Harper — From the sky, the huts dotted along unpaved roads leading to the port city of Harper resemble those in rural areas in Liberia. But while life in Harper resembles village life in many ways, several features set the city apart.
Most roads here are paved in concrete, and many of the city's public buildings are constructed from fine architectural designs. Gentle breezes from the Atlantic cool the city.
Residents tout Harper and (surrounding) Maryland County's beauty, but they say you can't live on appearance alone. They want better schools, more access to health care and roads to connect them to the rest of Liberia.
Harper lies in Liberia's southeastern corner, bordering the Atlantic to the south and Côte d'Ivoire to the east. Maryland is Liberia's seventh most populated county.
More than three-quarters of the country's population is unemployed, with about the same number unable to read and write. Maryland County, which is among the nation's poorest regions, highlights on a local scale all the challenges facing post-war Liberia as national and international efforts are made to redevelop and rebuild.
In Harper, the educational needs are great. Education is a major priority in the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS), a document that articulates the government's main plans for sustainable growth during a three-year time frame which began last April. But the demands are daunting in the areas of training teachers, improving salaries and rehabilitating educational infrastructure.
Education is in a very poor state in Maryland, with most of the county's 151 schools – 42 of them in Harper district – severely dilapidated. Of 1,071 teachers, 40 percent are volunteers and 77 percent are untrained.
At sunrise though, every corner of Harper city seems to be filled with children headed to school. Students wearing different shades of uniforms, excited to learn, are eager to be in class.
"The school business seems fine here," said Moses Clark, a 19-year-old student who attends Cape Palmas High School, a public school. "The only thing we are lacking are the required teachers for some subjects."
Education accounted for the largest chunk of the government's last annual budget. The increase in the allocation of resources enabled the introduction of free primary education. "In the first year of its implementation, the country experienced an impressive 40 percent increase in enrollment," said the Minister of Education, Dr. Joseph Kortu.
At the Community Children Rehabilitation School in Harper, a one-roomed, makeshift structure built with bamboo and mud bricks and covered by torn tarpaulins, smiling children run around. The school has five teachers, all untrained.
"We opened the school to help our community children," said Grace Hne, the school's principal. "It's not a government school."
Inside a packed classroom, three teachers are surrounded by noisy preschool students with an average age of five. A room to accommodate 50 now holds more than 265 students, said principal Hne.
Harper district has more than 5,000 students in the school system. The high enrollment is a result of the introduction of free primary schooling.
"Many schools in Harper do not have well-paid, qualified teachers, but volunteers," said Harrison Murray, president of Maryland's Teachers' Association. Of the 24 teachers at Cape Palmas, only seven are on the payroll.
At times, said Murray, finance ministry employees alternate teacher's salaries, meaning the name of one would appear on the August payroll, then get deleted for September. Teachers earn about U.S. $75 a month, while the "volunteer" teachers receive U.S. $9 a month.
"It's a challenge to have qualified teachers come here," Murray said.
Similar frustration is expressed by the acting county education officer, Jacob H. Brown, who said low salaries often lead to high turnover. He also said higher qualifications do not make an appreciable difference to salaries: "A janitor and a principal make the same salary." Unless this is addressed, he added, the education system will continue to decline.
Joseph Kortu acknowledged the quality of education is "not the best," but said much is being done by a government that has the "will and commitment" to improve the situation in collaboration with its development partners.
If the government maintains current progress, he added, the system will be restored to its state of development before the country's decade-long civil war. There are still problems with managing the school system, he said, and more management capacity needs to be built.
He points to the turning over to the government in October of the Zorzor Teacher Training Institute, which marked the beginning of a "regular teacher training program." Moreover, for the first time since the war, Peace Corps volunteers from the United States have returned to boost the education system.
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Many Liberian schools were damaged during the war, including those in Harper. The government, with development partners including the United Nations Mission in Liberia (Unmil), have been instrumental in rehabilitating damaged schools.
Harper has not yet benefited from Unmil's Quick Impart Projects, which have been very helpful in rehabilitating damaged schools in some parts of the country. But other UN agencies, including the UN High Commission for Refugees, have built schools there and students are benefiting from a World Food Programme scheme which feeds more than 400,000 primary school children in rural areas around the country.
In addition, other agencies have made a great impact. For example, a local NGO called Children Assistance Program is responsible for the high enrollment of girls through its campaign of encouraging them to go to school in Harper city.
Kortu said that economic revitalization is one of the government's strategies for reducing poverty: "By revitalization, you are going to be opening the mines, factories, rubber plantations, etc. which will be in need of quality human resources. And it's the educational sector that prepares them."
