Education drive receives govt boost

Angola made one of its biggest peacetime strides on Monday as education experts set the wheels in motion to train 29,000 new teachers, with the aim of getting one million children back into the classroom. The massive US $40 million-plus project will help slash the number of grade one to four children – those under the age of 11 - who are not in school, from 1.1 million now to 100,000, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said. "This $40 million and the engagement of the Ministry of Education mean that with international assistance, Angola can cut its number of first-level children out of school by 90 percent," said UNICEF representative Mario Ferrari. "We must seize this opportunity. Angola has already lost two generations of children to war." Angola's Ministry of Education, whose spending on schooling was woefully inadequate during the three decades of civil war, is ploughing $40 million into the project to pay for the salaries of the teachers. UNICEF is funding and organising their training. The war destroyed at least 4,000 classrooms in Angola. At the start of this year, 44 percent of children did not get any basic primary education. UNICEF hopes this will drop to four percent on the back of the education drive, which has the potential to initiate Africa's biggest education push in 2004. "The government and UNICEF can take the number of children out of school down to four percent. That's a phenomenal number, but there's a lot of work to go with it," said UNICEF spokesman James Elder. Mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles have worked to build local schools for their kids. Even if it is only a mud hut, it is a place to learn and creates a sense of ownership and pride in the communities. With 70 percent of the 13 million population under the age of 24, nurturing and educating the young was "absolutely critical" to rebuilding a nation devastated by three decades of war, Elder told IRIN. "Angola will recover when every boy and girl in every province is in school," he said. "I don't think any sector has more influence on society than education. Apart from the obvious benefits, education gives kids security and is a stabilising force on their lives." But UNICEF is struggling to get funds from the international community to help support this major government plan. Donor fatigue, and a focus on more public emergency conflict zones like Iraq mean developing countries, including Angola, are getting shoved on the backburner. UNICEF has only received nine percent of its consolidated appeal for education. "It makes a lot of sense to invest in this country now, in the next two or three years while the government is motivated to do the same. That way we’re saving dollars in five years time," Elder said. UNICEF needs $1.7 million for this first stage of training but will need more funds to keep up the work and continuously train the young teachers, many of whom were also affected by war and had limited or disrupted education themselves. It also needs funds to provide pens, pencils and notebooks for the one million children desperate to learn. The National Education Capacity Building Programme follows hard on the heels of a successful "Back to School" campaign in two of Angola's 18 provinces, which trained 5,500 teachers and benefited 500,000 children. The 29,000 new teachers will begin teaching in February, the start of the Angolan school year, but some from the original "Back to School" campaign are already commanding classrooms. "I feel this training is very important because this is the start of a new era in education in Angola," Domingos Caiumbuca, one of 39 teachers trained in Kunhinga, 30 kilometres north of Kuito in Bie province, told UNICEF. "I want to teach and help develop a new generation of Angolans." Caiumbuca's training will continue well into 2004 as UNICEF and the government strive to improve standards. "We have to take education to scale across this country. The quality of teaching is not great, but we can build on that over time. We can put windows into schools, bring in desks, and improve teacher training," Elder said.