Improving access and quality in primary schools

Throughout the world almost everyone agrees that all children have the right to education. However in many parts of Africa the education they get sometimes is barely worth having. There may be no classroom and the children have to sit day after day outside under the hot sun and sometimes in heavy rain. They may not have textbooks, or learning materials and basic facilities like clean water or latrines and they may be “taught” by untrained teachers who have themselves barely completed primary school.

In many parts of Southern Sudan, for example, over 50% of children are taught outdoors and more than 90% of the teachers are untrained. AET is working to improve the quality of education in primary schools in countries such as Southern Sudan, Somalia, Somaliland and Uganda.

The Trust provides grants to enable local communities to build classrooms, storerooms and latrines. It helps educators and teachers to develop new locally relevant classroom teaching and learning materials and it trains teachers how to use these new materials. It also helps the school to set up school libraries. Sometimes these may be as little as a box library of 100 books, but they might be the only books in the whole school.

AET also supports initiatives especially aimed at helping to improve opportunities for girls to get a good primary education. Initiatives such as supporting local women to act as “School Mothers” for the girls in their village or helping local colleges to run special courses so that more women can become teachers. A grant from a leading British law firm means that the Trust is also able to support the education of young HIV/ Aids orphans in Northern Kenya.

Next page: Supporting children for secondary education