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.
Reuters AlertNet - DRC: Where schools have flapping plastic walls - 0 views
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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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What is lacking, however, is specialised training of teachers, which limit the implementation of inclusive training, he said.
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Few teachers have specialised training, and none have formal training for multigrade teaching. This means that there is a lack of skills to pitch lessons at different grades, while many teachers generally struggle with classroom management.
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A shortage of teachers in the fields of accounting, mathematics, languages, computer studies and geography has been identified.
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AVAILABLE figures point out that the majority of teachers have Grade 12 with at least three years' tertiary education. "So, who is fooling who?" questioned Minister of Education Abraham Iyambo, in obvious reference to the less than satisfactory performance of most schools. What is lacking, however, is specialised training of teachers, which limit the implementation of inclusive training, he said. Few teachers have specialised training, and none have formal training for multigrade teaching. This means that there is a lack of skills to pitch lessons at different grades, while many teachers generally struggle with classroom management.
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