Action needed to address teacher shortage, says UNICEF

Yemen must address a dire shortage of both schools and professional teachers, according to a recent report from UN Children’s Fund UNICEF. “The lack of teachers is one of the main challenges facing education, mainly among rural women,” said Naseem Ur-Rehman, communications coordinator at the fund’s Sana'a office. “There’s also a lack of schools – students in some areas have to walk long distances to get to school.” A UNICEF statement issued on Wednesday noted that a whopping 46 percent of eligible school children "are not given basic education”, with primary school enrolment for boys and girls countrywide standing at about 65 percent and 41 percent respectively. "The task before the educationists is formidable,” the statement noted, “and makes it obligatory on the national leadership to mobilise the support of all partners for realising the child's right to education." The situation is far worse in rural areas, where only 30 percent of girls are enrolled in school, the statement noted. Moreover, a full half of the Yemeni girls who begin primary school drop out before they reach the sixth grade. The lack of education is reflected in national illiteracy rates. Almost half of the Yemeni population, of 19.7 million people, between the ages of 10 and 45 is illiterate, according to government statistics. While the figure hovers at about 30 percent for men, it exceeds 67 percent for women. In 2001, Yemen developed the Basic Education Development Strategy (BEDS) project with the help of the World Bank and donor countries and agencies. "Yemen prepared a suitable education strategy which has been reviewed and endorsed by the international community,” said BEDS Director Dr Abdulateef al-Munaifi. “BEDS is targeting education quality, building schools and encouraging child enrolment." Al-Munaifi said that the problem wasn’t necessarily with the numbers of available teachers, but with how they were distributed throughout the country. "We have around 170,000 teachers, but they aren’t well-distributed,” he said. “They’re focused mainly in the cities." He added that there were currently around 14,000 schools countrywide, accommodating five million students at the basic and secondary levels. The education problem is not unique to Yemen. UNESCO estimates that Arab states in general will need to create 450,000 new teaching posts to cope with incoming students, particularly in Egypt, Iraq, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. The UNICEF statement was issued on the occasion of the international "Education for All" week, celebrated annually to promote the UN millennium development goal of putting every child in school by 2015.