It is very difficult for a donor driven poverty stricken nation to get its priorities right especially as the aid is aligned with hard to reach conditionalities that for the best part draw further lines between the government and governed. But of course we do understand why people have to put their mouth where their money is. Surely if you fail to draw your own face, if someone else does it you may not even recognize it as your face.
This why, no one would like Education to be played down infavor of other sectors of our society. You know I stay in sympathy with policy makers in this land because it seems in this our tiny state almost every sphere of our life is a priority. I mean the needs are all over the place. If over 50% of our rural compatriots continue to drink unsafe drinking water, never mind SALWACO, what do you do? Like the people in one of our regional headquarter towns, they are used to accepting whatever comes their way from governance be it life threatening or simply life snuffing. They will tell you that their name is there is nowhere to complain. In fact that exactly is their name.
Don’t blame me for the little digression, if you think it is. I just feel very down just now for the struggles that our education is going through. You visit the rural areas of our country and see the schools. Where are the teachers? I was recently told that some 50% of our teachers may well be engaged with the ongoing electoral process. Can you blame them? No of course, just like you, they need the necessary extra cash to make their ‘two cut four.’ You see there are two very essential professions especially in a poor country like ours. These are the nurse and the teacher.
These two touch almost everybody. The unhealthy person is never productive, just as an uneducated person will be very difficult to rule especially in a democratic way. This writer recently had the opportunity to visit some four districts. Do you know that there are schools that do not really have qualified teachers? Yeas this is happening to our children…they simply do not have qualified teachers to give them relevant instructions.
The other celebrated issue that has reared its monster head in our education system is this whole idea of community teachers. Well it is like other teachers are not part of the community – no that is not it – these are teachers who are supposed to be assisted by community members since they are not on government pay role.
Here, this is not really because some of them are not qualified – some are but the state does not have enough money to pay them so they are not recruited by government. However because teachers are short in most of the schools, they are engaged by the school authorities hoping for government approval. This comes either very late or not at all. What happens most times is that the communities hardly have money to pay the teachers and so this is given in kind. Sometimes the pupils themselves contribute by making farms for the Community teachers. They do all sorts of chores for their teachers and for the girls, several protection issues do arise. All this is happening in remote areas where roads are either non-existent or are so poor that nobody dares challenge them. This kind of marginalization does not help the education of our kids. Do you see why many parents send their children to big towns where the opportunities are available? But even there because some are in independent living, they are not well protected and cared for. What do we do? I really think that the current repairs made on the roads especially in the cities, are replicated or cascaded at the rural level. This can help minimize the need for the current alarming migration to the cities.
For long we have been looking at our various sectors in isolation forgetting that they are all interrelated. Take the case of the building of schools. The sababu project built many schools which were destroyed during the war. However some of these did not have adequate seats in some areas. Much of the reasons were linked with contractors not meeting their own part of the bargain.
A recent development in the education sector is the fact that unlike former times when older men impregnated school girls, these days it is school boys that are impregnating their female counterparts. This situation even some years ago made the ministry of Education to come up with a policy that any school boy who impregnates a school girl should also stay away from school for the period for which the girl stays away because of the pregnancy. Well, accepted that this is some kind of deterrent, but is it actually beneficial to the nation? It means two instead of one child is having a setback. The actual issue is that this policy was hardly implemented. Just like child abuse cases are hushed in many parts of the country. What then do we do?
For so many years we are told that there was a big problem with the teacher’s pay roll because it appeared the Ministry does know the real number of teachers in the schools. Well I wonder why Statistics Sierra Leone cannot be engaged to do a thorough research once and for all. If we have to start working towards the universal primary education goal of the MDGs, then we need first of all to get over minor challenges like the statistical data.
Part of the problem is the establishment of mushroom schools in remote areas by dubious people or so called missions which do little or nothing to maintain them. You have a lot of these even along our highways across the country. Our children in some of these schools have no benches or chairs to sit on. They make do with stones that are no good bedfellows to the bottom. What is wrong? There have been schools where kids actually take their benches to school bought by their parents. The irony is that while there are accommodation problems in some schools, some others do not even have enough pupils to occupy the facilities. We also have the problem of teaching and learning materials which are almost always in short supply.
When the child returns home from school, there is the problem of time to study and also the light to study on. These are lacking in many communities where money is hard to come by even to buy food. Many of the facilities are over concentrated in urban areas while the rural areas are left on their own.
Over the years many functional school supporting and monitoring structures have been formed and are working well in some. With many WASH programs now being implemented around the country and communities now better sensitized on hygiene and other issues, the school environment are being improved. Just as the health sector is now given a whole lot of boost, I think so also the education sector should have the necessary attention so that they can both grow in tandem. You might be wondering whether I do not know the budgetary constraints. Yes I do, but that can be solved if proper scrutiny is done and strict prioritization is considered. Indeed we need to check the poor quality of students churned out of our universities every year. It starts right from the child’s formative years.
By Ben Cambayma
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