The shortages of days in the classroom and teachers, and the poverty of their schools and living conditions, provide for a very poor education for Venezuela's children and augur a significant lag for their performance in adult life and for the country's development. CREDIT: El Ucabista

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jul 10 2023 (IPS)

Hundreds of thousands of children and young people, and thousands of their teachers, drop out of regular schooling in Venezuela year after year, and most of those who remain go to the classroom only two or three days a week, highlighting the abysmal backwardness of education in the country.

“Why continue studying, to graduate unemployed and earn a pittance? We prefer to get into a trade, make money, help our parents; there are a lot of needs at home,” Edgar, 19, who with his brother Ernesto, 18, has been gardening in homes in southeastern Caracas for three years, told IPS."The education crisis did not begin in March 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. These are problems that form part of the complex humanitarian emergency that Venezuela has been experiencing for many years." -- Luisa Pernalete

A study this year by the non-governmental organization Con la Escuela (With the School), in seven of Venezuela’s 24 states -including the five most populated- found that 22 percent of students skip classes to help their parents, and in the 15-17 age group this is the case for 45 percent of girls.

In the school where teacher Rita Castillo worked, in La Pomona, a shantytown in the torrid western city of Maracaibo, “for many days in a row there is no running water, there are blackouts, and it’s impossible to use the fans to cool off the classrooms,” she told IPS.

The classes in the school are divided into 17 to 25 children each: the first three grades of primary school attend on Mondays and Tuesdays, the next three grades on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and Fridays make up for whoever missed class the previous days. That is in the mornings; secondary school students attend during the hot afternoons.

These are the first steps towards the definitive dropout of students: 1.2 million in the three years prior to 2021 and another 190,000 in the 2021-2022 school year, with 2022-2023 still to be estimated, with no signs of a reversal in the trend.

“The dropout rate is also high in secondary schools in Caracas, and the students who remain often pass from one year to the next without having received, for example, a single physics or chemistry class, due to the shortage of teachers,” Lucila Zambrano, a math teacher in public schools in the populous western part of the capital, told IPS.

Authorities in the education districts are increasingly calling on retired teachers to return to work, “but who is going to return to earn for 25, 20 or less dollars a month?” Isabel Labrador, a retired teacher from Colón, a small town in the southwestern state of Táchira, told IPS.

Currently, the monthly food basket costs 526 dollars, according to the Documentation and Analysis Center of the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers.

The infrastructure and equipment of many schools is seriously affected in different areas of Venezuela, and its recovery is essential as a space not only for students to obtain knowledge but also for the socialization and coexistence of students, teachers and representatives. CREDIT: E. Carvajal / CPV

Teachers held colorful street protests in the first few months of 2023, demanding decent salaries and other benefits acquired by their collective bargaining agreement, and these demands remain unheeded as the school year ends this July.

Teachers earning ridiculously small salaries, high school dropout rates, rundown infrastructure, lack of services, loss of quality and a marked lag in the education of children and young people are the predominant characteristics of Venezuelan public education today.

But “the education crisis did not begin in March 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. These are problems that form part of the complex humanitarian emergency that Venezuela has been experiencing for many years,” Luisa Pernalete, a trainer and researcher at the Fe y Alegría educational institution for decades, told IPS.

Numbers in red

In the current school year, enrollment in kindergarten, primary and secondary education totaled 7.7 million, said Education Minister Yelitze Santaella, in this country which according to the National Institute of Statistics has 33.7 million inhabitants, but only 28.7 million according to university studies.

The difference in the numbers may be due to the migration of more than seven million Venezuelans in the last decade, according to United Nations agencies – a figure that the government of President Nicolás Maduro considers exaggerated, although it has not provided an alternative number.

The attraction or the need to migrate, in the face of the complex humanitarian emergency – whose material basis begins with the loss of four-fifths of GDP in the period 2013-2021 – also mark the desertion of students and teachers.

In the three-year period ending in 2021 alone, 166,000 teachers (25 percent of the total) and 1.2 million students (15 percent of the number enrolled at the time), dropped out, according to a study by the private Andrés Bello Catholic University (Ucab) in Caracas, ranked as the top higher education center in the country.

Con la Escuela estimates that at least 40 percent of the teachers who have quit have already emigrated to other countries.

Educational coverage among the population aged three to 17 years continues to decline: 1.5 million children and adolescents between those ages were left out of the education system in the 2021-2022 period. The hardest hit group is children between three and five years of age, where coverage amounts to just 56 percent.

Public school teachers, whose basic salary barely exceeds 20 dollars per month, have held massive protests in Caracas and other cities in the country demanding a living wage and compliance with the provisions of their collective bargaining agreement. CREDIT: M. Chourio / Efecto Cocuyo

According to official figures, there are 29,400 educational institutions in the country, of which 24,400 are public, with 6.4 million students and 542,000 teachers; and 5,000 are private, with 1.2 million students and 121,000 teachers.

They cover three years of early education, six years of primary school and five years of secondary school. It was decreed 153 years ago that primary education should be free and compulsory.

According to Ucab and Con la Escuela, 85 percent of public schools do not have internet, 69 percent have acute shortages of electricity and 45 percent do not have running water. There are also deficiencies in health services (93 percent), laboratories (79 percent) and theater or music rooms (85 percent).

Surveying 79 public schools in seven states, Con la Escuela found that 52 percent of the bathrooms are in poor condition, 35 percent of the schools do not have enough bathrooms, and two percent have no bathrooms.

In 19 percent of the schools classes have been suspended due to the damage to the toilets, and 34 percent do not have sewage pipes.

“Water is the service that generates the most suspension of classes in Venezuela,” Pernalete said. “Classes can be held without electricity in the school, but you can’t do without water, and if the service fails in the community or in the whole town, then it’s hard for teachers to go to work or the families don’t send their children to school.”

The backpack decorated with the tricolor Venezuelan flag, which is given to primary school students in the country’s public schools, is often carried by immigrants, such as these walking along a Colombian highway, as many students and teachers, in addition to dropping out of school, go abroad. CREDIT: JRS

Con la Escuela also found that 36 percent of the classrooms are insufficient for the number of youngsters enrolled, 44 percent of the schools have classrooms in poor condition and 50 percent reported desks in poor condition.

Moreover, the Ucab investigation found “ghost schools”, which appear in the Education Ministry figures but are actually only empty shells.

“We have gone to the field with the list of these schools and we have found that they no longer exist. There are just four walls standing,” said Eduardo Cantera, director of Ucab’s Center for Educational Innovation.

From precariousness to backwardness

If the salary of a new teacher in a public school is 20 dollars a month, those who are five levels higher in the ranks do not earn much more, just 30 or 35 dollars, although they do receive some bonuses that are not part of the salary.

In Caracas, private schools – which serve from kindergarten to the end of high school – a teacher earns about 100, maybe 200 or more dollars, depending on seniority, hours of work, and the families’ ability to pay.

The drop in wages cuts across the entire labor spectrum. The basic minimum is around five dollars a month, although there are food bonuses, and the average salary of formal sector workers is around 100 dollars.

It is a difficult figure to reach for many of those who work in the informal sector of the economy – 60 percent of the country’s workers according to the Survey of Living Conditions that Ucab carried out in 2022 among 2,300 households across the country.

A view of the María Auxiliadora school in a middle and upper-middle class area of Caracas. In private education, families must make extraordinary contributions to improve teachers’ salaries and thus hold onto them. CREDIT: Oema

It is a consequence of the gigantic setback of the Venezuelan economy – GDP shrank by four-fifths between 2013 and 2021 – compounded by almost three years of hyperinflation between 2017 and 2020, and depreciation that liquefied the value of the local currency, the bolivar, and led to a costly de facto dollarization.

Although public education is formally free, parents must contribute a few dollars each month to help maintain the schools. In private schools, prices are raised under the guise of extraordinary fees – the only way to obtain funds that make it possible for them to hold onto their teachers.

Pernalete says that in the interior of the country many teachers have to walk up to an hour to get to school -there is no public transportation or they can’t afford to take it-, not to mention the lack of water or electricity in their homes, or the absence of or the poor quality of internet connection, if they can afford it, or the lack of other technological resources.

And if they do have internet, that’s not always the case for their students.

Damelis, a domestic worker who lives in a poor neighborhood in Los Teques, a city neighboring Caracas, has three children in school. Some teachers, she told IPS, assign homework through a WhatsApp group, but in her home no one has a computer, internet or smartphone.

What is the result? The initial reading assessment test that Ucab recently administered to 1,028 third grade students nationwide showed high oral and reading comprehension (82 and 85 percent, respectively), but low reading aloud and decoding skills (43 and 53 percent).

More than 40 percent of the students only read 64 words per minute or less, when they should read 85 or more. Con la Escuela applied the test to 364 students in Caracas and the neighboring state of Miranda, and the children only read 48 words per minute.

There is also discouragement among teachers. The main public teaching university in the country has almost no applicants. In the School of Education at Ucab, the first two years have been closed due to a lack of students, despite the fact that the university offers scholarships to those who want to train as teachers.

What can be done? “The physical recovery of schools should be one of the first steps to guarantee their fundamental function: to serve as a center for socialization and meeting of teachers, students and representatives around the teaching-learning process,” said Cantera.

“Otherwise, the consequences will be very serious for the country’s development,” he said.

Labrador said she observes “a gradual privatization of education, it is no longer truly free,” and the disparity between public and private education is increasing inequality in a country where in the second half of the 20th century public education stood out as the most powerful lever for social ascent.

Pernalete said it is a matter of complying with the 1999 Constitution, which stipulates that workers’ salaries must be sufficient to live on and establishes the government’s commitment to the right to education, as it states that education and work are the means for the realization of the government’s goals.

Shugufta Barkat, a former teacher, and her brother Rasikh Barkat, a former student, stand in the charred remains of the Nasirabad Government High School in Kulgam – one of the many schools in India’s Kashmir that have been recently burnt down. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
KULGAM, Kashmir, India, Nov 23 2016 (IPS)

In the fading light of a November afternoon, 12-year-old Mariya Sareer bends over a textbook, trying to read as much as she can before it gets dark. It’s been nearly five months since the seventh grader from Shurat, a village 70 kms south of Srinagar city, last went to school, thanks to a raging political conflict.

“Studying like this is hard. I don’t know where to focus. My scores won’t be as good as before,” says the young student, who has always been top of her class. Her siblings Arjumand, 9, and Fazl, 6, both students at the same school, nod in agreement.Unlike other terror attacks, the arsons have remained a mystery, with no one claiming responsibility.

Mariya is still luckier than many of her friends. Although her school – the Taleem-Ul-Islam Ahmadiyya Institute – has been closed for the past four and half months, the building is still standing. But for thousands of others, there will be no classrooms to return to when the shutdown ends because their schools have been destroyed in fires.

Burning down a generation’s future

Schools across Kashmir were closed for Eid ul Fitr, which was celebrated on July 6. They were expected to reopen soon after the festival. But violence erupted across the valley after Burhan Wani, a young militant, was gunned down by security forces on July 8. Amidst mass rallies, stone-throwing and renewed demands for “freedom” from India, the pro-separatist parties called for a total shutdown of the valley.

The shutdown effectively kept the valley’s 1.4 million students from returning to their classrooms.

A few weeks later, on Sep. 6, the first news of a school fire was reported in Mirhama village of Kulgam district. Soon, similar reports began to pour in from all over the valley. So far, nearly three dozen schools – both government-run and privately-owned – have been burnt down. A majority of these schools are in South Kashmir where Burhan Wani was killed.

One of them is the Nasirabad Government High School in Kulgam. The building was set on fire on the evening of Oct. 16 and although locals and police tried to douse the flames, the library, gymnasium, computers, laboratory and desks were destroyed. Locals allege that the arsonists wanted to prevent the school from reopening – a reason why they burnt the upper floor, instead of the ground floors that had little equipment.

Shugufta Barkat, a former teacher at the school, says it was among the best in the district. “They are burning down the children’s future,” a visibly shaken Barkat told IPS.

Mariya, Arjumand and Fazl Sareer, students from the village of Shurat in India’s Kashmir valley, study at their home. Educational institutions have been closed for four and half months due to political unrest in the state. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

Surprisingly, unlike other terror attacks, the arsons have remained a mystery, with no one claiming responsibility. Separatists and the government have both blamed each other, while some locals say they are the work of “fringe elements” in society who just want to cause disruptions. The police have made some arrests, but in each case, the accused has been identified as a “pro-separatist” without any clear link with any terror group.

With the increased cases of arson, the government has asked teachers to protect their schools during the nighttime hours. Accordingly, schools have created charts of teachers on “night duty”. Female teachers have been asked to send a male relative to patrol on their behalf.

Unease in a minority community

Basharat Ahmed Dar is the head of Asnoor, a village of the minority Ahmadiyya Muslim community in Kulgam. In a state of long political turmoil, violence, murders and torture, this is a community campaigning for love, peace and harmony. Their unique principles have earned them global respect, as well as scorn from many, especially the radicals.

The community strongly advocates for education as a healthy path to progress and also runs five schools in South Kashmir. The schools – which admit both Ahmadiyya and non-Ahmadiyya students – are known for a high standard of education and superior infrastructure.

Since the shutdown began, the Ahmadiyya youths, including some of the teachers, have been guarding their schools to repel possible attacks and arson. The patrolling will continue until the snow begins to fall, says Dar.

“It has not rained here for several months, so everything is very dry and prone to catching fire. But once snowfall begins, setting fire will not be as easy,” he explained.

Mass promotions and continued uncertainty

In Kashmir, a study year begins in April and ends in November- just before the three-month long winter vacation begins. The annual examinations are held in late October. However, this year, none of the schools could conduct the final examinations. With no signs of an end to the shutdown, government this week declared a mass promotion for students from first to ninth grade across the valley.

Private schools have decided to conduct examinations, even though they had completed only about 40 percent of the syllabus.

Farooq Ahmed Nengroo, a private school teacher, calls the mass promotions a “dangerous mistake.”

“In 2014 also, after a flood hit the valley, the students had a mass promotion although only two to three percent of all schools were affected. In future, we will definitely see a vacuum of knowledge and skills in the state’s labour force,” he warned.

High school students are also not pleased with the government decision. Ishfaq Ahmed, an eleventh grade student in Kulgam, says, “I had joined a coaching institute to prepare for the engineering college entrance test next year. But because of the shutdown, all the coaching institutes are closed. Unless those are allowed to function, nothing else is going to help.”

Meanwhile, Mariya Sareer is praying for an end to the shutdown and the burning of schools so she can get her life back. “I just want to return to school, study and play cricket,” she says.

Students at the “República de Venezuela” School in the indigenous Lenca village of Coloaca in western Honduras, where they have a vegetable garden to grow produce and at the same time learn about the importance of a healthy and nutritious diet. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
COALACA, Honduras, Jul 15 2016 (IPS)

Barely 11 years old and in the sixth grade of primary school, this student dreams of becoming a farmer in order to produce food so that the children in his community never have to go hungry. Josué Orlando Torres of the indigenous Lenca people lives in a remote corner of the west of Honduras.

He is part of a success story in this village of Coalaca, population 750, in the municipality of Las Flores in the department (province) of Lempira.

Five years ago a Sustainable School Feeding Programme (PAES) was launched in this area. It has improved local children’s nutritional status and enjoys plenty of local, governmental and international participation.

Torres is proud of his school, named for the Republic of Venezuela, where 107 students are supported by their three teachers in their work in a “teaching vegetable garden”. They grow peas and beans, fruit and vegetables that are used daily in their school meals.

Torres told IPS that he did not used to like green vegetables, but now “I’ve started to like them, and I love the fresh salads and green juices.”

Josué Orlando Torres, an 11-year-old student, dreams of becoming a farmer to ensure that children like himself have access to free high-quality food at this school in the indigenous community of Coloaca, where a sustainable school programme is beginning to overcome chronic malnutrition. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

“Here they taught us what is good for us to eat, and also to plant produce so that there will always be food for us. We have a vegetable garden in which we all plant coriander, radishes, cucumbers, cassava (yucca), squash (pumpkin), mustard and cress, lettuce, carrots and other nutritious foods,” he said while indicating each plant in the school garden.

When he grows up, Torres does not want to be a doctor, engineer or fireman like other children of his age. He wants to be “a good farmer to grow food to help my community, help kids like me to be well-fed and not to fall asleep in class because they had not eaten and were ill,” as happened before, he said.

The 48 schools scattered throughout Las Flores municipality, together with other schools in Lempira province, especially those located within what is called the dry corridor of Honduras, characterised by poverty and the onslaughts of climate change, are part of a series of sustainable pilot projects being promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and PAES is one of these.

The purpose of these sustainable school projects is to improve the nutritional status of students and at the same time give direct support to small farmers, by means of a comprehensive approach and effective local-local, local-regional and central government-international aid  interactions.

As a result of this effort in indigenous Lenca communities and Ladino (mixed indigenous-white or mestizo) communities such as Coalaca, La Cañada, Belén and Lepaera (all of them in Lempira province), schoolchildren and teachers alike have said goodbye to fizzy drinks and sweets, and undertaken a radical change in their food habits.

Parents, teachers, students, each community and municipal government, three national Secretariats (Ministries) and FAO have joined forces so that these remote Honduran regions may see off the problems of famine and malnutrition that once were rife here.

A family production chain was developed to supply the schools with food for their students, who average over 100 at each educational centre, complementing the school vegetable gardens.

Every Monday, small farmers bring their produce to a central distribution centre, and municipal vehicles distribute it to the schools.

View of Belén, a town that is the head of a rural municipality of the same name amid the mountains of western Honduras, in the department (province) of Lempira, where a programme rooted in local schools is improving nutrition among remote indigenous communities. Credit: Courtesy of Thelma Mejía

Erlín Omar Perdomo, from the village of La Cañada in Belén municipality, told IPS: “When FAO first started to organise us we never thought things would go as far as they did, our initial concern was to stave off the hunger there was around here and help our children to be better nourished.”

“But as the project developed, they trained us to become food providers as well. Today this community is supplying 13 schools in Belén with fresh, high-quality produce,” the community leader said with satisfaction.

They organised themselves as savings micro-cooperatives to which members pay small subscriptions and which finance projects or businesses at lowinterest rates and without the need for collateral, as required by banks, or for payment of abusive interest rates, as charged by intermediaries known as “coyotes”.

“We never dreamed the project would reach the size it is today. FAO sent us to Brazil to see for ourselves how food was being supplied to schools by the families of students, but, here we are and this is our story,” said the 36-year-old Perdomo.

“We all participate, we generate income and bring development to our communities, to the extent that now the drop-out rate is practically nil, and our women have also joined the project. They organise themselves in groups to attend the school every week to cook our children’s food,” he said.

Rubenia Cortes, a mother and volunteer cook at the school in the remote village of La Cañada in the department (province) of Lempira, in western Honduras. They cook in a kitchen that was built by parents and teachers at the school. Credit: Courtesy of Thelma Mejía

A 2012 report by the World Food Programmme (WFP) indicated that in Central America, Honduras had the second worst child malnutrition levels, after Guatemala. According to the WFP, one in four children suffers from chronic malnutrition, with the worst problems seen in the south and west of the country.

But in Coalaca, La Cañada and other nearby villages and small towns, the situation has begun to be reverted in the past five years. The FAO project is based on the creation of a new nutritional culture; an expert advises and educates local families in eating a healthy and balanced diet.

“We don’t put salt and pepper on our food any more. We have replaced them with aromatic herbs. FAO trained us, teaching us what nutrients were to be found in each vegetable, fruit or pulse, and in what quantities,” said Rubenia Cortes.

“Look, our children now have beautiful skin, not dull like before,” she explained proudly to IPS. Cortes is a cook at the Claudio Barrera school in La Cañada, population 700, part of Belén municipality where there are 32 PAES centres.

Cortes and the other women are all heads of households who do voluntary work to prepare food at the school. “Before, we would sell our oranges and buy fizzy drinks or sweets, but now we do not; it is better to make orange juice for all of us to drink,” she said as an example.

From Monday to Friday, students at the PAES schools have a highly nutritious meal which they eat mid-morning.

The change is remarkable, according to Edwin Cortes, the head teacher of the La Cañada school. “The children no longer fall asleep in class. I used to ask them, ‘Did you understand the lesson?’ But what could they answer? They had come to school on an empty stomach. How could they learn anything?” he exclaimed.

In the view of María Julia Cárdenas, the FAO representative in Honduras, the most valuable thing about this project is that “we can leave the project, but it will not die, because everyone has appropriated it.”

“It is highly sustainable, and models like this one overcome frontiers and barriers, because everyone is united in a common purpose, that of feeding the children,” she told IPS after giving a delegation of experts and Central American Parliamentarians a guided tour of the untold stories that arise in this part of the dry corridor of Honduras.

There are 1.4 million children in primary and basic secondary schooling in Honduras, out of a total population of 8.7 million people. Seven ethnic groups live alongside each other in the country, of which the largest is the Lenca people, a group of just over 400,000 people.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/ Translated by Valerie Dee

“We need a transformative change in our food and agricultural policies to have sustainability” – Ren Wang, FAO’s Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
NAPLES, Italy, Oct 9 2014 (IPS)

In his parody of the Michael Jackson hit “Beat It”, the American satirist and singer Weird Al Yankovic has a parent urging his son to eat the food on his plate, warning that “other kids are starving in Japan”.

The parody has raised smiles since it was released 30 years ago, but today “Eat It” could be a battle cry for activists trying to reduce the widespread waste of enormous quantities of food, an urgent concern around the world and no laughing matter.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 1.3 billion tonnes of food go to waste globally every year. Meanwhile, 805 million of the world’s people are still experiencing chronic undernourishment or hunger, Ren Wang, Assistant Director General of FAO’s Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department, told the 11^th International Media Forum on the Protection of Nature.“Even if just one-fourth of the food currently lost or wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed 870 million hungry people in the world” – SAVE FOOD Initiative

“We need a transformative change in our food and agricultural policies to have sustainability,” Wang said.

Organised by the Rome-based environmental group Greenaccord and hosted for the second time by the city of Naples from Oct. 8 to 11, this year’s forum – entitled ‘Feeding the World: Food, Agriculture and Environment’ – has brought together experts, journalists and policy makers.

It comes as the United Nations’ International Year of Family Farming draws to a close, and as rising food prices continue to pound the incomes of vulnerable groups.

Wang said that although global food production has tripled since 1946 and the world has reduced the prevalence of undernourishment over the past 20 years from 18.7 to 11.3 percent, food security is still a crucial issue.

The food that goes to waste is about one-third of current global food production, so expanding current agricultural output is not necessarily the answer. In fact, the world produces enough food for every individual to have about 2,800 calories each day, according to scientists. But while some people are able to waste food, others do not have enough.

Even if waste and hunger might not be directly related, there is unquestionable inequality in the world’s food system, said Gary Gardner, a senior fellow with the Worldwatch Institute, a research and outreach institute that focuses on sustainable policies.

“In wealthy countries, food waste often occurs at the level of the retailer or consumer, either at the grocery store or at home where a lot of food is thrown away,” he told IPS.

By contrast, food waste in developing countries mainly happens at the “farm or processing” levels, Gardner said. “Food is lost because usually there aren’t systems for getting it to processing facilities and then to the consumer efficiently.”

Food losses and waste amount to roughly 680 billion dollars in industrialised countries and 310 billion dollars in developing countries, according to the SAVE FOOD Initiative, a project involving the German trade fair group Messe Düsseldorf in collaboration with FAO and the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

Saying that “consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes)”, the SAVE FOOD initiative found that “even if just one-fourth of the food currently lost or wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed 870 million hungry people in the world.”

In Europe, the vast quantity of food thrown out by supermarkets has sometimes sparked public outrage, especially in countries where it is illegal for people to help themselves to the rejected items.

British supermarket chain Tesco has acknowledged discarding some 28,500 tonnes of food in the first six months of 2013, according to reports, and in Britain overall, an estimated 15 million tonnes of food is wasted annually.

In the United States, agencies estimate that roughly 40 percent of the food produced is discarded in landfills, with supermarkets accounting for much of this.

Yet, on both sides of the Atlantic, people can be prosecuted for taking food from dumpsters – a sore point with some activists who have organised public campaigns that offer meals cooked from thrown-away food.

At the Naples forum, where experts discussed the social and environmental consequences of food waste, among other issues, Gardner of the Worldwatch Institute described the experiences of activist Rob Greenfield, who has fed himself entirely from food from dumpsters while cycling across the United States.

“Many times the food was in packages that hadn’t been opened – whole boxes of cereal, sodas, that kind of thing – that for various reasons had been thrown out but which was perfectly good food to him,” Gardner told IPS in an interview.

“That’s not the optimal way for us to get rid of waste,” he added. “The better way would be not to generate that waste in the first place.”

Some solutions

Tesco and several other British supermarket chains have agreed to a programme of waste reduction, and restaurants in several countries are also taking steps not only to decrease the waste but to turn it into biogas to be used for energy.

Gardner told IPS that instead of throwing away food, supermarkets should be looking at donating produce to local organisations such as soup kitchens, although it would be better if they “weren’t generating the waste to begin with.”

On biogas, some speakers said that using food or household waste for energy at the local level could contribute to wider environmental solutions, but again the main aim should be to stem the creation of waste.

“Food security and climate change have certain challenges in common,” said Adriana Opromollo, international advocacy officer for food security and climate change at Caritas Internationalis, a federation of charity organisations.

“At the local level, we have seen where using food or household waste can be a successful strategy. But we have to focus on solutions that are tailored to the particular context,” she told IPS.

The ways to reduce waste can begin simply. Some U.S. food services companies found that by providing only plates (without accompanying trays), in school cafeterias, students were encouraged to take only the food they could consume, consequently throwing away 25 percent less waste.

Perhaps schools should record another version of “Eat It” for lunch hour.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Soundus, a young girl being treated in hospital for injuries from Israeli shelling of Gaza (August 2014). Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

By Khaled Alashqar
GAZA CITY, Aug 16 2014 (IPS)

“My child became blind and lost the ability to speak, his dad died and his three brothers are seriously wounded. He still has not been told about the loss of his dad,” says the mother of 7-year-old Mohamad Badran. 

Mohamad is in hospital for treatment after being seriously injured in Israel shelling of Gaza. “My only way to communicate with him is by hugging him,” his mother adds.

Israeli air attacks and shelling in Gaza have left more than 1,870 dead and thousands injured. They have caused damage to infrastructure and hundreds of homes, forcing a large number of families to seek shelter in schools run by the U.N. agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA).Some of the children have suffered serious injuries which cannot be treated in Gaza due to the limited medical infrastructure and capacities caused by the Israeli blockade.

In a news note, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that Israeli airstrikes and shelling have taken a “devastating toll … on Gaza’s youngest and most vulnerable.” It said that at least 429 children had been killed and 2,744 severely injured.

Some of the children injured have suffered serious injuries which cannot be treated in Gaza due to the limited medical capacities caused by the Israeli blockade.

According to UNICEF, about 400,000 children – half of Gaza’s 1.8 million people are children under the age of 18 – are showing symptoms of psychological problems, including stress and depression, clinging to parents and nightmares.

Monika Awad, spokesperson for UNICEF in Jerusalem, told IPS that 30 percent of dead as a result of the Israeli military attacks are children, and “UNICEF and its local partners have been implementing psychosocial support programmes in Gaza schools where refugee families are sheltering.”

”We have a moral responsibility to protect the right of children to live in safety and dignity in accordance with U.N. charter for children’s rights,” she added.

However, the acute psychological effects of the Israeli attacks Gaza that have emerged among children, such as loss of speech, are among the biggest challenges that face psychotherapists.

Dr Sami Eweda, a consultant and psychiatrist with the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (a local civil society organisation working on trauma and healing issues), told IPS: “When the Israeli war against Gaza ends, psychotherapists will grapple with many expected dilemmas such as the cases of the murder of entire families and the murder of the parents who represent the central protection and tenderness for the children. Such terrible cases put children in a state of loss and shock.”

According to Eweda, “we first need to stop the main cause of these traumas and psychological problems, which is the Israeli war against Gaza, and then begin an emergency intervention to support children’s health and treat traumas and severe psychological effects, including the loss of speech, which is considered as one of the self-defence mechanisms for overcoming traumas.”

Throughout the Gaza Strip, where entire neighbourhoods such as Shujaiyeh and Khuza’a have been destroyed by the Israeli invasion and heavy bombardment, access to basic services is practically impossible.

Displaced children in a UN-run school in the Shujaiyeh neighbourhood of Gaza (August 2014). Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

People in these areas have been suffering difficulties in accessing drinking water and have been living in an almost complete blackout since the Israeli shelling of the power station which was the sole source of electricity in besieged Gaza.

Social Watch– a network of civil society organisations from around the world monitoring their governments’ commitments to end poverty and achieve gender justice – Thursday called on the international community to declare the Gaza Strip an “international humanitarian disaster zone”, as requested by Palestinian NGOs.

“The unrestricted violation of international law and humanitarian principles adds to the instability in the region and further fuels the arms race and the marginalisation of the issues of poverty eradication and social justice that should be the main common priority,” said Social Watch.

“The recurrence of these episodes in Gaza is the result of not having acted before on similar war crimes and of not having pursued with good faith negotiations towards a lasting peace,” it added.

In a press release, Save the Children, the world’s leading independent organisation for promoting children’s rights, said: “Children never start wars, yet they are the ones that are killed, maimed, traumatised and left homeless, terrified and permanently scarred.”

“Save the Children will not stop until innocent children are no longer under fire and the root causes of this conflict are addressed. If the international community does not take action now, the violence against children in Gaza will haunt our generation forever.”

In an interview with IPS, Save the Children’s spokesperson in Gaza, Asama Damo, said: ”We call for a permanent ceasefire and for lifting the siege on Gaza to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid and basic services to children.”

“We also need the international community to intervene to end the catastrophic humanitarian situation and fight the skin diseases that are widely spreading among the refugees at UNRWA schools due to overcrowding and congestion.”

According to UNRWA, 87 of their schools are being used as shelters by the refugees, half of whom are children under the age of 18. Ziad Thabet, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education in Gaza, told IPS:

“Israel deliberately targeted educational institutions and the education sector in general; large proportion of those killed and wounded are children and school students. Many schools and kindergartens were attacked.”

In the current disastrous situation in Gaza, it seems not only that the burnt bodies of Gaza’s children are the heritage of war, but also that their educational and health future is being burned.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Still edible food thrown away together with plastic bottles and empty crates at local food market in Lucca, Italy. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
LUCCA, Italy, Jul 29 2014 (IPS)

“Only two years ago, the soup kitchen was serving 50 meals a day. Today the number has almost doubled and, what is even more worrying, we have started receiving families with children,” says Donatella Turri, director of the Caritas Diocese of Lucca.

The paradox is that the lengthening queues at the Lucca soup kitchen come against a backdrop of increasing food loss and waste.

Turri has no doubts concerning the impact of the current economic crisis on Italian families in terms of food security – “we call it ‘poverty of the third week’.”If our goal is to feed the planet, we cannot simply increase production and keep losing and wasting one-third of it. Our first commandment needs to be 'thou shall not waste' – Andrea Segré, President of Last Minute Market

“It means that the poor are no longer the homeless, the mentally ill and the drug addicts. More and more often we get requests for primary goods from families that simply cannot reach the end of the month with their salaries,” she told IPS.

Turri’s claims are confirmed at the national level by the yearly Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) report on poverty. According to the survey, absolute poverty [the threshold below which a family cannot afford the goods and services that are essential to guarantee a barely acceptable standard of living] has maintained its steady increase in recent years, rising from 4.6 percent in 2010 to 7.9 percent in 2013.

“The traditional distinction between the quantitative aspect of food security being typical of developing countries, and the qualitative one being a concern of the industrialised world, is fading away,” Andrea Segré, Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture at Bologna University and President of Last Minute Market, a company that recovers unsold or non-marketable goods in favour of charity organisations, told IPS.

However, while access to food is also becoming increasingly difficult for the low-income class of developed countries, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that Europe, North America and Oceania are top of the world’s food wasting classification, with a per capita food loss of almost 300 kg per year in North America.

“Food loss and waste are dependent on specific conditions and local circumstances,” Eliana Haberkon from FAO’s Office for Communications, Partnerships and Advocacy, explained to IPS.

“In low-income countries, food loss is mainly connected to managerial and technical limitations in harvesting techniques, storage, transportation, processing, cooling facilities, infrastructure, packaging, etc. … and food waste is expected to constitute a growing problem due to undergoing food system changes and due to factors such as expansion of supermarket chains and changes in diets and lifestyle.”

Currently, the biggest gap between rich and poor nations remains the quantity of food wasted at the consumer level. According to FAO figures, Europeans and North-Americans waste between 95 to 115 kg of food per capita every year, while in sub-Saharan Africa and South/Southeast Asia the number drops down to only 6 to 11 kg a year.

At the beginning of July, Last Minute Market, in cooperation with the SWG survey company, published a report called ‘Waste Watcher’. Using a complex questionnaire survey among Italian consumers, the outcomes paint a comprehensive picture of the social dynamics and behaviour of families that lead to food waste.

“The overall waste of food in Italy is worth 8.1 billion euro every year, and most of it comes from our houses. The rest of the losses, in agriculture, industries, distribution and service, can be recovered, but it is much less significant than what we throw in our bins,” said Segrè, commenting on the survey results.

Last Minute Market is now working to prepare the ground for a discussion on food waste during EXPO 2015, which will take place in under the heading ‘Feeding the planet, energy for life’.

“In order to be credible, EXPO needs to take into account the issue of food waste,” said Segré. “If our goal is to feed the planet, we cannot simply increase production and keep losing and wasting one-third of it. Our first commandment needs to be thou shall not waste.”

Indeed, as Haberon explained, the consequences of food loss and waste stretch far beyond their monetary value, “affecting current use and future availability and causing unnecessary pressure on natural resources.”

Studies by FAO estimated a yearly global quantitative food loss and waste of 30 percent of cereals, 40-50 percent of food crops (fruits and vegetables), 25 percent of oil seeds, meat and dairy products and 30 percent of fish.

Both Last Minute Market and Caritas agree on the paramount role of education in tackling food waste. In cooperation with more than ten local primary schools, the Caritas Diocese of Lucca has managed to recover excess food intact from school canteens for a value of 40,000 euro, taking it to the soup kitchens it manages.

This initiative has allowed it to develop a parallel food education project with the children of the schools involved.

“We obviously need normative support to help us reduce food waste, but first of all we must re-introduce food education, starting from primary schools,” said Segrè. “The current generation has completely lost the value of food and we must get it back.”

A new toilet for girl students at a school in Murshidabad district in the eastern Indian state West Bengal. Credit: Sulabh International/IPS.

By Ranjita Biswas
KOLKATA, Apr 19 2014 (IPS)

In large parts of rural India, the absence of separate toilets for growing girls is taking a toll on their education. Many are unable to attend school during their menstrual cycle.

According to the country’s Annual Status of Education Report in 2011, lack of access to toilets causes girls between 12 and 18 years of age to miss around five days of school every month, or around 50 school days every year.“There is a sharp increase in the dropout rate, mainly among girls, as they move from primary to upper primary, because we cannot till date provide them proper toilets."

The country’s Supreme Court had ruled in 2011 that every public school has to have toilets. But a pan-India study, ‘The Learning Blocks’, conducted by the NGO CRY in 2013, shows that 11 percent of schools do not have toilets and only 18 percent have separate ones for girls. In 34 percent of schools, toilets are in bad condition or simply unusable.

Atindra Nath Das, regional director of CRY East, told IPS, “Children do not have safe drinking water, schools still do not have their own building and toilets are missing. No wonder 8.1 million children in India are still out of school.

“There is a sharp increase in the dropout rate, mainly among girls, as they move from primary to upper primary, because we cannot till date provide them proper toilets,” he said.

A 2010 report by the U.N. University Institute for Water, Environment and Health noted, “Once girls reach puberty, lack of access to sanitation becomes a central cultural and human health issue, contributing to female illiteracy and low levels of education, in turn contributing to a cycle of poor health for pregnant women and their children.”

According to India’s 2011 census data, national sanitation coverage is 49 percent but the rural figure is worse, at 31 percent.  It is even lower for Dalits or socially marginalised communities (23 percent) and tribal people (16 percent).

Lack of sanitation facilities is still a stumbling block for the effective spread of health and education programmes in many parts of rural India.

Mahila Jagriti Samiti (MJS), an NGO working in Jharkhand, an economically backward state in eastern India with a large tribal population, has been conducting awareness programmes on the use of sanitation, but is not very happy with the results.

Mahi Ram Mahto, director of MJS, told IPS: “We have done 300 sanitation programmes, even helping to build toilets in homes with funding from government agencies, but only 15 to 20 percent of the beneficiaries use them.”

Without a cistern for flushing, the toilets pose a problem, he says. “People have to carry water in buckets from a common water source like a hand pump or a pond; most households do not have taps. They say they might as well go to the open field.”

In 1999, India launched the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan or Total Sanitation Campaign, a community-based programme, under which it gives an equivalent of about 80 dollars to a household to set up a toilet. But many poor people say that is not enough and still defecate in the fields or by railway lines.

The campaign has “provisions for toilet facility and hygiene education in all types of government rural schools (up to higher secondary or class 12) with emphasis on toilets for girls.”

But provisions alone do not help, activists say.

Access to water for toilets is a major problem in many rural schools in the eastern state of West Bengal, says Vijay K. Jha, honorary controller at the state branch of Sulabh International. The NGO leads one of the world’s biggest and most successful sanitation programmes.

“We have worked in 50 schools in Murshidabad district of India’s eastern state West Bengal, providing infrastructure and running awareness programmes on hygiene. Plans are afoot to extend the work to 100 more in the near future,” Jha told IPS.

Despite separate toilets for girls, the results are not satisfactory. As in the case of Jharkhand, non-availability of water hinders toilet use. Most schools do not have water pipes running up to the compounds.

Diara Hazi Nasrat Mallick High School in Murshidabad district, where Sulabh has constructed a separate toilet, is a typical example.

Alaul Haque, the school headmaster, told IPS, “We are happy that this facility has been built. But girls still have to bring water from the tubewell because there’s no water pipe connection in the school yet.” Half of about 300 students at the school are girls.

Another institution in the same district, Gayeshpur High School, has the same complaint. “With around 300 girl students in our co-ed school, we need at least two toilets. We were happy that the toilet has been built, but it still lacks flowing water,” headmaster Prasanta Chatterjee told IPS.

The government scheme under which NGOs take up the work of building toilets does not include providing water pipes – a task that depends on local agencies.

Girl students during the menstrual cycle are advised not to carry heavy objects like buckets filled with water; so they avoid school altogether during those days if there is no easy access to water in the toilets.

Under India’s Right to Education Act of 2009, which recognises the right of children to free and compulsory education till the completion of elementary school, provision of proper toilets as part of school infrastructure is mandatory, says S.N. Dave, WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) specialist at Unicef Kolkata.

Dave told IPS: “West Bengal being in a riverine area, water is not much of a problem. But there is scope for improvement in terms of better coordination between agencies.”

Some states like Kerala in the south and Sikkim in the northeast fare better.

According to a Planning Commission study in 2013, Sikkim had the best performing gram panchayats (village councils) and maintenance of sanitation facilities, having achieved 100 percent sanitation.

Girls at a makeshift school in Khyber Agency in the troubled northern region of Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Apr 7 2014 (IPS)

Following scattered defiance of the Taliban earlier, a new wave of students is now heading for education in schools and colleges across the troubled north of Pakistan.

“There is a steady increase in enrolment of students because parents have realised the significance of education, and now they want to thwart the Taliban’s efforts to deprive students of education,” Pervez Khan, education officer in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), tells IPS.

In 2012, he says, the literacy rate for girls was three percent in FATA. That rose to 10.5 percent in 2013."Anything opposed by the Taliban benefits the people.” -- Muhammad Darwaish, a shopkeeper in Khyber Agency

The boys literacy rate shot up correspondingly to 36.6 percent compared to 29.5 percent.

The Taliban are opposed to modern education. They have destroyed about 500 schools, including 300 schools for girls.

Khan says the Taliban’s campaign against education is only propelling more of the tribal population towards schools.

“The majority of people know that the Taliban are pursuing anti-people activities, such as damaging schools, and therefore they are now coming in droves,” he says.

Muhammad Darwaish, a shopkeeper in Khyber Agency, agrees with Khan. “I enrolled my two daughters and one son in school because I am now convinced that education will benefit them. Anything opposed by the Taliban benefits the people.”

Saeeda Bibi, one of his daughters, says she enjoys school. “I go to school everyday and am very happy there. Before, I used to pass the whole day in the streets.”

Darwaish says he will make every effort to keep his children in school. “I am poor but I will make all efforts to see my children educated.”

Khyber Agency, one of the seven tribal agencies within FATA, has faced some of the worst of Taliban violence. Since 2005, 85 schools have been blown up, depriving about 50,000 children of a school to go to on the militancy-stricken Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

But Khyber Agency saw a 16.1 percent rise in enrolment last year compared to 2012.

Like Darwaish, scores of parents in FATA are now taking the education of their sons and daughters more seriously.

Abdul Jameel of Kurram Agency sends both his sons to school. “Militants have blown up three schools in our area, due to which my children sat at home. They are back because now the Taliban-damaged schools have been reconstructed.”

Director of Education in FATA, Ikram Ahmed, says they have seen a 21.3 percent rise in boys and girls enrolment in Kurram Agency, 7.5 percent in South Waziristan, 4.3 percent in North Waziristan and 5.1 percent in Orakzai Agency.

In all 124,424 girls are enrolled in 1,551 primary schools, 19,614 girls in 158 middle schools, 13,837 girls in 42 high schools and 1,134 girls in five higher secondary schools in FATA, Ahmed tells IPS.

“In the past few years, militant activities and the poor law and order situation in tribal areas badly hampered girls’ education but the government’s measures have paid off,” he says.

“The massive allocation of 3.67 billion rupees [37 million dollars] offset the impact of damage caused to educational institutions during the war against terrorism.”

Annually, education was given top priority in the development programme of 2013 – at 24.64 percent of the FATA budget of 18.5 billion rupees (188 million dollars).

The current year will bring 38 new middle schools, 125 primary schools and three hostels for female teachers.

Akram says that in some areas the army damaged schools because militants had been using them. “About 10 schools were destroyed by the army in South Waziristan where Taliban militants lived,” he says. All those schools are being rebuilt.

“In some areas, the government has established tent schools to provide education to children and at other places dozens of well-off people have offered private buildings and structures to be used as schools,” he says.

Bismillah Khan, one of the 20 lawmakers from FATA, tells IPS that the government will provide more scholarships and free textbooks to support poor students.

“We have suffered a great deal due to prolonged militancy,” says Iqbal Afridi, a leader of the Imran Khan-led Pakistan Tehreek Insaf. “Our students have suffered, businessmen and farmers have lost their work, and the only way to make progress is education. The good news is that people now want to educate their children at any cost.”

Out of school children in Ibrahim Hyderi, a fishing community near Karachi. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS.

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Nov 6 2013 (IPS)

Rahmatullah Balal has spent ten years counting the schools that aren’t. The particular kind of Pakistani schools that are called “ghost” schools.

These are schools on paper, but really are sometimes enclosures to keep animals. Or, spaces for the locally powerful.

Balal, 35, chairperson of the Sindh Rural Development Society, a network of 40 grassroots organisations, has been pursuing education officers mostly in and around Hala city in Sindh province in southeast Pakistan to show them the schools that don’t exist.“There are animals kept in schools, and the buildings have been turned into stables. This is what we are doing to our children when education is a constitutional right.”

The education department paid no attention to his complaints, and some three years ago, he decided to stand outside the homes of politicians wearing black arm bands with a group of friends, or go to events where the the politicians would be invited as guests. “They listened but did absolutely nothing, because there was no pressure from the parents,” he said.

Last year his group decided to use digital technology. “We got the community involved and whenever we heard of a ghost or non-functional school, hundreds of text messages would be sent from different numbers to the MP.”

This brought media attention, with local newspapers highlighting the issue almost daily. Still, nothing changed.

As a last resort, Balal decided in January this year to move an application in the Supreme Court asking the Chief Justice to take notice of the “pitiable condition” of education in Sindh, with particular reference to ghost and non-functional schools.

Through text messaging, he asked local community-based organisations and individuals to send in details of such schools. “Within ten days, we had made a list of 1,300 such schools all over Sindh.”

The Sindh High Court conducted a fresh survey and reported to the Supreme Court earlier this year that there were some 6,721 such schools owned by the government, and for which it even disburses funds.

“There are animals kept in schools, and the buildings have been turned into stables,” Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry observed on Feb. 11 this year while hearing a petition filed by Balal. “This is what we are doing to our children when education is a constitutional right.”

Balal is still awaiting a legal resolution. “I would like to see all those who have been sponging off the government to be held accountable,” he told IPS.

Sadiqa Salahuddin, head of the Indus Resource Centre, said she would prefer to call these “closed” schools. Some of the 130 schools run by the Indus Resource Centre in Khairpur, Sukkur, Dadu, Jamshoro and Karachi districts in Sindh province were once non-functional schools.

“Ghost schools, especially, are equated with corruption, particularly with teacher absenteeism, when that is not always the case,” she told IPS. “Some of the teachers of these very schools may still be teaching and drawing an honest paycheck, but posted by their supervisor elsewhere under pressure from a higher up.”

She admitted it could well be the case that teachers get themselves transferred to a more convenient area.

“Posting female teachers to far-flung village schools when there is no public transport is the first step to throw a spanner in the career of even the most dedicated and committed of teachers,” she told IPS. She blamed the centralised recruitment policy where government-employed teachers can be posted anywhere.

According to Transparency international’s Global Corruption Report on education presented on Oct. 1 in Pakistan, some teachers work in collusion with education administrators to “falsify reports on the functioning of schools” while actually working elsewhere.

The problem of teachers not showing up for work, or schools turning into cattle pens, lies with the government’s skewed education policy, said Salahuddin.

The government system of building schools on land donated by the community is one of the reasons, she said. “In rural Sindh, which I know best, land belongs to a handful of powerful people, and when they part with their land, there will always be strings attached, influence wielded and interference.”

As things stand today, Pakistan will not be able to meet its target on education for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. Nor will it be able to achieve the goal of universal primary education as sought in the Dakar Declaration 2000, to which Pakistan is a signatory.

A 2010 study undertaken by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) revealed that some 25 million children between the age of five and 16 were missing out on school. In India in contrast, there were an estimated eight million children between 6-14 out of school in 2009, a significant decline from 25 million in 2003.

The study conducted with support from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics and the Lahore University of Management Sciences did not include the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistan administered Kashmir.

Pakistan spends 1.9 percent of its GDP on education, compared to a global standard of four percent. In contrast, 54 percent of the budget goes to defence and servicing of debt to buys weapons.

However, a part of even this low budget remains underutilised. The four provinces of Pakistan spent 31.3 billion rupees (293 million dollars) on education in 2012-2013 – less than half the allocated budget, according to Alif Ailaan, an alliance of NGOs working to bring education to the forefront of public discourse.

The group is campaigning for both an increased budget and for better utilisation. “We need both because the scale of the solution has to match the scale of the problem,” Mosharraf Zaidi from Alif Ailaan told IPS.

Zaidi said construction of school buildings and the hiring of teachers have become tools of political patronage. And yet education is not politicised enough because politicians are not “expressing any outrage at the outcome of this education system.”

Islamic studies curriculum in Somalia’s schools is a radical form of Islam that analysts say is contributing to the growing militancy of the country’s youth. Credit: Ahmed Osman/IPS

By Ahmed Osman
MOGADISHU, Oct 4 2013 (IPS)

Mukhatar Jama has been teaching at a secondary school in Mogadishu for the past decade. Religious education is part and parcel of the curriculum of all schools in Somalia, but he says most parents are unaware of exactly what their children are being taught – a radical form of Islam.

“The Islamic studies curriculum you hear is the pure Wahhabism, exported from Saudi Arabia, that teaches children that all those who are not Wahhabi are non-believers, including the children’s parents, and that it is ok to kill non-Muslims,” Jama told IPS.

While there are no statistics on how many schools there are in Somalia, most here follow the Saudi curriculum, which advocates and inculcates Wahhabism. This is a far more radical interpretation of Islam than the moderate Sufi school that older generation of Somalis follows.

The radicalisation of Somalia’s youth has already started spilling over the war-torn country’s borders to its neighbours, influencing the region’s fragile security situation."Al-Shabaab, which means youth in Arabic, has realised the potential of Somalia’s young and are working to capitalise on it in our schools." -- analyst Omar Yusuf

It has taken root not only in Somalia and Kenya, but in the whole sub-region, Omar Yusuf, an analyst in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, told IPS.

“The event of Westgate is perhaps one of many wake-up calls for governments in the region to tackle the growing radicalisation and the logical next step of deadly militancy in the youth of the region,” Yusuf said.

The Sep. 21 attack on the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi by the Somali Islamist militant group Al-Shabaab left more than 70 dead and dozens injured.

The Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab had repeatedly vowed to target Kenya after the country’s troops crossed over the border into Somalia in 2011 and ousted the radical group’s fighters from key areas in southern Somalia, including Kismayo.

Al-Shabaab advocates the establishment of an Islamic State not only in Somalia, but in East Africa. It adheres to the fundamentalist Wahhabi school of Islam. The extremist group’s ideology seems to be gaining ground in Somalia due to a number of factors.

“Think about it, schools in Somalia provide Al-Shabaab with the radical ideological teaching for the youth and when they graduate what they just need is to give [them] military training and there you have a qualified Al-Shabaab fighter,” Yusuf said.

Both teachers and parents seem divided over what is being taught at Somali schools, with some accepting it as part of the children’s religious education, and others expressing concern that their children are being indoctrinated to be Wahhabists without their consent.

“I came to know that my son gets indoctrinated with extremist views at school. He had to change schools a number of times but all schools in Mogadishu use the same Wahhabi books that we took from Saudi Arabia. The whole country will covert to Wahhabism in no time,” one parent, who sought anonymity for fear of reprisals, told IPS.

Another parent, Omar Kulmiye, disagreed that his children were being radicalised by this teaching. “I don’t [know] much about religion but I think since they are learning Islam it is ok with me and I have not sensed anything different in my children since they started school five years ago,” he told IPS.

Hussen said three factors have contributed to radicalisation and militancy among Somali youths. Lack of political participation, and of employment and education opportunities draws youth to militant groups, she said.

“The search for a ‘second family’ and a sense of belonging offered by militant groups…has attracted many youths,” Hussen said. “Young recruits are offered a group to belong to, a job with salary as well as marriage – things that are otherwise hard for them to obtain in Somali society.”

The unemployment rate for youth aged 14 to 29 is 67 percent — one of the highest in the world. According to the United Nations Development Programme’s “Somalia Human Development Report 2012”, 70 percent of Somalia’s 10.2 million people are under the age of 30.

The attack on the Westgate Shopping Mall comes as no surprise as Al-Shabaab has been spreading its radicalising tentacles in the region, local security expert Muhumed Abdi told IPS.

“This was a crisis that has been simmering for years because the radical groups have found not only Somalia but neighbouring countries fertile ground to grow and recruit, with governments in the region seemingly unprepared,” Abdi said.

However, the Somali government, along with the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and international partners, is currently trying to implement an ambitious initiative to put one million children to school. Through this Go 2 School Initiative the government has also proposed changes to the curriculum in the hope that this will help fight radicalism. According to UNICEF, enrolment rates here are among the lowest in the world with only four out of every 10 children attending school.

But the government faces huge resistance from private school administrators and parents who fear the changes would make education devoid of religious moral teaching for the young.

Islamist groups have condemned the campaign as an attempt by the government to westernise Somali education and sideline religious studies.

Numerous calls by IPS to Somalia’s ministry of education remained unanswered while one official declined to comment on the allegations that schools are used as breeding grounds for militancy in Somalia.

But Hussen said the Somali government recognised that youth are the “future of Somalia” and need empowerment.

“However, the government has not been very forthcoming in the implementation of this … as youth are still very much marginalised from the political arena,” she explained.

Yusuf agreed, but said the approach needs to be far more radical and start with a critical look at the kind of education Somali children receive in school during their formative years.

“There is a need for holistic approach to youth problems in Somalia because Al-Shabaab, which means youth in Arabic, has realised the potential of Somalia’s young and are working to capitalise on it in our schools. We need to change that,” Yusuf said.

The Somali government, in conjunction with the United Nations Children’s Fund has begun a campaign to get one million Somali children to school. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

By Maryan Qasim
MOGADISHU, Sep 14 2013 (IPS)

Somalia is well-known for being a country torn apart by decades of conflict, by hunger and instability. Today, with fragile stability emerging and a new government in place, there is an opportunity to define a new future of peace, prosperity and justice.



The capital city, Mogadishu, is changing at an extraordinary pace. On the streets the “thwack-thwack” sound that rings out in the mornings is not the clatter of machine guns, but the sound of hammers. The painters are painting and signs of construction are visible everywhere. There is hope.

Yet, that hope can only bear fruit when we have built the right foundations for our children.

Today in Somalia, the United Nations Children’s Fund estimates six out of 10 children aged between six and 12 have never seen the inside of a classroom. Never had the joy of discovering how to read, to write their name and translate numbers into practical knowledge. Never had the pride of a teacher telling them they have done well and encouraging them to do even better. Never belonged to a school community, where in that safe space they can learn to dream and believe in their potential.

I believe the success of a stable Somalia can only be measured by reversing the numbers of children, who are deprived their right to an education and by getting them into school, giving them hope to believe in a common future.

This month the country is mounting the Go-To-School Initiative (“Aada Dugsiyada”), which aims to enrol an additional one million children and young people back into the education system over the next three years. As part of this first phase we are enrolling nearly 100,000 additional primary school children across Somalia.

Schools will teach our children the basic skills of reading and writing skills, but more importantly it will educate them on what peace looks like by providing them with the stability of going to school every day and the experience of continuity and stability rather than violence and insecurity.

Somalia’s Minister for Human Development and Public Services Dr Maryan Qasim says that the success of a stable Somalia can only be measured by giving children an education. Courtesy: Susannah Price/UNICEF

Of course this is only the first step in reaching our ultimate goal of providing free quality education to all Somali children. But it is a quarter of the number of children and young people who are currently out of school and it is a historical first step in breaking with the past.

Its success though is a collective responsibility. Already, the Somali community has shown incredible support – volunteering and working with us day and night out of a deep sense of responsibility towards their country.

The Somali government is made up of many who have returned from different parts of the world to work alongside those who have always been here. Many of the staff working are people who have returned from the diaspora to help rebuild the country and believe in our ambitious goal.

Yet, despite the billions spent on securing the military victory, we urgently need a much greater investment now in the social sector. We cannot build schools, train teachers, and provide school books without these resources.

So while international partners have yet to commit, we have to rely on innovation and what little funding infrastructure we have to get children back to school.

My own dream is of a united, peaceful Somalia – at peace with itself, its neighbours and the rest of the world. My dream is for every Somali child to be in a safe and secure learning environment with quality education.

My dream is to see a Somalia where children are not afraid; where they can play out in the open fields like we used to play in our villages.

My dream is for Somalia to become a productive member of the community of nations and a country where the rule of law is respected, human rights are upheld and a country on the path of economic and human development.

I know that my dream can only become a reality by providing children with the opportunity to learn. After all, peace, education and development ought to be basic right, not luxuries, for every child in the world – including Somalia.

A more educated Somalia is a more peaceful Somalia.

* Dr Maryan Qasim is the Minister for Human Development and Public Services in the Federal Government of Somalia

Girls in a hostel in a school in Peshawar, sent there by parents defying Taliban threats to education. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

“I miss my mother and cry every night,” eight-year-old Afaq Ali tells IPS. He is a Class 5 student at the University Public School in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the administrative centre for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to its west.

Ali’s parents shifted him in 2010 from their village Pranghar in FATA’s Mohmand Agency to a school in Peshawar, 157 km away. The Taliban militants have since 2005 systematically destroyed 120 schools in this Pakistan district, one of the seven agencies that make up FATA on Afghanistan’s southeastern border.“It’s a massive sacrifice that I have allowed my 10-year-old daughter to stay in a hostel.” -- Gul Fam, a housewife from Aka Khel village in the FATA district

“I feel extremely bored and lonely because most of my classmates are from around here and stay at home with their parents,” adds Ali, his frame pencil-thin. “Because of this, I cannot study.”

Like Ali, there are many other homesick children in Peshawar’s schools whose families in FATA’s militancy-afflicted districts have had no alternative but to send them out to study.

Zareen Gul from the Dande Darpa Khel village in North Waziristan is unhappy about having to send his eight-year-old daughter Spogmay to a Peshawar school. A cobbler by profession, he travels 200 km to the city every month to see her.

“It was a very hard decision for us to send Spogmay to Peshawar because we miss her very much,” her mother Reshma tells IPS.

“The Taliban militants are responsible for our woes. We want education for our children, but they just don’t allow it,” says Gul. So, even though it wrenches his heart, he is determined to send his daughter to school.

Studying in Class 3 at the Umar Farooq Public School in Peshawar, Spogmay herself says she has loving teachers and good friends at school and in the hostel but they cannot replace her parents. “I love my father, mother and sisters,” she tells IPS. “Living away from them is difficult. But I will study because that’s what my parents want.”

Peshawar has a total of 5,000 schools, 2,000 of them in the private sector. These are already overburdened with local students. “The hostels are finding it hard to house more students,” says Saleem Khan, warden of the Turangzai hostel at the Islamia Collegiate School in Peshawar.

Rooms meant for two people are being allotted to four students, he says. “The situation is becoming increasingly difficult as more students arrive from FATA every year.”

Muhammad Fakhr Alam, a Peshawar-based education officer, says they had registered about 20,000 students from FATA for admission to schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2012. “About 90 percent of the students from FATA live in hostels,” he tells IPS.

There are, however, about 10 percent children from FATA whose parents have taken up rented accommodation in Peshawar for the sake of their wards’ education, Alam adds.

The Taliban militants, says Akhtar Rasool, deputy director of the education department in FATA, have destroyed 766 schools in the region till date. This has deprived almost 80,000 children, mostly girls, of education.

“Those who can afford it send their children to Peshawar and other adjacent districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” Rasool tells IPS. The bulk of the children stay back, without a school to go to.

Any initial sympathy the Taliban might have attracted when they were hounded out of Afghanistan in 2001 and forced to cross the 2,400-km porous border into Pakistan has long turned into anger.

“We are repentant over the hospitality we extended to Taliban and their Al-Qaeda friends when they came to seek refuge here,” says Salamat Gul, 50, a cloth merchant in the Ghareebabad village of Bajaur Agency, the smallest of FATA’s districts, located in the north.

The Taliban have destroyed 115 schools here. “They are hell-bent on depriving our children of education,” says Salamat Gul.

Twelve children from his family, including his two sons and daughter as well as nine nephews and nieces, are in Peshawar schools, he tells IPS.

Salamat Gul has travelled 120 km to Peshawar to get two of his nephews examined by doctors. They were both running a fever, and their families were extremely anxious on this account, he says. “There’s no one to take care of them at the hostel,” he tells IPS, as he waits outside the Peshawar Model School for his nephews to come out.

The Pakistan government, with financial assistance from the United States Agency for International Development, started building 130 schools in FATA in 2010 to ensure that students get back to school. “We have also contacted other donor agencies to rebuild the Taliban-damaged schools as soon as possible,” says Rasool.

Meanwhile those who are sending their children away think of it as a necessary sacrifice for their children to get educated. “It’s a massive sacrifice that I have allowed my 10-year-old daughter to stay in a hostel,” says Gul Fam, a housewife from Aka Khel village in Khyber Agency, the FATA district west of Peshawar and said to be its most literate.

Fam’s daughter Javeria Bibi is a Class 2 student at the University Model School in Peshawar and lives in a boarding house nearby. “She is very good in studies,” the proud mother tells IPS. “And not just that, she also takes part in sports and extracurricular activities.”

Fam has made a 150-km journey to Peshawar to attend the annual day function at her daughter’s school where she too was participating.

Fam now hopes that their sacrifices will bear fruit and her daughter will grow up to be an educationist who can help spread education back home. “Without education, the people of FATA cannot progress,” she says. That realisation is a battle half-won.

Students and teachers from a physical education school in Michoacán take part in protests in Mexico City. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Sep 12 2013 (IPS)

On his first day of fourth grade, Efraín found there were no desks or benches in the classroom in his Mexico City school. His parents had to help the teacher haul in furniture from other rooms so the children wouldn’t have to start the new school year sitting on the floor.

That day, Aug. 19, Efraín’s mother found out about the suspension of the swimming programme that served 15,000 public school students in the capital and had functioned successfully for 10 years.

She also learned of the start of teacher protests, which culminated in a national teachers’ strike on Wednesday Sept. 11.

“Being in the swim programme was a privilege for your children,” a public ministry official told the parents who demanded an explanation.

The parents didn’t know it, but the disappearance – by presidential decree – of the general directorate of physical education was merely the start of a series of changes in public education, planned by the conservative government of Enrique Peña Nieto.

The reforms have triggered an insurrection by teachers in roughly two-thirds of Mexico’s 31 states.

The problem is not a shortage of funds for education. The educational system, which serves some 26 million primary school students and 4.3 million secondary students, receives 17.5 percent of the federal budget.

But 93 percent of that goes to salaries of teachers and other staff according to “Education at a Glance 2013” by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the so-called “rich countries’ club”.

The report says that is the highest proportion among OECD countries, which include Mexico.

Efraín’s school is in the Benito Juárez borough in the capital – the municipality with the highest level of human development in the country, according to the United Nations Human Development (UNDP) index.

That means he is better off in terms of school conditions than children in the rest of the country.

To get to the bilingual school he heads, Raymundo Carrera has a four-hour walk every Sunday and crosses the Presa Miguel Alemán lake by motorised canoe in the region of Tuxtepec in the impoverished southern state of Oaxaca, which has a high concentration of indigenous people.

The 50-year-old, who has been a teacher for 26 years, lives in a hut with a tin roof and a dirt floor.

“That’s what the community gives you, and you get used to it. We also join in the local harvests and fiestas,” Carrera told IPS as he took part in the protest camp that teachers have set in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square.

Oaxaca is Mexico’s second-poorest state, according to the UNDP Human Development Report 2010.

Teachers from Oaxaca make up the biggest delegation among the 15,000 teachers protesting in Mexico City since Aug. 19 against a series of laws restricting their labour rights. Their roadblocks have exacerbated the chaos of downtown traffic for nearly a month. The teachers have also occupied public buildings, blocked the Mexico City international airport for several hours, and seized toll booths on highways.

On Wednesday, protesters clashed with anti-riot police as they tried to approach the presidential residence.

The laws were approved by Congress last week and signed into law by the president on Tuesday.

But news on the issue was overshadowed by the scandal of the arrest of Elba Esther Gordillo, the lifelong leader of the teachers’ union and one of the country’s most powerful political leaders.

Gordillo is in prison, charged with embezzlement and organised crime.

The protesting teachers form part of a dissident faction of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación – the national teachers union – which has 1.2 million members among primary and middle school teachers.

But after the laws were passed, the protesters were joined by other unions, and the movement grew in strength until declaring Wednesday’s national strike.

The laws, which are focused on primary and secondary education, introduce mandatory periodic teacher evaluations. In addition, teachers will be recruited through open tests, starting in 2014. There are also changes to the systems of promotions, wages, benefits, and working conditions in different states.

But critics say the evaluation system is vague. They also complain that their concerns were not taken into account by the legislators, and that the reforms do not take into consideration the specific challenges of teaching children from disadvantaged backgrounds, as well as indigenous children, many of whom do not speak Spanish.

Mexico’s native population is variously estimated to make up between 12 and 30 percent of the country’s 112 million people (the smaller, official, estimate is based on the number of people who actually speak an indigenous language).

Furthermore, the protesters argue that the reform paves the way for the privatisation of the education system in Mexico.

The trade unionists are calling for an autonomous national institute to carry out evaluations. An institute was created in 2002, but it is not independent.

“This is a labour reform, not an educational one, and it did not arise from a negotiated consensus,” Raymundo Vera, a teacher from the Oaxaca committee, told IPS.

Promoters of the reform, spearheaded by business leaders, have complained about the high proportion of education expenditure that goes towards salaries.

However, the OECD study also reveals that Mexico has the highest student/teacher ratios – more than 25 pupils per teacher in early childhood education, compared to the OECD average of 14.3. And the ratio is even higher at the primary school level (28 students per teacher) and highest (nearly 30 students per teacher) at the secondary level.

“I do want to be evaluated, but who will guarantee that they’re going to do it properly, and not like they have up to now, with standardised tests that do not take into consideration the conditions at each school?” asked Carrera.

Teacher evaluations, which were introduced in 1989, were held up by the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) as an indication that quality was improving.

But few advances have actually been made on that front.

The “2012 Panorama educativo de México” (Mexican Educational Outlook), by the National Institute for Evaluation of Education (INEE), found that half of the students in the first three years of secondary school were unable to solve mathematical problems involving two or more operations.

The same study, which measures advances made between 2006 and 2010, shows that primary students in urban public schools improved in Spanish, while the proportion of indigenous students who under-performed in Spanish had risen to nearly 50 percent.

A primary school teacher earns between 2,000 and 8,000 pesos (160 to 620 dollars) a month. “Much less than these personages,” Vera said, referring to lawmakers who earn at least 20 times more.

“The people complaining about our protest marches do not and will never understand our living conditions,” he said.

In Mexico, only 56 percent of young people between the ages of 15 and 19 are enrolled in school – the lowest rate in the OECD.

INEE statistics from the “Panorama educativo de México”, presented in April, show that 4.8 million children and adolescents in Mexico do not go to school.

Hazem Maher, 16, from Hebron, works as a porter in a fruit and vegetable market in a city near Ramallah. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, Occupied West Bank, Jun 4 2013 (IPS)

Hazem Maher, 16, from Hebron in the southern West Bank, works a backbreaking 12-hour day in the fruit and vegetable market in the city of El Bireh, next to Ramallah. He earns just over 15 dollars a day as a porter.

“My father is blind and both my parents are unemployed. I am the sole provider for my parents and my three brothers and two sisters. They depend on me to be able to eat,” Maher told IPS, adding that poor grades and his family’s financial situation forced him to drop out of school.

“I work from 6 am to 6 pm,” he described. At night, he sleeps with other boys because the drive from Hebron to Ramallah takes one and a half hours. “Transportation by service taxi is expensive,” he added."[My family] depend[s] on me to be able to eat."
--Hazem Maher, 16

Maher is not alone in the work he does and the life he leads. Physical and verbal abuse, exploitation, long hours, little pay, exposure to danger, a missing childhood, and a future scarred by physical and psychological damage are what some of the thousands of Palestinian child labourers in the Palestinian territories face.

“If the Israeli occupation continues and Palestinians are unable to implement a national strategy and enforce legislation protecting children in the workforce, the future of these children will be seriously compromised,” said Osama Damo, from the aid organisation Save The Children in Gaza.

“The physical and psychological damage they experience could affect their ability to be good parents and this damage could pass on to the next generation,” Damo told IPS.

‘I have no other choice’

Anis Issa, 17, is also from Hebron. He too works as a porter at the fruit and vegetable market to help support five brothers and supplement the wages of his father, who works in a photography office.

“At the end of the day I’m very tired. I hate this work but I have no other choice. I don’t even think about going to university because my family could never afford that,” Issa told IPS.

Thousands of Palestinian children are currently employed as child labourers in Gaza and the West Bank, though hundreds more are believed to be excluded from those statistics.

According to a report from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) on Palestinian children, based on information collated in 2011, eight percent of Palestinian children were employed in Gaza and three percent in the West Bank during that year.

Six and a half percent of the children employed were aged 5-11, and less than five percent were between 12 and 14 years. These figures, however, exclude children working in family-owned businesses or on agricultural land and construction sites. Children enrolled in primary United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools were not included in the statistics.

The percentage of children aged 5-14 years attending school and also engaged in child labour was 5.9 in 2010 – 7.8 percent in the West Bank and three percent in the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian children can be found working as street and kiosk vendors, car cleaners, newspaper sellers and porters. They also work in construction and agriculture and sell goods at border crossings, traffic lights and in markets, either working for themselves or for employers.

Push factors

According to Palestinian law, children younger than 15 cannot legally work. From the ages of 15 to 18, they are employable with certain limitations and restrictions, according to Damo. However, “this law is not being enforced adequately, and the children are being exploited as adults,” Damo told IPS. “They are working long hours for less pay than an adult because they are more profitable.”

One reason children enter the labour market is because they drop out of school. In the Palestinian territories, the secondary school dropout rate for boys was 1.9 percent and 2.1 percent for girls.

“High levels of unemployment and poverty, exacerbated by illiteracy, are forcing Palestinian children out of school and into the labour force to try and help provide for their families,” Damo explained. He added that because of the Israeli blockade and greater unemployment and poverty, the situation in Gaza is worse than in the West Bank.

Poverty and unemployment in Gaza have been exacerbated by a ban on exports, severe restrictions on fishermen off the Gaza coast, and Palestinians’ inability to reach their agricultural fields in the Israeli-imposed buffer zone.

The separation barrier in and around the West Bank also prevents Palestinians from working in Israel. In addition, “numerous checkpoints and barriers make transportation longer and more expensive for school children, leading many to drop out from school,” Damo elaborated.

Other factors behind the children working and often spending hours in the streets are the lack of public recreational facilities and a high population density, of which children comprise 60 percent. Meanwhile, high birth rates ensure that few Palestinian children ever experience the luxury of a room to themselves at home.

In order to tackle the problem of child labour, Save The Children has embarked on a three-year project, funded by the European Union, in partnership with a number of non-governmental organisations and the Palestinian ministries of social affairs, labour and education. “Our aim is to develop a national strategy for implementing and enforcing child labour laws and protecting children,” Damo described.

A Roma stall for used clothes in Bucharest. Segregation in schools means Roma children grow up to find few decent jobs. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.

By Pavol Stracansky
PRAGUE, May 4 2013 (IPS)

As the Czech government comes under fire for apparently backtracking on commitments to inclusive education, Roma children and teenagers continue to be systematically shut out of Eastern Europe’s mainstream education system.

A string of recent court rulings has revealed the depth of the problem – and should have forced governments into action to redress the situation.

But despite these, and calls from bodies like the European Court of Human Rights for authorities to ensure Roma have proper access to mainstream schooling, there has been a lack of any serious action, NGOs and rights groups say.

“Research has been done in a number of countries documenting segregation and court judgements have confirmed that discrimination in access to education is a common practice.

“Governments need to take quick steps to stop discriminatory practices,” Jana Vargovcikova, Advocacy Coordinator at Amnesty International Czech Republic, told IPS.

Roma segregation at schools has been well documented with reports by Amnesty International and other groups highlighting widespread systematic segregation at schools across the former Eastern bloc.“Governments need to take quick steps to stop discriminatory practices"

Meanwhile, recent court rulings have confirmed individual cases of educational discrimination of Roma in countries such as Croatia, Greece, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.

The discrimination ranges from overt segregation where Roma children have been taught in separate classes at mainstream schools, to the placement of Roma children in schools for the mentally handicapped – noted by the European Court of Human Rights as being widespread – because of systemically flawed and discriminatory testing.

One study by the Open Society Foundation claimed Roma children in Slovakia and the Czech Republic were 28 and 27 times more likely, respectively, to be put in special schools than non-Roma pupils. Another study by the Czech School Inspectorate from 2011 suggested that more than 3,000 pupils in such schools had been placed there without any testing at all.

Children as young as six or seven can be sent to these schools – renamed ‘practical schools’ recently in what critics say was a merely cosmetic change to the education system – and they have been repeatedly criticised for offering a limited curriculum and effectively preventing children reaching their education potential, deepening a cycle of poverty and deprivation among Roma.

According to a 2009 study from the Czech Institute for Information on Education and the Ministry of Education, only 1 percent of Roma children from practical schools go on to secondary schools providing full school-leaving qualifications as opposed to 30 percent of Roma children from normal elementary schools.

Ciprian Necula, a 32-year-old Roma activist living in Bucharest who works on projects to help end discrimination against the Roma in Romania, told IPS what happened to Roma children placed in special schools in his country.

He said: “Just as one example, in Dumbraveni, central Romania, around 500 Roma kids go to special needs schools although they are normal. This is because they only speak the Roma language and would not fit in at normal schools and their parents are happy because their kids go to a school where they get a warm meal.

“But when they get to high school age they do not know how to read or write, only how to draw.”

However, Roma parents are often happy to send their children to such schools because they are poorly informed of what it will mean to their child’s educational development to attend such a school and also out of fear of their child being bullied in a normal school or because the costs of sending them to a mainstream school further away would be too high.

The Czech government had previously pledged to phase out ‘special schools’ as part of a commitment to inclusive education.

But comments just a few weeks ago from the Czech government’s plenipotentiary for human rights, Monika Simunkova, suggest that the process of closing ‘practical schools’ will have to be pushed back from an original target of 2015.

NGOs fear that the government is now backsliding on its commitments to ending discrimination under pressure from non-Roma parents, teachers from practical schools and special psychologists who recently garnered over 70,000 signatures for a petition against the closing of practical schools.

They say though that fear of closing the schools is irrational as the phasing out of the school should be carried out in conjunction with mainstream schools being given the support to allow them to provide children with the necessary help to meet their individual needs.

Amnesty International, the European Roma Rights Centre and the Open Society Justice Initiative last month sent an open letter to the Czech government calling on it to implement a moratorium on placements of Roma children with disabilities in practical schools, and undertake a comprehensive review of the system to ensure compliance with international and regional standards on education and non-discrimination.

The government has yet to respond to the letter.

However, there have been some examples of positive recent change on educational discrimination in the region. In Sarisske Michalany in Slovakia, one school where Roma children were until last year taught in separate classes on separate floors and were served separate lunches, has now fully integrated all non-Roma students following a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights.

And local NGOs say that, as they had hoped, the situation there is ‘positive’ with Roma children being provided fully inclusive education.

Stefan Ivanco of the Centre for Civil and Human Rights (Poradna), told IPS: “The school has started the process of introducing inclusive education principles and desegregation and what is also positive, so far there has been no indication of any ‘white flight’ or non-Roma pupils leaving to go to other schools.”

‘Chal Parha’, a popular TV show hosted by Pakistani singer Shehzad Roy, takes viewers on a virtual tour of the country’s education system. Credit: KT/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Mar 28 2013 (IPS)

Mounted on a Harley Davidson, Shehzad Roy, a popular Pakistani singer, is on a mission: to expose the country’s 176 million residents to the good, the bad and the ugly side of Pakistan’s education system.

Stopping by small villages dotting the mountainous terrain, or traversing miles of sandy desert and green valleys and plains, Roy takes viewers on a virtual road-trip for the popular television show ‘Chal Parha’ (meaning ‘Come, Teach’), aired on the private channel ‘Geo’ every Saturday and Sunday night.

The 23-part programme – part of the channel’s initiative to promote public awareness on education and literacy – highlights everything from the dog-eared national curriculum and ancient textbooks to dilapidated school buildings without water, latrines and electricity.

In his hallmark tongue-in-cheek style, Roy ends every episode by assigning the government “homework” – policy recommendations to correct the system.

The show has no shortage of scenes to cover: Roy has already shown his viewers everything from beautiful buildings devoid of teachers to three-roomed schools where a multitude of classes are taught simultaneously by one teacher.

Some episodes have covered children studying in makeshift schools comprised of nothing more than tents, after school buildings were destroyed in the 2005 earthquake. The money earmarked for reconstruction was misplaced, officials say.

For students in rural areas, studying under a tree is all they know. Many classrooms are taken over by village notables as storerooms for animals and fodder.

Things are no better in the big cities, where children can be seen cleverly sidestepping streams of sewage or covering their noses to avoid the foul smell on their way to school, while uniformed students are often crammed into classes with no electricity or ventilation, forced to learn by rote.

The programme quickly became a hit, perhaps because a “picture is always much more effective than words, especially a real one with real stories”, Baela Raza Jamil, head of the Islamabad-based NGO Idare-e-Taleem-o Agehi (Centre for Education and Consciousness), told IPS.

“I have asked my team to consider it compulsory viewing,” she added.

Pakistan lags on education targets

In April 2010, education was made a fundamental right for all up to the age of 16, after the insertion of Article 25-A into Pakistan’s constitution.

Yet, according to Roy, almost seven million children between the ages of five and nine do not go to school and those that do drop out after just a few years of schooling.

Some believe the root of the problem dates back to Pakistan’s inception. According to Haris Gazdar, a senior researcher at Karachi’s Collective for Social Science Research, “The dominant strand in Pakistani nationalism is divisive and has not presented a viable cultural model for nation-building.”

He believes that education, which in “virtually all other countries is regarded by the nationalist elite as a vehicle for nation-building, has no real value for Pakistan’s divided elites”.

Though many families “will invest in their children’s education to the best of their capacity, interest and knowledge, nowhere in the world has universal schooling been achieved through private demand alone”, he told IPS.

“There is no collective demand for education in Pakistan because there is no collective agreement on the cultural model for nation-building.“

Jamil agreed, stating that good-quality early childhood education in Pakistan was accessible to “fewer than ten percent of Pakistani children”.

Currently leading the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) for Pakistan with several partners and volunteers, she was quick to support her statement with dismal figures: “Seventy percent of government-run primary schools have only one or two rooms for five classes,” she told IPS. “More than 40 percent of schools are without latrines; 66 percent do not have electricity; and children in 37 percent of schools lack drinking water facilities.

“Pre-primary classes in Pakistan seldom have an exclusive teacher or teaching-learning aids, which are required by the national curriculum,” she said.

The gross enrolment rate, including under- and over-age children, at the primary level is 86 percent, out of which 33 percent drop out. Meanwhile, only 18 percent of those who complete primary school are eligible for mid-level education.

Of those who make it to the 10^th grade, only 30 percent successfully complete high school and only three percent make it to the tertiary level.

This pattern has brought the national literacy rate to 58 percent, far below the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of 88 percent.

Enlightening and painful

Sprinkled with candid interviews with schoolchildren, and discussions with parents, teachers, government officials, clerics and psychologists in over 200 schools, the show has been an interesting yet painful experience, according to Roy.

Others, like professor A.H. Nayyar, a prominent physicist and peace activist, laud the programme as “riveting” and a much-needed step towards achieving the MDG education target in the absence of government action or proper resource allocation.

“The national education policy of 2008-9, promised a higher allocation for education, but that promise was never met,” he told IPS. According to official data, Pakistan spends just two percent of its national GDP on education.

The travelling TV show also offers glimpses into other reasons youth stay away from school, such as poverty, child labour and early marriage.

The use of corporal punishment is also a strong deterrent. Roy recently exposed the story of eight-year-old Malaika, whose teacher threw a pen at her eye, damaging her cornea and leading to the detachment of her retina. The teacher claims Malaika was “not paying attention”.

That episode prompted three provincial assemblies to pass a resolution scrapping Section 89 of Pakistan’s penal code, which allows “guardians” to punish children in “good faith”.

Additionally, a bill on corporal punishment that had been languishing in the National Assembly (NA) gained fresh impetus after the show was aired. Tabled by legislator Attiya Inayatullah back in 2010, it was unanimously passed in the assembly on Mar. 13, which, she told IPS, was quite “historic”.

When the bill officially becomes a law, individuals involved in abusing children will be sentenced to one year in prison, a 500-dollar fine, or both.

Another episode traced the life of a young girl with no hands who, despite learning how to write using only her feet, had been pushed out of school due to poverty. A few days after the show aired, Fehmida Mirza, the speaker for the NA, presented the young girl with a check for 5,000 dollars in order for her to continue her studies.

Children stand around the ruins of an old school building in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan 10 2013 (IPS)

Eight-year-old Muhammad Akram was forced to quit school when he was in the second grade, when the Taliban destroyed the small, government-run school that he and his brother had been attending.

“Father couldn’t afford the expenses of private school,” Akram, a resident of Mohmand Agency, one of seven agencies that comprise northern Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), told IPS.

Families in the militancy-stricken FATA, a hotbed of violence, blame the Pakistan military and the Taliban in equal measure for reducing the education system here to rubble.

The Taliban’s intolerance for any kind of “modern” education, which they believe to be “anti-Islamic”, coupled with the destruction or occupation of scores of school buildings for military purposes, has robbed tens of thousands of children of their right to gain a decent schooling, resulting in a literacy rate of 16 percent – the lowest in all of Pakistan.

Despite wishing to stay in school and pursue their studies, children spend their days playing in the streets and roaming about aimlessly, Akram lamented.

FATA Assistant Education Officer Mohammad Rehman told IPS, “Taliban militants, who are strictly opposed to modern education, have destroyed more schools in Mohmand than any other agency. Their campaign has left 12,000 children, including over 3,800 girls, idle.”

He added that damages to over 460 schools throughout FATA’s seven agencies – including 110 in Mohmand, 103 in Bajaur, 70 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), 55 in Kurram, 65 in Orakzai, 44 in North Waziristan and 16 in South Waziristan – have “displaced” 62,000 children, including 23,000 girls, from school.

The education crisis here is the result of over a decade of militancy, which began when U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban government in Kabul, forcing militants to flee Afghanistan.

The ‘war on terror’ that followed the attacks on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 pushed hard-line militants to take up refuge along the 2,400-kilometre-long porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and eventually settle in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

From here the militants began their campaign of terror, which included attacking government institutions and offices, as well as slowly but surely pulverising the school system across the region.

“The very first school to be destroyed was in South Waziristan. The campaign is still continuing today,” Rehman said.

But the militants are not the only ones to blame. Roughly, 100,000 military troops who are carrying out operations in the FATA in an effort to “eradicate” the Taliban use state-run buildings as hideouts.

“The army also live in government schools and the children have to stay home instead of studying,” according to a resident of Orakzai.

The army’s presence has brought despair in its wake, with some residents claiming that the army and the Taliban “are two sides of the same coin” in terms of their attitude to education and the younger generation.

There is no official record of the number of schools under military control in FATA because authorities fear “reprisals” for revealing such data, the Orakzai resident, who did not wish to be named, told IPS.

But what is plain to see is that the army has been utilising schools as “offices” and “camps” since 2005, he said.

For example, Cadet College Razmak in North Waziristan is closed to students because it serves as an army camp. The army has declared certain areas “war zones”, effectively making schools within those parameters off-limits to students.

However, the FATA secretariat was able to disclose that the army has reconstructed 80 schools in areas deemed “peaceful”, according to the source.

Education expert Umar Farooq told IPS that such a devastating scenario is likely to “send FATA youth back to the Stone Age.

“The literacy has dropped from 30 percent in 2000 to about 16 percent in 2011,” he added.

FATA, which already had the lowest literacy rate in the country, compared to a nationwide average of 47 percent, is now faced with the gargantuan task of rebuilding Taliban-damaged schools, reclaiming those occupied by the army and preventing even further destruction, according to Farooq.

Umar Daraz Khan, an official at the directorate of education in FATA, told IPS that an acute shortage of funds to repair and reconstruct schools has stalled efforts to pull the literacy rate back to a reasonable level.

And even in the rare moments when funding becomes available, the Taliban’s ongoing anti-education campaign makes reconstruction that much more difficult to accomplish, Khan added.

So far, 72 million dollars from the government of Saudi Arabia has enabled the reconstruction of 60 schools in Bajaur Agency, he said. But experts and residents alike are agreed that a lot more remains to be done.

Meanwhile, teachers are also feeling the impact of a dying school system.

Ghani Shah, a teacher who was rendered jobless last March after the Taliban destroyed the school he worked at in Bajaur Agency, is furious at both the Taliban and the army. He is one of 15 teachers at the school who is now forced to do “odd jobs like selling fruits and other part-time jobs, because there is no hope of immediate reconstruction of the damaged schools,” he told IPS.

Akhunzada Mohammad Chittan, a lawmaker from Bajaur Agency, told IPS over the telephone that the government was extremely upset about the militancy in FATA and was trying its level best to defeat the Taliban as soon as possible and rebuild the schools.

“We have established tent schools in many agencies but these can’t substitute cemented buildings,” he said, adding that the militants are “enemies of Islam as well as the children”.

But some have given up hope that things will change.

Muhammad Jaffar, a farmer from Orakzai Agency, says he migrated to the nearby Kohat district in KP in order to raise his two sons and daughter in a peaceful environment.

“There is no hope that the schools will re-open any time soon because the army operation has been in progress since 2005 in FATA but the militants are still (active). Therefore, my decision to leave my hometown for the sake of educating my children was the correct one,” he told IPS.

He believes that the children of FATA will grow up to be “monsters” if immediate measures are not taken to safeguard their right to a decent education.

(END)