Thirst for education stifled by poverty

In this farming village in Guinea Bissau, many of the children haul their own seats to school in the morning, teachers turn up carrying the blackboards. State schooling at primary level is free in this tiny West African former Portuguese colony, but the aftershocks of a civil war and lack of funds mean there aren’t enough schools or teachers to provide every child with an education. So in Kampada Namoante village, some 30 km east of the northern town of Sao Domingos, cashew nut farmers, many of them illiterate, took matters into their own hands five years ago. Already struggling to fill their children’s bellies with food, they clubbed together their few resources and built their own community school and appointed their own teachers. “I’ve always been one of the community school teachers,” said 44-year-old Oscar Naessa, who has taught there since the school was set up in 2001. “If we did not do this then our children would not go to school at all.”

Oscar Naessa explains his role as a community school teacher under the shade of a mango tree

The teachers are paid whatever the parents can afford, some months it might be coins, another a few mangoes or whatever has been harvested in fields. When times are tough, which happens often, the teachers receive nothing at all. Every school day, more than 150 children aged between seven and 16 squeeze into the three open classrooms built by their parents, one from woven palm leaves, two made from sun-baked mud-bricks. “Many of the kids aren’t very comfortable, the seats often collapse while we are trying to teach,” said Naessa, trying to balance a plank atop stakes driven into the dirt floor that will then substitute as a desk. When the lessons are over, the kids and the teachers take the chairs and blackboards home and get down to the serious business of farming - the community’s only income. Naessa became a teacher because he was one of the better-educated villagers, though he quit secondary school in the eighth grade, aged 13. The low education levels of teachers, is cause for alarm however. “Many of the teachers are just high school kids with no training - in fact the majority around here are like that. Our trained teachers are very few,” said Paulo Sambo, the general inspector of schools for Sao Domingos district. According to Sambo, less and less high school graduates are opting to teach nowadays as pay and work conditions are so poor, especially in rural areas. And every year the situation becomes more desperate as the population grows. Guinea Bissau has a population growth rate of 3 percent according to the World Bank - that means the population doubles in size very 23 years. “Even little girls are having kids - and I think it’s because illiteracy levels are so high,” said Sambo. “A well educated woman would not have children so early.” Nearly 70 percent of Guinea Bissau adults cannot read or write and boys are more likely to be sent to school than their sisters. The problems do not stop there. Even in the classroom learning is impeded as instruction is in Portuguese - a language spoken by only seven percent of the population according to the UN children’s agency UNICEF. But it is not just farmers’ children who are struggling to get a decent education. The problems are nationwide and include the capital Bissau, home to half of the country’s 1.4 million people. A NATIONWIDE PROBLEM Each month, the cash-strapped government struggles to pay civil servants’ wages, including those of the few trained teachers, so morale is low and strikes frequent. The tiny country south of Senegal has failed to recover yet from 11 months of civil war that ended seven years ago.

Domingos Amelia Mango taking a class in one of the thatch classrooms at the government primary school Escola 8 de Marco in the capital Bissau

Domingos Amelia Mango strides across the dirt yard of ‘Escola 8 de Marco’, the oldest primary school in the poor Bissau district of Bairro-Militar, clapping the chalk from his hands. He is 52 and a father of seven with 24 years of teaching experience, but earns only 40,000 CFA francs (US $80) a month and regularly goes long stretches without receiving a cent. “I last got paid two months ago, in March,” said Mango, his shirt threadbare from wear and washing. “But it has been much worse - last year we went nine months without being paid!” Mango counts himself lucky to be on the government pay roll at all, which works out at less than US $1 an hour for a 20 hour week. Staff shortages are made up by non-contract teachers, who often do not have a teaching certificate and are paid by the hour. When his classes are over, Mango walks 30 minutes out of the low-rise city to work a plot of land on his uncle’s farm. The rice, cassava and beans that he produces keep his family going. Mango’s school has 600 pupils who rotate through the school in three shifts of 200. Each child has 4 hours in the classroom before another child slips into the seat. The waiting list for school places is long. “Every year more children register than we can accommodate,” Mango said, even though two classrooms built out of palm thatch were added some years ago. “If they don’t get in, they just have to wait for the next year or end up working.” A HISTORY OF DIFFICULTIES

When it rains the water pours through the whole in the roof of this classroom at Escola 8 de Marco in Bissau

Access to education is not a new problem in Guinea Bissau, according to teacher trainer Mariama Manga, who was 15 when she started primary school. “Many parents - like my own - were not educated and so they do not understand the importance of education,” said Manga. “As a child I wasn’t allowed to go to school by my father, he was worried that if I got educated I would leave the village and never come back. But I would watch the other kids through the window and try to follow what they were learning.” Manga, who estimates she is about 49, owes her education to the Catholic missionaries who came to her village when she was a teenager, in the days when Guinea Bissau was still a Portuguese colony. The nuns eventually persuaded Manga’s father to let the eager girl attend school, but it made her relationship with him very difficult. And as her father prophesised, once she passed her school exams, she left the village and never went back. “But he finally came to accept education as a good thing when I used my first teacher’s salary to replace the thatch roof on the family home with corrugated iron,” said Manga, “Then he was very happy!” SS/CCR