The Netherlands to aid education

Six million schoolbooks are to be printed and distributed to children throughout Ethiopia, the Dutch government announced on Wednesday. Mieke Vogels, an education expert with the Netherlands embassy, told IRIN that a massive shortfall of textbooks was hampering teaching efforts across the country. "The quality of education is being negatively influenced by the fact that lots of children have to share textbooks," she said after her government announced a grant of US $3 million to fund the printing and distribution of the textbooks. According to official statistics, there is on average of one textbook for every two children nationwide, but in some rural classrooms even teachers have no books. Ethiopia has one of the poorest levels of education in the world, with about half the population receiving no teaching at all. However, under the government's current $100 million Education Sector Development Programme (ESDP), the number of children attending schools has increased dramatically. When the ESDP was first launched in 1998, just 30 percent of children were attending school; now, by contrast, half the country's 7 million children are receiving education. Under the programme, 15 million textbooks are being printed and distributed. Meanwhile, Ethiopia has become one of 23 countries "fast-tracked" by the World Bank for massive financial investment in its education sector. Vogels noted that girls were often overlooked in terms of access to textbooks. "More often than not it is the boys who take the books home," she said. Currently one-fifth more boys than girls attend school in Ethiopia. Experts argue that education is one of the key weapons for reducing poverty and inequality and boosting economic growth. About 120 million children worldwide do not go to school, most of them girls. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is developing strategies to get more girls into schools, in concert with the Ethiopian education ministry, and aims to have the same number of girls as boys receiving education by 2005. It says that at present, many girls stay at home because they are needed for domestic chores, or because of early marriages. Under the United Nations Millennium Development Goals all children must receive primary education by 2015. In Ethiopia, the education ministry argues that alternative basic education could be a means of attracting marginalised children and achieving educational goals. Alternative - or informal - basic education allows people to have access to schooling outside the state sector, allowing children and adults to attend lessons in villages where there are no schools, and at times that suit them.