Maso and Makamray school opening - September 18

I have been meaning to post the post below for some time – it was written a while ago, but I forgot to post it. The school openings took place September 18, so a few weeks ago now. More to come tomorrow on today’s World Teachers Day celebration in Mapaki.

Yesterday I attended the opening of two new schools, primary schools in the communities of Maso and Makamray (both in the Paki Masabong Chiefdom) - photos are at http://picasaweb.google.ca/clarepoulev/MakamrayAndMasoSchoolOpening#. The schools were built by Plan (formerly Foster Parents Plan) Sierra Leone with funds from Plan Japan. I went with the Chief, who was speaking at both events.

Each school is a building with six classrooms (for classes 1 - 6) and an administrative area. Along with the school building, Plan also builds a latrine and a well for use by students. This is important because schools must have these facilities in order to get approved by government for support. In addition to the buildings, Plan also provided some basic educational materials (e.g. text books) as it is difficult for schools to get these. Plan also provides some scholarships for students, to help with fees and costs (although there are no school fees at the primary level, the required books and uniforms cost money), and for teacher training. PSI and cdpeace provide similar scholarships, and these two schools were involved last year in our school twinning project as well.

Both openings were similar – the communities, students and teachers were waiting to greet us with song when we arrived. The first opening began about an hour late, and the second one was then late as well. The late starting time is fairly typical here. Each opening included speeches by the Chairman of the Teacher’s Council, the Paramount Chief of Paki Masabong, representatives from the district council, the national government, and the school management committee, and by Plan staff.

At both openings, the children from the school performed a few short skits and songs. The skits were cute. In Makamray the skit was focused on allowing all children to attend school. The kids in Makamray also sang a song, directed at the government officials present that included a request to approve the school. Both Maso and Makamray are community schools, so they currently get no support from government. Now that they have school buildings, latrines and wells, they can apply to become a government-supported school. This would give them some support for teacher salaries (for those who are certified teachers) and some support in terms of books and learning materials.

In Maso, the skit the kids did was about HIV/AIDS prevention. They talked about safe sex, about ensuring that any needles and razors used are clean or sterilized, and about getting tested for HIV. They also sang a song about protecting yourself from HIV using the “ABC” method: abstinence, be faithful and use a condom. While AIDS is not as big of a problem here in Sierra Leone as it is in other parts of Africa, the song and skit was a reminder that it is present here too.

A few stats on HIV in Sierra Leone from UNAIDS (http://www.unaids.org/en/CountryResponses/Countries/sierra_leone.asp). In 2008. an estimated 55,000 people were living with HIV in the country, a prevalence rate of 1.7%. There were approximately 3,300 deaths due to AIDS, and 16,000 children orphaned due to AIDS. Of course, data collection is a challenge here, so it’s a bit hard to say how reliable these statistics are (for example, the estimate on AIDS orphans ranges between 6,400 and 26,000).

Some colleagues who work in hospitals in Makeni have told me that they think that the official prevalence rate is an underestimate based on their own experiences. Given how prevalence data is collected, this could definitely be the case. From what I understand, prevalence of HIV is usually estimated primarily by testing pregnant women who present at clinics for prenatal care and extrapolating that data to the population at large. There are a few problems with this approach in Sierra Leone:
1. Many pregnant women here never go to a clinic for a variety of reasons.
2. Taking a quick look at the map of testing sites in Sierra Leone shows that they are highly concentrated in Freetown, with a few in the south and east of the country. There are none near Makeni or anywhere in Northern Province, except one in Kambia District.

If you are interested in learning more about HIV/AIDS in Sierra Leone, take a further look at the UNAIDS website link above.

Schools in Sierra Leone

Now that I have visited a number of schools in Gbonkolenken and Paki Masabong chiefdoms, I’d like to describe them a little bit for you. All of the schools I have visited so far are in rural parts of the country. They are generally all community schools, meaning that they are not run by the government. Some of them receive government support to pay some of the teachers’ salaries, especially in the secondary schools, but most receive insufficient support, or none at all.

Many of the school buildings are built by either ministries (Adventist and Catholic are two that I saw), by NGOs (two communities near Mapaki have new schools that opened officially today that were built by Plan), or by the community (for example, the old school in Makambray – the one whose roof blew off). The buildings are then turned over to the community to care for them.

The schools I have met with range in size from about 250 to 700 students. Class sizes are large, generally around 40-50 students per class. The official government policy is a maximum of 50 students per class, but you do see classes bigger than that. In one secondary school we visited in Mathombo, last year they had 400 students and cold only get 4 teachers. Imagine that, 100 students to a class. Definitely makes it more difficult for the students to learn.

For primary school, students pay no official fees to attend school. However, there are other associated costs, like uniforms, shoes and books, that can present a financial barrier to attendance. Once students reach the Junior Secondary (JSS) and Senior Secondary levels, there are fees just to attend. These fees are in the range of between 210,000 LE and 420,000 LE per year, and the books and uniforms these students require are in addition to that. Also, in many cases there isn’t a senior secondary school located nearby, so a student from a rural community would also have to pay room and board to attend school in one of the bigger centres.

From what I can see, and what I understand from others, the majority of teachers are untrained. Very often they have only a high school education, with no formal post-secondary training. Sometimes they have a post-secondary degree in a subject area (e.g. math) but no training in teaching. One big reason why teachers are not able to get qualified is that there is no way possible for them to afford the training. Those teachers who do earn a salary would receive between 150,000 to 300,000 LE per month (about $45 to $90) depending on their qualifications and years of experience teaching. With a bag of rice to feed a family costing about 100,000 LE, there isn't anything left over at the end of the month. Many of the teachers I have talked with do not receive a salary of any kind, and work completely as unpaid volunteers. Some of them have been teaching 6 or 7 years without being paid at all. Later, in thinking about this, I asked Kouame why he thought the teachers were willing to work for no salary. He said that they saw that there was a need for teachers and they valued education. The children needed to learn, and there was no one to teach them, so these volunteer teachers stepped in.

The government now intends to pay teachers once the community schools go through an approval process. However, government will only pay teachers who are formally trained and have a teaching certificate, so this remains a challenge for many of the current teachers. There simply aren't anywhere near enough qualified teachers in the country to meet the need.

As is evident from all this, the educational system here is struggling. However, at all of the community meetings I have been at so far, people have mentioned the importance of education for their children. For example, the women’s groups I met with in Gbonkolenken spoke about the importance of being able to earn income to support school fees for their children. There seems to be a great desire and interest among all people in improving their level of knowledge and education, regardless of the obstacles.

This is one of the reasons cdpeace and PSI are working on education issues here. We do this in a few different ways:
- scholarships for teachers that cover the costs for teachers to attend the teacher training college part-time and through distance learning and get their teaching certificate;
- scholarships for students to help support their fees and costs at school, especially at the secondary level;
- training workshops in basic teaching skills for teachers;
- some funding from our CIDA project also assisted with the repair and reconstruction of some schools.

Alleviating the financial burden on families and being able to properly train and pay teachers would result in a big improvement in education in the country.