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The East African:  - News |How long do East African pupils remain in school? - 0 views

www.theeastafrican.co.ke/...-

Kenya Uganda Rwanda Burundi EFA MDGs education Education for All

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 28 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Tanzania and Burundi, for instance, have recorded a 99 per cent enrolment rate into the first grade of primary school.The pertinent question is: How effective are these funds in retaining children in school? Once enrolled, how long can the pupils be expected to last in the education system, and how many years of schooling, on average, are actually attained by East African pupils?
  • However, East Africa is faring badly a 9.1 years, equivalent to a pupil completing primary school, but dropping out of high school. The average number of school years actually completed regionally was a mere 4.7 years. The scenario is particularly dismal in Burundi, where on average pupils completed only 2.7 years of school.
  • According to the Global Education Digest 2010 published by Unesco, in the late 1990s, developing countries began to recover some of the educational ground lost in the 1980s, when enrolments stagnated or even declined in sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In fact, the pace of progress accelerated since 2000 and if trends between 2000 and 2008 continue, the increase in school life expectancy in the current decade will be three times the level achieved in the 1970s.In sub-Saharan Africa, school life expectancy nearly doubled from 4.4 years to 8.4 years in the past 30 years. Despite this progress, the region has the lowest number of school years — almost half of the number of years in North America and Western Europe (16.0 years).
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  • As pointed out by the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, primary education without transition into secondary and tertiary levels can only lock a country in a basic factor-driven economy.
  • n Burundi, for instance, government commitments to providing universal primary education appear to be directed towards enrolment.From an enrolment rate of 36 per cent in 1999, the country recorded a full 99 per cent of girls and close to 100 per cent of boys enrolled in primary school nine years later. School drop-out rates are high however, as only 45 per cent of Burundian children complete a full course of primary education.
  • Girls in Rwandan primary schools outnumber boys: 97 per cent of girls compared with 95 per cent of boys are enrolled in primary school. Slightly more than half (54 per cent) of Rwandan children complete primary school. Secondary school enrolment in the country stands at 21.9 per cent, the second lowest in the region.
  • he situation in Uganda is similar — 98 per cent of girls and 96 per cent of boys are currently enrolled in primary school. Completion rate of primary school is 56 per cent. The transition rate into secondary school is low, however, with most pupils unable to progress past the final grade of primary school — only 21 per cent of girls and 22 per cent of boys make it into secondary school.
  • Kenya lags behind other East African countries in primary school enrolment — 82 per cent of girls and 81 per cent of boys of primary age are enrolled in school.
Teachers Without Borders

allAfrica.com: Rwanda: Free Basic Education Increases Enrolment - 1 views

allafrica.com/...201009270149.html

Rwanda EFA teachers schools enrollment MDGs

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 14 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Kigali — Early last year, the government introduced the 9-Year Basic Education (9 YBE) programme, which offers six years of primary education and three years of secondary education to all Rwandan children free of charge.The idea was to have school-going children unable to access education in the past to do so, and be able to compete in the job market regionally. The Ministry of Education also hopes that the programme will reduce the dropout rate in schools.Information from the Ministry of Education indicates that already, the current enrolment rate stands at 97 percent for boys and 98 percent for girls.
  • According to UNESCO, this is the highest enrolment rate in the region. So far, many countries are implementing free primary education. Few, however, have put in place a programme for post-primary education.
  • Several Headteachers say the programme has gained momentum following a recent schools construction campaign that has seen thousands of new classrooms built across the country. Nearly all the classrooms have been voluntarily built by parents, teachers, university students or government officials. They say the strategy of free education for all is beginning to pay off. The enrolment rate has increased as more children go to school.
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  • The goal is to reduce the teacher-student ratio from 74 to 45 students per teacher. Though headteachers commended the government's effort to equip schools with the basic teaching materials like books, they noted that lack of computers and the insufficient lab materials for practical lessons hamper the success of the programme.
  • Electricity also remains a challenge especially for schools and students in rural areas. This has a great impact on students' performance.
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BANGLADESH: School's In To Drive Poverty Out - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views

ipsnews.net/news.asp

Bangladesh education EFA poverty girls girls' education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 24 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • The poor, who make up some 45 percent of Bangladesh’s 164 million population, are the main beneficiaries of the country’s education efforts. In addition, girls have overtaken boys in rates of enrolment, attendance and completion of primary education. With over 94 percent net enrolment, Bangladesh is one of only a handful of the world’s least developed countries that are close to achieving the U.N. millennium development goals of 100 percent enrolment rate in primary schools by 2015.
  • For example, schools by the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) – whose 1.2 million students account for 76 percent of all students in NGO-operated primary schools – are unique in that local community members decide and implement all academic programmes in consultation with parents and stakeholders. "We enrol drop out (and) non-enrolled children – mostly girls – from poor families, ensure high attendance, child friendly pedagogy and high completion of five-year academic studies in our primary schools," Safiqul Islam, director of BRAC’s education programme, told IPS.
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allAfrica.com: Africa: Abolishing Fees Boosts African Schooling (Page 1 of 2) - 0 views

allafrica.com/...201002181133.html

Africa developing nations schools tuition Kenya education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • UNICEF, the UN children's agency, reports that the abolition of school fees has had the intended effect of vastly increasing access to education. The number of primary students in Kenya has increased by nearly 2 million.
  • Encouragingly, the dropout rate, an important measurement of affordability and educational quality, has also fallen. The share of students completing primary school jumped from 62.8 per cent in 2002, the last year fees were charged, to 76.2 per cent two years later as fewer poor children were forced out for nonpayment.
  • the lifting of fees in Kenya and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa has proved to be a giant step forward for access to education by millions of the region's poor. It has helped Africa make progress towards its goal of finding a place in school for all its children. GA_googleFillSlot( "AllAfrica_Story_InsetB" ); var ACE_AR = {site: '768910', size: '180150'}; Over the last 15 years a number of other countries, including Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Ethiopia, Malawi and Mozambique, have also experienced explosive growth in primary school enrolment following the elimination of fees. The UN Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that between 2000 and 2007 overall primary school enrolment in sub-Saharan Africa rose by 42 per cent - the greatest rate of increase in the world. As a result, the percentage of African children in primary school increased from 58 to 74 per cent. A few African countries, including Botswana, Cape Verde, Togo and Mauritius, could achieve universal primary enrolment by 2015
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  • But the increase in school attendance is only a start. Despite the surge in enrolment, almost half of the 72 million children out of school worldwide in 2007 lived in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • The UN's MDG Monitor website, which tracks progress towards the goals, estimates that school fees and other mandatory charges, such as uniform costs and dues for parent-teacher associations, consume an average 25 per cent of poor families' household budgets in Africa. But except for the costly fees often assessed on parents in wealthy districts, the sums collected are too small to dramatically improve the quality of learning.
  • Malawi primary school: The abolition of school fees greatly increased school enrolment, but without sufficient teachers or adequate funding, educational quality suffered.
  • Despite the huge increase in students, the number of teachers in Kenyan primary schools has increased slowly amidst government concerns that hiring large numbers of unqualified teachers would lower instructional quality and increase costs. By reassigning teachers from overstaffed areas to understaffed districts and running some schools in double shifts, Kenya kept its national pupil-to-teacher ratio from rising beyond 40 to 1 in 2004. Ratios were much higher in some provinces, however.
  • The government also managed to reach its target of one textbook for every three students in most subjects - an improvement in many poorly performing, largely rural districts that were not given priority for teachers and supplies before 2003
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Launch of World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education - 0 views

www.uis.unesco.org/...unesco-gender-atlas-2012.aspx

gender equality women education EFA UNESCO

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 09 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 09 Mar 12
     
    To mark International Women's Day, UNESCO and the UIS have jointly released the World Atlas of Gender Equality in Education, which includes over 120 maps, charts and tables featuring a wide range of sex-disaggregated indicators.   The vivid presentation of information and analysis calls attention to persistent gender disparities and the need for greater focus on girls' education as a human right.   The atlas illustrates the educational pathways of girls and boys and the changes in gender disparities over time. It hones in on the gender impact of critical factors such as national wealth, geographic location, investment in education, and fields of study.     The data show that: Although access to education remains a challenge in many countries, girls enrolled in primary school tend to outperform boys. Dropout rates are higher for boys than girls in 63% of countries with data. Countries with high proportions of girls enrolled in secondary education have more women teaching primary education than men. Women are the majority of tertiary students in two-thirds of countries with available data. However, men continue to dominate the highest levels of study, accounting for 56% of PhD graduates and 71% of researchers.
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Midterm report: Tanzania's educational revolution needs investment | Global development... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...mdg2-education-tanzania

Tanzania Africa MDGs education EFA enrollment international_development tuition

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Enrolment at primary schools nationwide has leapt from 59% in 2000 to 95.4% today, putting the impoverished country well on course to achieve the second millennium development goal (MDG) of primary school education for all by 2015.
  • half of pupils will fail to qualify for secondary school, with 3,000 girls a year dropping out due to pregnancy.
  • The progress has come with a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. Enrolment has grown so fast in Tanzania that the school system is creaking with overcrowded classrooms, shortages of books, teachers and toilets, and reports of corporal punishment being used to keep order. In short, it seems that quality has been sacrificed for quantity.
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  • 32-year-old Grace Mayemba, who teaches English, Swahili and social studies. "It's so hard because there are so many," she says."They are noisy and can do anything. To make each child understand is very difficult but you have to try your best.
  • Salima Omari, 36, a science and maths teacher, faces classes of 76 pupils. "It's difficult to cope with when you want to give one-to-one support. There are only four toilets for the whole school and two for the teachers, and there is not much water. The MDG has been good for Tanzania overall, but it was rushed."
  • With significant donor support from Britain and others, the government has allocated more than 2tn shillings (£856,000) for education in 2010-11, about double its spending on health. But most schools still lack electricity or water – nine in 10 children cannot wash their hands after using the toilet. Education activists warn that Tanzania, where half the population is below 18, still has a long way to go to achieve the MDG in spirit.
  • "Students will be enrolled, but in a few months, because of no shoes or textbooks, they can easily drop out," says Anthony Mwakibinga, its acting co-ordinator. "Boys often drop out for child labour near diamond mines. Girls drop out because of early pregnancy or marriage in some areas."
  • In Tanzania, parents are still expected to contribute to teaching materials, uniforms and even classroom construction. Still, it's not enough. Mwakibinga says he has come across classes of 200 pupils where quality inevitably suffers. "What do you from expect from a classroom of 200 children, even if the teacher works like a donkey? What if the 200 children have no books?"
  • The national teacher-pupil ratio has climbed from 1:41 in 2000 to 1:51 today. New teacher training colleges, including some in the private sector, have opened in a bid to meet the demand, but some trainees are allegedly rushed through in three or four months. The profession also suffers from low public esteem.
  • One teacher, Florence Katabazi, 37, says: "I chose teaching and to this day people think I'm a failure. People say, 'I want my son to be a doctor or lawyer, not a teacher,' It's shameful to be a teacher. Everyone runs away from the profession. If they want to be an accountant, they just use teaching as a bridge. At the end of the day we've got 10,000 half-baked teachers and only 400 good ones."
  • Struggling to maintain classroom discipline, some of the country's 160,000 primary school teachers resort to corporal punishment. Noel Ihebuzor, Unicef's chief of basic education and life skills, says: "They see it as controlling children and don't feel they are doing anything wrong. They were brought up that way. We've had stories where parents take children to the head and say, 'He's stubborn, cane him for me.'"
  • "Another problem is the provision of decent training services to teachers. The ministry has tried to develop a management strategy this year but it has not been implemented because of scarce resources. It's good to have a target, but a target without resources is a problem."
  • the pass rate for the primary school leaving exam is just 49.4%.
  • One teacher has a class of 166, with some pupils forced to lie on the bare concrete floor during lessons. They keep up spirits in the dusty, tree-lined central courtyard by playing steel instruments on the bandstand. In headteacher Abdallah Mgomi's office, a typed sheet of paper on the wall reminds anyone who reads it: "Quality is never an accident."
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UNICEF warns of education crisis in Somalia :: U.S. Fund for UNICEF - UNICEF USA - 0 views

www.unicefusa.org/...unicef-education-somalia.html

education unicef somalia crisis enrolment students drought famine

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 14 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • The assessment, which was carried out last week, indicates that with the movement of an estimated 200,000 school-age children who have migrated to urban areas or across the border due to hunger, the gross primary school enrolment of 30% could plummet even further.  This is likely to be compounded by an acute shortage of teachers and an increase in demand for education services in areas where influxes of internally displaced people have been the greatest, such as in Mogadishu. 
  • "Education is a critical component of any emergency response," said Rozanne Chorlton, UNICEF Somalia Representative.  "Schools can provide a place for children to come to learn, as well as access health care and other vital services. Providing learning opportunities in safe environments is critical to a child’s survival and development and for the longer term stability and growth of the country."
  • Already, most of 10,000 teachers across the southern and central regions are dependent on incentives paid through the support of Education Cluster partners. Results indicate that in Lower and Middle Juba as well as Bay regions, up to 50 percent of teachers may not return to the classroom when schools reopen. 
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  • more than $20 million will be needed to carry out the plans.  Funding received to date is inadequate, and funding gaps in the education sector have reached their highest levels in the last four years.
  • Support is urgently needed to establish temporary learning spaces in camps for the internally displaced, support additional classroom space to accommodate new learners in host communities where people have migrated, provide water and sanitation facilities, provide school kits of essential education and recreational material to 435,000 children, provide incentives to 5,750 teachers and strengthen the Community Education Committee’s involvement in schools.
  • "After decades of neglect and lack of funding, the educational opportunities for school-aged children in Somalia are already dire, so it is imperative that we do everything we can to make sure the situation does not get worse,” said Chorlton.
  • Teachers Without Borders on 14 Aug 11
     
    NEW YORK (August 10, 2011)- With an estimated 1.8 million children between 5-17 years of age already out of school in southern and central Somalia, a rapid assessment conducted by the Education Cluster, in ten regions, warns this number could increase dramatically when schools open in September unless urgent action is taken. The assessment, which was carried out last week, indicates that with the movement of an estimated 200,000 school-age children who have migrated to urban areas or across the border due to hunger, the gross primary school enrolment of 30% could plummet even further.  This is likely to be compounded by an acute shortage of teachers and an increase in demand for education services in areas where influxes of internally displaced people have been the greatest, such as in Mogadishu. 
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UNICEF and partners help educate children displaced by conflict in DR Congo |... - 0 views

www.educationandtransition.org/...placed-by-conflict-in-dr-congo

DR Congo IDPs conflict Education Under Attack UNICEF Education Education in Emergencies

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 07 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • DR Congo, a vast country the size of Western Europe, has been mired in war and political unrest for decades. The United Nations has kept its largest peacekeeping mission here since 1999. It is also the world’s second poorest country, with 59 per cent of the population living below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day.
  • The gross enrolment rate for primary school in DR Congo – that is, the proportion of children of any age who are enrolled in primary school – decreased from almost 100 per cent 30 years ago to 64 per cent in 2005. Gross enrolment for girls today is at 58 per cent.
  • he programme is part of an initiative to place education in emergency and post-crisis transition countries on a viable path in order to achieve quality basic schooling for all children. “The school provides a protective environment,” UNICEF Goma Education Specialist Elena Locatelli said, noting that a few hours spent in the classroom each day also keeps children “occupied with activities that don’t let them think of the difficulties of their past.”
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  • By participating in group activities, children can express themselves and channel their trauma through song, poetry and dance. With this in mind, AVSI has been training teachers to nurture displaced and vulnerable children. The training has produced significant changes in the philosophy and practice of education in Walikale.
  • “In the past, we would whip the children,” said Mr. Zirhumana Muzirhu. “But thanks to the psycho-social training, teachers and schoolchildren are now friends, so we don’t use the whip anymore.” The education-in-emergencies programme is also rehabilitating schools and providing school supplies and recreation kits, so that students can participate in regular activities that are crucial to their physical, mental, psychological and social development. In addition, the programme has provided more than 130,000 children with education kits in conflict-ravaged North Kivu Province in recent years.
  • “I like going to school and hope to finish it, but I’m not sure if another war will break out and make me displaced again,” she said. “My biggest fear is, I don’t know if my children will finish school one day,” admitted her mother.
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Poverty News Blog: A drought can even dry up school enrollment - 0 views

povertynewsblog.blogspot.com/...ht-can-even-dry-up-school.html

Kenya enrollment schools drought

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 20 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • A drought in Kenya has hurt enrollment at schools for the start of New Year's classes. Families who need green grass for their livestock to graze upon have moved away from the drought areas. A school district in the driest parts of the country have as many as 1000 children who will not be able to show up for school. Meanwhile, the districts in Southern Ethiopia that have more water will see a strain on their resources as the new children arrive.
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Education failures fan the flames in the Arab world « World Education Blog - 1 views

efareport.wordpress.com/...n-the-flames-in-the-arab-world

Egypt Tunisia unemployment education EFA democracy teachers

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 27 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Education is a key ingredient of the political crisis facing Arab states. Superficially, the education profile of the region is starting to resemble that of East Asia. The past two decades have witnessed dramatic advances in primary and secondary school enrollment, with a step-increase in tertiary education. Many governments have increased public spending on education. The 7% of GDP that Tunisia invests in the sector puts the country near the top of the global league table for financial effort.
  • In Egypt, the education group most likely to be unemployed is university level and above, followed by post-secondary. Around one quarter of the country’s male university graduates are unemployed, and almost half of its female graduates.
  • For all the expansion of access and investment in education, the Arab states have some of the world’s worst performing education systems. The problems start early. In this year’s Global Monitoring Report we carry a table showing the distribution of performance across different countries in reading test scores at grade 4. In Kuwait, Qatar and Morocco, over 90% of students scored below the lowest benchmark, indicating that they lacked even basic comprehension.  In fact, these countries held the bottom three positions in a group of 37 countries covered.
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  • The median (or middle-performing) student in Algeria, Egypt and Syria scores below the low-benchmark; in Tunisia they score just above. In other words, half of the students in each country have gone through eight years of school to arrive at a level that leaves them with no working knowledge of basic math. In Saudi Arabia and Qatar, over 80% of students fall below the low benchmark. The median student in both performs at around the same level as their counterpart in Ghana and El Salvador – and Qatar is the worst performing country covered in the survey.
  • Why are education systems in the Middle East and North Africa performing so badly? In many countries, teachers are poorly trained – and teaching is regarded as a low-status, last-resort source of employment for entrants to the civil service. There is an emphasis on rote learning, rather than solving problems and developing more flexible skills. And education systems are geared towards a public sector job market that is shrinking, and for entry to post-secondary education. Most don’t make it. And those who do emerge with skills that are largely irrelevant to the needs of employers.
  • Moreover, many Arab youth view their education systems not as a source of learning and opportunity, but as a vehicle through which autocratic rulers seek to limit critical thinking, undermine freedom of speech and reinforce their political control.
  • To a large extent, the protest movement across the Arab States has been led by educated youth and adults frustrated by political autocracy and limited economic opportunity. This has deflected attention from an education crisis facing low-income households in primary education – and from the needs of adolescents and youth emerging from school systems with just a few years of sub-standard education.
  • The Arab states have an unfinished agenda on basic education.  They still have 6 million primary school age children out of school – around 16% of the world’s total. Despite the vast gap in wealth between the two countries, Saudi Arabia has a lower primary school enrolment rate than Zambia. The Arab world also has some very large gender disparities: in Yemen, primary school enrolment rates are 79% for boys, but just 66% for girls.
  • Consider the case of Egypt. On average, someone aged 17-22 years old in the country has had around nine years of education. That’s roughly what might be anticipated on the basis of the country’s income. Scratch the surface, though, and you get a different picture: around 12% of Egyptians have had less than two years of education.
  • High dropout rates from primary and lower secondary school are symptomatic of parental poverty, poor quality education, and a sustained failure on the part of the Egyptian government to tackle the underlying causes of inequality. Adolescents from poor backgrounds entering labor markets without a secondary education are carrying a one-way ticket to a life of poverty, insecurity and marginalization.
  • The political crisis sweeping Arab states is the product of many years of political failure. The aspirations and hopes of young people – who are increasingly connected to each other and the outside world through the Internet – are colliding with an atrophied political system governed by complacent, self-interested elites who are disconnected from the population.
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Countries struggling to meet rising demand for secondary education - UN - 0 views

www.un.org/...story.asp

UNESCO report education UN Africa

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 04 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • 25 October 2011 – The global demand for secondary education has risen exponentially, says a new United Nations report, which adds that governments, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, are having a hard time keeping up and many children are being left out. The 2011 Global Education Digest, released today by the Institute for Statistics of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), says there are only enough seats for 36 per cent of children who want to enrol in secondary education in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • “There can be no escape from poverty without a vast expansion of secondary education,” said UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova. “This is a minimum entitlement for equipping youth with the knowledge and skills they need to secure decent livelihoods in today’s globalized world.”
  • Yet, the agency adds, a child in the last grade of primary school only has at best a 75 per cent chance of making the transition to lower secondary school in about 20 countries, the majority of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. The region also has a shortage of secondary school teachers.
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  • “Nevertheless, more than 21.6 million children of lower secondary school age remain excluded from education across the region and many will never even spend a day in school,” states UNESCO. Girls are the first to suffer from this inequality, the report says. In sub-Saharan Africa, the enrolment ratio for girls in lower secondary education is 39 per cent compared to 48 per cent for boys. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in which the gender disparities against girls are getting worse at the upper secondary level, with 8 million boys enrolled compared to only 6 million girls, according to the report.
  • “All of these data underscore a central message: secondary education is the next great challenge,” states Hendrik van der Pol, Director of UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics. “According to the Digest, about one third of the world’s children live in countries where lower secondary education is formally considered to be compulsory but the laws are not respected. We need to translate the commitment into reality.”
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allAfrica.com: Kenya: Overcoming Cultural Obstacles to Girls' Education in Dadaab - 0 views

allafrica.com/...201204111049.html

Kenya refugees camps girls girls' education gender

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 16 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 16 Apr 12
     
    Dadaab - A mix of cultural practices, such as early and forced marriage, as well as child labour, are depriving girls of education in the Dadaab refugee complex in eastern Kenya. Out of Dadaab's estimated population of 463,000 mainly Somali refugees, more than half are children under 18; of these about 38 percent attend school. The proportion of girls in the camps' primary and secondary schools is 38 and 27 percent, respectively, according to the UN Refugee Agency. A third of girls aged between 5 and 13 in Dabaab go to school; for those aged 14 to 17, only one in 20 are enrolled.
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UNGEI - News and Events - A primary school becomes a model for increasing girls' enrolment - 0 views

www.ungei.org/...index_2912.html

South Sudan Africa girls' education education development clubs students

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 06 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • WESTERN EQUATORIA, South Sudan, 27 October 2011 – Access to education is one of the key priorities for the government of the world’s newest nation, South Sudan. Seventy per cent of children aged 6 to 17 have never set foot in a classroom. The completion rate in primary schools is only 21 per cent, one of the lowest in the world.
  • Baya Primary School in Western Equatoria has become the envy of other schools in the state. The school is successfully using its own child clubs, not only to increase girls’ enrolment but also encourage dropouts to join the Accelerated Learning Programme (ALP).
  • UNICEF and the Ministry of General Education and Instruction have been providing supplies such as school bags, notebooks, training, learning and essential teaching materials to support the initiative in South Sudan.
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  • In 2007, UNICEF initiated the Girls’ Education Movement (GEM) throughout Southern Sudan. The Baya Primary School GEM club has been since 2008. Chaired by a dynamic 13-year-old, Tabitha Morris, it has 50 members who organize various activities using the ‘edutainment’ approach – with skits, dramas, rallies, dance and visits to the community.
  • All children in South Sudan have the right to education. And the child-to-child approach taken by GEM clubs offers one good alternative for helping girls get an education.
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AFGHANISTAN: Struggling to improve education - 0 views

www.irinnews.org/report.aspx

Afghanistan Education Under Attack schools

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 04 Sep 10 - Cached
  • KABUL, 29 August 2010 (IRIN) - Education in Faryab Province, northern Afghanistan, has never been as good as it is now thanks to the dozens of new schools built by Norway.
  • Faryab is a success story in a country where almost half of the 12,600 schools nationwide do not have a building (classes are held in the open or in tents), officials said.
  • Norway’s flag and other official symbols are not used on the schools which, according to some experts, have helped keep them immune from armed attacks. Schools, students and teachers have often been attacked and harassed by gunmen allegedly associated with Taliban insurgents.
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  • n terms of education, the southern province of Helmand, severely affected by the insurgency, appears to lag far behind Faryab Province.
  • Though it has roughly the same population as Faryab, Helmand has only 282 schools of which over 150 have been closed due to insecurity and lack of teachers, provincial officials said.
  • “Building schools does not mean improving education - any more than building a hospital means improving health care,” adding that the focus on education was good but not at the cost of other important issues.
  • Up to seven million students are currently enrolled at schools across Afghanistan, according to the Education Ministry, indicating significant progress since 2001 when only two million (boys only) were enrolled.
  • However, about five million school-age children, mostly girls in the insecure southern and eastern provinces, are still being deprived of an education due to war, poverty, lack of schools and social restrictions, the Education Ministry said.
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allAfrica.com: Africa: Abolishing Fees Boosts African Schooling (Page 2 of 2) - 0 views

allafrica.com/...201002181133.html

Kenya Malawi Africa developing nations schools tuition girls girls' education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 23 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Malawi struggles to cope GA_googleFillSlot( "AllAfrica_Story_InsetB" ); GA_googleCreateDomIframe('google_ads_div_AllAfrica_Story_InsetB' ,'AllAfrica_Story_InsetB'); Other countries have been less successful. Malawi eliminated its school fees in 1994. But with less than half of Kenya's gross domestic product per person and fewer financial and human resources to draw on, it still faces difficult challenges in providing universal primary education.
  • As in many other African countries, notes the UN study, "the adoption of universal primary education was triggered by political demands rather than by rational planning processes." Although Malawi had lifted some fees for Standards 1 and 2 and waived primary education fees for girls prior to 1994, the decision to eliminate all fees coincided with the return of multiparty elections that year. The focus, the researchers found, was on increasing enrolment. "Very little attention was paid to quality issues."
  • One immediate response was to hire 20,000 new teachers, almost all of whom were secondary school graduates who were given only two weeks of training. Plans to provide on-the-job training failed to materialize. Instructional quality declined sharply as the pupil-teacher ratio climbed to 70 to 1.
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  • The lack of facilities meant that many classes met under trees, and books and teaching materials arrived months late, if at all. Despite increases in the education budget, spending per student, already low, declined by about 25 per cent and contributed to the decline in quality. As a result nearly 300,000 students dropped out during the first year, and high dropout rates continue to this day.
  • Overall, reports the UN study, only about 20 per cent of boys and girls successfully complete eight years of primary education in Malawi. This is largely a function of the country's deep poverty, the researchers say, and the lack of resources, such as nutrition programmes, to help poor children remain in school.
  • The abolition of school fees is a precondition for getting large numbers of poor children into school, but it must be accompanied by strong public and political support, sound planning and reform, and increased financing.
  • fter systems adjust to the surge in enrolment, they argue, resources must be directed at improving quality and meeting the needs of the very poor, those in distant rural areas and children with disabilities. The analysts say that a particular focus should be girls, who face a range of obstacles to attending and staying in school, including cultural attitudes that devalue education for women. Improved sanitation and facilities and better safety and security conditions can make it easier to keep girls in school.
Teachers Without Borders

UNICEF - Afghanistan - UNICEF Regional Director highlights challenges for girls in visi... - 0 views

www.unicef.org/...afghanistan_53145.html

Afghanistan UNICEF girls' education girls education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 27 Mar 10 - Cached
  • UNICEF is working to increase the numbers of girls in school by supporting the training of female teachers and setting up child-friendly classrooms.  Mr. Toole visited female students at Herat Girls High School to see such efforts firsthand.“To see such a big number of girls who are enthusiastic about becoming teachers, doctors or engineers is extremely encouraging. Their protection is among our key concerns in this country where early marriage and the denial of access to education for females is still deeply rooted in the society,” said Mr. Toole.
  • “Especially in high-risk, difficult to access areas, UNICEF is promoting community-based schools,” said UNICEF Representative in Afghanistan Catherine Mbengue. “We set up community management committees for each school, discussing with them from the onset the importance of girls’ education and their role in making it happen.”Afghanistan has seen an improvement in the number of children – including girls – who are enrolled in school. Today about three quarters of boys and nearly half of girls of primary school age are enrolled in primary school. While this is a drastic increase from the 42 per cent rate for boys and 15 per cent rate for girls in 2000, the gender gap remains wide.
  • A total of 613 school incidents were recorded from January to November 2009, a frightening increase from 348 incidents in 2008.  Insecurity is pervasive — with continued threats and direct attacks against schools, health centres and humanitarian workers.
Teachers Without Borders

allAfrica.com: Ghana: Karaga Parents Refuse to Send Girls to School - 0 views

allafrica.com/...201012211032.html

Ghana parents enrollment girls girls' education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 04 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • According to Madam Fatima, most of the Muslim parents, in spite of the Capitation Grant, School Feeding and supply of free school uniforms and exercise books by the government, still prefer to send their children to the farms, or allow them to travel down south for menial jobs such as 'Kayayei', rather than send them to school.
  • schools in the Karaga District continued to record low female enrollment every academic year, more especially, the Islamic schools. Citing her school, which is also an Islamic school as an example, Madam Fatima described it as being "highly unacceptable" to see a school with a population of 700, with only 200 females. Out of the 523 pupils at the primary level, only 160 are girls, and at Junior High 1 and 2, only 21 are females out of 134 pupils.
  • Madam Fatima told The Chronicle that even though the Karaga District Education Directorate and the District Assembly had over the years embarked on sensitisation campaigns to encourage parents and even traditional rulers to push their female wards to school, something positive was yet to come out it.
  • Teachers Without Borders on 04 Jan 11
     
    She indicated that the majority of the parents were of the view that the education of girls was irrelevant, since a woman would eventually end up in a man's house as a wife, no matter the successes she achieves in education.
Teachers Without Borders

Experts discuss the challenge of achieving universal, quality education | Bac... - 0 views

www.educationandtransition.org/...ng-universal-quality-education

World Economic Forum Davos EFA MDG education Uganda

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 10 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • “Kids are enrolling in school in much greater numbers than ever before,” she said, “but that really masks the fact that they’re actually not learning very much. One example is that in Uganda, half the kids in third grade can’t read a single word.”
  • “We know how to train teachers. We know how to put in curricula. We know what the right things to do for kids are to give them all the right skills,” added Mr. Wong. “But the investment required, and the time and the commitment, is not there if you don’t have the political support.”
  • A Brookings Institution analysis of the wealthiest philanthropic donors in the United States found that global education was a very low priority for them. Ms. Winthrop said she believed this was because a focus on enrolment – which is on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal on education – has “lulled people into thinking that the global education agenda is done, check, we can cross that off the list.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “It’s not just [about] putting them into school…. It’s making sure they’re coming out with the right skills that make them employable and make them so creative and innovative that they might actually go ahead and start their own business.”
Teachers Without Borders

Afghan girls' education backsliding as donors shift focus to withdrawal | Global develo... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...anistan-girls-education-report

Afghanistan girls' education girls funding schools education report

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 25 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Education has long been held up as a shining example of reconstruction in Afghanistan. Donors have ploughed approximately $1.9bn into rebuilding the Afghan education system since 2001. The Back to School campaign, launched in 2002 as a joint Afghan government/UN Initiative, was labelled an "inspiration" and the flagship of reconstruction and development efforts in Afghanistan.
  • The achievements of the Back to School campaign were undeniably impressive. In just the past two years, 2,281 schools have been built across the country. Around 5,000 Afghan girls were enrolled in school in 2001. Now there are 2.4 million, a staggering 480-fold increase.
  • Now, according to the report, Afghanistan's education system is sliding backwards and becoming crippled by poverty, increasing insecurity and a lack of investment in infrastructure and trained staff.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The report's research claims that far fewer of the 2.4 million girls enrolled in school are actually in the classroom. In 2009 approximately 22% – around 446,682 – of female students were considered long-term absentees.
  • While 2,281 schools have been built in the past two years, data from the Afghan Ministry of Education shows that 47% still have no actual building. A lack of investment in female teachers is proving a significant obstacle to girls attending school.
  • In the past years schools and girl students have been targeted by anti-government forces or other extremist groups, prompting teachers to leave their jobs and parents to keep their children out the classroom. In 2009 there were 50 attacks on schools across Afghanistan every month.
Teachers Without Borders

Benin's progress in education: Expanding access and narrowing the gender gap ... - 0 views

zunia.org/...s-and-narrowing-the-gender-gap

Benin teacher development Africa teachers

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 23 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 23 Feb 11
     
    In 1990, Benin had one of the world's lowest primary and secondary school enrolment rates, with enormous gender, socioeconomic and regional disparities in access to education. Since then, initial access to primary education has been approaching universality. The gender gap has narrowed substantially, and has in some regions been eliminated.
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