Photo: Richard Etienne/IRIN

Angela is HIV positive but managed to find a centre in Jamhuri to top up her supplies of ARVs

NAIROBI, Angela, in her thirties, who did not wish to be identified, was born in the vast slum of Kibera in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and has lived there all her life. Today, however, she is one of an estimated 2,400 people living in the city’s Jamhuri Park, where she fled during violence in Kibera after the 27 December elections.

“I live in the Gatwekera area of Kibera, which is mainly occupied by the Luo ethnic community, but I am Kikuyu. On the day Mwai Kibaki [also Kikuyu] was declared the winner of the election, there was so much violence in Kibera that I had to run away. It was so bad that I got separated from my husband and two children and ended up seeking shelter at a nearby police station for a few days.

“After about five days my family located each other and we came to Jamhuri, where we have been given food, blankets and safety.

“When I had to run away, I became so concerned about my health; I am HIV-positive and I usually attend the MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] clinic in Gatwekera; I collect a monthly dose of anti-retrovirals from them. By the time I reached here I had only two days’ worth of pills with me.

“Thankfully, when I reached here I found that MSF had set up a centre in Jamhuri so I have received my next month’s dose. Of course the food we get here is not enough because the drugs make me so hungry … but it’s better than nothing.

“My biggest worry now is my children. Schools have started but I am too scared to send them back to school in Kibera. My oldest child has finished primary school and is meant to start secondary school now, but I have no money to send him to school and don’t even know where I would send him.

“We’re stuck here for now, with no money and no idea what the future holds; I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to return to Gatwekera.”

kr/mw

Photo: Heba Aly/IRIN

A displaced Chadian in Adé has turned his home into a school, using cardboard for a blackboard and sticks as benches. The government-run school in this small town along the border with Sudan has been closed for two years

GOZ BEIDA, 13 March 2008 (IRIN) - Sitting on a plastic mat in an outdoor classroom at a site for people displaced by violence outside the town of Goz Beida in southeastern Chad, Ibrahim Abdoulaye Moussa has reason to pay attention in class.

“I’m in school to save my country,” said the boy who is one of 180,000 displaced Chadians scattered around the vast semi-desert east of the country. “I dream of being president.”

Before, in his home village of Djédidé along the border with Sudan, the closest school was a three-hour walk. Only after he and his family arrived at this site was he able to go to school for the first time.

At 14 years old he is now in Grade 2 of primary school.

Over the last year and a half, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and some non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have begun building an education system for Chadian children displaced by inter-communal fighting and cross-border attacks by Sudanese militias.

The challenge is enormous. Enrolment rates for school-age children were less than 10 percent even before the violence began so the agencies are almost starting from scratch. There is little infrastructure, few teachers, and limited interest in education from the government or the international community.

“Me, Sir! Me, Sir!”

At the Gassiré site for displaced people outside Goz Beida, all 200 children in a makeshift classroom are raising their hands, eager to give their teacher Mahamat Abdelkarim the correct answer. He has written the letter “O” on the blackboard and is asking them if they know how to pronounce it.

Abdelkarim is a community teacher, a rare commodity in eastern Chad, Andrea Berther, UNICEF education programme officer, told IRIN.

“The biggest challenge is the lack of teachers,” she said.

Illiteracy in Chad’s east is estimated to be between 90 and 95 percent, she added. Finding local people to train as teachers who can read and write is difficult.

The few that are found usually come with a First Grade education, and often they can earn more money working for NGOs, Berther said.

The question IRIN asked the few teachers here sitting on mats under sticks and plastic sheeting is, why do they stick around?

“These children are our children,” said Baharadin Anour, a community teacher who was recruited from among the displaced at the Gassiré site. “We cannot leave them without any education.” He himself was given just 10 days of training in order to become a teacher.

Photo: Heba Aly/IRIN

Zakaria Ousman, president of the parents’ association at a school for displaced Chadians, stands outside one of the makeshift classrooms. “The majority [of parents] do not know the importance of school,” he says.

The state

The state does send some salaried, trained teachers to the east but many leave due to the harsh conditions and insecurity. For the 2005-2006 school year there were just 37 trained teachers for 104 primary schools.

But even harder than finding teachers is finding money to pay them.

“It’s deadlocked,” wrote Namia Doumbaye, Ministry of Education delegate for the Dar Sila department. “The answer lies in community teachers, [but currently] they are ill-trained and [often] refuse to work because they are mistreated financially,” he wrote in his 2006 end of year report.

The government pays community teachers about 30,000 CFA francs (US$67) per month though it takes on very few, said Elise Joisel, the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS)’s director of education at Goz Beida. “They have very small quotas,” she said.

Instead, JRS has begun paying the bulk of community teachers’ salaries, plus parents from the communities chip in.

Quality

From behind the plastic sheet that serves as a wall for one of the outdoor classrooms at Gassiré comes the sound of a child being whipped.

A few metres away, neither the JRS director nor the UNICEF representative seemed very surprised. “We try to raise awareness,” Joisel told IRIN. “We tell them [corporal punishment] is not allowed. But it’s difficult.”

She said bringing students into the classrooms was a first step. The second is going to have to be improving the quality of teachers.

Parents

But even with teachers, makeshift classrooms and a school feeding programme, many children are absent.

…The majority [of parents] do not know the importance of school…

“The majority [of parents] do not know the importance of school,” said Zakaria Ousman, president of the parents association at Gassiré’s school.

Children, and particularly young girls, in displaced families often spend their days walking or riding on donkeys, searching for wood they can sell – one of the few forms of revenue for the displaced.

School books distributed to children at school are found on sale in Goz Beida’s main market.

“In Chad, the understanding and the demand for education at the community level is very poor,” said Katy Attfield, former country director of the NGO Save the Children UK. “We’re trying to provide the teachers and the schools so that the supply is there, but… creating the demand for education is the bigger work”.

Schools

There are areas in the east where education barely exists. A three-classroom school in the small town of Adé, along the Sudanese border, has not officially opened its doors in two years. Informally a community teacher teaches a group of 28 students what little French he knows.

At a nearby site for displaced people, Youssouf Cherif has turned his straw home into a makeshift classroom, using cardboard as a blackboard and branches as improvised benches.

“Since we’ve been here, there isn’t one child who has gone to [a real] school,” he told IRIN.

New schools

Yet there are areas in the east where access to education, instead of decreasing with the violence, has actually increased. In fact the number of children in school shot up 15 percent in the department of Dar Sila which is where most of the displaced populations in the east live.

“[Before when people were living] in remote zones, no one saw to education,” Hissein Djaba, a UNICEF education officer, told IRIN. “[Now], through the grouping of schools in the sites for [displaced people], children have the chance to go to school.”

Still the agencies providing education are working on a shoestring. Of the $287 million the UN and NGOs requested for all humanitarian operations in Chad for 2008 only $15 million was requested for education. And while donors funded 97 percent of the overall appeal they gave only 12 percent of the amount requested for education.

“It shows that education doesn’t have a very high place on the scale if you compare it with the other sectors,” said UNICEF’s Berther. “It is important to make clear that in the humanitarian sector, there is a need for education.”

According to Education Ministry delegate Doumbaye, the Chadian government’s priority for education is even lower.

“We have no suggestions to make because none of our suggestions has ever been taken into account,” he stated in his government report on education. “We beg the Good Lord that our situation improves.”

ha/dh/nr

Photo: Modeste Messavussu/IRIN

Plan International warns children of all ages, both genders, are vulnerable to school violence

DAKAR, 10 October 2008 (IRIN) - Sexual exploitation in African schools has become so widespread that children have come up with their own terms to refer to sexual relations with their teachers.

From ‘Sexually Transmitted Grades’ to ‘BF’, or bordel fatigue, which refers to exhaustion from multiple sexual activities with teachers, this slang hints at the prevalence of exploitation in Africa’s learning environments.

The lexis of abuse was discovered during research for Plan International’s (PI) latest report, ‘Learn Without Fear,’ part of the organisation’s global campaign to end violence in schools.

“We’ve been aware of the problem for a long time but we’ve had to just go on anecdotal evidence of violence and its effects,” John Chaloner, PI Regional Director for West and Central Africa, told IRIN. “What this report has done is to talk to children, to teachers and to parents. So now we’re dealing with evidence not hearsay”.

Drop out danger

As schools reopen throughout Africa, the report reveals alarmingly high levels of violence, which are undermining government efforts to provide quality education. The report concluded many girls and boys are dropping out of school as a result of sexual abuse and corporal punishment.

“Our teachers should be there to teach us and not to touch us where we don’t want,” a 15 year-old girl from Uganda told PI, “I feel like disappearing from the world if a person who is supposed to protect me, instead destroys me”.

According to the report, research in Uganda found that eight per cent of 16 and 17 year-olds had had sex with their teachers. In South Africa, at least one-third of all child rapes are by school staff. In a survey of ten villages in Benin, 34 per cent of children confirmed sexual violence in their schools.

While boys usually suffer more violent – and possibly deadly - corporal punishment at the hands of their teachers than their female classmates, sexual harassment and exploitation appear to be overwhelmingly carried out against girls. The report found girls are vulnerable to attacks not only from teachers and other care givers, but also from male students, either at school or on the journey to or from school.

“Teachers often justified the sexual exploitation of female students by saying that their clothes and behaviour were provocative, and that they, the teachers, were far from home and in sexual need,” according to PI’s report.

Sex exchange

What can appear a ‘grey area’ in this situation is the apparent collusion of some female students.

‘Africell’, or ‘a free sell’ has been coined to describe girls who do not wear underwear to provoke teachers into sexual activities in exchange for good grades or ‘sexually transmittable means’ – food, school materials or school fees.

But these girls are not the instigators, said Atoumane Diaw, Secretary General of the National Union of Elementary Teaching in Senegal.

“These children are often encouraged by their parents. Do you think a ten year-old is going to buy herself ‘sexy’ clothes? No, it is the system, it is society that is corrupt. These poor families need [financial] help so they won’t put themselves into this situation”.

In addition to financial assistance, Diaw suggested practical measures for schools: “A modest uniform for students so everyone looks the same. Separate toilets for boys, girls or teachers. And surveillance so that the teacher is not left alone with a pupil after class”.

Poverty facilitates the abuse, according to PI. Children are increasingly responsible for the economic welfare of their families; teachers are often underpaid, or not paid at all, with some seeing sexual favours from students as ‘compensation’.

Authors of the report noted that in many African cultures, corporal punishment is often viewed as an acceptable form of discipline. Social norms that encourage male aggression and female passivity are also seen to champion various forms of violence against girls.

Speak out

“We need to educate people so we tackle the problem [of violence] before it happens.” said Atoumane Diaw. “Our campaign is…raising awareness with teachers. We’re educating children about their rights and their worth. Laws have to be harmonised and enforced in different countries. We must go forward together, fight together.”

The Kenyan education ministry recently launched guidelines on school safety after a recent deadly spate of high school student riots.

Violence in schools, and particularly sexual violence, is chronically under-reported because of cultural norms, students’ feeling of shame, and because they do not know in whom they can confide, according to PI’s report. It adds teachers are often reluctant to report colleagues’ abuse.

“As adults, we need to be watchful, we need to be alert.” PI’s John Chaloner told IRIN, “Children need outlets, like help lines, so they can express themselves. We need to get the message out so that children will no longer be harmed by the very people who should be protecting them”.

aw/hb/pt/

Photo: Fid Thompson/IRIN

African youth representatives attend the International AIDS and STIs Conference in Africa (ICASA) in Dakar, Senegal

DAKAR, 11 December 2008 (IRIN) - Children in sub-Saharan Africa want to know more about sex and how to protect themselves from HIV, but taboos surrounding children’s sexuality can mean life-saving information is kept from them, according to an international NGO.

Children in the region say they need access to sex education that is comprehensive, practical, and free from moral judgment, according to the report Tell Me More! by Save the Children Sweden (SC-S). The NGO researched children’s views on sexuality, sex education, HIV prevention approaches and sexual identity in nine sub-Saharan African countries.

“Adults think we’re too young to know anything about sexuality. They don’t explain things clearly. They don’t want to give the information to children,” Carine Hlomador, a 15-year-old AIDS activist from Togo, told IRIN during the International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa (ICASA) in the Senegalese capital Dakar.

With nearly 1,800 new infections every day among children under 15 worldwide, some through sexual activity, sex education for children is vital to prevent the spread of HIV, Save the Children says in its report, released on 1 December.

Right to information

The 2001 UN Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS states that young people aged 15-24 should have access to information and services to protect themselves from HIV infection, and aimed to reach 90 percent of youths by 2005.

But three years past that target only 40 per cent of young men and 36 percent of young women worldwide are armed with accurate knowledge on HIV prevention, according to a 2008 UN report.

Under-15s are not targeted at all, despite more than 10 percent of interviewees between 15 and 19 claiming to have had sex under the age of 15, according to Amé David, SC-S programme manager in Dakar.

“Children under 15 have been largely ignored in HIV/AIDS prevention education programmes, because talking about children’s sexuality is taboo,” David said.

…Teachers don’t seem to want to open the debate to allow children to express themselves…

Taboos around children’s sexuality also mean that little is known about children aged 7 to 14, according to Save the Children. “There is clearly a need – if not a moral obligation – for studies [on these age groups],” the report concludes, adding that children are being exposed to HIV from a young age, becoming sexually active early and developing their own strategies to protect themselves.

Studies show that children with access to accurate information tend to delay having sex for the first time. “It is the children who don’t have the information who try to discover what it is all about,” SC-S’s David said.

David is convinced that suppressing children’s sexuality can only make things worse: “If we say nothing is happening at adolescence, we are deluding ourselves. If we look the other way and put our head in the sand, children will look for information in the media which is not always a good source.”

Bayala Rodrigue, 16, of Côte d’Ivoire, told IRIN adults would be wrong to avoid the subject. “In Africa, adults say there is an age after which you can teach sexuality to children. But there is no age limit. You think you know your child, but in reality you don’t. On the street you don’t know what he or she is learning.”

Why the taboo

The silence surrounding children’s sexuality in some sub-Saharan countries comes partly from adults’ unease with the subject, says Anta Fall Diagne, programme officer for reproductive health at the Population Council, an international NGO working on reproductive health in Senegal.

“It is adults, policymakers and ministers who are afraid of [talking about it]. The youth themselves are open about their problems.”

Photo: Fid Thompson/IRIN

Young girls get a chance to discuss sex at an after-school health club in the Senegalese capital, Dakar

Religion also plays a significant role, she said. People are reluctant to talk to children about sexuality in societies where sex outside of marriage is frowned upon.

But Fall said: “One thing is sure – many of them [youths] have a sex life. Another thing is sure – they have problems with their sex lives. Thirdly, they do not have the right information to deal with these problems.”

Better sex education in schools

Children surveyed by SC-S who do receive sex education in schools said that it is often negative, contradictory and too focused on biology. Instead children want knowledge that is relevant to their situation and the skills to negotiate prevention methods in a relationship.

“You’ve told me to protect myself,” Rodrigue of Côte d’Ivoire said. “OK, I know that you put the condom on the penis. But there are other things to negotiate. We need more realistic information.”

The report also found that teachers are often unprepared to openly discuss issues of sexuality with children and frequently take a moralistic and negative stance.

“Teachers don’t seem to want to open the debate to allow children to express themselves, talk about what’s happening to them and find solutions for their problems,” Souadou Ndoye, a 17 year-old Senegalese student, told IRIN.

Read one girl’s plea for early sex education

ft/aj/np

Photo: Nicholas Reader/IRIN

A market in Kano, northern Nigeria (file photo) Education experts say girls’ primary school enrolment is rising slightly in Kano

KANO, 19 December 2008 (IRIN) - In Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north a community-run project to create ‘girl-friendly’ primary schools is helping to correct long-time gender inequalities in education, analysts say.

In the region’s most populous state, Kano, boys continue to outnumber girls in school but education officials say the margin has narrowed over recent years.

“The enrolment of girls is increasing,” Yakubu Suleiman, head teacher of the public primary school in Zakarai village, 64km from Kano, told IRIN. “I am sure in a few years there will be as many girls as boys.”

While official figures say primary school intake has more than doubled in Nigeria since the government introduced free primary education in 2001, the gender discrepancy remains in northern states.

Just over a quarter of girls in northern Nigeria make it beyond secondary school and more than half are married before age 15, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2004 set up a project to involve community members in improving education quality and boosting girls’ enrolment – Community Participation for Action in the Social Sector (COMPASS).

“We realised we had a lot of problems in our school system, including overcrowding in the classrooms, lack of furniture, low numbers of girls and few qualified teachers, so we started by setting up a community dialogue to discuss the problem,” said Alhaji Nuhu Gaya, leader of a community coalition.

Further, the school system is run-down, over-stretched and low on teachers, with classrooms designed for 40 holding 150 students, according to Gaji Abdullahi of the Kano state Universal Basic Education Board.

In Zakarai, a low-income farming settlement with some 8,000 residents, of the 1,690 registered pupils at the only primary school in 2008, 860 were girls, reflecting a three-year upward trend; 776 girls were enrolled in 2006.

With COMPASS, education and health experts assess education needs alongside community members, and jointly come up with a plan for how to tackle them. “We don’t give them money, only advice,” said Mohammed Gama, COMPASS mobilisation officer in Kano. “Once we have spoken with communities they vow to push ahead and want to do something about it themselves,” he said.

Encouraging girls

One of the best ways to attract more girls is very simple, says the Kano basic education board’s Abdullahi: toilets. In a conservative, predominantly Muslim community, unisex toilets have hindered girls’ enrolment. Community leaders are beginning to provide separate facilities for girls.

…I am sure in a few years there will be as many girls as boys…

In Gabasawa village, 36km from Zakarai, teachers at a primary school are also trained to encourage girls to participate more in class, according to Magaji Ibrahim, the assistant head teacher.

Health and nutrition programmes, which have long been neglected in schools, according to the education board’s Abdullahi, have been reintroduced through COMPASS. “We used to be taught to take care of our hair, to clean our uniforms, wash our hands in school and teachers are now doing this again.”

COMPASS relies on parents and teachers collaborating and taking an active role in the education of their children and the problems facing the school, as well as in raising funds for maintenance.

Impact

Retired government employee Lamino Bello Gaya, 61, who recently returned to live in Gabasawa after 40 years in Kano city, said he can see attitudes changing.

His five-year-old daughter, Amina, held onto his traditional caftan as he sat in the head teacher’s office at Rimin Dagaci primary school and denounced the custom of marrying off young girls in northern Nigeria, cutting short their education.

At the school 47 percent of the students are now girls, compared to 36 percent in 2006.

“COMPASS has made a huge impact on our educational system,” said Abdullahi. “Teachers are better equipped to teach, literacy and numeracy skills are enhanced and parents now see they can also play a role in educating their children, especially girls.”

Taking it forward

But despite increasing community interest, the COMPASS project may draw to a close in late 2009.

Thus far COMPASS has reached just 16 out of a projected 44 government councils in Kano state. “We have received requests from several schools that are not currently benefiting from COMPASS to be included in the project…the challenge is for us to replicate it in all government areas of the state,” Abdullahi said.

State authorities allocated 18 percent of the annual budget to education in 2008 and have made it a priority to commit substantial resources to education, but with a population of more than 10 million even this is not enough to ensure quality schooling for growing numbers of students, he said.

But if more community members come on board, the local authorities can try to take COMPASS’s work forward, he said.

Gabasawa parent Gaya is ready: “I advise any person to enable his daughter to reach whatever level of education she wants because it will help the country in the future.”

gc/aj/np