The provision of Education that prevails in pastoral regions of Afar and Somali regions of Ethiopia: A comparative study

• In Event: Access to high quality education

Abstract

The Status of Provision of Education in Nomadic Regions of Ethiopia
It is now almost more than one century since Ethiopia started taking the first official initiative to provide education for all its children. In 1906, Emperor Menelik II (1989-1913) issued a proclamation that every parent would be fined a substantial amount of money if they fail to send their children to school. The initiative had gained momentum in the subsequent regimes. For example, in 1961, after hosting the famous Educational Conference of newly independent African nations in Addis Ababa, the country has officially set to achieve universal primary education by the year 1980. This could not be materialized at all even though there was a sort of campaign to expand access by building more and more schools.
Based on the education and training policy of 1994, the Education Sector Development Program (ESDP) was launched, with an ultimate goal of increasing access to primary education, equity by expanding schools; improve efficiency by reducing drop out rates and repetition rates. It was also targeted to increase the primary enrolment rate in the two most under served pastoralist regions of the country; namely, Afar and Somalia regional states. The educational annual abstract of 2010/11, however indicated that GER has reached 96.4% at the national level, whereas the GER of Afar and Somalia pastoralist region is only 40.1% and 61.3% respectively. Yet, after all these long years, Ethiopia cited as first to begin but last to grow, lagging far behind those countries who started pretty late. Thus, providing education to nomadic communities becomes one of the most challenging and urgent issues currently facing educational policy makers and practitioners in the education system. Therefore, the aim of this paper is investigating the educational situation of nomadic pastoralists in terms of access from the perspectives of the EFA so as to enhance EFA among this vulnerable groups and to identify new ways to reach this not reached Nomads. Human Capital Theory and Rights Based Approach are the guiding theory for this research in that both theory rests on the assumption that formal education is highly instrumental and even necessary to improve the production capacity of a population and human rights activists view education as a basic human right and contend that it is the obligation of the state to ensure the availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability of education to all its citizens respectively.

To get the hindering factors of students’ participation in education in pastoralist areas of Ethiopia, in depth interview and focus group discussion that deals on school related, socio economic and socio cultural issues were conducted with State ministers, regional governments, principals of the school, clan chiefs, PTAs, parents, teachers and students and observation has also been made to check the reliability of the data. The finding then shows that their participation to education is found to be below expectations and attributed to administrative inefficiency, low commitment of the concerned officials, decentralization, deep-rooted poverty, mobility of the people, frequent draught and famine and harsh climate that the temperature ranges b/n 45-52 degree centigrade. This findings may help to examine the accessibility and alternative means to provide education and training to children of pastoralists and it may indicate the main problems related to provision of education and training services so that concerned authorities will take corrective measures to reverse the trend and to alleviate the existing problems.
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Author

• Petros Woldegiorgis Woldesenbet, Tampere University