly into formal categories, without assuming either deficiency or equivalence to schooling.
The structure of this paper is as follows: after this introduction, we review literature. We then outline a conceptual approach to the research. The methodology section describes our qualitative interviews with out-of-school Fulani girls in southern Ghana. The findings are presented thematically followed by the conclusion.