Civic education programme extended for another 5 years

A project educating children about democracy and civil rights has been extended for another five years in Tajikistan. More than 25,000 school students are expected to master the basics of civic education. "Textbooks on civic education have been published in Tajik, Russian and Uzbek and this complementary schoolbook will help our children to have a thorough idea of what elections are, what a democratic state is, what their rights are," Mavjuda Nabieva, a project assistant for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), told IRIN from the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, on Wednesday. Her comments came the day after a document to extend the project was signed in Dushanbe by the US embassy in Tajikistan, the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) and the Tajik Ministry of Education (MoE). It will strengthen civic education (the explicit and continuing study of the basic concepts and values underlying a democratic political community and constitutional order) in the Central Asian country for the next five years, a US embassy statement said. The original agreement, signed by IFES and MoE in November 2002, established a variety of initiatives, including preparation of a civic education textbook and school-based activities such as student action committees, student local government days, democracy summer camps, student conversation clubs and student parliamentary days. "Our project has been operating in Tajikistan since 1997. We mainly worked in developing political parties in Tajikistan. Then we decided to initiate something more simple for children and we wrote a textbook on civic education, which includes the issues of family and society, what the aims of civic education are, human rights and international law, the rule of law and governance," Sayora Grezova, a civic education textbook project coordinator for IFES, told IRIN. Some 9,800 students from 140 pilot schools have used the civic education textbook. This new agreement is set to offer the curriculum to around 900 additional schools, reaching nearly 27,000 students throughout the country. The US government is funding the project through USAID. USAID will work closely with IFES and the MoE to develop and print civic education textbooks and teachers' guides in Tajik and Russian, the US embassy added, noting that Tajik youngsters would learn about the democratic process and civic responsibility. Also, teachers are set to be trained on teaching children using interactive methods and would receive extensive resource information from the teachers' guide that supplements the course. "The importance of this project is that our children will become more active citizens, not passive ones as they are now," Grezova said. "Those children who have read our book know things better and they understand what is what, and we hope that the situation in this regard will be improved."