Growing need for rural pre-schools

Farmers Almagul Akerova, 33, and her husband are struggling to look after their younger children while they work due to a lack of pre-school facilities in their province of Batken, more than 14 hours’ drive southwest from the capital, Bishkek.

“Our elder daughter goes to school, while our two younger children are under school age and that is why it has been a big problem to find someone to look after them when we need to work,” Almagul said in her small mud-bricked house in Kara-Bulak village.

Zuulaika Satarova, a Russian language and literature teacher at the Kara-Bulak school, said that nursery schools or pre-school classes had ceased after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and subsequent independence of Kyrgyzstan.

“During Soviet times children under six were in pre-school classes and they were starting to learn letters and reading, writing and drawing along with learning poems by heart,” Satarova said.

But a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) project is helping to solve the problem. The villagers, local authorities and UNICEF, have repaired the old village school and opened a pre-school class for local children.

The local authorities and the villagers raised the money to repair the building and UNICEF provided education materials, including textbooks for children and manuals for teachers on how to teach.

Aida Iskanderova, early childhood development project coordinator with UNICEF, told IRIN that the pilot pre-school in Kara-Bulak was the only one of its kind in the country.

“There were 1,696 kindergartens in Kyrgyzstan, most of them were closed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just a little over 400 are currently working in the country and parents do not have an opportunity to take care of their children,” Iskanderova explained.

Uulkan Kambarova, a teacher who has worked 30 years at Kara-Bulak school, is very happy with the textbooks provided by UNICEF. “The books are very colourful and interesting, they are by education scientists [and show how] to correctly develop and teach children,” Kambarova said.

The pre-school in Kara-Bulak with some 40 children has already become popular. “I see the difference – when our eldest daughter Anara went to school, she got tired and did not have time to do her lessons and grasped everything slowly. But our son Bektemir, who goes to the pre-school class, already recites verses, sings songs and re-tells fairy tales and stories. It is good for him, they teach and feed him and I have time to do lots of things,” said Almagul.

Kyrgyz education experts say that newcomers to school who have not attended pre-school find it difficult to adapt to school environment within the first six months and cannot focus on the learning process.

Meanwhile, an ‘Hundred Hours for Pre-school Children Preparation Programme’ is being developed by the Kyrgyz education ministry. Ministry officials said that children aged between six and seven would receive some pre-school teaching before they go to school, but gave no details as to when the programme would commence.