South Sudanese education delegation visits Kenya
Aug 7, 2006 (NAIROBI) — Senior government officials from southern Sudan arrived in Kenya on Monday for a week-long familiarization tour of the country’s education system.
A 16-member delegation comprising of three ministers of education and 13 senior officials are expected to hold discussionswith senior Kenyan government officials and tour the east African nation’s learning institutions.
The delegation led by Michael Milli, Minister of Education, Science and Technology of southern Sudan, is expected to hold discussions with officials in the Kenyan Ministry of Education.
Speaking on arrival in Kenya, Milli said peace has now returnedto southern Sudan, adding that reconstruction was the major challenge facing the autonomous government, which emerged from 21 years of civil war.
“There is now peace in southern Sudan and the major challenge facing us is reconstruction. Education is our top priority and we hope that our tour in Kenya will assist us learn more and put in place education structures and systems,” Milli told reporters in Nairobi.
“We started from scratch and we are looking to our good neighbors like Kenya to assist us. Already we are working with Kenya on the supply of textbooks and teachers. Teacher recruitmentand training will be our major issues of discussions while in Nairobi,” Milli said.
The visit comes after Kenya’s Education Minister Noah Wekesa said the east African nation, which brokered the landmark peace deal between the southern rebels and Khartoum, would send 200 primary school teachers to Sudan soon.
Analysts say anticipating the return over the next several months of thousands of internally displaced Sudanese and Sudanese refugees who fled to other countries, southern Sudan authorities, UN agencies, and NGOs are preparing for increased enrollment of children in primary schools throughout the vast region of southernSudan.
More than 20 years of civil war, which ended in January 2005, destroyed most of southern Sudan’s infrastructure and it is estimated that only 20 percent of children attend primary school.Of those who do, just 35 percent are girls.
Out of an estimated population of 7.5 million, only 500 girls in southern Sudan complete primary school each year.
Wekesa said the Kenyan government had agreed to send teachers on request from the Sudan government. “A delegation from Sudan will see me shortly. We have agreed to send the teachers there,” Wekesa said last month.
According to the minister, southern Sudan’s request for teachers followed successful negotiations over the deployment of 50 secondary school teachers from Kenya to Rwanda in May.
After more than two decades of civil war, the school system in southern Sudan is totally destroyed.
Only about one child in three goes to school, the teachers’ work for nothing, or for the very little that parents can pay.
Because of this situation, the UN World Food Program (WFP) has begun a 3.5 million dollar construction project to build 25 schools in southern Sudan, where primary school attendance rates are the lowest in the world.
WFP has already signed contracts to build four schools following donations in 2005 of 800,000 dollars from the United Kingdom and 400,000 dollars from the Netherlands.
Education authorities have indicated their willingness to integrate teachers who fled the conflict in the south and have been living in the northern part of the country.
Displaced by long years of conflict, some 400 teachers in and around the capital, Khartoum, have reportedly indicated their willingness to teach in communities that have been deprived of adequate education for years.
Aid workers say about half of the teachers in southern Sudan did not have any professional training, while just 7 percent have had a year’s training.
(Xinhua/ST)