New York — The sight of children making their way to school every morning - missing during 14 years of chaos and conflict - is a sign that Liberia has returned to stability. But a durable peace and economic recovery require teachers who are qualified to impart basic skills to students eager to learn.
During 14 years of civil conflict, Liberia's schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, power grids and water systems were destroyed. Teachers fled or were killed. With two-thirds of the nation's population displaced, a generation of children grew up on the run or in refugee camps in neighboring countries. Seventy percent illiteracy remained the norm.
When peace finally came, everyone wanted to "know book" - to learn to read and write, to move on and up, to better themselves and their families. A core challenge for President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, when she took office in 2006, was to respond to the national yearning for education. Schools were built, teachers were recruited and students flooded into the system.
Yet a recent World Bank-funded survey, the Early Grade Reading Assessment, shows that many Liberian primary school teachers lack adequate skills to teach reading, the fundamental tool for learning. At the end of second grade, the study found, 34 percent of Liberian students could not read a single word. "These data are shocking," President Johnson Sirleaf said, in agreement with the report.
Under her administration, education expenditure has reached U.S.$24.7 million, accounting for 7.12 percent of the national budget, making education the largest single line item. "We will continue to make education one of our highest priorities," the Liberian president said last week in New York, where she attended the United Nations General Assembly and related meetings focused on global poverty reduction.
"The task of rebuilding the education sector is towering," she told me in a breakfast interview. "National capacity must be restored throughout the education system. We cannot afford to lose another generation of pupils. So we must concentrate on providing children in those schools with better quality education and better systems to support them."
Johnson Sirleaf's emphasis on education is sound, according to Dr. Rebecca Winthrop, director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. "It is not enough to just enroll children in school," she said. "We have to make sure that children are learning. How well students learn today - from literacy, numeracy, to problem solving - is an important determinant of the economic growth of a country tomorrow." In particular, she said, "a quality education where both boys and girls have opportunities to learn is right in line with global data on effective strategies for economic development."
"Despite the great strides made in building schools, training teachers, providing textbooks, supporting girls' enrollment and addressing systemic issues at the national and local levels, much remains to be done," said Johnson Sirleaf. "Gains made to date can so easily be lost, if learning does not take place and pupils drop out of the early grades in frustration."
The president said that "Liberia has ambitious but achievable plans to raise the country to a middle income country by 2030. We will not reach our mid-to-longer-term goals without an educated citizenry. We have focused on education throughout my first term. We must continue the effort and increase the funding, or we will not get to where we need to be."
Liberia's transformation, she said, requires a focus on literacy and numeracy. "We must add in-service training to upgrade our primary school teachers to teach reading," she said. "We must build libraries and send book mobiles into rural areas. We must create a culture of reading in Liberia, backed up with the books and activities to support reading and learning. We must not lose another generation."
With support from the U.S. Agency for International Development, Liberia's Ministry of Education has identified effective strategies for improving early reading among primary students, including rapid training of teachers on how to better teach reading and spend more time in class practicing reading skills.
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Extending these strategies to schools across the country requires resources. Johnson Sirleaf has called on Liberia's private, bilateral and multilateral partners to continue to support the next, deeper steps of the restoration of the basic education system, including a focus on the early years, when the fundamentals are consolidated.
"Liberia's future lies in educating our youngsters," she said. "If we are to have a future as a thriving nation, we can not ignore this challenge."
Dr. Deborah Harding is president of the Liberian Education Trust, a project of the AllAfrica Foundation. She formerly served as vice president of the Open Society Institute and program officer at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
