EDUCATION-MONGOLIA: Transition Pushes Children Out of School

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Lutaa Badamkhand

ULAN BATOR, Jan 18 2000 (IPS) - On a bitterly cold winter day, nine year-old B Erdene Suvd (which means ‘Precious Pearl), stands on a crowded downtown bus stop here with her seven-year-old brother, Altanhuyag.

Together, they sing Mongolian folk songs, surroundd by people impatiently waiting for their bus. After a while, the two go around collecting small change from their “audience”.

“In one day I earn as much as 3,000 tugriks (3 U.S. dollars),” she says proudly, her cheeks reddened by the cold.

Erdene Suvd came from Erdenet town, some 500 km from the capital city, to earn money. “When we will make enough money I will buy a black and white TV set for Father.”

“And when back home, I will go to school,” the small girl says dreamingly. She has never gone to school, as her parents, both unemployed, could not afford to send her to do so.

Like little Erdene Suvd, up to 100,000 Mongolian children, or every sixth school-age child, never went to school or dropped out of it. They are the sad legacy of a decade-long transition to a market economy.

Like many other former socialist countries, Mongolia, a remote country sandwiched between China and Russia, embarked on bold political and economic reforms back in 1990s that aspired to replace a command economy with free market and to promote democracy.

The collapse of the former Soviet Union, the coumtry’s main trade partner and donor, resulted in a deep economic crisis throughout the early 90s. The funding of the education sector from the state budget alone was cut from 11.3 percent of GDP in 1990, down to 5.6 percent in 1996.

The economic crisis has had dire effects on the social sector, threatening to undermine the achievements of previous seven decades of socialism when almost universal access to education was secured.

Dwindling state funding threatened even the operation of a network of boarding schools — vital in a country where half of its 2.5 million population still live nomadic lifestyles and herd cattle in remote areas.

“Problems of transition period have most negative impact on the education sector, with school environment deteriorating and total of 166,000 children dropping out of school by 1996,” reported the Human Development Report for Mongolia 1997.

According to Ministry of Science and Education data, the number of school drop-outs increased from 6,311 in 1989 to a peak 48,446 in 1992, before falling back to 14,272 four years later.

During the crisis, school enrolment rates also went down from net 98.6 percent in 1990 down to a record low of 65 in 1996. Effectively, this means that every fifth child failed to enroll in school during that time.

“Economic factors played a major role,” says B Uranbileg of the National Centre for Children. “In 1991 more than 25 million state-owned livestock was privatised. As the number of livestock grows by at least 1.5 million heads per year, cattle breeders need more helping hands.”

In rural areas, many herders withdrew their children to looks after cattle rather than have them go to badly managed, under- financed boarding schools.

“They know that children need education, but many herders maintain that once boys are grown up, they will inherit the cattle and for this they do not need education,” says sociology researcher D. Dariima, of the Gender Centre for Sustainable Development.

Says L Tegshjargal, director of a primary school in Telmen, Zavkhan province: “Each of 62 children staying at our boarding school is required to supply 61 kg of meat, 10 kg of rice, one sheepskin and three cubic meters of wood.”

“The state provides no more for the boarding dormitory. In our soum alone (a smallest administrative unit) 34 children from 24 families did not go to school. Their parents have no money for textbooks, clothes, food, even though they would like to send their children to school,” the official adds.

While 260,000 herder families have 33 million livestock to benefit from, back in cities and province centers there are fewer jobs are available and here growing poverty takes its toll.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimated that by 1998, up to 37 percent of the country’s 2.5 million people

lives in poverty.

“The people’s attitude is changing in recent years as parents realise the importance of education for the better future of their children,” says D Oyunsaikhan, officer at the UN Children’s Fund office in Mongolia.

In the last two years, the school enrolment rate has climbed back and last year reached 75 percent, though the imbalance between rural and urban areas remains.

Meantime, many non-formal and distance education projects have been launched by national NGOs and international organisations to tackle the problem of school drop-outs and children in remote areas as part of fighting poverty, or the growing number of street children.

“Our primary focus is mostly on life skills and business development training. But within this range we provide training to many young, low educated people in economically depressed, remote areas,” says Undrakh, director of a project on distance education funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

Under this three-year long project, 35,000 adults and unemployed youth nationwide will be trained with extensive use of radio lessons.

In 1998 such organisations as UNICEF and National Center for Distance Education involved close to 10,000 children and youth into non-formal education programmes.

The UNESCO-supported “community-based education” alone provided financial assistance to 4,505 rural children to allow them to go to school. Another 1,300 children form herder families went back to school with the help of the Norwegian Children Fund.

The Save the Children Fund, UK, present in Mongolia since 1996, has chosen a different approach.

“Our main goal is to build an institution of social workers at schools, so that they prevent pupils from dropping out from schools,” says B Temuujin, the fund officer. In the last two years, the foundation successfully tested this mechanism in 29 schools nationwide and plans to expand the project.

More projects by other NGOs using different approaches are underway. World Vision, an international charity organisation, introduced a rehabilitation programme helping 450 children from poor families to get back to school.

Despite these efforts, the legacy of the transition decade still haunts the future of the education sector.

Indeed, the country’s Human Development Report 1997 predicts that this disruption will bring “a wave of less literate cohorts to pass through the age structure over next 70 years”.

And as a government report on education released in December said: “Many children and youth who never attended or who dropped out from school during the last decade period, will face problems in continuing their education.”