In their persistent lobbying, the women parliamentarians brought to the fore a problem that could have continued to hinder the education of young girls. Thirteen-year-old Dorothy Akinyi, a standard seven pupil from Kibera, which is arguably the largest slum in Africa, stays at home every time she menstruates.
"Without sanitary pads life at school is difficult. We are subjected to very embarrassing and humiliating incidences, especially from the boys. Tying a pullover around your waist to hide the soiled patch behind your uniform in case the tissue leaks is a dead giveaway. We choose to stay at home," explains Akinyi. But the situation is bound to change for Akinyi and other girls like her. But only if the money allocated for the sanitary wear is spent efficiently.
"This is gender responsive budgeting at work. Being sensitive to the distinctive needs of men and women, while allocating and spending public funds," explains Jacinta Nyachae, executive director of Kenya Aids Law Project and an advocate of human rights.
Her comments come just as Rwanda prepares to host a global high level meeting on increasing accountability and developing effectiveness through gender responsive budgeting in Kigali from 26 to 28 Jul. The meeting is held in conjunction with the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and the European Union.
But girls are not the only ones to have benefitted from a gender sensitive strategy. In a move that has seen women break socio-political economic barriers, the planning and budgeting for the establishment of the ministry of gender and children affairs remains government’s strongest show of its commitment to address gender inequality.
"But gender planning and budgeting is not enough, the rampant corruption across various government ministries is a clear indication that there’s need for tracking and monitoring how these funds are used," explains a source from the G-10 alliance, which is a coalition of women organisations fighting for women’s rights.
South Sudan has three generations of children who have never seen the inside of a classroom. According to Dr. Michael Hussein, the minister for general education, the education sector suffered most during the civil war.
"Teachers were neglected, salaries were not regular, there was no training and many fled the war-torn areas. As a result, three generations lost the opportunity to go to school," says the minister.
The issue of education in South Sudan is so critical that most leaders are calling on the youth to go back to school.
Lieutenant General Daniel Akot, the Deputy Speaker of the national assembly is calling on his colleagues to pass relevant laws that will make it possible for all South Sudanese children to access education. "We have won the war with our enemy. Now the real war of fighting poverty, ignorance and hunger has started. We can’t achieve this when our children don’t go to school," he says.
Hussein is urging the government to dedicate at least 20 percent of its national budget to his ministry. He said his ministry wants to build 6,000 primary and 3,000 secondary schools respectively.
"We have some areas that have 120 pupils per teacher, making learning impossible. One textbook is being shared among five pupils. We want to recruit many teachers, train more of them. We welcome those of our citizens who fled the country and (were educated) around the world to come back and bridge the big gap of a lack of personnel," says Hussein.
Hussein says that by the end of 2010, South Sudan had 169 pre-primary schools with 47,266 pupils and 1,249 teachers. There are 3,195 primary schools with 1.3 million pupils and 2,912 teachers. And there are 168 secondary schools with 34,487 students and three functional teacher-training colleges with 2,310 trainees.
But there remains about two million young South Sudanese who have not attended school, against an acute shortage of teachers. The government is working with its neighbours, like Kenya, to provide it with teachers. Kenya has over 70,000 unemployed trained teachers.
There is a touch of gold fever in the small western Madagascan town of Ankavandra and schoolgirls are being affected.
Rural poverty coupled with record world gold prices is proving an irresistible pull for young girls in and around Ankavandra who are being lured away from class and into the foothills of the central plateau area by the promise of a few flecks of gold.
Nearly every day a group of five girls, all related and aged 8-15, wake at dawn to begin a two-hour brisk walk up steep goat tracks to one of the many tributaries of the River Manambolo. As they draw closer to their destination their numbers swell to about 20 people, as parents with young children and other groups of girls, some appearing to be as young as five, join them.
On their heads - and to protect them from the scorching sun - they place the gold-panning bowls, which are made locally of wood and cost the equivalent of about US$5 each.
Cattle thieves (`Dahalo’) in search of `zebu’, Madagascar’s distinctive hump-backed cattle, frequent these hills, but so far there have been no reports of them switching into the gold-panning trade.
The girls, who asked not be named, told IRIN they were by no means the only ones from the district engaged in gold panning. “Girls do this because the boys usually have to look after the `zebu’,” they said.
The work is physically demanding. The sides of the river bank are hacked out with shovels and iron bars and the soil and rocks piled onto the wooden bowls, which are then taken to the nearby stream to be panned.
During the couple of hours IRIN spent with the girls, they probably dug out a couple of hundred kilograms of mud each, and never stopped for a break. They spend about six hours a day panning, and with the travelling time that makes for a more than 10-hour working day. They brought no food with them.
Mining permits
According to Madagascar’s mining code, gold panners have to purchase an annual permit for a few dollars, while gold dealers collecting the gold pay about US$50 for an annual permit. These taxes are supposed to go into district coffers for the improvement of local services, but the girls IRIN spoke to said they had never paid any dues.
The website of Paris-based mineral exploration company Zamarat Mining, which has established a local subsidiary, Zamarat Mining Madagascar, estimates there are about 150,000 gold panners in the country, producing 3-4 tons of gold annually, although it acknowledged “gold smuggling is a major problem.”
The UN Development Programme Human Development Index, which ranks Madagascar at 135 out of 169 countries, estimates nearly 70 percent of the island’s 20 million people live on US$1.25 a day or less.
In their best week in the past few years the girls made about US$14 each, working a six day week - more than double what they could have earned doing other menial tasks like washing clothes.
The girls say they do the work with their parents’ blessing and the proceeds are used to buy clothes and food.
A gold fragment half the size of a rice grain still arouses great excitement among the panners. The gold is sold at general trading stores in Ankavandra for 70,000 Malagasy ariary (US$36.50) a gram; the minimum quantity they can sell is one tenth of a gram.
Now we reach a central question for our age: How can we most effectively break cycles of poverty? For decades, we had answers that were mostly anecdotal or hot air. But, increasingly, we are now seeing economists provide answers that are rigorously field-tested, akin to the way drugs are tested in randomized controlled trials, yielding results that are particularly credible and persuasive.
Prof. Michael Kremer, a Harvard economist, helped pioneer randomized trials in antipoverty work. In the 1990s, Kremer began studying how to improve education in Africa, trying different approaches in randomly selected batches of schools.
One intervention he tried was deworming kids — and bingo! In much of the developing world, most kids have intestinal worms, leaving them sick, anemic and more likely to miss school. Deworming is very cheap (a pill costing a few pennies), and, in the experiment he did with Edward Miguel, it resulted in 25 percent less absenteeism. Even years later, the kids who had been randomly chosen to be dewormed were earning more money than other kids.
Kremer estimates that the cost of keeping a kid in school for an additional year by building schools or by subsidizing school uniforms is more than $100, while by deworming kids, the cost drops to $3.50. (In a pinch, kids can usually go to “school” in a church or mosque without a uniform.)
An absence of boarding facilities for high school pupils in Zambia's northern province of Luapula is forcing children to share lodgings with their peers - unsupervised by adults - leading to teenage pregnancies and HIV/AIDS infections.
Many children live a long way from school and prefer to rent accommodation nearby. Grade 12 pupil Dorcas, 17, stopped attending the Mabumba High day school, about 20km east of provincial capital Mansa, after becoming pregnant.
"We were staying the three of us [girls], then we started sharing the house with three guys and that is how we paired ourselves. We just wanted some form of emotional support; life is really tough out there. So, the whole of last year we were living together with the guys and would have [unprotected] sex almost every night but everything was OK," she told IRIN.
"When I missed [my periods] early this year, I decided to go to Mansa General Hospital for a [pregnancy] test and the results were positive... I left school because everyone was laughing at me. They were saying 'this one is a married woman' after they knew [of my pregnancy]."
Mabumba High School enrols some of its 690 pupils from as far away as the capital Lusaka and about 500 of the children are responsible for their own accommodation arrangements.
"We couldn’t find a place in a proper boarding school in Luapula. Everywhere we went, we were told 'the places are full', and that’s how my mother decided to bring me here. She sends money every month for rentals, food and groceries," Margaret Chanda, 16, a Grade 12 pupil from Ndola in the Copperbelt and attending Mabumba High School, told IRIN.
She shares a two-room grass-thatched hut with her friend and pays US$5 a month.
Wamunyima Chingumbe, a Health Ministry director in Mansa District, said the absence of boarding facilities at day schools had led to teenage pregnancies and made pupils vulnerable to contracting sexually transmitted infections (STIs). After malaria, STIs were the most common ailments recorded at makeshift boarding high schools.
Higher STI rates
"In terms of HIV/AIDS and other STIs, quazi-boarding schools record higher numbers of pupils with STIs compared to schools with [official] boarding facilities," Chingumbe said.
"Mabumba High School once recorded 13 HIV-positive female cases and four HIV-positive male cases out of an enrolment population of about 600 pupils," Chingumbe said.
"On the other hand there are very few cases of HIV-positive/STI cases recorded [at official] boarding schools, and this could be attributed to the fact that pupils are confined in one place and dormitories are out of bounds for the opposite sex," he said.
Government investment in universal primary education has not been matched in the high school sector, and the 2008 scrapping of qualifying examinations for Grade 10 has put more pressure on school facilities, with more and more pupils continuing their education. The province has 23 high schools, six of which are day schools.
Elizabeth Mushili, coordinator of the Mansa District Women’s Development Association, a gender-based advocacy group, wants the government to equip all schools with boarding facilities.
'Free-range lifestyles'
"These children adopt confused, free-range lifestyles. We are of the view that government should have been more considerate and constructed dormitories for both girls and boys at these high schools. Or better still, they [government] should have built more day high schools to cut down on the distances [between the schools].
"Early pregnancies are very common because of lack of parental care; no one is looking after these children and, hence, they can do anything," Mushili told IRIN.
"We have pupils, especially girls, who get abused by male adults for sexual exploitation; we have many children around 13, 14 years carrying their own children and dropping out of school in Mabumba and Chembe [another day high school in Mansa where children use makeshift accommodation]," she said.
Luapula is one of Zambia’s poorest provinces: it has a poverty level of 75 percent, compared with the national average of 64 percent. According to UNAIDS the national HIV prevalence for sexually active adults aged 15-49 is 14.3 percent.
"Many of us end up sending our children to these weekly-boarding schools like Mabumba because we have no money to send them to boarding schools. We are poor," Joseph Mutale, a small farmer in Mansa, told IRIN.
"I give my son a tin of maize [for grinding into the staple maize meal] every month and 10,000 kwacha [US$2] to buy relish but he keeps on complaining about other things that I can’t afford to give him," he said.
Pupils attending boarding high schools pay up to $300 for a three-month term, but day schools like Mabumba only charge $40 a term.
Defilement
Zambian law classifies sex with anyone under 16 as defilement, and is punishable by a prison term of up to 25 years.
"We have many children below 16 years who are very sexually active. It is defilement [of a minor] but she will not see it that way. There are many defilement cases going on here; they are contracting many diseases especially STIs; some are falling pregnant," a teacher at Mabumba High School, who preferred anonymity, told IRIN.
Luapula's provincial education officer Florence Kanchebele told IRIN the government had begun constructing boarding facilities at two day schools – in Ponde and Lukwesa, and acknowledged the problems associated with learners renting accommodation close to schools. She said some pupils engaged in "what may be termed as 'marriages of convenience' with other pupils and sometimes, community members due to economic reasons".
The school authorities were still responsible for their children outside school hours and landlords were "instructed to protect the pupils, report to the school any bad behaviour by such pupils, and sensitize the pupils on the dangers of HIV/AIDS, STIs and early pregnancies," she added.
Ruth Mwewa, a landlord for several pupils from Mabumba High School in the past, told IRIN: "No teacher has ever approached me to talk about these pupils’ behaviour. Two of the girls I have kept here got pregnant and stopped school. The girls are especially a big problem because they are forever found with boys or married men who come with cars."
Instead of providing much needed opportunities, South Africa’s ailing education system is keeping children from poor households at the back of the job queue and locking families into poverty for another generation.
By the age of eight, school children from the most affluent 20 percent of South Africa’s population are already significantly out-performing children from poorer backgrounds, according to new research by the Social Policy Research Group at Stellenbosch University.
The study, "Low Quality Education as Poverty Trap", found that the schooling available to children in poor communities is reinforcing rather than challenging the racial and economic inequities created by South Africa’s apartheid-era policies.
Using newly available data sets, including those linking information on income with numeracy skills, the report analyzed how low-quality tuition in the post-apartheid education system is perpetuating "exclusion and marginalization".
Money not enough
The government allocated R190 billion (US$28 billion) or 21 percent of its 2011/12 budget to education, but 80 percent is spent on personnel and the remainder is not enough to supply thousands of schools in mainly poor areas with basic requirements like electricity and textbooks.
Yet the top 20 percent of state schools - which largely correspond to historically white schools and charge fees to compensate for insufficient public funding - enjoy adequate facilities and attract the best teachers.
South Africa's status as one of the wealthiest countries on the continent has not helped its educational performance - the poorest 25 percent of students ranked 14th out of 15 sub-Saharan countries in reading performance, and 12th for mathematics, according to the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality surveys of 2000 and 2007.
"When seen in regional context, South Africa grossly under-performs, given that it has more qualified teachers, lower pupil-to-teacher-ratios and better access to resources," the report on the study noted.
Nomusa Cembi, spokesperson for the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (SADTU), whose nearly 250,000 members make it the country's largest public sector union, said many teachers had received an inferior education as a result of apartheid's "Bantu" education system, which was deliberately designed to disadvantage black learners and only ended in 1994 when a new democratic government came into power.
There are a host of other problems besetting schools in poor areas. According to Yoliswa Dwane, spokesperson for the education advocacy group, Equal Education, over 2,000 schools had no piped water supply, 3,600 lacked electricity, and over 90 percent were without libraries or a functioning laboratory.
Poorly trained teachers
SADTU and other teachers’ unions have opposed national calls for education to become an essential service, which would prevent strike action. In August 2010 a teachers' strike closed schools across the country for three weeks, contributing to a public perception that SADTU and some of its members did not have learners' interests at heart.
"The focus needs to be on teachers' development," said Cembi. "We've had changes in the curriculum since the new [post-apartheid] era, but we find not much focus on training teachers."
Many teacher training colleges were closed in the late 1990s after new legislation required them to merge with existing higher education institutions. Plans to transform the training colleges into university-level institutions have not materialized, leaving thousands of teachers without any specialized training.
In recent years, SADTU has called for the reopening of training colleges because the shortage of teachers has meant that some schools in poor and rural areas have had to hire individuals who do not meet the official requirement of holding a teaching diploma.
According to the report, insufficient teacher knowledge is a problem, with many teachers scoring poorly in basic reading and mathematics tests.
A large number of changes to the national curriculum, beginning with the 1997 adoption of Outcomes Based Education, many subsequent adjustments, and the final decision -announced in 2010 - to scrap it, have further stressed an already failing system.
The way forward
Equal Education's Dwane said the debate needed to move past "blaming teachers" and towards how to achieve a "serious commitment to a national education programme that would spell out what needs to be done over the next 20-30 years".
Such a plan would have to include an assessment of existing teacher knowledge, followed by a national teacher training programme, but Dwane stressed the need to consider factors beyond teacher knowledge, including teacher motivation, and a lack of community and parental involvement.
Her view was backed up by the Stellenbosch study, which identified the lack of regular and meaningful student assessments and feedback to parents as another major weakness in the education system.
"For the parents to know how their child is performing, and by proxy to know how the teachers are performing, is very helpful," said Ronelle Burger, one of the study's lead researchers. "Very few top-down measures can be as effective as getting the people who are affected to act to correct the problems."
The researchers found that the job prospects of school leavers were determined not only by the number of years of education attained, but the quality of that education.
“The labour market is at the heart of inequality, and central to labour market inequality is the quality of education,” they concluded.
“Policies that address inequality by intervening in the labour market will have limited success as long as the considerable pre-labour market inequalities in the form of differential school quality persist.”
Now comes the painful number: Mauritius's GDP has grown faster than 5% annually for almost 30 years. Surely, this must be some "trick". Mauritius must be rich in diamonds, oil, or some other valuable commodity. But Mauritius has no exploitable natural resources. Indeed, so dismal were its prospects as it approached independence from Britain, which came in 1968, that the Nobel prize-winning economist James Meade wrote in 1961: "It is going to be a great achievement if [the country] can find productive employment for its population without a serious reduction in the existing standard of living … [The] outlook for peaceful development is weak."
As if to prove Meade wrong, the Mauritians have increased per capita income from less than $400 around the time of independence to more than $6,700 today. The country has progressed from the sugar-based monoculture of 50 years ago to a diversified economy that includes tourism, finance, textiles, and, if current plans bear fruit, advanced technology.
During my visit, my interest was to understand better what had led to what some have called the Mauritius miracle, and what others might learn from it. There are, in fact, many lessons, some of which should be borne in mind by politicians in the US and elsewhere as they fight their budget battles.
First, the question is not whether we can afford to provide healthcare or education for all, or ensure widespread home ownership. If Mauritius can afford these things, America and Europe – which are several orders of magnitude richer – can too. The question, rather, is how to organise society. Mauritians have chosen a path that leads to higher levels of social cohesion, welfare and economic growth – and to a lower level of inequality.
Second, unlike many other small countries, Mauritius has decided that most military spending is a waste. The US need not go as far: just a fraction of the money that America spends on weapons that don't work against enemies that don't exist would go a long way toward creating a more humane society, including provision of healthcare and education to those who cannot afford them.
Third, Mauritius recognised that without natural resources, its people were its only asset. Maybe that appreciation for its human resources is also what led Mauritius to realise that, particularly given the country's potential religious, ethnic, and political differences – which some tried to exploit in order to induce it to remain a British colony – education for all was crucial to social unity. So was a strong commitment to democratic institutions and co-operation between workers, government, and employers – precisely the opposite of the kind of dissension and division being engendered by conservatives in the US today.
Here in the U.S., Jordana Confino, co-founder of Girls Learn International, is working to make that number shrink. Jordana, a junior at Yale University, started the organization with her mother in 2003 -- when she was still in the eighth grade. Her mother, who'd just gone back to school to take classes about women's rights, talked to Jordana about the stories on sex trafficking, child marriage, and other human rights issues that flooded the news.
"We realized that one of the key things in all these places was that girls weren't allowed to go to school," said Jordana. "If they had the opportunity to get an education, it could help curtail these violations."
She and her mother realized that there had to be something they could do. In 2003, Jordana started the first Girls Learn chapter in her middle school. Her sister and her cousin shortly followed suit.
For the millions of girls across the world who lack access to education, often due to extreme poverty, illiteracy rates are unsurprisingly high. Girls Learn takes the stance, which is backed by research, that without schooling, girls are put at a greater risk to remain trapped in the cycle of poverty, and become more vulnerable to child marriage, sex trafficking, domestic violence, and other women's rights violation.
"Initially, the first year, we were just fundraising," Jordana said. But since then, GLI has not only raised over $140,000 to help send girls to schools, they have also opened 60 chapters in the U.S. and partnered with 31 schools abroad to reach their goals.
With the majority (88 percent) of the world's 1.2 billion adolescents living in developing countries, investing in their education and training could break entrenched cycles of poverty and inequality, says the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) 2011 State of the World’s Children report.
“We need to focus more attention now on reaching adolescents - especially adolescent girls - investing in education, health and other measures to engage them in the process of improving their own lives,” Anthony Lake, UNICEF executive director, said in a statement issued at the launch of the report, Adolescence: An Age of Opportunity, on 25 February.
Lake said: "Adolescence is a pivot point – an opportunity to consolidate the gains we have made in early childhood or risk seeing those gains wiped out."
In Nairobi, UNICEF's regional director for eastern and southern Africa, Elhadj As Sy, told IRIN: "Africa has the largest proportion of children, adolescents and young people in the world. Almost half its population is younger than 18 years and almost two-thirds are younger than 25 years.
"As the gap between rich and poor, men and women, urban and rural keeps widening, and inequality generates a 'nothing to lose' generation, paying more attention to adolescents and young people is especially critical for the African nations. ."
According to UNICEF, strong investments during the last two decades have resulted in "enormous gains" for young children up to the age of 10, with a 33 percent drop in the global under-five mortality rate.
"On the other hand, there have been fewer gains in areas critically affecting adolescents. More than 70 million adolescents of lower secondary [school] age are currently out of school, and on a global level, girls still lag behind boys in secondary school participation," UNICEF said in a statement. "Without education, adolescents cannot develop the knowledge and skills they need to navigate the risks of exploitation, abuse and violence that are at their height during the second decade of life."
Among the challenges facing today's adolescents, UNICEF said, are health risks such as injury, eating disorders, substance abuse and mental health issues - "it is estimated that around one in every five adolescents suffers from a mental health or behavioural problem".
Challenges
The agency said global challenges facing adolescents include the current bout of economic turmoil, climate change and environmental degradation, explosive urbanization and migration, ageing societies, the rising costs of healthcare and escalating humanitarian crises.
To enable adolescents to effectively deal with these challenges, UNICEF recommends improved data collection to increase the understanding of adolescents’ situation; investing in education and training to lift adolescents out of poverty; expanding opportunities for youth to participate and voice their opinion; promoting laws, policies and programmes that protect the rights of adolescents, and stepping up the fight against poverty and inequality through child-sensitive programmes to prevent adolescents from being prematurely catapulted into adulthood.
Lake said: "Millions of young people around the world are waiting for greater action by all of us. Giving all young people the tools they need to improve their own lives will foster a generation of economically independent citizens who are fully engaged in civic life and able to actively contribute to their communities."
When a girl starts school in Liberia, she arrives full of enthusiasm and hope. Squeezing onto a bench with children her age—under a corrugated roof, in a make-shift building—she looks to her teacher ready to learn. But, without books to read from, a desk to lean on or a pencil to hold, progress is slow. Her teacher is an untrained, unqualified, unpaid volunteer. He struggles to control the overcrowded class and yearns for a curriculum to follow, textbooks to use or a decent blackboard to write on.
Concern Liberia is working to address these issues in 30 remote schools in Grand Bassa County. Constructing classrooms, separate toilets for boys and girls and providing furniture is just the start. Textbooks and other essential learning items like blackboards, pencils and copybooks are also being distributed.
To address the shortage of trained teachers available, Concern has posted Teacher Trainers in several rural communities across Grand Bassa to provide on-the-job training and support for primary school teachers. By providing textbooks, tutoring and courses in teaching methodology, literacy and numeracy, the gaps in their own education can be effectively bridged.
Ida Hughes approached Concern about becoming a teaching assistant when she heard about our education program. Her eight children (5 boys and 3 girls) attend a Concern-supported primary school in the rural community of Fortsville. Ida never had the opportunity to complete her own education and knows plenty about the consequences. She puts her children through school with meager earnings from rice production and charcoal, which she makes from chopped wood.
Ida explains how she was forced to abandon her education: “At grade seven my foster parents stopped sponsoring me in school. They told me that they were not in a position to support another person’s child to complete high school.”
Not long ago, Ida joined Concern’s program as a teaching assistant. Today she supports teachers in the classroom, and attends basic courses to improve her own academic skills. She has high hopes to sit the Liberian national examinations and is determined to realize her dream to enrol in a teacher training college.
Liberia is still recovering from a brutal 14-year civil war that destroyed lives, schools and homes. Providing education opportunities for young girls and boys is essential to securing the country’s economic recovery and to affording Liberia the opportunity to lift itself out of poverty. Children need safe learning environments free from corporal punishment and sexual exploitation and abuse – especially girls. Concern is working to address the inadequacies of a system that in 2008 revealed an abysmally low net enrollment rate of just 33 percent for primary school: that’s 67 percent of primary school aged children out of school.
When I visited Tepenneh last week, I was reminded about Concern’s effectiveness in providing safe learning spaces for girls. The old school building, a makeshift one-room structure made out of mud and stone is on the verge of collapse. Accompanied by a crowd of giggling children, I visited the site where Concern is building a new school with six classrooms, equipped with separate toilets for boys and girls. The importance of doing this can’t be overestimated. Girls are placed in danger of sexual assault when they have no safe toilets and have to share toilets with boys and men, or when they have to leave the school grounds to use the bush. Rape and sexual violence is a serious problem in post-conflict Liberia and Concern has prioritized making primary schools as safe as possible so children can learn free from danger of assault. For now, Concern is providing teaching and learning materials and training teachers in Tepenneh, but I look forward to April when we hand the new school building over to the community.
Girls’ education is hampered by the common belief in Liberia that girls are less intelligent than boys—a falsehood most devastatingly apparent in the lack of support demonstrated by parents. Unfortunately in Liberia, a girl’s education pays few tangible dividends and she ultimately becomes the ‘property’ of the family into which she marries. In addition, gender based violence and sexual exploitation by male teachers and fellow classmates severely limit enrollment and retention.
Concern is working with communities to encourage parents to send their children to school, especially girls. More importantly, Concern is supporting communities to know about their children’s rights and to become aware of the importance of gender equality. Parents and children are learning about the newly-introduced Liberian Code of Conduct for Teachers. Community members have translated the code into Liberian English so that parents and children can understand it better. One rule simply said “Teachers must not make love to students or pregnate students”. Now parents can report abuses in confidence to ensure their children are protected while at school.
Together with the Ministry of Education, Concern is working in rural schools to ensure that every girl has a brighter future, so she can “be someone tomorrow”.
Alsup ended up traveling to Africa in July and August of 2007 to teach math in a rural village deep in Tanzania with the help of Global Volunteers, an organization that facilitates nonprofit, short-term volunteer work for people in education and health services.
Alsup shared his work with students and staff at BHSU earlier this year. He has also been called to share with others around the world. Since his trip to Tanzania, Alsup has traveled to Korea, Europe and Greece, as well as several conferences in the U.S., to speak about his trip and his work.
“My passion is education within the developing world,” he said.
His trip to Tanzania was “life-changing,” he said. Many of the African villages have been stricken with HIV and malaria. Poverty is a way of life, and education is often one of the only ways to escape it.
While in Africa, Alsup taught elementary and high school math to 80 students in a packed classroom.
“It was an amazing experience,” he said.
His goal now, he said, is to bring awareness to people in the U.S.
“I want to highlight, emphasize and bring awareness without being righteous about it,” he said, so people will be more conscious of the developing world.
Business schools are racing to meet the demand for such “social entrepreneurship” programs. Observers say a growing number of schools are offering stand-alone social enterprise programs, or as part of a business school degree program.
There are several possible reasons for the growing interest in social enterprise programs, including the economic meltdown that eliminated tens of thousands of jobs from the financial sector and darkened the reputation of the banking industry.
But the current generation of young people also has a strong sense of social responsibility, said Thomas Moore, dean of the College of Business Administration at Northeastern, which has some 200 students enrolled in social enterprise programs.
“There’s a lot of interest in social enterprise at the business school, and I think it’s partly generational,” Moore said.
“These days students don’t want to wait; they want to make a difference now,” he said. “This is the curriculum that prospective students expect, and if you don’t give them the opportunity to get involved in it they will do it for themselves anyway.”
Scott Shrum, director of MBA admissions research at Veritas Prep, a test prep and MBA admissions consulting firm, agrees. He’s seeing more prospective students looking for schools with social entrepreneurship programs, and more business schools expanding their programs.
“It used to be that a business school’s social entrepreneurship program was just an office, but now it’s often a whole department,” said Shrum, co-author of “Your MBA Game Plan: Proven Strategies for Getting into the Top Business Schools.”
“The programs have become more robust and sophisticated, and they’re attracting big naming gifts, or endowed chairs,” he said. “So if you aspire to spending a semester abroad helping a coffee farmer in Africa get his or her business off the ground, you can. That kind of opportunity didn’t exist much before.”
Balesa and El Adi primary schools have boarding facilities where children from pastoralist parents can get a reprieve but acute water shortage in the region will prevent normal school opening from taking place.
The boarding facilities at the two schools are paid for by church organisations but they could not sponsor the fuelling of water tankers because of the distance involved.
“Sponsoring organisations of Balesa and El-Adi boarding facilities could not incur watering expense since the nearest water point is 98 kilometres away across the desert in Horr town. Parents have shifted together with their children in search of water for livestock during the December holidays and they might not return quickly for opening of schools,” said Mr Kimani.
Animals have died
Pastoralists in the area have shifted to Merti district while others have crossed into southern Ethiopia with their livestock as drought ravages the region. Many animals have died from lack of water and pasture in the area.
As drought continues, an upsurge of pupils flocking to stable schools such as Maikona and Horr primary schools which have boarding facilities fully sponsored by the Catholic Church are anticipated but Education officials fear such eventuality might affect provision of quality education due to high number of pupils in classrooms.
“Pupils from other schools which could not open due to water shortage will enrol for first term this year at either Maikona or Horr Primary but that will strain the school resources and quality of education will drop,” said the DEO.
Though she lives just a short walk from the local school, Maza Matthews, 14, rises before dawn every morning to help take care of her younger siblings so that she can be at her school desk for 8:00 am. Like all pupils in this remote rural village of Duguna Fango, in Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR), Maza’s parents have determined with the school which shift suits their family best.
Double-shift schooling was adopted in Ethiopia as a solution to the overcrowding that ensued after 2002 when the government introduced free primary education for all. In practice it serves many purposes by reducing large class numbers, doubling the number of seats available in a day; and allowing schools to operate on lower budgets.
In Maza’s case, and perhaps because, as she says herself, she was “the first to come” in her family, it means she can take the burden off her farming parents by looking after her three-year-old brother and five-year-old sister in the early mornings and afternoons without missing out on an education.
Unlike her parents, Maza says that she and her two siblings will complete primary education. Her mother, she says, got the chance to marry and left after Grade 4: “My mother says not to take the same path as her because it was a disadvantage and you can get more from going to school. She says that I must go on because it is very important.”
For four months of the year when flooding is at its worst and roads are all but washed away, the village here is completely cut off. Maza wants to be a nurse, so that she can “serve the community,” she says. For now, having a place to study is one of her biggest obstacles. She tells me that for the past number of years she has being completing her homework under the shade of a tree close to her home.
The heat here near the equator is unrelenting year-round, and there are plenty of distractions. Maza looks forward to the day when there will be a library at the school so that she can “do her homework in a silent place.” She would like to avail of books to study her favorite subjects: Science and Math, she says, and is keen to learn English.
More than 500 children attend the school here and between them share the few scarce books in the school’s existing library—a dark and poky place, that is utterly under-stocked.
In response to the need, Concern has supported its local partner the Wontta Rural Development Assocation to build and furnish a spacious two-room library that will lend books to students across the Duguna Fango Woreda area. Already supplies of books have been purchased so they can be made available to children at two local primary schools and two Alternative Basic Education (ABE) centers –serving a total of 2,100 pupils.
When the Concern education team and I arrived at Maza’s school more than 30 community members—the majority of them parents—were busy at work constructing the library. Dana Chebo, 70, one of the father’s present spoke about how the lack of access to books, and not having a place to study was having an effect: “Without books the children don’t have a chance to study the different subjects they are learning and can’t remember what they are being taught in class,” he said. “It is too hard for them.”
Maza’s teacher Alemu Lagase, 18, tells me that one of his biggest challenges is the lack of water. “The children have no water to drink at the school or to wash their hands after using the latrine,” he says, adding, “Children are also dropping out because of malaria.”
In the past year, 16 of his students left after they became sick with malaria. The nearest clinic is 30 kilometers away which makes immediate treatment unattainable for many, and in some cases, Alemu tells us, children simply never come back.
Teachers like Alemu are all too aware that attendance falls off at
harvest time too when children have to support their parents in the fields. Families depend on crops like teff, false banana, sorghum, peas, maize and coffee for their livelihoods and children are tasked with sharing the intensive field labor. The drought which usually hits from April through June affects families in several ways. The closest river is 20 kilometers away and pack mules provide the only form of transport suitable to the steep and unforgiving terrain.
Ayelech Lama, 30, a mother who had come to help lay the brick for the library spoke of her determination to give her children extra time at the school to do their homework: “I am willing to take on additional work during the harvest time so that my children can stay here after school to study,” she said.
There are several barriers preventing children from receiving a quality education in this remote region of the Ethiopia and villagers know that as with a lot of other things in the country, the steps towards progress can be achingly slow.
Nobody in Duguna Fango is under any illusion that because of a new library, the children around here have it all. Still, with a healthy supply of a books and a permanent place to study, one of many obstacles will have been removed for a decent number of them.
There’s a saying in southwestern Ethiopia and not surprisingly—in an area ravaged by drought for three months of the year—it relates to water. Loosely translated it goes: it’s impossible to win back your water after the bucket has fallen over.
Abebech Tito, a mother of five, told me this through the school fence near her children’s classroom as she considered how her life might have been different had she not dropped out of school at Grade 8. She delivered the proverb with a smile and a shrug. “It was my own foolishness,” she added.
Her village of Fango Bijo is located in the Rift Valley in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (SNNPR) region of Ethiopia, where recurrent drought and the prevalence of malaria is notoriously high. “A child died of malaria last year here,” she says, tipping her head towards the Concern-supported Alternative Basic Education (ABE) center that her children now attend.
When I ask if she worries about her own children becoming infected, her undaunted air departs and she draws a sharp breath, “I worry,” she says in a way that suggests she’ll confront it head-on, if she has to. Like the millions of mothers in rural Ethiopia tasked with providing for their children on meager means, Abedech isn’t the type to bellyache.
Had she stayed in school, she likes to think she would have become a nurse or a health worker. She thinks she would have enjoyed tending to the sick. The nearest clinic is 6 kilometers away, a one hour distance by foot—and health workers in this remote area a positively rare phenomenon.
For the early learners of this hot and dusty village, some 50 kilometers from the nearest town—which can be reached after a two-hour truck journey through dried river beds, steep inclines and sporadic herds of cows and goats—the ABE center offers the only tuition around. The nearest primary school is a two-hour journey by foot and parents are loath to send their children across terrain where the water is scarce, wild animals prevalent and abductions rife.
Two of Abebech’s boys attend the center here run by WRDA, Concern’s local partner. They are in Level 1 and Level 2, and she is thankful that their future looks bright. Here in this drought-prone, food-insecure region of Ethiopia an overwhelming percentage of the population are pastoralists. Without the center, her children would almost certainly be helping her in the fields, she says.
ABE centers are part of the Government strategy to achieve education for all and are designed to streamline out-of-school children into formal schools through accelerated programs. After completion of level 3, they are equipped to enter primary schools at Grade 5 and continue in the government-run formal schools.
Brimming with pride, Abebech tells Concern that her eldest boy completed the ABE curriculum a couple of years back and now attends Grade 9 at a secondary school two hours from here. “He rents a house with a group of boys his age so that he doesn’t have to walk the long distance in the heat,” his mother says. “I left school to marry and start a family,” she recalls. “My children, they will finish.”
Her husband, like the majority of the people in this tiny, remote village, is a farmer. Abebech is still happily married, she says, but after four boys and a girl, will have no more children. She and her husband grow teff (a grain used to grow Ethiopia’s bread Injera); false banana; sweet potato; and other staples like sorghum and beans. Most people must endure a three-month “hunger gap”—the period when food stocks from the last crops have run out and the new harvest is not ready. Frequent flooding from June through August also threatens crops, and deepens cracked land fissures from the dry season into yawning seasonal rivers.
Life is tough for Abebech, undoubtedly so, but the dreams of her children’s future make her life of labor tolerable. She tells me that she is thankful she and her husband earn enough farming to provide a good life for her five children. With their earnings she can cover the family’s expenses: their food and clothes. And she brightens at the mention of their education: “I can put my older child in school and save for the younger ones,” she says.
Ethiopia has seen unprecedented expansion of its education system. In 1992, around four of five primary school-age children were out of school. In 1999, this figure stood at over 60 percent. Now, it is one in five. Forty-four percent of the population in Ethiopia is under 14 years of age—a segment that represents 37 million children. According to the World Bank, this is the largest youth population in sub-Saharan Africa. Speaking to Abebech, I catch a glimpse of how the figures are being slowly vanquished across Ethiopia—it’s in the steadiness of the conviction held by the millions of mothers just like her: “I will struggle to win the life of all of my children,” she says.
Thousands of children in three of Yemen’s 21 governorates have stopped going to school for fear of being targeted by revenge killings, according to international NGO Partners-Yemen (PY).
PY is running an awareness campaign in the governorates of Al-Jawf, Marib, and Shabwa which run from north to south in central Yemen and where the tribal system is paramount in social and political life. The presence and influence of the official authorities here is still limited.
PY has been getting children in schools that remain open to chant the slogan "To those who deprived me of my father; don't deprive me of my education", but thousands of children have stopped going to school for fear of crossing tribal boundaries.
"I haven't gone to school since 2005 when I was in grade six. I fear that armed tribesmen from Hamdan tribe may kill me," said 17-year-old Salim Yahya of the Al-Shulan tribe in al-Jawf Governorate, which has been in conflict with the Hamdan tribe for 40 years now. Dozens of people in the two tribes have been killed in revenge killings over the past 20 years.
The conflict between the two tribes first broke out in the early 1970s over disputed land, with each tribe claiming ownership. "Now, those plots of lands are no longer a problem. The problem is that of complicated revenge killings that continue to kill thousands of tribesmen and keep children out of school," Sheikh Sultan al-Aradah, a chief mediator in the conflict from the governorate, told IRIN.
Dealing with the conflict at this level is very complicated - even through traditional structures - as tribes consider it a "black shame" to remove the threat of a blood feud from the family or tribe of an individual who has committed murder, said a PY situation analysis paper.
According to Judge Yahya al-Mawri, a member of the Interior Ministry-affiliated supreme national committee for addressing revenge killings, revenge killings in the three governorates claimed the lives of 4,698 people between 1998 and 2008. He could not give a more up-to-date figure as no official records of revenge killings and conflict casualties have been released in the past two years.
The three governorates have a high illiteracy rate: "Fifty-six percent of the male population and 70 percent of the female population… are illiterate," he said.
According to 2009 statistics from the government's Central Statistical Organization, 1.3 million people live in these three governorates where the illiteracy rate is 63 percent, compared to the national average of 41 percent.
Schools closed
Revenge killings have led to the closure of several schools, especially in al-Jawf and Shabwa governorates. The situation is not quite so bad in Marib, said PY.
Abdulhamid Amer, chairperson of local NGO Social Development and Peace Association in al-Jawf Governorate, told IRIN that around 20 schools across the governorate are closed. "As many as eight schools in Maraziq and Al Sayda areas have been closed for five years now," he said, adding that thousands of boys and girls had dropped out of education as a result.
According to Naji al-Sammi, conflict management officer with local NGO Brotherhood Society for Peace and Development in Shabwa Governorate, more than a dozen schools in his governorate have been deserted for several years as a result of revenge killings.
"Al-Nabub School in Nisab District, where around 500 students were enrolled, has been deserted for more than five years now. Few students have moved to other safer areas to complete their education; most have stopped going to school since then," he said.
Mediation efforts
Many former teachers have started mediating between warring tribes: "As our school in Al Sayda District has been deserted for five years now, we found ourselves idle, so we started working as mediators to help end long-standing conflicts, district school teacher Khalid al-Qubati told IRIN.
The carrying of guns is commonplace in the three governorates. "Parents teach their kids how to carry and use guns, as well as how to kill… They don't care about sending them to school," said teacher al-Qubati, who is from the central governorate of Taiz, but works in al-Jawf Governorate.
PY’s awareness campaign is designed to ensure a safe environment for children in school and has reached out to over 50,000 local women in the three governorates to promote girls’ and boys’ education and the need to protect students from revenge killings, Nadwa al-Dawsari, PY executive director, told IRIN.
"Our awareness activities have been well received in communities and that is because we frame them in a way that is appealing to local culture and builds on existing positive traditions," she said.
According to al-Dawsari, the ineffective role of government institutions in these remote tribal areas, extreme poverty, and poor infrastructure are the key challenges facing awareness efforts. "If government institutions were involved, our campaigns could be much more effective," she said.
Schools come in many forms in Ethiopia. The best ones are usually built with brick walls, lined with mud floors, furnished with desks and chairs and served by trained teachers.
In parts of rural Ethiopia however, where villagers are often cut off from roads or where searing heat in the dry season makes traversing long distances by foot impossible, there are several thousands of schools up and running against all the odds.
I visited one last month in the tiny village of Adacha Ellio, in Ethiopia’s Wolayita region. Children here have to walk barefoot for up to 8 kilometers a day through dried river beds, steep ravines and dusty, hot terrain to sit on the ground and listen to their teacher under the shade of a tree. There are no desks, no chairs, no blackboard and no books but there are students, 40 of them at a time, who come here eager to learn.
In response to the need, Concern has supported its local partner, the Wontta Rural Development Association (WRDA), to begin construction on an Alternative Basic Education (ABE) center. ABE centers are part of the Government strategy to provide access to basic primary education for all and are designed to streamline out-of-school children into formal schools through accelerated learning programs.
The aim is that children catch up with their peers in three years through a custom-designed curriculum, and in many cases with intensive after-hours tutoring. After completion of level 3, they are equipped to enter primary schools at Grade 5 and continue in the government-run formal schools.
Thankfully for the 40 children attending lessons under the tree, along with 20 others who are being taught in the room of a small house nearby, the ending is a happy one. Soon all of them, regardless of age, will enter Level 1 of the ABE curriculum, sit in chairs at desks and read from books provided with Concern’s support.
The villagers here tell us that the community is anxious to get the school up and running so that older children can get a start on their education and their actions are telling.
When I arrived at the site with Concern’s education team, community members were hard at work. Mothers and fathers had come to lay brick and mix cement, and to give their children a chance at opportunities that were beyond their reach. “We suffer because our parents neglected to send us to school, but now there is a newer generation and we must support them. I hope that my children will complete their primary education and become well educated,” Mangizte Malabo, a mother of three told me.
She had high hopes for her son Bimbesa, 11, and two daughters, Tamenich, 3, and Jegena, 2, and spoke freely about her vision of the future: “I would be very happy to see them employed by the government. I don’t mind that they have to leave this place. I will be happy to support them to do well. With God’s help I will work hard to save money to support all of my children.”
The new school being built with Concern’s support will serve 100 students from this area. Before Concern began working with local partner WRDA, there were no teachers here, and students either stayed at home or worked with their families in the fields. Since then, Concern and WRDA have trained teachers from the community; mobilized the village to select a site and clear the surrounding brush areas; and sourced construction materials locally—including the stones and sand used to build the school.
“The nearest primary school is 16 kilometers away. Those that began attending in the past, eventually dropped out because of the long distance and the heat,” says father Binay Bijizar, whose children began classes earlier this month. Parents worried about their children being attacked by wild animals like hyenas, about the equally sinister possibility of kidnappings and about the safety of girls walking to school on their own.
Binay told me that he was happy to send his two daughters to the nearby center, in an area where male children have traditionally been given preference: “The government works to employ both male and females in health and other sectors. They have declared that we at the grassroots level must support the education of our daughters. It is time to start to send all of our children to school. If the government itself practices equality, then I think it is time that we start to do so too,” he said.
It’s difficult to put into words what is so striking about the people of rural Ethiopia: a mix of pride, physical distinction, and tranquil contentment in measures unique to them. And yet, I found myself looking forward to the day when children living in villages like this one had already completed their education—the kind of education that transforms shyness into unflappable confidence, and gives people a shot at reaching their true potential. It’s tough to imagine then how anything could hold them back.
