Stretching for universal primary education by 2015

Opening day at Escola Communitaria 4 de Outobro in the Mozambican Capital, Maputo, is an anxious occasion as parents worry about their children's admission if they cannot pay the fees.



While two men try to salvage the decaying white signboard above the sandy entrance to the school yard, the few lucky parents with the money to register their children crowd a tiny reception room while they wait outside the even tinier headmaster's office.



"It is the first day of school but ... you can see that today there are hardly any children and lessons have not even started," Lote Daniel Mondlane, the school's headmaster told IRIN.



"This is a community school and the last choice of any parent. Most of our students come from the poorest members of the community," Mondlane said. The school was opened in 1988 to serve the people of Polana Canico, a crowded shanty neighbourhood near the centre of Maputo, and named 4 October to commemorate the signing of a peace agreement that ended the country's 16-year civil war.



Mondlane's school usually caters to the students who are left when the better schools reach capacity, "But each year the number of students that cannot pay fees for education is going up - last year [2008] we had 168 students who could not pay their school fees."



The challenges to Mozambique's education system are substantial but not insurmountable, and the school is an example of the struggle to provide basic education to the population.

It is the first day of school but ... you can see that today there are hardly any children and lessons have not even started

Illiteracy rates remain stubbornly high; according to the Human Development Index 2007/08 of the United Nations Development Programme, adult literacy is a mere 38.7 percent. But while the situation in the capital, in the southern tip of the country, might not be ideal, conditions in the central and northern provinces are worse.



But getting better



The government and its development partners aim to reverse this trend by extending the reach of education services throughout the country, in line with the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of universal primary education by 2015.



According to Cristina Tomo, Director for General Education (DINEG) in the Ministry of Education and Culture, an education programme targeting primary school children in the disadvantaged central and northern parts of the country is already reversing low education indicators.



The Child-Friendly Schools (CFS) programme is part of a "Six-year programme aimed at providing education as the basis for improved welfare and livelihoods for vulnerable children, such as orphans in disadvantaged communities in the rural areas," Tomo told IRIN.



CFS was launched in 2006 in the Maganja da Costa district of Zambezia Province, and has since expanded northward to cover seven provinces, reaching more than 145,000 children in more than 570 schools.



"Education indicators in all the districts where this programme is running have recorded some of the highest figures in terms of enrolment rates, completion rates and reducing the gender gap," Tomo said.



Enrolment rates have increased by 36 percent in the targeted districts, showing a much higher increase than the national average of 17.5 percent, while the average drop-out rate in Maganja da Costa district has decreased remarkably from over 2.9 percent in 2006 to 1.7 percent in 2008.



Critical education



"Primary school children at the critical ages of between 10 and 14 years are our targets in the CFP because it is a crucial window period in their lives, when they come into adolescence and start learning about sex and HIV/AIDS," said Thierry Delvigne-Jean, of the UN Children's Fund, UNICEF, in Maputo.



The programme's success is derived from its broad approach. "The school is at the centre of the society, of the community - that is our approach. CFP [focuses] on five critical areas: education, protection, water and hygiene, health and community participation," Delvigne-Jean said.



Ensuring that the schools have adequate water and sanitation services, and that the health needs of the children are catered for, is central to the success of the programme.



"Under the CFP more children are coming to school because of the improved environment and increased community participation, and you find that indicators such as the gender gap are beginning to decline because of this," Tomo noted.



"In 2008 our national enrolment of primary school children reached about 4.8 million [roughly a quarter of the country's about 21 million people] learning in about 12 000 schools nationwide," she said.



"Already, the CFP has started reversing low education indicators and we are now using it as a model for the rest of the country. We are encouraging the rest of our school system to use the programme as a model."



There are still too few teachers. "We currently have about 50,000 teachers in schools nationwide, which is still not enough," Tomo said. "A bigger number will help us reduce our teacher-per-class ratio from the current high of one teacher for 74 pupils per classroom, to one teacher to 50 pupils per classroom by 2011."



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