allAfrica.com: Ethiopia: Self-Help Efforts to Promote Sustainable Alternative Basic Education

Ethiopia: Self-Help Efforts to Promote Sustainable Alternative Basic Education -

During the last month of November, Regional Forums on Alternative Basic Education were established in Tigray and Afar Regions.

These initiatives, launched by the Regional Education Bureaus in partnership with the Ministry of Education, were facilitated and sponsored by the Italian Development Cooperation.

Due to the peculiar nature of its demographic characteristics and the socio-economic challenges that confront Ethiopia, conventional school system is unable to thrive and make an impact in remote areas. Especially, areas with high levels of poverty are unable to send all children to school due to child labor pressures and therefore require alternative routes to achieving basic literacy.

Yet another obstacle is the official school calendar which usually conflicts with families' economic activities to which the child is a crucial contributor.

Another dimension to the problem is that deprived rural areas are often unable to attract and sustain "trained teachers" and therefore require alternative more cost effective approaches to introducing basic education.

Besides, a growing number of NGOs and civil society organizations are introducing basic education initiatives that have been adjusted to reflect these demographic and socio-economic realities of remote areas. As a matter of fact, these organizations have the advantage of adequate funding but are also able to integrate contextual understanding into program delivery to meet the needs of poor communities.

However, using NGO and other donor funds to provide alternative routes to basic education for the poor communities comes with its difficulties and unintended consequences. First of all, the alternative routes tend to be short-term initiatives and crucially the efforts do not link very well to the formal system, making many of them a dead end. There is also evidence that many of such schools are unable to engage in productive collaborations to sustain financial and programmatic commitments that are critical for their continued existence which often leads to a dependency on the providers that is not sustainable.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that external aid assistance can play an important role in motivating self-help efforts among poor rural communities especially in situations where poor people have little or no collective active capacity, voice and resources to initiate a process of change. The challenge really is how to make aid-assisted education interventions work in such a way as to motivate self-help effort and avoid creating a dependency relationship.

Accordingly, the Italian Development Cooperation is actually providing assistance to Federal Ministry of Education as well as to the Regional Education Bureaus of Afar, Oromyia, Somali and Tigray Regional States in order to analyze and draw out conclusions on good practices and areas of need by identifying a broad range of good practices, from which wider lessons can be learned. In order to understand exclusion and strategies for working toward inclusion, it is necessary to examine experiences and best practices on policy and practice.

Taking into consideration the difficulties which civil society organizations and NGOs face in forging closer relationships with local institutions, the Italian Contribution to the ESDP is promoting the launch and development of regional forum in order to facilitate a networking system among CSOs, NGOs, donors, Woreda and Zonal Education Offices, Regional Education Bureaus as well as Federal Ministry of Education. The key therefore, is finding productive ways of engaging the best partnership. Education decentralization policy offers a good way to achieve this.

In Mekele, the forum was established during a two days workshop held November 11 and 12, 2007. The participants, belonging to Regional, Zonal and Wereda education bureaus and offices, to Mekelle and Addis Ababa Universities, to Teacher Training Colleges as well as to various NGOs working in the education sector in the region, analyzed the education system in their region, the importance of ABE as an additional instrument for the achievement of UPE by 2015 and the major challenges for the implementation of such alternative education practices. By the end of the workshop, a committee chaired by the Regional Education Bureau was nominated for the guidance of the forum. Within the next six months the committee will have the task to elaborate regional ABE Strategy and Implementation Procedures that will be than submitted to the forum for discussion and approval.

Whereas, in the Afar Regional State the Afar Education Development Coordination Platform (AEDCP), a multi-stakeholders forum for discussion and coordination of different education issues, was already established by the Regional Education Bureau last year.

A week ago, a two-days workshop was organized in Awash to bring ABE to the attention of different stakeholders members of AEDCP. The Workshop was sponsored by the Italian Development Cooperation and it saw the participation of Regional Government and Education Bureau representatives and numerous NGOs both local and international.

Among the others, we bear in mind APDA-Afar Pastoralist Development Association, KETA-Kelem Education and Training Association, EMRDA-Ethiopian Muslim Relief and Development Association, Rohi Woddu Pastoral Women Development Association and Save the Children UK and Norway, Oxfam GB, ActionAid, PACT Ethiopia. In addition, representatives from different international organisations have attended at the workshop, such as UNICEF, WFP, UNAIDS.

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