Djibouti — The Djibouti government aims to get all its boys and girls in school by the end of this decade. That target, most observers agree, is likely to prove much easier in the capital, Djibouti City, and provincial towns than in the hamlets that dot the arid countryside, where the challenges to universal primary education are strongest.

Despite its small size (area 23,000 sq km, population about 500,000] Djibouti has huge variations in terms of education coverage. In the capital's wealthier neighbourhoods, such as the ornate city centre, built at the turn of the last century with the help of Yemeni craftsmen, just about everyone who should, goes to school, education officials say.

Registration rates are somewhat lower in the poorer parts of Djibouti City and in district capitals. In the countryside, where most people are nomads or semi-nomads, only a few children attend primary school.

It is also in the countryside that the greatest disparities between the enrolment of boys and that of girls are to be found. The southwestern village of Kouta Bouya, where the third edition of an annual campaign to get parents to send their girls to school was launched in December 2003, is a case in point. Its school had 106 pupils, according to brochures distributed by education ministry officials at the launch; only six were girls.

Primary education for all is one of the millennium development goals (MDGs), a set of eight targets for improving the welfare of the world's people, that governments have committed themselves to achieving, as well as the promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women. The MDGs are to be achieved by 2015. However, the target date for eliminating disparities between boys and girls in primary and secondary education, thereby to promote gender equality, is 2005.

UNICEF HELPING TO PROMOTE GENDER EQUALITY

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) has been striving to help all countries eliminate gender disparity in education. However, it has placed special emphasis on 25 countries judged most at risk of failing to achieve this goal. Nine of these are in Asia and the Pacific, one in South America, and 15 in Africa, including Djibouti.

Calculating education coverage in Djibouti is a major challenge since population estimates range from 450,000 to upwards of 700,000. The official figure - quoted by the government in its Poverty Reduction Strategy Framework - is 500,000. Based on the premise that around 18 percent of the population is between six and 12 years of age, the generally accepted estimate of the number of children of primary school age is 90,000.

Gross enrolment for the 2003-2004 school year is estimated at 47 to 49 percent - one of the lowest in sub-Saharan Africa. Girls make up about 43 percent of the primary school population. There had been some improvement, said Mahdi Isse, the director of planning at the education ministry, since 1998 when there were 61 boys to every 39 girls. But the increase is far below what the government would like to see.

Can Djibouti meet the 2005 deadline? "We'll get close to it," says Keith McKenzie, who heads UNICEFs Djibouti office. "I think there has been a tremendous push by the government [ ] over the last couple of years," he added, pointing to an "intensive campaign" led by the government, with support from donors and UN agencies such as UNICEF and the World Food Programme (WFP), to get more girls into school.

Parity can be achieved by 2010, says Isse, so long as ongoing efforts to mobilise parents and get them to send their children, both boys and girls, to school are kept up, and obstacles to girls' education are removed.

CONSTRAINTS

There are many constraints, however.

Some of them have to do with the schools themselves. "As UNICEF, we feel that the schools are still not what we consider child-friendly," says McKenzie, "and further still, they are not girl-friendly. I think there are certain changes that need to be made from a policy point of view to try and encourage more girls to go to school. Even the physical school itself is not really completely attractive to girls."

Deterrents mentioned by parents range from the lack of toilet facilities in some schools to the near-total absence of female teachers in rural schools. Only 30 percent of teachers are women, according to Isse, and rare are those who opt to teach outside urban centres.

The fact that in rural areas births are not always registered has also limited access to schools since children need identification documents to be enrolled. UNICEF planned to launch a study in March of the non-registration of births and its effects, McKenzie said.

The role of girls in the family is also a factor, especially in the countryside. In some cases, girls are kept at home to help their mothers with household chores, or to help bring up their younger siblings, says Koran Ahmed Aouled, who in 1996 became Djibouti's first female legal practitioner in private practice. "The further you go from town, the fewer girls you find in school, because girls assist in the home," adds Koran, whose nine siblings all went to school.

Access to education is another hurdle, especially in places like Campement du Lac Assal (Lake Assal Camp), a hamlet close to a salt lake roughly 100 km from Djibouti City. The camp is a collection of huts made from the stones that litter the area. It started off as a temporary shelter for nomadic herdsmen over five decades ago, according to its residents, and became a permanent camp around 1993. The nearest school was about 50 km away, residents said. As a result, of the scores of children in the hamlet and nearby settlements, none go to school.

But would they want to send their children to school if one were built nearby? IRIN asked during a visit to the hamlet in December. "Why not?" responded one woman, seemingly surprised that the question needed to be asked in the first place. Would they send the girls? "Yes, we would, and not only the girls," said another villager, 50-year-old Sultan Ali. "Even I would be willing to learn. When a car runs over one of our goats and does not stop, as happened the day before yesterday, we cannot even write down the number, so even I would go to school."

CULTURAL FACTORS

However, this attitude to education is not universal in rural Djibouti. Even when there are schools within walking distance, some parents still keep their children at home. "Those who reject [education] say it alienates people from their culture," says Isse. "They say school only trains people who have left their original culture, who do not know how to tend their livestock."

It goes even deeper than that, according to journalist Hasna Maki. "In the remotest parts of the country, people consider school an institution that makes girls say loud and clear what they feel - this in a society that is completely patriarchal, in which women have no voice. That's the main fear, that tomorrow you'll be faced with a woman who says 'No, I don't want to' to her parents, her husband and so on."

Moreover, parents have increasingly lost faith in schools since they are no longer a sure path to social advancement, according to education officials. "Just about 15 years ago, any child who graduated from primary school could land a job," said Isse. "Now, unemployment is so high that those who have been to school cannot find work, and people see this. So they say: why waste time and money sending a child to school so that, after six or eight years, that child comes back and lives off those who remained behind in the village?"

Primary education is free in Djibouti. However, clothes and school supplies still have to be bought for the children. Not all parents can afford this in a country where about three-quarters of the population are poor. In some cases, parents can only afford to educate some of their children.

When that happens, they choose the boys, says Degmo Isaack, the secretary-general of the National Union of Djiboutian Women "The thinking is that the girl will find a husband, so it's not really necessary to send her to school. In Djibouti and the district capitals, this mentality is changing, but in the countryside it's still there."

Getting parents to send their girls to school was one thing; keeping them there was another. Girls tended to have higher dropout rates than boys, said Isse. At times, this resulted from early marriages, especially in the countryside. Moreover, there was much less tolerance for failure among girls than among boys. Girls who performed badly in class, especially in secondary school, tended to be withdrawn more quickly by their parents, he added.

High demands are thus placed on girls, so much so that at the secondary school final examination, the baccalaureat, they outshine their male counterparts. "For the past two years, the first places at the baccalaureat have gone to girls," Isse said. "This surprises people, but these are girls who have gone through a rigorous selection."

OTHER LIMITING FACTORS

Another challenge facing Djibouti's education sector is a dire shortage of textbooks, with some schools having on average only one book per subject for every four pupils, according to sources in the sector.

Providing textbooks, increasing the number of schools and classrooms in the country, making education more affordable, improving its quality and revamping teacher training are among the priorities the government has set itself, according to Education Minister Abdi Ibrahim Absieh.

Its targets include increasing the number of classrooms by 575 between 2001 and 2005. About three-quarters of the new classrooms have already been built and equipped.

UN agencies are also involved in efforts to support education for girls.

INCENTIVES AS STIMULUS

A WFP programme officer, Amadou Bocoum, told IRIN that his agency supported 44 schools with 11,539 pupils, of whom 45 percent were girls. It provided cooked meals - breakfast and lunch - for schoolchildren, and incentives for parents to send their girls to school. "For example, if a girl goes to school for an entire month, we give her a tin of edible oil to take home," he said. Field officers also go from door to door to explain to parents the advantages of educating their daughters.

"We support girls from class three to six, because that's where we've noticed the biggest dropout rate," Bocoum said. "Since we started giving the oil [at the beginning of the 2002-2003 academic year], attendance has been regular."

A one-year UNICEF project scheduled to begin this month is also aimed at increasing the number of girls in school and reducing the dropout rate. It will complement an ongoing programme begun in 2001-2002 by UNICEF in conjunction with the government seeking to ensure that conditions in schools are conducive to the development of the full potential of girls and boys.

Under the Child-Friendly Schools programme, schools compete for prizes awarded for their performance in areas such as availability of textbooks, the quality of education provided, the conditions under which children learn, the commitment of teachers, and sanitary facilities and the school's surroundings. Rewards range from computers and television/video sets to dictionaries and school supplies.

"This has created a great deal of emulation by schools and generated much interest among teachers, as well as parents and children, some of whom have been asking for their schools to be included," said a UNICEF programme officer, Roger Botralahy. This year, he said, prizes would also be given to students of winning schools.

UNICEF has sought funding for another project that aims to increase gross primary enrolment from 43,000 this year to 52,000 in 2005-2006 and reduce the dropout rate in the final year of primary school from about 30 percent to 20 percent. The project would provide students with school supplies such as slates, pens, pencils, notebooks, teachers would be given teaching manuals, and just under 200,000 textbooks would be distributed to schools between 2004 and 2006.