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As African countries overhaul education, a school succeeds against the odds
05 December 2007
International Herald Tribune
Lilongwe, Malawi: Here at the Chiseka school on the rural outskirts of town, many children attend class outside, sitting among weeds in the shade of a towering blue gum tree. There are 1,531 students, six classrooms, no running water and no light bulbs.
Yet Chiseka has the best academic record in its district by far. Last year all 40 students in the eighth grade passed their exams. And 30 did well enough to qualify for secondary school -- a significant achievement in a country where less than 30 percent of students finish primary school.
Chiseka vividly shows one of the biggest challenges Africa faces today: Saving a generation that is growing up with hardly any education. One in two African children don't finish primary school, and millions don't go at all. Those who do often end up in crowded schools with untrained teachers.
Malawi is one of several African countries that are now overhauling education, in an effort to meet the United Nations goal of having every child of the right age enrolled in primary school by 2015. Countries such as Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania are working with donors and the United Nations to improve schools and train teachers.
But Malawi stands out because it is designing its ambitious 10-year education plan itself, in the belief that only a program designed by Africans for Africans will work in the long run. It gives children books by Malawi authors and teaches them science through their own environment. And it touts Chiseka's recent success as a sign of slow but steady progress.
The aim isn't to produce doctors or engineers, but simply to teach everyone to read, to do enough math to hold down a basic job and eventually to write a check and balance a checkbook. What rides on that goal is the future of the next generation, and ultimately the country's own chances at development.
"We want to learn, we try hard to get an education. I want to be a teacher someday," says Jeffrey Joseph, 14, a slight and timid eighth-grade boy at Chiseka, the son of a farmer.
Jeffrey, sitting beside the village's hand-pumped well, is uneasy at sharing a dream he knows will be difficult to achieve. He scratches nervously in the dirt with a stick. He is embarrassed that he has never read a book, and can barely speak English, the language of education in Malawi beyond the fourth grade.
"That is how life is," he says softly in Chichewa, his native tongue. "If you are born into a poor family that is your destiny."
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