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Syrian army and security officers have detained and tortured children with impunity during the past year, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch has documented at least 12 cases of children detained under inhumane conditions and tortured, as well as children shot while in their homes or on the street. Human Rights Watch has also documented government use of schools as detention centres, military bases or barracks, and sniper posts, as well as the arrest of children from schools.

“Children have not been spared the horror of Syria’s crackdown,” said Lois Whitman, children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Syrian security forces have killed, arrested, and tortured children in their homes, their schools, or on the streets. In many cases, security forces have targeted children just as they have targeted adults.”

Some of the arrests took place in schools. “Nazih” (not her real name), a 17-year-old girl from Tal Kalakh, told Human Rights Watch that in May 2011, security forces entered her school and arrested all the boys in her class, after questioning them about the anti-regime slogans painted on the school walls.

Even today, schools in the most remote areas in the Moroccan countryside have neither water nor electricity, and often no facilities (classrooms, toilets) either. Students have to walk very long distances to get there, and teachers who have to live in such areas feel totally isolated. These situations lead to serious inequalities among the Moroccan population. 

A radical reform of education in rural areas, the construction of classrooms, canteens, boarding schools, and roads require the commitment not only of the Ministry of Education, but also of the Ministries of Transport, Infrastructure and Facilities, Housing, Youth and the Budget.  The Moroccan government must show real political determination to transform its rural schools.

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.

Indeed, there is consensus that no strategy for poverty reduction and development can ignore humanity's need for water and sanitation.

While there are specific MDGs relating to water and sanitation, it is an indisputable fact that the achievement of all other MDGs are dependent on access to clean water and improved sanitation facilities.

At Ashaiman alone, 2,015 children, each bearing a plastic drinking cup, formed a 2,015-people queue to remind duty bearers of the 2015 deadline for the meeting of the MDGs on water and sanitation.

For many pupils and parents, the dreams of joining the so-called best schools have been shattered because they did not score the required points. Now, they must fight tooth-and-nail to find a place in other schools.

At the root of all this is an archaic colonial education system, which no longer has a place in our situation today. In developed countries, an exam-based education system for primary pupils has long been abandoned.

promotion to secondary school should be on the basis of continuous assessment. Also, let the government increase capital expenditure to secondary schools. Most schools have the space to expand their facilities but they lack capital. As the number and the performance of pupils continue to increase every year, the facilities should be able to increase at the same pace.

South Africa's education and finance ministers are being taken to court over poor standards at state schools. The BBC's Karen Allen investigates the education crisis and why some parents in Eastern Cape province are opting to send their children to private schools despite the cost. "We are not a flashy family - I'm just an ordinary kid," says Simanye Zondani, 17, as he pores over his maths homework in the subdued light of his home. Since his parents died, his aunt has given up her smart "bachelorette" flat in Queenstown and opted instead for a house in the township. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote We used to have good results, but we are short of maths teachers [and] science teachers” End Quote Khumzi Madikane Head teacher at Nonkqubela Secondary It means she can now just about afford the £700 ($1,100) to send her nephew to private school. Five thousand children, most of them from black families on modest incomes, are switching to independent schools annually. The quality varies, but in Gauteng province alone, South Africa's economic hub, more than 100 new schools have applied for registration in the past year. It is a response to a sense of failure in the state sector, argues Peter Bosman, the principal of Getahead High School, the low-cost private school which Simanye attends. "Parents want consistency and quality," he says - not with a sense of schadenfreude but resignation.

The irony is that significant numbers of parents who send their children to private schools are themselves teachers in the state sector.

"We used to have good results, but we are short of maths teachers, science teachers and when staff look at our facilities they decide not to come here," head teacher Khumzi Madikane laments.

ISLAMABAD, Dec 9 (APP): United Nations International Children’s  Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has planned to establish 1,550 Temporary Learning Centres (TLCs) in the flood-affected areas. According to UNICEF Progress Report 2010, UNICEF took detailed assessments of school facilities and staff capacity.  In total, 150,200 women and children in flood-affected districts across the country benefitted from assorted school supplies, including tents, the report said. UNICEF has sent 2,600 tables and 2,500 chairs to flood affected districts as well as 930 temporary school in a box kits, 1,200 recreation kits and assorted stationary, including individual school kits and bags.

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.

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).

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.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 12-year-old Abigail Appetey is forced to miss her classes at primary school to sell fried fish door-to-door in Apimsu, her farming village in eastern Ghana. She gets up at 5am to buy the fish three miles away.The little she earns won't go on the exercise books she needs; her parents will spend it on her 20-year-old brother Joseph's education. Abigail wants to be a teacher, she says, but is always tired in class.There are 41 million girls around the world who should be in primary school all week, but aren't, the Department for International Development says. At least 20 million of them are, like Abigail, in sub-Saharan Africa.

In Ghana, 91% of boys, but only 79% of girls finish primary school.

Here in Asesewa – one of Ghana's poorest districts – Abigail's nearest junior high school has just five girls out of 20 pupils in its most senior class. The school improvement plan is torn, written in felt tip and peeling from a wall in a corridor. It is the middle of the dry season and temperatures can reach 31C, but the school's tap is empty and the toilets don't work. The most the school seems to have is a few exercise and textbooks that look as though they date back to the 1950s.The average income for Asesewa's population of 90,000 is between £11 and £14 a month, according to the international charity Plan, which has a base here.

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.

Education is vital to the recovery of a region. Education will enable Ikotos' youth to escape a life of poverty and lead prosperous lives.

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.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai pleaded with insurgents on Saturday to stop attacking schools so that the five million Afghan children with no access to education can reach their potential.

"Five million school-aged children of our country, can't go to school," Karzai said. "Some of them due to Taliban attacks and their schools' being shut down, and others due to lack of facilities." "If they (Taliban) shut down schools ... I can say that they are committing an atrocity against Afghanistan and Islam," Karzai said.

However, with almost 39% of the world’s population or over 2.6 billion people living without improved sanitation facilities, the report also points out that much more needs to be done to come close to the sanitation MDG target. If the current trend continues unchanged, the international community will miss the 2015 sanitation MDG by almost one billion people.

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.

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.

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.

Pope denounces 'atrocious' Nigeria bloodshed AMINU ABUBAKAR March 11, 2010 - 12:44AM Ads by GoogleCAFM/CMMS FacilitiesDeskWeb-based integrated CAFM/CMMSMaintenance, Asset & Space mgmtwww.manageengine.com/FacilitiesDesk Pope Benedict XVI denounced the "atrocious" bloodshed in Nigeria on Wednesday after a massacre of Christian villagers, as police said 49 people would be charged over the killings. As new gunfire added to the tensions around the flashpoint city of Jos, the pope added his voice to a chorus of international revulsion over the weekend slaughter which police say left 109 people dead but the state information commissioner said left more than 500 dead.

"Violence does not resolve conflicts but only increases the tragic consequences," he added. The three-hour killing spree in the early hours of Sunday was the latest wave of sectarian violence to engulf the Jos region where several hundred people were killed in Muslim-Christian clashes in January. The security forces have faced heavy criticism over their failure to intervene to stop the latest killings at a time when a curfew was meant to be in force.

Jang told reporters he had alerted Nigeria's army commander about reports of movement around the area and had been told that troops would be heading there. "Three hours or so later, I was woken by a call that they (armed gangs) had started burning the village and people were being hacked to death. "I tried to locate the commanders, I couldn?t get any of them on the telephone."

The 67-page report, "Promises Unfulfilled: An Assessment of China's National Human Rights Action Plan," details how despite the Chinese government's progress in protection of some economic and social rights, it has undermined many of the key goals of the National Human Rights Action Plan (NHRAP) by tightening restrictions on rights of expression, association, and assembly over the past two years. The report highlights how that rollback of key civil and political rights enabled rather than reduced a host of human rights abuses specifically addressed in the NHRAP.

ut the NHRAP's value was undermined by the government's simultaneous commission of human rights abuses during the same period. In 2009-2010, the government: continued its practice of sentencing high-profile dissidents such as imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo to lengthy prison terms on spurious state secrets or "subversion" charges; expanded restrictions on mediaand internet freedom; tightened controls on lawyers, human rights defenders, and nongovernmental organizations; broadened controls on Uighurs and Tibetans; and engaged in increasing numbers of enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions, including in secret, unlawful detention facilities known as "black jails." "China needs a credible national human rights action plan that is designed and implemented to improve its human rights performance, not deflect criticism," Richardson said. "The Chinese government's failure to meaningfully deliver on the National Human Rights Action Plan's key objectives will only deepen doubts about its willingness to respect international standards as its global influence grows."

Kampala — The government has warned school head teachers against hiking school fees as the new term opens. Closing a two-day Senior One selection exercise at Mandela Stadium-Namboole on Friday, Education Minister Namirembe Bitamazire said the habit of increasing fees by top schools deny hundreds of students a chance to join their dream schools.

"We don't say that they shouldn't increase but let the increment be reasonable, justifiable and they must seek our permission. Our target is to see that all Ugandan children acquire quality education regardless of their parents' financial predicaments," she said.

This means that at least 155,716 students will not be admitted despite having garnered the required aggregate for admission. But the Commissioner for Secondary Education, Mr Francis Agula, said the number of admission could be raised to 350,000 due to expansion of existing education facilities in some schools and establishment of new ones.

N'dele, 21 February 2011 (IRIN) - With literacy and school-enrolment rates among the lowest in the world, the continuing fighting between local rebel groups is putting even more pressure on CAR’s fragile education system.  Years of displacement have caused the collapse of school attendance. Destroyed or looted facilities are still being rebuilt and the recruitment of teachers in areas affected by violence in the North is extremely difficult, leaving humanitarian aid organizations battling to providing basic education.

“I decided to stay in the village anyway. I was trying to keep regular lessons with the children in school though the situation was so fragile a lot of people had left. Many of them never came back.

“Since I left I haven’t been under contract with the government any more. However, I decided to carry on with teaching in rural areas, even though I am not paid for it. Teaching is my passion but now to earn some money I have to cultivate people’s land.”

MAKAMBA, 24 February 2011 (IRIN) - Unversed in Burundi's official languages of French and Kirundi, children of refugees returning after decades spent in Anglophone countries, such as neighbouring Tanzania, often find it difficult to continue their studies and some drop out.

To ensure such students continue learning, a group of returnee teachers has set up an education centre in the commune of Mabanda in Makamba Province, near Tanzania. The teachers work without pay. "We couldn't just sit back while our children faced a lack of education due to a language barrier," Norbert Bitaboneka, the principal, told IRIN. Swahili and English are the languages of instruction at the facility, the Centre Prévisionnel de l'Afrique de l'Est (East African Planning Centre), in line with the Tanzanian curriculum. The language of instruction in Burundian schools is French.

Most of the returnee students affected by the language barrier are those whose parents fled Burundi during civil war in 1972.