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Chad: A Semblance of Education for a Displaced Child
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UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
13 March 2008
Posted to the web 13 March 2008
Goz Beida
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 was 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 a sticks and plastic sheeting is, why do they stick around?
"These children are our children," said Baharadin Anour, a community teachers who 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.
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 little they are supposed to earn from the government - about 30,000 CFA francs (US$67) per month -often never comes, said Elise Joisel, the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS)'s director of education at Goz Beida. Also the government does not take on many community teachers. "They have very small quotas," she said.
Instead, JRS has begun paying the bulk of their salaries, and parents from the communities chip in.
Quality
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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 smacked.
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.
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