Ivory Coast violence keeps children out of school - UN - AlertNet - 0 views
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DAKAR (AlertNet) - Some 800,000 children in Ivory Coast have missed out on school since the outbreak of violence following last year's disputed presidential election. In the western regions of Moyen Cavally and 18 Montagnes, where fresh fighting erupted on Tuesday, some 180,000 children are losing out on their education and most teachers have been absent since November. "We know from experience that when children’s education is disrupted in a situation like this, they are less likely to go back to school once the crisis is over," said Guy Cave, Ivory Coast country director for Save the Children.
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Nearly 45,000 of those who have fled their homes have sought safety in Liberia. But aid groups say the thousands of children who have crossed into Liberia cannot attend school there because of language and curriculum differences.
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Simmering political tensions among secondary and college students supporting different sides in the deadlock have led to fights. About 4,000 students have seen their books, schoolbags and other study materials destroyed by fellow students.
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Reuters AlertNet - DRC: Where schools have flapping plastic walls - 0 views
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KIWANJA, 19 July 2010 (IRIN) - It is a sunny day at the Mashango primary school in the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC's) North Kivu Province. That is good news for teacher Dusaba Mbomoya who is holding a geography exam under a roof filled with holes in a classroom where flapping pieces of plastic do duty as walls. Even the blackboard has holes large enough for students to peer through. "When it rains we allow the pupils to go back to their houses," said Mbomoya.
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Most classrooms are dark and crumbling with limited teaching materials. With the government opting out, Save the Children estimates that parents are forced to finance 80-90 percent of all public education outside the capital Kinshasa, though under the DRC's 2006 constitution elementary education is supposed to be free. Teachers' salaries go unpaid which means parents must contribute to their wages via monthly school fees of around US$5 per pupil. Large families and an average monthly income of just $50 means such fees are entirely unaffordable for large swathes of the DRC population - with serious consequences. Estimates from Save the Children and others suggest nearly half of Congolese children, more than three million, are out of school and one in three have never stepped in the classroom.
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Save the Children's research shows that teachers' pay is so low and so irregular that many take on other jobs, such as farming, taking them away from their classrooms and students. The situation is particularly bad in North Kivu where hundreds of thousands have been uprooted by years of war. Some like Laurent Rumvu live in camps for the internally displaced. None of his five school-aged children are in regular education.
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Reuters AlertNet - Food crisis looms in rural Haiti - 0 views
Reuters AlertNet - Teachers go back to School in Sudan - 0 views
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Ikotos, South Sudan-a scenic region that belies its tragic past. For the past two decades the area has been ravaged by conflict, disease and deprivation. Basic services are scarce with education facilities suffering from a desperate lack of trained teachers and teaching resources.
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Education is vital to the recovery of a region. Education will enable Ikotos' youth to escape a life of poverty and lead prosperous lives.
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UNICEF has launched an initiative to get children back to school but there is a significant and unaddressed gap in teacher training. Education was near nonexistent during the civil war and has been slow to recover. Schooling mostly takes place in temporary shacks or under trees with limited or no teaching resources. Only 67 out of 353 primary school teachers in the Ikotos region received any training at all. Not only are most of the teachers untrained but some of have not completed even primary school education. Few have access to basic teaching materials. Without sufficiently trained teachers, increasing the rate of school attendance will be ineffective. With 11,809 pupils in Ikotos needing education, this is a desperate situation and a severe block to Ikotos's recovery.
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Reuters AlertNet - GLOBAL: Unsafe water, the silent killer - 0 views
Clashes kill more than 100 in central Nigeria - Reuters AlertNet - 0 views
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JOS, Nigeria, March 7 (Reuters) - More than 100 people were killed in clashes on Sunday between Islamic pastoralists and Christian villagers near the central Nigerian city of Jos, where sectarian violence killed hundreds in January, witnesses said.
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A Reuters witness who visited the village counted around 100 bodies piled in the open air. Pam Dantong, medical director of Plateau State Hospital in Jos, showed reporters 18 corpses that had been brought from the village, some of them charred. Officials said other bodies had been taken to a second hospital in the state capital. It was not immediately clear what triggered the violence.
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Four days of sectarian clashes in January between mobs armed with guns, knives and machetes killed hundreds of people in Jos, the capital of Plateau state, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and predominantly Christian south. The latest unrest in the volatile region comes at a difficult time for Nigeria, with Acting President Goodluck Jonathan trying to assert his authority while the country's ailing leader Umaru Yar'Adua remains too sick to govern.
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THE SCHOOLGIRL: Homework by moonlight - AlertNet - 1 views
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It’s been almost a year since the quake brought Christine and her mother, brother and sister to this muddy sprawl of tents by a garbage-choked canal, where planes roar overhead and cars and trucks zoom close by.
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Her memories of Jan. 12, 2010 are vivid and sad. “We were standing in the middle of the street: myself, my mum and my younger sister,” she said. “We were holding each other. We were in a circle, screaming: ‘Jesus, save us, save us.’
Mexican children learn to take cover in drug war - AlertNet - 1 views
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Mexican officials are teaching school children how to dive for cover if they come under fire from gangs fighting over the Pacific beach city of Acapulco as drug violence reaches deeper into everyday life. At a drill in an Acapulco primary school this week, instructors used toy guns that simulated the sound of real gunfire. "Get down, let's go!" shouted an instructor as children threw themselves on the ground in classrooms and the playground and then crawled toward safety, burying their heads in their hands.
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Most schools in Acapulco have not yet received the training and some civic leaders prefer to play down the violence.
Turning environmental destruction into a crime against peace - AlertNet - 0 views
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environmental lawyer Polly Higgins outlined the proposed law of ecocide, which she says should be recognised by the United Nations as a fifth crime against peace alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression.
Militants target teachers in Pakistan's southwest-HRW - AlertNet - 0 views
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Militants in Pakistan's Baluchistan are increasingly attacking teachers, college professors and other school personnel, pushing the education system in the southwest province to the "brink of collapse". New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report called "Their Future is at Stake" and released in Islamabad on Monday, that the attacks were forcing several hundred education officials to flee.
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Critics say the government has failed to provide millions of with a proper education in Pakistan. Many poor Pakistanis can only afford to send their children to religious schools, which the critics say promote Islamic fundamentalism.
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Baluchistan, Pakistan's largest but poorest province bordering Afghanistan and Iran, has large mineral reserves, including oil, gas, copper and gold.
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KENYA: Education boost for girls in Muhuru Bay - AlertNet - 0 views
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"I know that my life will change for the better when I complete school; I hope to become a teacher so that I can serve as a role model for the many girls who give up on education as soon as they give birth or get married," Gor said.
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Like Gor, many girls in Muhuru Bay, with a population of about 25,000, have a slim chance of a secondary education as only four public schools in the area admit both genders. The few private schools are out of reach for many poor parents.
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"We are trying to reverse this trend by conducting frequent assessments of schools as well as holding education days where we inform parents and pupils on the importance of education. We welcome efforts by individuals and charitable organizations to sensitize the communities on keeping children in school."
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"When I completed primary school at the age of 15, I hoped my parents would somehow find the money to take me to secondary school; but they did not," Gor told IRIN. "With peer pressure, I soon found myself pregnant; I then got married and before too long I had had five children, but I didn't give up, I persuaded my husband to allow me to return to primary school and try again."
Making vulnerable children come first in Tunisia - AlertNet - 0 views
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TUNIS, 9 February 2011 – He says he’s 16, but he looks 14, if he is a day. I met him at the fish market in central Tunis, on a weekday, at a time when he should have been in school. Hamza left school two years ago. He says the school principal kicked him out, for no valid reason. According to recent data, 98 per cent of children of primary-school age in Tunisia are entering primary school. Thousands of them, however, drop out every year, although education is compulsory between the ages of 6 and 16. In 2009, an estimated 69,000 children left school.
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“I would like to sign up for a vocational training class,” he says. “I would still work at the market on my days off so that I can make some money. But I would really like to learn a skill.”
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Until Hamza really turns 16, the minimum legal age for work, he will not be able to fulfill his wish. The principal at his former school will not give him the school certificate necessary to sign up for vocational training classes.
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CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Education against the odds - AlertNet - 0 views
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Decades of political violence in northern Central African Republic have caused widespread destruction and displacement. The educational sector has been badly affected by a dire shortage of teachers and adequate physical infrastructure. For thousands of children, classes take place not in solid buildings of brick, but in rudimentary “bush schools”.
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“Needs are huge and funds insufficient. More appropriate infrastructure as well as qualified teachers are needed. Because of difficulties in the conflict-affected areas of the North, disparities in terms of access and quality are deepening,” Farid Boubekeur, chief education officer with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in CAR, told IRIN.
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For about 200 pupils of the primary school Ecole Ouande, in the Linguiri Village of the M'Brès Sub-Prefecture in the northeast of the country, lessons are conducted under a big tree with five pupils sharing each wooden desk.
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FEATURE-In Yemen, schools become hostages of rising - AlertNet - 0 views
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"Should the current situation continue, every single province will be impacted, and many of Yemen's 4 million school-going kids could be affected," said Geert Cappelaere, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) representative in Yemen. "If Yemen is to ever get out of its current, dire crisis, the single most important investment it can make right now is in the education of its people," Cappelaere said. Yemen was grappling with poor education before the unrest. Some 40 percent of Yemenis suffer from illiteracy and soaring unemployment has especially hit the youth bulge of the country's 24 million people.
AFGHANISTAN: Avoid using schools in elections, say agencies - 0 views
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KABUL, 17 June 2010 (IRIN) - Putting a polling station in a school would be run-of-the-mill in most countries, but in Afghanistan it can be an invitation to an attack by Taliban insurgents, opposed to the government and western-style democracy. Taliban rocket, grenade, gun and arson attacks on schools averaged about 50 a month last year. During the August 2009 elections, which the Taliban vowed to disrupt, the number hit 250 in that month alone, according to data compiled by aid agencies.
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Since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, student numbers have surged from less than one million in 2001 to about seven million in 2010. More than 30 percent of the students are female, according to the Ministry of Education (MoE).
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According to research by Care International, in 2006-2008 about 1,153 attacks on educational facilities were reported. Some 230 people were killed in armed attacks on schools in 2006-2007, according to the MoE. Schools are an easy target for the Taliban, looking to demonstrate the government's impotence. "Girls' education is clearly targeted more than boys," stated Care's report of September 2009, which blamed the insurgents and other community members for the attacks.
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