Help us Help Ourselves: Education in the Conflict to Post-Conflict Transition in Liberia

This report povides an assessment of the current state of education in Liberia as well as a questionnaire that can be used as education systems and facilities are developed.

Liberia is emerging from 14 years of civil war. It is one of the only countries in the world where there are more literate adults than children and youth. Infrastructure, including schools, teacher training centres and roads, has been destroyed. Textbooks and other learning materials are in short supply or nonexistent. Trained teachers are few and far between, and due to government corruption, are most often not paid for their work. Liberia will need to build its education system from square one.

On a positive note, the new president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is committed to ending government corruption on all levels and is making education a priority. Communities, even those with almost no resources, are beginning school construction and working to ensure their children have access to education. Creative education programmes are being implemented, such as accelerated learning, where children and youth who have missed more than two years of primary school can take two academic years in one year and then go to secondary education. Vocational training, such as carpentry and blacksmithing, is combined with basic literacy and numeracy ans customer service classes.

This report includes a series of questions, gleaned from interviews and meetings in Liberia and based on categories in the Minimum Standards for Education in Emergencies, Chronic Crisies and Early Reconstruction, the international guide for provision of education in crisis situations. The questions have been developed to provide a framework for thinking about education reconstruction in Liberia. This is the first report of a three-country case study designed to develop a set of questions that can be used internationally when developing or redeveloping education systems in the conflict to post-conflict transition.

pdf: http://www.womenscommission.org/pdf/lr_ed.pdf

Countries

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