Civil war disrupts education on both sides of the frontline

The civil war in Cote d'Ivoire has wrecked the country's school system. Even though there has been no fighting for the past 16 months, most teachers drawing government salaries have refused to return to the rebel-held north. And until the rebels hand over their weapons to UN peacekeepers, the education minister is reluctant to send them back there. Nearly a quarter of a million children in the rebel-held area have been deprived of school for the past two years as a result. Those who are lucky enough to get any education at all in the north mostly receive it from unpaid volunteer teachers. Meanwhile a flood of displaced families into the government-held south of Cote d'Ivoire has put huge pressure on existing schools there and has forced the authorities to open dozens of temporary overflow establishments. "When we launched an appeal for people to come to this side of the frontline because we could no longer go up there to run the education system, 133,000 pupils crossed over," Education Minister Michel Amani N'Guessan said. "They all found places at schools in the south, but nearly 533,000 pupils stayed behind. Of them, 240,000 haven't been to school at all since 2002," he told IRIN in an interview. Amani N'Guessan, who belongs to President Laurent Gbagbo's Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party, admits that he hasn't been going out of his way to send droves of teachers back to the north since the fighting came to an end with the signing of a definitive ceasefire agreement on 3 May 2003. No disarmament, no school His argument is very simple. The rebels have not yet disarmed. If they and the people who support them enjoy all the social services normally provided by central government, they will have less incentive to lay down their weapons. In fact, Amani N'guessan is rather annoyed with overseas donors for channeling aid to schools in the north while doing much less for children on the government side of the lines. "The international community has tended to be much more active in the rebel north and we don't understand why," the education minister grumbled. "We think that, today, if you want to enjoy social services provided by the government you should submit to the government's authority," he added. "People must feel they are seriously missing out on something if this rebellion is to come to an end. The moment you start satisfying their needs, they will keep the rebellion going forever." Amani N'guessan said his attitude had led to "open conflicts" with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and several donors and independent aid agencies which insist on trying to resurrect the education system in the north immediately.

240,000 children have not been to school at all since 2002 in the north of the country

"Whenever I have hesitated to reopen schools, UNICEF, UNESCO and WFP (the UN World Food Programme) have gone into these areas to try and restart education there. It is just, it is human, but it prolongs the partition of the country," he complained. Amani N'guessan would rather the donors did more to help overcrowded schools in the south. "The classrooms are overloaded," he said. "This is a consequence of the war. We have been having to cope with 80 to 90 children per class in both primary and secondary schools. Even where conditions are a bit easier we have at least 60." But in the north, many schools have had to close their doors completely, along with the universities of Bouake and Korhogo, whose staff have fled south to the capital Abidjan. NGOs and volunteer teachers fill the gap According to the Education Ministry, only 20 percent of teachers in the north stayed at their post or went back to their school once the fighting died down. But the rebel authorities, helped by international relief organisations and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs), are trying to keep things going and more than 3,000 largely unpaid volunteer teachers are helping to fill the gap. "Children have a right to go to school. We haven't got the right to stop them," said Jeff Brez, the UNICEF spokesman in Cote d'Ivoire. "When you look after the interests of children you have to go to wherever you find them." According to Sekou Toure, the president of Ecole pour Tous (School for All), the main NGO working to revive schools in the north, 286,000 children now attend primary school in the rebel-controlled area and 55,000 are receiving a rudimentary secondary education. But he noted that there were only 821 teachers to staff 62 functioning high schools in the north - an average of just 13 teachers per school. Toure said that sometimes, when the parents of school children were unable to pay the volunteer teachers, they simply provided them with food and accommodation instead. Bakari Kone, 27, is one such volunteer teacher, working in a primary school for 200 children in the northwestern town of Odienne, near the border with Guinea. He was studying for a degree in Modern Literature at the University of Cocody in Abidjan when the civil war broke out in September 2002. But instead of remaining in the capital, he decided to come home. "This is my home. That's why I decided to come back," he told IRIN. "We had to help the kids. I am just a volunteer. It's hard to get any money. We make the pupils pay 250 CFA francs (50 US cents) every two or three months." Florence Nadio, who works as a volunteer at a kindergarten in Korhogo, near the northern frontier with Mali and Burkina Faso, told a similar story. "We volunteers get a bit of money, enough to pay our bus fares to get around, but there are not many children here, so I don't earn enough to live, but it's better than being unemployed," she said. Exam results are still reasonable Toure, the head of Ecole pour Tous, said Bouna, a town in northeastern Cote d'Ivoire near the frontier with Ghana, presented a fairly typical picture of desperate under-staffing in the rebel zone. Only 55 of the 245 secondary school teachers that once worked in Bouna had stayed on - about one in five. And only half the town's 55 primary schools were still open, he said. But Toure said classes were still given regularly and Ecole pour Tous was laying on special catch-up lessons for pupils who had missed school for long periods. Last February, the government was persuaded to let some pupils in the north sit key national exams, eight months after their colleagues on the other side of the frontline had done so in June 2003. The exams were held under watchful eye of French peacekeeping troops and rebel soldiers and the results were surprisingly good. Altogether 23,000 primary school children passed entrance exam for secondary school, 7,000 gained the BEPC secondary school leaving certificate and more than 3,000 achieved the baccalaureat, which qualifies them to go on to university. The pass rates were pretty good too, considering the difficult learning conditions. They ranged from 63 percent in the secondary school entrance exam to 35 percent in the baccalaureat - well in line with the results of previous years. The next round of exams is due to take place in the north in November. Amani N'Guessan hopes that by the start of the 2006/7 school year, the country will be reunited and schools in the north and south will be back on the same cycle. But that may not happen. The latest attempt to put a flagging peace agreement back on the rails calls for the rebels to start disarming on 15 October. But none of the political reforms which Cote d'Ivoire's power-sharing government of national reconciliation was supposed to have legislated by the end of August, have so far made it through parliament to the statute book. And there is still a lot of tension between Amani N'guessan's education ministry in Abidjan and the NGO's who are keeping things going in the north. Ali Coulibaly, the head of education and training at Ecole pour Tous, told IRIN: "Our NGO isn't much appreciated by you know who. I have been advised not to show my face in Abidjan for my own safety, but I am still obliged to go there every month to pick up my retirement pension." "Some people are considered rebels because they work in this NGO," he added. "But I was the regional education director in Bouake (the second largest city in Cote d'Ivoire). I couldn't just sit back and see children not going to school. Given my experience and knowledge of the area, I couldn't just sit back with my arms folded." Problems with child behaviour However, teachers in the north complain that war and rebellion have made children there more unruly and difficult to teach. Raymond Coovi Assogba, the head of SIKA, another education NGO, told IRIN that classroom behaviour had deteriorated badly. "Pupils now take instead of giving," he said. "They stand up and leave class without permission. They enter the classroom without knocking on the door and violence has become a way of life." Catherine Sekongo, a government-paid primary school teacher who chose to stay on in Korhogo, where rival factions of rebel fighters have regularly fought street battles in recent months, told a similar story. "The children are disturbed," she said. They have forgotten everything they have learned, above all how to read. We have had to begin again, gently, from square one."