At sixteen years old, Cecelia, a young woman from Chiunda Village in Malawi, has already confronted countless barriers to receiving her education.
As early as primary school, Cecelia remembers watching her friends drop out – a fate that is all too common in the country of Malawi, where less than 6% of women hold a high school diploma. Throughout her adolescence, she has seen firsthand the problems of early marriage. One in every two girls nationwide is married or raising children by the age of 18.
The problem is not just the amount of funding for education, but how the available resources are being spent. In the past decade, tertiary education consistently received the highest proportion of education aid of any education sector, beating out even primary education year after year. Moreover, during this period, seven of the top fifteen donors to education increased the portion of their aid allocated to higher education and consequently decreased the portion to basic education.
Further, this aid to tertiary education isn’t being spent sustainably. A large percentage of growing funds to higher education have been used not to strengthen university systems in recipient countries but rather to provide scholarships for students to attend higher education institutions in donor countries. In 2012, for example, “for every US$1 disbursed in direct aid to early childhood care and education, the equivalent of US$58 went to support students from recipient countries at the post-secondary level in donor countries.”
Can you remember your first day of kindergarten? Or even preschool? Chances are, you were excited beyond words.
Chances are, your first classroom greeted you with colorful drawings on the walls, 27 letters on the chalkboard, and even a cozy reading corner filled with stacks of books, waiting patiently to take you on an adventure.
Education is a human right. More than that, it is a lifesaving humanitarian response. School provides stability, structure and routine that children need to cope with loss, fear, stress and violence. Being in school can keep children safe and protected from risks, including gender-based violence, recruitment into armed groups, child labor, and early marriage. In periods of crisis, parents and children identify education as one of their highest priority needs.
There is a wildfire beginning to rage in public education in Liberia. Without immediate firefighting from many directions, this wildfire could spread elsewhere fast. Unlike other fires that can be dampened and extinguished quickly, a wildfire “differs from other fires by its extensive size, the speed at which it can spread out from its original source, its potential to change direction unexpectedly, and its ability to jump” borders.
The first to spot this explosive fire was the National Teachers’ Association of Liberia; it sounded the alarms. The government of the Republic of Liberia, with leadership of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Minster of Education George Kronnisanyon Werner, has developed the “Partnership Schools for Liberia,” plan for private, for-profit providers to manage all primary schools in the nation by 2020.
Despite significant progress made in achieving the second Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of universal primary education, an estimated 63 million adolescents remain out of school. Barriers to education disproportionately affect girls and include poverty, gender-based violence, child marriage, and pregnancy. WomenOne and the Global Campaign for Education-US (GCE-US) are dedicated to ensuring the provision of quality education to all children. Recently, WomenOne focused our efforts on improving quality of education for a small community in rural Haiti.
The United Nations recently adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, 17 goals and 169 targets that will guide international development efforts over the next 15 years. The objectives are ambitious; they include efforts to end hunger and poverty, reduce economic inequality, achieve gender equity, combat climate change, promote sustainable development, and improve infrastructure, sanitation, health, and education. And yet, if the efforts covered by this last goal – education – are any guide, it will take more than promises to ensure that the SDGs are achieved.
The mentioning of the name of the girls’ education project IGATE in full to stakeholders and communities was always greeted with many interesting questions: “What about boys?”; “Do you want parents to forget about the boy child and focus on the girl child?” These were some of the questions that were quickly asked by the communities and stakeholders. Explanations and clarifications about the project’s support to boys’ education were not easily understood. This story provides a detailed account of how IGATE is also benefiting boys’ education with specific reference to the case of Thulani Munkuli, who was assisted by the Mothers Group (MGs) to re-enroll after dropping out of school.
For over four years now, discomforting images and stories of entire neighborhoods leveled by bombs, of families mourning children taken too soon and of thousands of refugees leaving everything behind have served as daily reminders of our failure to end the conflict in Syria.
Next up, math classes! The women of the two villages of Djangoula, in rural southwestern Mali, made the same request. Separately. Perhaps they had discussed the issue together. Perhaps their conclusions were reached independently.
They’d like to learn basic arithmetic, and sharpen their skill at accounting.
