A Girl child is a prudent seed that breeds the generational continuity of man’s existence. Education is a life changing destiny that if equal opportunity is given towards the training of a girl child it could lead to sanity, equal growth and contributions in Nigerian society. The study investigated the assessment of psycho-social factors affecting the promotion of a girl-child education in Katsina State, Nigeria. The researchers adopted descriptive survey research design for the study. The target population was made up of senior secondary school female students’ in Katsina State, Nigeria. Multi-stage sampling techniques were utilized for the study. Thus, a total of nine hundred (900) senior secondary school female students participated in the study. The instrument used for data collection was a questionnaire which consists of two (2) sections. Section A consists of personal information of the respondents and Section B contains ‘Psycho-social Factors Affecting Girl-child Education Questionnaire (PSFAGCEQ). Two research questions were asked and three hypotheses were tested in the study. Frequency, percentage, standard deviation, mean and rank-order were used to answer research questions while analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the formulated hypotheses. Results show that all the twenty-one (21) psycho-social factors assessed such as poverty, mental ability, lack of finance, religious belief, cultural practice, parental level of education, early marriage, sexual violence among others affect the promotion of girl-child education Katsina State, Nigeria. Also, security issues, personal sanitation and hygiene, gender balance among teachers, lack of finance and poverty ranked 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th among the psycho-social factors affecting the promotion of girl-child education Katsina State. In addition, the results reveals that there is significant difference in the psycho-social factors affecting the promotion of girl-child education across the three zones (F (2, 897) =59.578; P < 0.05); age groups (F(2, 897) =11.682; P < 0.05) and class levels (F(2, 897) =19.374; P < 0.05) in Katsina State, Nigeria. The following recommendations are made based on the results of this study girl-child should be given free education in order to increase enrolment of female students in schools and government at all levels, parents and other stakeholders in education should join hand together for the promotion of girl-child education in Katsina state and Northern Nigeria in general.
Keywords: Education, Girl-child education, Promotion, Psycho-social factors
