- World’s worst literacy rate
- Enrollment soared after 2005 peace deal
- Austerity measures threaten progress
- Primary schools for adults too
YEI, 4 September 2012 (IRIN) – Five decades of war and upheaval in South Sudan has had an inevitable impact on education – almost three-quarters of adults in the world’s newest country are unable to read or write.
A recent report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) holds that less than 2 percent of the population has completed a primary school education.
“South Sudan is believed to have the worst literacy rate in the world, worse than Mali and Niger, which were the only ones close. [Adult literacy] currently sits at 27 percent, according to the latest statistics we have from 2009,” said Jessica Hjarrand, education specialist at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
A 2005 peace deal paved the way for South Sudan to secede from the north in July 2011. The country has since struggled to build an education system for its young and to educate the millions of adults who missed out on school during the war.
“There’re not enough schools. There’re certainly not enough teachers,” said Hjarrand. “Most of the teachers in South Sudan are primary school leavers.”
As a result, the quality of instruction is poor, Hjarrand continued. “They don’t know how to manage a classroom. They don’t know how to manage people with different needs in the classroom, let alone the content area and the skills you’re supposed to be passing down through education.”
Michael Adier Kuol, headmaster of Lomuku Primary School in Yei, a town in Central Equatoria State, concurred. “In the school where I’m teaching now, there are around 16 teachers, and all of them are untrained.”
Complicating matters is the fact that South Sudan has decided to switch from offering instruction in Arabic, which is associated with the north, to teaching in English – a challenge for most teachers and students.
Many education experts believe that children should first become literate in their mother tongues. “But it’s very difficult to do when you’ve got something like, I think, 66 languages in South Sudan, to have to develop materials for each of those languages,” Hjarrand said.
Keeping up with demand
After southern Sudan signed the 2005 peace agreement, its education programme, supported by international donors, underwent one of the world’s fasted reconstruction programmes, a recent study reports.
Between 2006 and 2010, the number of primary school students more than doubled, from 700,000 to 1.6 million, the study notes.
But even after the influx of international donations, the country’s school system does not yet have the resources to keep up with demand.
In a courtyard in Yei, children sit on makeshift benches under a tree as they recite the alphabet. “They are taught under the mango tree, not in a classroom,” said the teacher, John Wandera. “That is one challenge – lack of enough space for learning”
Lack of educational materials is another challenge, he said. Continue reading “South Sudan Struggles to Meet demand for Education”
