https://archive.md/ujeMz
"MAKENI, Sierra Leone — Any exasperated parent might be forgiven for wanting a
daughter like Alimatu Sesay, a highly motivated 16-year-old who can’t afford
schoolbooks but borrows them from wealthier classmates and studies the texts
outside every night with a flashlight because her tiny home is crowded and has
no electricity.
Alimatu is one of seven children, her dad died years ago, her mom is illiterate
and she herself sometimes must go without eating all day when money is tight.
But she is a brilliant student on a path to fulfill her dream of becoming a
lawyer because of an education revolution underway here in Sierra Leone. (And
when she becomes a lawyer, she says, she’s going to buy her mom a house.)
In 2018, the government here banned school fees, which had kept Alimatu’s
parents and millions of others from attending any school at all. The
authorities have also outlawed corporal punishment in schools and ramped up
investment in education, with more than 20 percent of the national budget
allocated to teacher pay, school renovation and other education expenses. The
result has been a 50 percent increase in enrollment and also an apparent
improvement in the quality of education, with impoverished children benefiting
the most.
Sierra Leone may offer a model for how even a very poor country, still
recovering from an Ebola outbreak in 2014-16 that followed a particularly
brutal 11-year civil war, can by sheer determination and leadership make
schooling more equal. The United States and other countries could learn a thing
or two in the ramshackle schools of Sierra Leone.
Yet Sierra Leone’s grand experiment in promising “free quality school” is also
maddeningly incomplete."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-homicide-education-sierra-leone-solar-china/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
