Monrovia — After more than a decade of civil strife destroyed Liberia's infrastructure and schools, the country's leaders are keen to revitalize education. This year, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's government has put education at the top of its budgetary priorities.
Education has long been important to the new government. In 2006, government officials and other stakeholders began to formulate what many have referred to as a road map for the country – the Poverty Reduction Strategy, or PRS. The PRS – modeled on the Millennium Development Goals – articulates the government's overall vision and major strategies for moving toward rapid, equitable, and inclusive growth and development by 2011.
Although Liberia is facing challenges across many sectors, experts categorized the country's needs into four main areas for effective intervention. One of the four areas is the provision of basic services, including education.
"Without an informed citizenry, we can never have sustainable development and peace here in this country," deputy information minister Gabriel Williams told AllAfrica in a recent interview. "When the government's free primary education scheme was launched about two years ago, we realized an astronomical increase in enrollment. Then we noticed we didn't have enough schools [or] enough teachers to accommodate the growing student population. So this is why the government wants to provide more resources."
Resources are desperately needed. Literacy hovers around 20 percent, and few girls or women are enrolled in school. With most of the country's teacher training institutes destroyed, nearly all teachers currently employed schools have no formal training. Moreover, teachers are in short supply.
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One of the schools facing such problems is Maggie's Kinder Care, a school for nursery school children in Monrovia's eastern district of Sinkor.
"You find a lot of children in the street today who are selling and whose parents cannot afford to send them to school," says Martha Jones, the school's principal. "The owner of this school had a love for children and decided to contribute to improve literacy."
With the lack of infrastructure or the means to build schools, many occupy makeshift buildings and Maggie Kinder Care is no exception. The school building was originally built for residential purposes, but now functions in both capacities, with residents and school-going children mingling during school hours.
Many organizations and partners of the Liberian government – including United Nations agencies, the United States and China – have made large contributions to resolving the education crisis. The U.S. has helped rehabilitate some of the teacher training institutes that fell out of use following the civil war.
The Liberian Education Trust is one of the many initiatives to combat the education crisis. The trust aims to reduce the gender gap in school enrollment by providing 5,000 scholarships to girls, training 500 teachers and building 50 new schools over five years.
Even with outside help, rebuilding the country's education sector from scratch is a daunting task. Although many organizations and partners are working together to rehabilitate the system, some observers are pessimistic about achieving the educational goals of the PRS by the target date.
