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Why Zambia?
Compared to many of its neighbours – particularly Zimbabwe, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – Zambia could be considered one of the more successful countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. It has a stable, democratically elected government, no history of civil war and inflation levels which even dipped into single figures for year end 2006.
Unlike many African nations, it’s a country rich in natural resources, agricultural potential and – thanks to Victoria Falls and some of the continent’s best wildlife reserves - has plenty to attract foreign tourists.
And yet, when you see the raw statistics, Zambia typifies the profile of nearly every country in the area.
- A massive 68% of the population live below the poverty line.
- In a country of nearly 12 million, less than 5 million access to clean, safe drinking water.
- One in seven people are HIV positive, and AIDS has played a key factor in reducing life expectancy to 42 years of age
- The infant mortality rate is over one in ten, while the under-5s mortality rate is 170 in a thousand
- One in three adults are illiterate, placing Zambia in the bottom 25% of countries in the world for literacy.
- Out of 177 countries, Zambia is ranked 165th on the Human Development Index, a UN measure of well being and standards of living.
It shouldn’t be this way. A 10-year period of corrupt governance throughout the 90s and reliance on the fluctuating prices of one major export – in this case copper – means that by some estimates, the average Zambian was three times better off at the time of independence in 1964 than they are today.
The need for better schools
While it’s not the only solution to Zambia’s problems, improving the standards of education throughout Africa will play a key role in pulling communities out of poverty. As well as being an obvious route to economic opportunity, a primary education is proven to reduce malnutrition and HIV infection, and combat the spread of infectious diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. Malaria alone kills over 1,000,000 people, mostly children, in Africa each year.
The current government recognises this. It is committed to the Dakar Framework for Action which was drawn up to help African countries meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Education is free up to grade 7. In the last nine years, it has increased the number of children enrolled in primary school to over 90%.
The challenges
While that’s to be applauded, the truth is that they need more help to meet the MDG targets by 2015. Education is a priority, but it’s also a strain on an overloaded system that’s been hit once again by the global downturn.
It’s hard to see how the Zambian government can fund the necessary changes on its own. Thanks to low life expectancy, 48% of the population is under the age of 15, and a third of those are orphans.
Even with the provision of universal access, only 10% of children in grade 6 reach the standards expected by SACMEQ, the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality. Books are a luxury, and the average pupil to teacher ratio is around 1:50 – a measure that includes the relatively successful private schools for the wealthy.
As a result only a quarter of children continue their education into secondary level, and in the poorest areas the dropout rate among younger children is so high that only 40% actually complete their primary education in the first place.
That’s why we’ll be in Zambia for the next few weeks. To give a community who need a school the opportunity to share their stories with you. Please follow the trip live on our blog and Twitter and help to share the stories with the world.
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Why education. Part 3/3.
The human story
Children enjoy learning. They enjoy it so much, that in many rural African areas, they’ll walk for three hours every morning to get to school. And it won’t necessarily be a school in the sense that you or I understand it.
Books, for a start, are likely to be a luxury. In Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia, over half of grade six students don’t have a single book. It’s not just the kids, either, up to 40% of the teachers in the same countries don’t have textbooks for the subjects they teach either. You could say they’re the lucky ones, though - Mozambique loses over a thousand teachers every year to AIDs.
For too many people, expectations are low. It’s heartbreaking that so much effort is expended for so little reward. The Education For All report for 2009 reckons that 60% of young women who’ve completed six years of primary education in Zambia can’t read a single sentence in their own language.
You can understand why there’s a pattern of ‘high enrolment, low survival’ even in countries that have made huge strides to opening up access in the last ten years. In Madagascar and Malawi, nine out of ten children are enrolled in primary school, yet fewer than half of those will complete the final grade.
These unpromising outcomes are only part of the story. In areas where it’s endemic, malaria can cut school completion rates by 29%. Poor sanitation in schools can lead to high drop out rates – particularly among girls – and then there’s the pressure to work. A quarter of 5-14 year olds in sub-Saharan Africa are engaged in child labour (PDF).
We don’t despair at the problems faced by educators and pupils in Africa, though. We marvel at the dedication shown by the huge numbers of families and children who are still determined to attend class, and do our best to help them fulfil their potential.
That’s why we won’t just be investing in the bricks and mortar, pens and paper, physical substances of a school. We place an enormous value on listening to the specific needs of a community. We’ll be spending your money on the things that will help to keep children at school and getting the most out of it. Whether that’s a basic breakfast to start the day, or a village borehole so they don’t have to spend hours fetching water for their family before class. Every project we undertake will be different.
LearnAsOne is able to exploit all the benefits of living in a prosperous, knowledge based economy to drive its fundraising activity. Almost everything we do is based online to reduce our costs and make us more effective. We hope that the same low cost technology will mean that the children you can help will be have access to the same levels of opportunity tomorrow, that we enjoy today.
Source for all stats unless otherwise linked to - http://www.efareport.unesco.org
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Why education? Part 2/3.
The progress so far
We’re not alone in recognising the importance of education. The UN’s well publicised Millennium Develpoment Goals (MDGs) include a pledge to ensure all children have access to primary education by the year 2015. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines the expectation that everyone should be able to go to school in article 26, and states unambiguously that “Elemental education should be compulsory”.
At a meeting in Dakar in 2000 a basic framework for meeting the Millennium Goal was drawn up. The good news is that the governments of nearly all developing nations recognise this and are working really hard to improve access to free education at the primary level. There has been huge progress in the last nine years. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, this decade has seen the number of children enrolled in primary school rise from 54% to over 70%. That’s a tremendous achievement.
These statistics hide the fact that people still need help, though. Especially now, when many of the fragile economies of the area have been smashed to pieces by falling commodity prices. Although much has been achieved, governments still lack resources and infrastructure to keep the pace of change up.
Despite more schools, the African educational watchdog, SACMEQ, found that less than 10% of grade 6 children in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia achieved the desirable rate of literacy for a child of their age.
It gets worse. In many countries, high enrollment numbers only lead to high rates of absenteeism and numbers dropping out. Pressure to work or even marry, illness and poor school resourcing all contribute to outrageously high attrition rates in the numbers of pupils actually finishing their basic schooling.
To put it another way, children in France are twice as likely to continue school after 18 than children in Benin or Niger will finish primary school. The 2009 Education For All report projects there will be 29 million children out of school in 2015. In other words, the Millennium Development Goal for education will almost certainly be missed.
The goodwill of governments isn’t going to build schools. That takes money and infrastructure which is all too often not in place. That’s why we are going to Africa. To document the situation on the ground and give you the chance to help.
* Source for all stats - http://www.efareport.unesco.org
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Why education? Part 1/3.
It’s just two weeks now until our first trip to Zambia gets underway. To prepare you for the blitz of stories we’ll be posting once we get there, we’re going to be posting a series of articles which make clear our aims and objectives, the need for our work and our long term plans.
First up is the question of why education?
When you break down all the problems that Africa faces today – poverty, water shortages, civil war, corrupt government, food scarcity, out of control inflation, HIV/AIDS – you might think that education is fairly low on the list of priorities for the continent. It’s not a headline grabbing subject: children aren’t exactly dying in the streets because they can’t get to school.
Yet access to good schooling is absolutely vital if communities are to break the cycle of poverty and dependence that much of sub-Saharan Africa is locked into.
Why?
Here are just a few facts from the 2009 Education For All (EFA) Monitoring Report about the current state of schooling in Africa, and the implications it has for public health and well being. The report argues that general education should be at the centre of strategies for meeting all health-related Millennium Development Goals.
- Improving access to schooling directly correlates to a significant drop in the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, particularly by empowering young women with knowledge of the disease.
- In Zambia, AIDS spreads twice as fast among populations of uneducated girls, and rural Ugandans with a secondary education are three times less likely to be HIV positive than those with no schooling.
- A primary education is essential for childcare in future generations. Stunted growth due to malnutrition in the under fives drops by up to 25% among households of equal income, location and size, where mothers have had a primary education.
- Infant mortality rates can fall by over 50% where mothers have had a secondary education.
- In Zambia, the infant mortality rate for children born to mothers with no education is 200 children per thousand born, or one in five.
- In Mozabique, only 40% of children born to mothers with no formal education are vaccinated against TB, measles and polio. 100% of children born to mothers educated to secondary level in the same country are vaccinated.
- More than half the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have yet to achieve gender parity in education.
- Nearly one third of children of primary school age in Sub-Saharan Africa have no access to school.
It shouldn’t need saying, but the underlying truth is that a well schooled child has a better chance of finding work or starting a business later in life, and a properly trained community can sustain itself in the long term. As the authors of the EFA report put it, “The educational deficits of today will result in the human costs of the future”.
Knowledge isn’t just power. It’s an essential for survival.