Oct 08
2009
4:02 PM
Text by Louis Vigneault. Read more on UNICEF’s website.
Salomie Kieah is one of many six-year-old children starting school this month in Liberia. After a final adjustment to fit her new uniform and a stop at the stationery shop to buy supplies, she is ready for her first day in primary school.
Salomie was born in 2003, a few weeks after her country restored peace following 14 years of conflict that killed, wounded and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. She is among the first class of first-graders to be born in peace here in many years.
But Salomie’s aunt, now 18, had to flee with her family during the war and missed three years of school. She is currently trying to catch up with her education. It’s the same story for many Liberian young people. Only one in three schoolchildren is studying at the traditional grade level for his or her age.
Even in the lower grades, the age gap is present. Most of Salomie’s classmates will be older than her, because children must be able to read and write when they start first grade – and very few parents can afford to send their children to preparatory school.
Salomie’s mother lives in the United States and sends money to pay for her education at a private school. At $50 per year, this option remains out of reach for most families in a country where 84 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line.
Liberia is now enforcing free and compulsory primary education in all public schools. With limited government resources to build new schools, however, the public school system is overwhelmed by new enrolment.
According to Ganta District Education Officer David N. Kehzie, 8,700 primary school students were enrolled in the district last year. More are expected this year. He says four new schools are needed to accommodate new students.
UNICEF and its partners are building a new school in Ganta as part of ‘Learning Along Borders for Living Across Boundaries’ initiative, which uses strategic education interventions to help advance development in post-conflict Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
The child-friendly public school in Ganta will be able to offer free primary education to about 270 new students in a few weeks. But classrooms for many more children will have to be built.
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf recently called for more international support and investment in primary education.
“Young children today feel that they can have a future that they can be safe” she said at a press event in Monrovia. “This is the first time that six-year-olds will go to school not knowing war, not having to run, not having to hide. Those children see life in Liberia as normal. We must continue on this path, so they can become adults in a normal environment.”
About Scarlett Lion
I’m an American photographer and journalist traipsing around Africa on the lookout for the ordinary and the extraordinary, using my camera as a pretext to enter worlds not otherwise available.
This space is a scrap book of web and life trawlings – photography, music, arts, politics, and other sundry subjects. It is also a vanity press for my unpublished (and occasionally) published work.
I found the scarlett lion on the roof a friend’s house in Kampala back in 2006 when I went through a crate of discarded items he and a few other artists had gathered. On that day, I was looking for something and I found the lion: a discarded kid’s toy made in China on the cheap, that somehow found it’s way to East Africa. Something about the hollowed out, paint chipped figurine appealed to my understanding of this amazing continent: I’d never seen a real lion, after all.
Previously based in Uganda, currently in Liberia. Always roaming.
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