A Boost for the World’s Poorest Schools
By TINA ROSENBERG

Since the turn of the millennium, the world has made stunning progress toward the goal of universal primary education. In sub-Saharan Africa, enrollment in primary school has risen by 18 percentage points; in Asia and Latin America there has been more limited progress. While globally, 69 million school-age children do not attend school now, in 1999 that figure was 106 million. This is a huge achievement.

The aim of having all children in school by 2015 is one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals that will come closest to achievement. Countries have made progress by abolishing school fees, building schools in remote areas, switching the language of instruction to the one the children actually speak and giving families incentive to send children to school with school food. In some countries, parents who keep their girls in school get sacks of food from the World Food Program. One Ethiopian program that encourages girls to stay in school gives each girl who does so a sheep or goat.

But the influx of new students in many places has overwhelmed school systems that were already barely functioning. Poor countries devote their education budgets disproportionately to universities, because urban, middle-class students and their families have political clout. Neglect of primary schools in rural areas and urban slums is epic.

Four-year-old Ashish Dangaura and eight-year-old Narayan participated in a Literacy Boost reading camp in Rajipur Village in Kailalia District, Nepal.

Schools in poor parts of Latin America, Asia and Africa often have no books or teaching materials other than a chalkboard. The method of instruction is rote repetition. Teachers sometimes don’t speak the same language as their students. Absenteeism — among teachers, not just students — is astronomical, and some teachers just never show up at all.

Now add to that class sizes swollen to absurd levels, as governments have not been able to add teachers and new buildings at the same rate as they are adding new pupils. There are schools in Malawi with 175 children per class. And the children coming to school for the first time now are the least likely to make progress, because they are starting late and are disadvantaged by the same factors that kept them out of school before — they are from the very poorest households, their labor is needed, their families neglect girls.

So are the tens of millions more children who have entered school in the last dozen years learning anything?

Read more story here.

Maggie Doyne — Why the human family can do better from The Do Lectures on Vimeo.

Cost of High Education In Nepal from Tulzs on Vimeo.

Planting paddy

Ropai Day again

Feast for the eyes while at rest

End of the day

Fishtail lodge across the lake

Grace of age

Lake side at night

Ghandruk:
Pokhreli sky, Nepali Akash

Fewa Taal

A lady cleaning the Barahi temple periphery in the lake island.

Riot of colors.

Cottage across the lake

Source: Flickr