PEACE & SECURITY | Creating a more stable world
08 February 2008
President’s Initiative Increases Access to Education in Africa
Program giving scholarships to 550,000 girls, training 920,000 teachers
Washington -- When President Bush and first lady Laura Bush travel to Africa February 15-21, one of the programs in which they will have keen interest is the President’s Africa Education Initiative (AEI), a multiyear effort that focuses on increasing access to quality basic education in more than 30 sub-Saharan countries through scholarships, teacher-training programs and textbooks.
Launched in 2002, AEI is a $600 million program that will have provided scholarships to 550,000 African girls and trained more than 920,000 teachers by 2010.
“If boys and girls in Africa, and other developing nations don't learn how to read, write, and add and subtract ... all the aid efforts we'll be trying will go to naught, in my judgment,” President Bush said in 2007, in explaining the impetus for the AEI.
“Educated women will pass their knowledge along to their communities and to their children,” the first lady said in Senegal in 2007 of AEI's focus on girls' education.
After returning from her 2007 Africa trip, her third as first lady, Laura Bush spoke of her experience at the Grand Medine Primary School in Dakar, Senegal, where she met five young women who are receiving AEI Ambassadors' Girls Scholarships.
“They come from rural Senegalese villages -- their villages are without electricity or running water. In that village, education for women is rare. One of the young women, Nango Dang, hopes to become the first girl in her village to ever go to college. And since her community has no nurses or doctors, she wants to study medicine so she can return to her village and serve her people,” the first lady said.
“I helped distribute books produced through the AEI's Textbooks and Learning Materials program. Six African countries have partnered with six American universities -- primarily minority-serving universities -- to produce 15 million school textbooks. Through the program, more than a million books that are Africa-centered, tailored to the culture and curriculum of Senegal, written in French, [and] printed in Senegal are being delivered to that nation's schools.
“Many of these books were pilot-tested at Grand Medine School. For the first time, the school's math texts teach basic statistics. From their health books, the students learn how to prevent HIV/AIDS. They go home and inform their parents that mosquitoes transmit malaria, and they pass along lessons about basic first aid. Grand Medine teachers say their students are so excited by these new books that they skip ahead of their teachers and can't wait for the next lessons,” she said.
THE AMBASSADORS GIRLS’ SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM
The first of AEI’s three main components is the Ambassadors Girls’ Scholarship Program.
The 100 local nongovernmental organizations that administer the scholarship program seek to select the neediest girls who are likely to succeed in the program, according to Judy Benjamin, the project director for the program at the Academy for Educational Development, a nonprofit organization that specializes in implementing development programs. “Many of them are orphans because of HIV/AIDS,” she said. “We deliberately are working in the very poorest neighborhoods.”
In 15 of the participating countries, respected women from the community who have some education and leadership skills are chosen to be mentors for the girls.
TEXTBOOKS TAILORED TO THE CULTURE
Another component of AEI focuses on improving the quality and quantity of textbooks and learning materials in Africa. AEI is working to develop and distribute 15 million textbooks and related learning and teaching materials in partnership with African institutions and American universities.
“That young girl takes the book home with her, shares it with the parents, shares it with the grandparents,” said Cindy Courville, U.S. ambassador to the African Union. “This child becomes a fundamental instrument in changing that family’s life.”
“We saw that we could make a difference by helping the educational institutions in Africa to partner with minority-serving institutions in the United States to write, to publish and distribute textbooks and other learning materials for children, so that eventually every African child would have at least one book they could call their own,” said Sarah Moten, AEI director at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
In Tanzania, for example, USAID funding is enabling South Carolina State University and Zanzibar’s Ministry of Education to collaborate on the production of more than one million textbooks and learning materials.
“The beauty of this program is its respect and support for local resources and traditional customs,” former Assistant USAID Administrator Lloyd Pierson said when the agreement was signed. “The books will be published locally in Zanzibar. The characters will have names like ‘Halima and Hassan.’ The pictures will look like Zanzibari children and draw examples from the local context.”
TRAINING 920,000 TEACHERS
A third major component of AEI involves teacher training. AEI is developing, promoting and expanding innovative methods for training more than 920,000 teachers and administrators to improve the quality of learning for millions of African children. These in-service and pre-service training programs are implemented through the International Foundation for Education and Self-Help in Africa (IFESH), a nonprofit development organization based in Phoenix.
IFESH teacher-trainers, who receive a stipend of $800 per month, do not just participate in classroom teaching, in-service workshops, demonstrative teaching and administrative management. They also develop learning modules, curricula and resource centers; participate in English as a second language training and English clubs; train in information technology and promote gender equity, HIV/AIDS awareness and child-centered teaching.
