Group items tagged

This is a war zone. Families in the sprawling camp have lost everything – everything that is except a drive to get their kids an education. In the midst of the most abject poverty, parents have come together to build makeshift classrooms, hire a teacher, and buy a blackboard. Many of the kids work in the afternoon, selling charcoal to pay the $1 fee charged every term. “Being in school is fun – and people with an education can have a better life. I’ll be a doctor,” says David Ichange, aged 12.

If every girl in sub-Saharan Africa had a secondary education, it would cut under-five deaths by around 1.8 million. The reason: educated mothers are empowered to demand better health and nutrition provision.

Education in conflict-affected states is getting spectacularly short shrift. Humanitarian aid could play a vital role in keeping open opportunities for schooling in communities displaced by violence. Yet education receives just 2% of humanitarian aid – and no sector receives a smaller share of the emergency aid requested in emergency appeals.

“I believe the school environment was the main reason I dropped out. Mainly, I didn’t feel that I was learning anything. Teachers preferred using force and intimidation instead of listening to the students. I wasn’t able to understand a thing during class, and was constantly so scared.”

“I thought many times of going back to school, especially since my new school is very close to home. But at the time, my parents said I was too old to go back and that I’ll soon get married and have a home of my own. I still felt something missing from my life, and it was difficult for me to see my peers at the preparatory level going to school every day, while I stayed home.”

Safaa had the unique chance to tell her story to the USAID Mission Director, Mr. Jim Bever, on a surprise visit to Abou Harb School. “It was a really nice visit and had a huge impact on me. People came from such a far off place to visit our school, and spend time to talk to me! It really made a difference to me personally. I felt important and people were interested in listening to me and what I had to say.”

BOUAKÉ, Côte d’Ivoire, 9 March 2011 – Since last November’s disputed presidential election, many schools in Côte d’Ivoire have remained closed. There are now nearly 800,000 children waiting to get back to learning.

The impact could be long-term. “This school year is seriously disrupted and if children cannot go to school during a crisis, they are more likely to drop out and never return even when the crisis is over,” said Save the Children Country Director Guy Cave.

The effect of the school closures can be seen around the country. In Bouaké, a city in central Côte d’Ivoire, the streets are filled with children who – faced with nowhere to learn – sell goods to earn a little money and help support their family.

Noreen was 13 when she came home from school to be told that she was getting married. "I was scared, and sad I wouldn't be going to school anymore." A studious child, she wanted to become a teacher to bring 'glory' to her family.

At the end of this week, Southern Sudan will become an independent nation. Citizens of the newest country in the world, the people of Southern Sudan face immense challenges and immediate threats.

They also stand before a unique opportunity to build a country that is free of war, respectful of human rights and prosperous. Education will play a pivotal role in the future stability and economic development of Southern Sudan.

more than 100,000 Sudanese civilians have been displaced due to recent clashes over the contested border district of Abyei. About half of them are children who are being exposed to hunger, violence and disease. They are often separated from their parents and out of school due to the conflict.

Dominic, 6, from St Mary's Primary School in Erskineville, is one of the students whose command of technology is being harnessed in the trial use of iPads to boost literacy skills. Teachers in the Sydney Catholic diocese are trialling the iPads with children in reading recovery, a remedial program for year 1 students, with encouraging results.

The trial is in its early stages but integrating the iPad into lessons ''seems to unleash an engagement in learning, an increase in motivation and previously unseen independence in the reading and writing process''.

Each classroom consists of 18 to 20 kids and is named after a child killed in the war. Children paint various forms of the rebels' star-and-crescent flag. The girls learn to stitch small pillows as gifts to families who lost relatives in the fighting. Scrawled on a blackboard in Arabic is "Free Libya, out with Gadhafi."But mainly, Saffar said, the school is a way for the children to play, meet their friends and act their age."Our goal was to allow the children to express their emotions about what they have just gone through," said Saffar. "They are allowed to run free in the playground, sing, play, draw — whatever helps them to forget."

Teachers at Ras Mouftah said the children's behavior reflects what they have been through: They are rougher with each other, and new words have crept into their vocabulary — Kalashnikov, mortar, rape."Instead of cartoons they are now watching the news. They can even distinguish the types of rockets that fly overhead," said Fatma Tuweilab, a volunteer at the school.

A total of 129 Senor High School girls, from the three Northern Regions, are to benefit from a GHc 74,000 scholarship scheme to guard against school drop-out. The World Food Programme and the Ghana Health Service Girls Project seek to support the less privileged girls, who attained the aggregate 06 to 16 in the 2010 Basic Education Certificate Examination.

As part of the programme she said, girls who attended school of a minimum of 85 percent of the month were rewarded with a take-home food package of cereal, vegetable oil and iodized salt.

"We at WFP are proud of the success of the girl child education programmes, but we are equally wary of challenges, including inadequate classroom, high teacher pupil ration, floods and drought, which could slow down the nation's quest to achieve MDG two," he said.

Students and teachers in four southern African countries are benefiting from an ambitious HIV programme spearheaded by UNESCO. From its start in 2008, the programme was designed to strengthen the education sector’s AIDS response in Angola, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland.

Asked at the start of their first Chinese class what motivated them to take up the language, the students of the Institut de la Providence, a secondary school outside Namur in Belgium, give their new teacher varied answers. “It’s a big country,” says one. “I’ve been to China and would like to go back,” ventures another. The two dozen teenagers are part of a pilot project started this autumn in nine Belgian schools to promote Chinese language learning. More broadly, they are among hundreds of thousands of students in the West who are opting to learn Mandarin Chinese, often at the expense of traditional languages such as Spanish or German.

China’s rapid economic rise is gradually translating into a greater presence in European and U.S. classrooms, from a very small base as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.

From a marginal position 15 years ago, Chinese has imposed itself as the fourth major language behind French, Spanish and German, which, on current trends, it will overtake by the end of the decade.