Archive for category: Education

Information and stories on education.

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Uganda’s Struggling Universal Primary Education Policy

Universal Primary Education Policy
The Ugandan government spends roughly $300 million annually on universal primary education. Despite the government’s devotion to free public education, the universal primary education policy is enduring severe growing pains.

One main issue is that despite the government’s large expenditure, parents still pay for half of their students’ fees. According to Nelson Wanambi, an economist at Uganda’s Ministry of Education, parents now pay 46.9 percent for education whereas the government pays a mere 27.6 percent.

The high cost for families causes many children to drop out of school as education becomes burdensome for parents. This economic strain on families contributes to Uganda’s staggering 75.2 percent primary school dropout rate.

After the universal primary education was introduced in 1997, Ugandan schools grew at such a high rate that not enough teachers could be trained to accommodate the increased enrollment rate. Further, many teachers receive insufficient salaries, resulting in strikes and frequent teacher absenteeism.

Fortunately, the government has recently received financial support from the Global Partnership for Education. The most recent contribution was over $100 million to support Uganda’s Education Sector Strategic Plan (EESP). The ESSP originally ran from 2004-2015, and the Global Partnership for Education has made a pledge to continue the program from 2014-2018.

As in many developing nations, gender-related issues contribute to the high drop out rate. On average, Ugandan boys stay in school for two more years than girls — 6.3 compared to 4.5 years respectively. In Uganda, 30 percent of girls drop out of school when they start menstruating because they cannot afford sanitary pads.

Organizations like Afripads, which is headquartered in Uganda, work to increase accessibility to sanitary pads for young girls and provide job opportunities for Ugandan women. Some schools, such as Katwe primary school, are successfully implementing the universal primary education policy. At Katwe, the school provides sanitary pads for their female students.

In theory, the universal primary education program would relieve the burden for many families to pay tuition for their children and increase graduation rate. However, the program has faced many obstacles. With the help of organizations such as Global Partnership for Education and Afripads, Uganda’s future for education is bright once again.

– Sabrina Yates

Photo: Flickr

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6 Facts About Education in Romania

6 Facts About Education in Romania
Romania’s current education system is relatively new. Under communism, education in Romania was politically-fueled. The communist revolution in eastern Europe heavily influenced a nationalistic approach to education in Romania.

This meant that education was tailored to the Romanian majority. In the 1960’s Hungarian schools were merged with Romanian schools and virtually all classes that were once taught in Hungarian were now taught in Romanian.

This politicized education system was abolished in 1990 along with Romania’s communist regime. Today, Romania is a unitary republic with an education system that is constantly under reform. Here are six facts about education in Romania today:

  1. Kindergarten students can start school at three years of age. Although it is uncommon, it is legal to enroll a child into kindergarten as young as age three. Students can remain in kindergarten until they are six or seven, but they must complete at least one year of kindergarten to be eligible for enrollment in elementary school.
  2. Student admission to the high school is based on test scores. The Ministry of Romanian Education and Research administers nation-wide exams that determine where each child will attend high school. Performance on these exams dictates where each student will be able to attend high school. Certain private institutions, typically the more prestigious ones, also include their own attendance criteria on top of the test score requirements.
  3. Students attend specialty high schools. Unlike in the United States where every high school student is expected to gain a certain amount of credits in each subject, eighth-grade students in Romania decide between multiple areas of study in high school. Students can decide between attending an arts or science high school, a military college, economic college or professional school.
  4. High school students take up to 14 subjects at once. Most students take between 12 and 14 classes at once ranging from geography to Romanian literature. Students also take a minimum of two other languages, along with Romanian. Common languages taught include English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. High school teachers rotate between classrooms instead of the students. In most Romanian high schools, it is common that students have all of their lessons in the same classroom with the same classmates for all four or five years that they attend. This is intended to create a sense of community among students.
  5. Romanian women generally attend school longer than men. According to UNICEF, approximately 83 percent of women in Romania were enrolled in secondary education in 2012, compared with 81 percent of men.
  6. Romania’s education system is rapidly advancing. The literacy rate among those over the age of 15 rose from 96.7 percent in 1992 to 97.3 in 2002. Today, 98.8 percent of Romanians are literate.

Although these are major improvements, education in Romania still has room for improvement. Many people in rural communities do not have access to quality education and despite obtaining a higher level of education, there is a severe level of pay inequality between men and women in the workforce.

– Laura Cassin

Photo: Flickr

Students Find Hope in Nigerian Education

Hope in Nigerian Education
There is new hope in Nigerian education since an Islamic militant group, Boko Haram, ripped through certain parts of the country. Boko Haram, which means western education is forbidden, primarily operates in the northern states of Nigeria. These states include Yobe, Kano, Bauchi, Borno and Kaduna. Boko Haram has a long history of terrorizing prisons, police headquarters and heavily populated civilian locations. Boko Haram’s egregious actions have forced around 2.2 million Nigerians to flee their homes, creating one of the largest concentrations of internally displaced persons in Africa.

Consequently, the terrorism has effected many families and in turn hindered thousands of children from attending school and receiving the educations they desperately need. Due to this growing problem, the USAID and many NGOs have created a program called the Education Crisis Response.

Started in 2014, Education Crisis Response focuses on children ages 6 to 17 and plans to “expand access to quality and protective non-formal education and alternative education opportunities for out-of-school children.” The program provides students with the necessary school supplies, school provided meals and psychological teaching methods. According to Ayo Oladini, the programs director, returning to the classroom is more than therapeutic for the children who have been away for years at a time.

The program helps the students cope with their traumatizing pasts by having the students work as one unit and establish a great rapport with their teachers. The local community places an important role by stressing peace and other beneficial values.

Since the program was launched, 294 non-formal learning centers have been created and adhere to a curriculum that includes literacy, numeracy and life skills. The communities in Nigeria open up their schools and other various buildings to be used for these learning sessions. Oladini and the other trained facilitators are using hope in Nigerian education to instill positive values in the many children they teach. They want them to strive for better futures no matter what happened in the past, and education is the key to unlock it.

“We make sure that we don’t create any more trauma, either for these children or within the community where they live,” Oladini explained. “We tell them ‘Look, the future is still there for you. You [may] have lost this, you [may] have lost that…but there is still hope for you.”

Documented evaluations conducted by state officials have proven that Education Crisis Response works and the Nigerian Government has continued to fund the program. Even though the program will begin to phase out in 2017, the government will sustain the program for the long haul. The combined efforts of the local government and communities has given these many children hope in Nigerian education, and a reason to care about the lives they will lead in the future.

It has returned ambitious attitudes to children who at one time believed all hope was lost. They are being taught “to move forward and persevere in a state of difficulty.” They have to fight for a brighter future and finding hope in education has given them that chance.

– Terry J. Halloran

Photo: Flickr

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Challenges Plague Education in Papua New Guinea

Education in Papua New Guinea
Endemic problems facing education in Papua New Guinea (PNG) continue nearly unabated despite the passing of the 15-year-long time frame established by the U.N. for securing its ambitious Millennium Development Goals. Included among its eight commitments was dramatic education reform to address systemic gender-based discrimination, a goal that has hardly been realized in the Oceanic nation.

In a 2012 report, the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) tallied total enrollment in primary education to be a meager 29.3 percent of all PNG children. The research found that the male-to-female ratio is nearly equal during those early education years, with 16,821 males and 16,120 females enrolled in some level of schooling in the relatively wealthier Autonomous Region of Bougainville.

That seeming equality morphs as children age, however, especially when comparing different regions of the country. Female enrollment rates decline significantly in poorer regions that are also marked by a horrific record of abuse toward women. That state of affairs is attributed by many to the historic degradation toward women found worldwide, and in particular regions of the country like the Eastern Highlands.

Indeed, the literacy rate between men and women in that region was 51 percent and 36.5 percent, respectively. In 2009, grade 12 enrollees were made up of just 180 females to their 494 male colleagues. Much of the blame has been leveled at a lack of will and ability to actually fund initiatives aimed at attaining universal gender equality in spite of such officially professed goals.

Similar to the reality throughout the world, PNG girls and women face an exorbitantly high likelihood of experiencing rape or assault at some point in their lifetime. Human Rights Watch pegs that figure at a staggering 70 percent for PNG, well above the one in three average for much of the majority world.

The World Health Organization notes that this problem is exacerbated in low-income regions with poor social attitudes toward women, like rural PNG, and often increases the risk for physical and mental health problems. As those problems increase, the amount of professional and personal self-improvement women and girls can achieve diminishes, thus perpetuating the problem of gender inequality for education in PNG and elsewhere.

Some progress toward reforming education in Papua New Guinea has been made. AusAID found that total enrollment rates have increased from 52 to 63 percent between 2007 and 2009 among primary-aged students. At that same time, completion rates for students enrolled up to grade eight rose from 45 to 56 percent.

In 2012 the government rolled out a new round of subsidizations for tuition fees, building on the apparent success of similar policies enacted in the early 1990s. The new policies have positively affected enrollment among female children and have promoted retention rates among children who seek to continue on with their education at various levels.

In fact, a unique problem has arisen over the last several years involving a lack of resources to accommodate so many current and prospective students, with the numbers expected to continue climbing. For example, nearly 14,000 high school-aged students are expected to continue their education in Papua New Guinean colleges and universities despite glaring inadequacies in terms of quality of educational infrastructure and low numbers of qualified educators.

Ravinder Rena, who published research in 2011 which studied the causes and challenges facing primary education in Papua New Guinea, laments that the quality of most things associated with the PNG education system is derelict and in need of reforms on nearly every level.

“But, if the government can maintain its financial commitment to education, then Papua New Guinea’s educational system most likely will continue to progress,” writes Rena.

– James Collins
Photo: Flickr

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How UNICEF is Maintaining the Education of Burundian Children

Education of Burundian Children
Burundi relies heavily on foreign aid and what is not coming in cannot possibly go out. At the close of last year, the president of Burundi announced the budgetary conditions for the upcoming year, and all sectors would be receiving a large cut. The Ministry of Education was reduced by one-third, with water/sanitization and human rights services closely following. The Ministry of Health would also have to operate with half of its previous budget.

It is not just the availability of education in Burundi that affects a child’s capacity to learn and function, all of their basic needs must also be met in order to contribute to their growth. Toward the end of last year, the number of children suffering from severe malnutrition in Bujumbura doubled within less than three months. The city is in strife, abreast with political unrest, making the streets unsafe for children, leading to an increase in Burundian’s seeking asylum in neighboring countries.

With strains being placed on Burundi’s already feeble education system, it is hard to predict a positive outcome for the education of Burundian children living in these harsh circumstances. However, UNICEF refuses to let the education of Burundian children fall victim to circumstances.

Although UNICEF provides school supplies, manages grants and other forms of relief in Burundi, they have also implemented a number of other programs for the advocacy and safety of Burundian children.

Partnering with Handicap International, a program called “Zones of Peace” was launched in Bujumbura, where teachers received specialized training to help children cope with the psychosocial effects of living in turbulent conditions. UNICEF also mediated with organizations in Tanzania to provide a way for Burundian refugee students to take their 9-10 grade exams, without jeopardizing their safety.

The safety and education of Burundian children are UNICEF’s top priority, especially lone male children that are being targeted and forced into jail. In response, UNICEF and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights have fought rigorously for their release and opened two re-education centers to house the previously detained children.

The majority of imprisoned children are held in adult prisons, where they are at risk for abuse and are malnourished during their confinement. The re-education center is a safe haven for the children to receive needed counseling, nourishment, legal services, education and reintegration back into society. These centers hope to remove the stigma that often accompanies incarceration and to return educated, mentally well young adults into society.

UNICEF’s efforts to provide safety and the education of Burundian children does not stop at the re-education centers. On Aug. 1, 2016, in conjunction with Burundi’s Ministry of Education, UNFPA, WFP and the United Nations Volunteers, they have opened 20 summer camps in Bujumbura. The goal of these camps is not only to allow the children a safe place to join in recreation but also to provide them with life skills, education, as well as enhancing non-violent communication and interactions.

The road towards achieving stability for Burundian children, with reliable access to education, is wrought with challenges, but through the unrelenting efforts of UNICEF and co-sponsoring organizations, one thing Burundian children have is hope.

– Amy Whitman

Photo: Flickr

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Top Five Reasons for Prioritizing Global Education

prioritizing Global Education
In a report recently released by UNESCO, only 64 of the 157 countries tied to the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) met the 2015 deadline for complete accessibility to global education.

While the U.N.’s sustainable development goal on education (SDG4), launched last September, strives to achieve universal education for both primary and secondary levels by 2030, only 12 countries are expected to achieve its goal by 2030. The U.S. is not expected to meet the goal until 2040.

What is causing the delay?

According to the director of the global education monitoring report, Aaron Benavot, there are two primary reasons for the slow progress made in reaching targets set out by MDG and SDG4. Benavot cites continued political instability, conflict and economic as well as social inequalities as casual factors. In addition, the director also notes that aid is not being distributed equally or prioritized to those countries that may need it the most.

“Mongolia has universal primary completion already, but received 15 times the amount of aid to education per child than Chad […], where only just a quarter of children are completing primary education,” Benavot explained to The Guardian.

Why is prioritizing global education important?

  1. If universal secondary education were to be achieved by 2030, there would be 20,000 fewer natural-disaster-related deaths over the next two decades.
  2. If all children had a primary education, as many as 700,000 cases of HIV could be prevented each year.
  3. Educating women would prevent up to 3.5 million child deaths between 2050 and 2060. According to UNICEF, educating a woman would also dramatically reduce the chance her child will die before the age of five.
  4. A country that has 10 percentage points more of its youths in schools reduces its risk of conflict from 14% to around 10%.
  5. According to UNESCO, if all students in low-income countries learned basic reading skills, 171 million people could be lifted out of poverty, resulting in a 12% decline in global poverty.

Although funds may support greater accessibility to global education for millions of children as well as prepare them to contribute to their country’s economies, education’s impacts cross multiple sectors — health, mortality rates and international conflict. Education is the disguised powerhouse towards successfully eradicating poverty. Meeting the U.N.’s SDGs by 2030 should be the number one priority.

– Priscilla Son
Photo: Flickr

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Increasing Education Foreign Assistance

Increasing Education Foreign Assistance: Unlocking a World of Promise
Knowledge is power. This simple statement is more resonant than ever as the world moves towards a knowledge-based economy. In spite of the tremendous importance of education in building the lives of youth around the world, only a small share of the United States’ foreign aid budget goes to education and social programs. By increasing education foreign assistance for such programs, the U.S. could bolster its contribution to global development.

Here are four facts about the current amount of U.S. foreign assistance for education:

  1. Since 2010, spending budgeted for foreign assistance for education has fallen by 44 percent from $1.75 billion to $1.21 billion in 2016. This stands in stark comparison to the seven percent decline in the overall foreign assistance budget and the 13 percent increase in total federal spending over the same time period.
  2. The U.S. spends only three percent of its total foreign assistance budget on social and educational programs, around half of which goes to basic education. By contrast, Australia spends around 25 percent of its foreign aid budget on such programs. The largest recipient of foreign assistance for education in the 2016 fiscal year is Afghanistan. Many of these programs target education for women and girls in a society where female education has traditionally received little support or even outright hostility.
  3. In 2016 the military budget for the U.S. was $604.5 billion and foreign assistance spending on security was $8.77 billion, respectively 500 and 7.2 times higher than spending on foreign assistance for education.
  4. Since 2006, 123 different countries have received foreign assistance for education from the U.S. Afghanistan received the most, $696.8 million, while Montenegro came in last with a little over $14,000. The other leading countries after Afghanistan were Ethiopia, Liberia, Kenya and Guatemala.

Increasing education foreign assistance can bolster economic growth, encourage gender equality and build local capacities. For each additional year of schooling in a country, annual GDP growth rises by 0.37 percent, allowing for greater trade opportunities. The higher the proportion of the population enrolled in secondary education, the lower the risk of war. Therefore it is key to U.S. economic and national security interests that we continue to provide foreign assistance for education.

– Jonathan Hall-Eastman

Photo: Flickr

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How Poverty Affects Learning

How Poverty Affects Learning
Education’s role in improving the lives of the global poor has been well documented. However, researchers have been exploring the reverse — how poverty affects learning and a child’s education.

The Ontario Child Health Study concluded in its research that there is a “direct link between lack of income and chronic health problems, psychiatric disorders and social and academic functions.”

Additional research provided evidence that poverty decreases a child’s school readiness through six factors: the incidence of poverty, the depth of poverty, the duration of poverty, the timing of poverty, the concentration of poverty and crime in a student’s community and the impact of poverty on social networks.

Children from families with lower incomes score significantly lower on vocabulary and communication skills assessments, as well as on their knowledge of numbers and ability to concentrate. Furthermore, their counterparts in higher-income households outperform them in copying and symbol use, and in cooperative play with other children. Students with lower income are more likely to leave school without graduating.

Experts refer to the relationship between socioeconomic status and academic performance as the “socioeconomic gradient.”

According to author Eric Jensen, although “children raised in poverty rarely choose to behave differently,” poverty affects learning because they face challenges their affluent counterparts never see. “Their brains have adapted to suboptimal conditions in ways that undermine good school performance,” Jensen writes.

A child’s formation of new brain cells will slow down and the neural circuitry will create emotional dysfunctions if a child’s primary needs are not met at an early age.

Typically, children from low-income families suffer from parental inconsistency, frequent childcare changes, lack of adult supervision and lack of role models. Thus, the child does not receive the stimulation or learns the social skills necessary to maximize their academic performance.

In order to reverse how poverty affects learning, researchers suggest that schools focus on support services that aid in a child’s cognitive and social skill development.

The High/Scope Educational Research Foundation concluded in a study, that children who received proper intervention services were more likely to graduate secondary school, have higher employment and income rates and have lower crime rates by the time they reached 40.

Schools with targeted efforts to aid in a child’s academic development, such as counseling and after-school programs, can both lessen the effect of poverty on a student’s learning and use education to fight poverty to improve lives.

– Ashley Leon

Photo: Flickr

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Education in Mozambique: Serving Children with Disabilities

Education in Mozambique: Serving Children with Disabilities
Volunteers spent the day with disabled children and adults at the Matola Children’s Home. In Mozambique, disabled people may be abandoned by family members and are often seen as a financial burden.

Currently, the Matola Children’s Home houses 42 children from many local areas and has 67 young children in their daily preschool. The center relies solely on donations from the international community. The most difficult situation for disabled children is the limited assistance and opportunities they have to pursue an education in Mozambique.

According to the African Disability Rights Yearbook, 103,276 people with disabilities were children between the ages 0 to 15 years, which makes up approximately 21 percent of the total population of people with disabilities. One of the main problems within the confines of the country with such children is the issue of schooling.

Public schools aren’t developed with this demographic in mind making, which makes it difficult for these children to partake in education provided by the government. In 2013, UNICEF partnered with world-renowned photographers to create a collection of multimedia films that centers on the troubles surrounding the children of Mozambique.

In “The Rights Responsibility: Invisible Children” directed by Francisco Carlos Zevute and photographed by Patrick Zachmann, many children and families are interviewed in order to shed light on how grave the situation pertaining to disabled children and education is in Mozambique.

The film goes on to state “children with disabilities are almost twice as likely to fall victim to violence and are at heightened risk of abandonment and intimidation.”

One of the direst situations for special needs education in Mozambique is a lack of qualified teachers able to teach these children as well as the infrastructure of schools which is not conducive for a child with disabilities.

Mozambique is slowly but surely making an effort to improve education as a whole in the country. In 2015, 51 percent of the country’s primary schools taught all seven grades in one school, and in 2016 the proportion increased to 56 percent.

Although great strides are made toward improving the education in Mozambique, little is being done to help disabled children.

Poverty plays a pivotal role in the scarce resources and availability of appropriate education for the disabled community. Ending global poverty proves to be a catalyst towards the accessibility of inclusive education in the developing world.

– Mariana Camacho

Photo: Flickr

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Blue Rose Compass: Focusing on Refugee Education

Blue Rose Compass: Helping Refugee Education Take a Front Seat
Youth unemployment is one of the greatest challenges throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). According to a report by the World Economic Forum, MENA has the highest regional youth unemployment rate in the world. Over 27 percent of the population under the age of 25 are unemployed in the Middle East and more than 29 percent in North Africa. That is more than double the global average.

Blue Rose Compass, or BRC, is a non-profit organization that aims to give gifted young refugees the opportunity to develop their talents and become agents of change in the world. The NGO identifies incredibly talented young refugees and moves them forward to get a top university education.

The identification process starts with BRC representatives traveling to U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) camps. From there, they work with teachers and administrators to select qualified student candidates to go undergo a series of evaluations. These include local and national standardized testing or its equivalent, psychological, emotional and physical testing conducted by certified partners, and intensive interaction between BRC representatives and the families of student candidates.

The process behind it is simple, yet impactful to so many under-recognized young men and women. BRC visits countries that host refugees and identifies those that are considered gifted. From there, these young refugees are connected to educational opportunities in world-leading colleges and universities, such as Princeton University and University College of London (UCL) to name a few.

The various university programs offered help with language, testing, visas, travel, living expenses and finding a job on graduation. The only thing Blue Rose Compass asks in return is a commitment to finding future opportunities to help rebuild each refugee’s country of origin. BRC requires that a graduate works for five years minimum in a job that impacts their community or region.

Lorna Solis, founder and CEO of Blue Rose Compass, said in an article, “This will make 100 dreams come true each year and affect the lives of many others. When I visit refugee camps I am heartbroken by the waste of talent and human potential. Gifted students are being left to stagnate. Girls who have the potential to achieve academically, are often married off and become mothers in their teens. I see first hand how education in conflict zones can bring opportunities to youth who would otherwise have none.”

As far as the name goes, Solis feels that the young refugee scholars are like blue roses — rare and precious — and the organization itself symbolizes the compass, helping these gifted men and women find their way.

– Keaton McCalla

Photo: Flickr