At a Turning Point: Primary Education in Southern Sudan
by Nick Boke
October 2005
Going to School in Southern Sudan
No Quick Fix
One thing’s for sure. There’s no quick fix for education in Southern Sudan. It’s not just a matter of bringing a few teachers up to speed, or of getting a few more textbooks into kids’ hands, or of making the regions’ classrooms a bit more girl-friendly.
It’s a matter of doing all these things and more. Much more.
“Africa’s a tough place to work. South Sudan’s tough even by African standards—decades of civil war, nonexistent infrastructure, dozens of rival ethnic groups. It’s the sort of place where radio can make a real difference, but it’s going to take a lot of careful work on our part,” says Mike Laflin, EDC vice president who conceived the IRI program for the region, which is funded through USAID’s dot-EDU mechanism.
The newly semi-autonomous region of South Sudan—created with the
signing of the peace accord between the Sudan People’s Liberation
Army/Movement and the Government of Sudan in January, 2005—faces considerable
challenges.
Multiple Barriers, Especially for Girls
Most obvious is relentless civil war. The most recent round lasted from 1983 to 2005, as the Islamic government of the north tried to impose Sharia law and Islamic education on the south, which is made up of followers of Christianity and indigenous religions. From 1955 to 1972, however, the same war had raged in the region over the same issues. With only ten conflict-free years in a half-century, war has taken its toll on schooling.
The war, however, wasn’t the only source of damage to education in Southern Sudan. Under joint British and Egyptian rule in the first half of the 20th century, the region was considered out of reach and with few resources to offer. Consequently, social and physical infrastructure was sorely lacking, with Christian missionaries providing what little schooling they could.
The result? Today, according to a recent UNICEF studies, approximately 20 percent of Southern Sudan’s kids attend school overall, with the percentages declining significantly through the grades. The statistics are even more dramatic for girls—it’s estimated that only 500 girls attend secondary school throughout the entire region, which has a population of over 8 million.
Of those who do have access to education, where do they go to school? Well over half of the region’s schooling takes place under trees, sometimes with single teachers working with groups of more than 200 students. Students walk an average of thirty minutes to reach these informal schools that have little access to clean water and latrines.
Who teaches them? Fewer than ten percent of Southern Sudan’s teachers are formally trained, with another 40 or 50 percent having attended an occasional workshop. Most teachers—indeed, most principals, county supervisors and Secretariat of Education personnel—receive no pay. Fewer than ten percent are women.
What do they learn? That depends. In some areas, they study from the Kenyan syllabus. In other places, it’s the Ugandan syllabus. The Southern Sudan Secretariat of Education (SoE) developed a syllabus in the mid-1990s, but it has taken hold in only a limited number of schools. Until the 1990s, all schools relied on the Arabic-based syllabus of the Government of Sudan. School begins in January, March or April, depending on the region’s weather.
What materials do they have? Few teachers have teacher’s guides, and even fewer students have textbooks or copybooks. Chalk and some sort of chalkboard are present in many schools, but pencils, paper and pens are rare.
Ready for The Learning Village
Even with these barriers to education, “…the commitment
among Southern Sudanese to make things better is really amazing,”
says CoP Leesa Kaplan. “There’s an energy and a vision everybody
seems to share, whether it’s the upper echelons of the education establishment,
under-a-tree teachers, or the staff of writers and actors we’ve assembled.
Somehow, lots of Southern Sudanese have been able to hang in there, just
waiting for the time to come when they could get things going back home
again.”
And the time is nigh. Beginning January 2006, southern Sudan Interactive
Radio Instruction (SSIRI) will begin to bring a little light into the picture.
Based in Nairobi, Kenya, EDC’s SSIRI is developing primary grades
one, two and three literacy, maths and English audio programs to be broadcast
by Sudan Radio Service—another EDC undertaking—to classes throughout
the region. These interactive audio lessons employ a combination of games,
songs and stories with quality educational content. Ongoing capacity building
is achieved as the “radio teacher” provides cues and instructions
to the classroom teacher while engaging the students in various exercises
that support group work, reinforce key concepts and generally make learning
fun.
A team of Southern Sudanese scriptwriters and production staff is creating 100 half-hour programs for each grade level, using characters from The Learning Village to capture the imaginations of Southern Sudanese teachers and pupils.
Working closely with the SoE, which is soon to become the South Sudan Ministry of Education, SSIRI is careful to target non-formal as well as formal school settings. Among these are students enrolled in the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), which combines two primary grades into one year. ALP was specifically developed to meet the needs of internally displaced persons returning to their homes, demobilized soldiers, and girls, and will thereby play an indispensable role in helping “catch up” youngsters in southern Sudan.
But nothing in the region is simple. Travel to and from as well as within the region is very complicated—only the temporary capital Rumbek is accessible by commercial airlines, with other major population centers being served by Operation Lifeline Sudan, Mission Aviation Fellowship, and charter flights. Internet is sometimes available from some towns, while satellite telephones are the best way of communicating from others. Generators provide electricity, and Internet access is through VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) technology.
This makes formative evaluation of the radio programs and instructional
materials a real challenge. SSIRI tests its programs at Sud Academy, a school
for Sudanese refugees in Nairobi, but is committed to conducting formative
evaluation in the field, as well. Given the complexities of transportation
and communication, the turn-around from producing a single program to learning
how well it played in a classroom can be as long as two weeks.
Stakeholder Commitment
These problems aside, the word is out, and there’s great enthusiasm for SSIRI’s programs. Outreach Coordinators have found audiences of teachers and students ready to get to work—show up at Formative Evaluation (FE) schools in Rumbek or Maridi, and you’re likely to be greeted with an enthusiastic chorus of students singing “Oh welcome, o-o-o-o welcome, ye! Welcome to the Learning Village!” The response among educators from throughout Southern Sudan to a presentation at the SoE’s Education Reconstruction and Development Forum in Maridi in May, was overwhelmingly positive. Teachers asked, “when will you be bringing the program to our county? How can our teachers participate?”
Education Commissioner Kosti Manibe, Under Secretary of Education William Ater and General Education Director Lino Girikpio are closely involved in the development of the programs, and have helped SSIRI make arrangements to set up a compound in Maridi, not far from the National Teacher Training Institute campus and SoE offices. At the request of the SoE, SSIRI is currently piloting a radio-based, credit-bearing teacher-training course and is also working on an Adult Literacy Program.
The problems confronting education in Southern Sudan are immense. EDC, through careful collaboration with local and regional educators, the SoE and USAID, is laying foundations that will begin to make a difference in the very near future.
A project staff member concludes, “We’ve tested our programs in the field, and they work. We’re addressing our logistical and technical dilemmas. We’ve got partners who believe in IRI and are doing everything they can to help us. SSIRI is going to make a real difference.”
For more information, please contact:
- EDC Project Director (IES), Kent Noel, knoel@edc.org
- EDC Chief of Party, Leesa Kaplan-Nunes, lkaplan@edc.org
- EDC Project Coordinator (IES), Abdenour Boukamhi, aboukamhi@edc.org
