ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to bridge the gender gap in girls' participation in science by drawing attention to Indigenous Educational systems and women's roles as primary healthcare providers since pre-colonial times. It focuses on two scholarship strings. First, studies on the medical missions, including Barbra Mann Wall's Into Africa: A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change. Second, scholarship on Indigenous Education and its interaction with Western Educational systems in Nigeria, including Jamaine Abidogun's "Western education's impact on Northern Igbo gender roles in Nsukka" and Peter Ukpokodu and Omiunota Ukpokodu's Contemporary Voices from the Margin. The chapter lends voice to the call to Africanize education in the continent, as it has never been clearer that "the modernization implied in globalization should seek to gain from indigenous structures, rather than arbitrarily abandon them". An interesting oral history perspective points to Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s as creating a major rift or gap in Indigenous Knowledge transfer in Igboland.
