Tackling Angola's Teacher Shortage

(The Guardian, Oct 13) The dusty playground around Primary School 200 is filled with children. It could be breaktime, except that everyone is sitting in attentive groups. Some pupils are gathered beneath trees; others bake in the heat under a long, shiny sheet of corrugated metal that looks like a bike shelter.

In her job as a teacher-training co-ordinator in Huíla province, 43-year-old nun, Sister Cecília Kuyela witnesses school overcrowding every day. Primary School 200, which serves the poor area of João de Almeida, has 7,348 pupils for 138 teachers and eight permanent classrooms. At peak periods, classes are held in the street. But that is the least of Sister Cecília's worries.

Amid the hum of singing and recitation, 33-year-old teacher Rosa Florinda is drawing on a blackboard. "She is teaching her second-graders to tell the time,'' says Sister Cecília. "She has drawn clock faces on the board but that is not going to work. These children do not have watches. Neither, probably, do their parents. She needs to do things differently,'' she says.

Outdated teaching methods are only a fragment of Angola's education challenges. When the country's 27-year civil war ended nine years ago, its education system faced a standing start. Millions of people had moved into cities and provincial towns. The schools that were still functioning in 2002 had been built before independence in 1975 to cater essentially for the children of Portuguese settlers. The curriculum had scarcely evolved beyond some Soviet-influenced tinkering. Teacher training had stopped.

Angola signed contracts with China, trading oil for infrastructure projects such as roads, railways, hospitals and schools. Angolan cities became, and still are, building sites. But the realization loomed that without teachers, schools are just empty shells.

In his office in the provincial capital, Lubango, director of education Américo Chicote, 48, describes a "crisis'' that seems without end. "Our biggest challenge is to get children into school but then we have to find people to teach them. In Huíla province we have about 700,000 children of school age and 19,000 people teaching them. At the end of the war we had 200 schools. We now have 1,714 schools but we are still teaching 40% of our pupils under trees, and the school-age population is growing at a rate of 3% per year. Results are suffering. There are 171 days in the school year but there are not 171 days of good weather. We just have to do our best.''

Learning to Read for a Better Future

September 1st marked the opening of the International Literacy and Learning Week in Angola's capital, Luanda.  The meeting, focusing on "Literacy and peace, fights hunger and poverty" aims at exchanging experience between linguists of national vernacular languages. According to Angola National Director of Education of Adults, Guiherme Tuluca, " National language literacy helps fight hunger and poverty as it opens horizons for the population to change habits with a view to better build a domestic economy with qualified staff and workers."

Being a former Portuguese colony, Angola predominately speaks the Portuguese language.  Of 42 individual languages in Angola, there are six national or official languages: Portuguese, Kikongo, Kimbumdu, Mbundu, Chokwe and Oshiwambo. The literacy rate among Angolan males is 82.1% while only 53.8% of Angola females are literate. A high rate of Angolan illiteracy occurs in the predominately rural, remote areas where girls drop out of school at higher rates than boys and thus have a very low exposure to primary education.

Angola National Director of Education of Adults, Guiherme Tuluca adds in relation to building a better economy through literacy, "A trained peasant better analyzes the fertilizers and land information and produce markets.  An improvement in a farmer's own harvests helps boost the family's economy.  Tuluca urged the need for the rural population to benefit from the program. (Angop, Save the Children)