Ninety-four percent of Zimbabwe’s rural schools — where most children are educated — failed to open this year, a Unicef (United Nations Children’s Fund) spokesperson informed a media conference called in Johannesburg, South Africa on February 10.
Zimbabwe’s education system, once regarded as the finest in sub-Saharan Africa, has become a casualty of the country’s economic collapse and political instability. Tsitsi Singizi, Unicef’s spokesman in Zimbabwe, says the top priority of the new unity government should be to salvage the education system. “The infrastructure for education is still there, but it needs to be brought back from the brink,” she urges.
The leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Morgan Tsvangirai, who was sworn in as prime minister on February 11, is expected to begin the work of reconstructing Zimbabwe.
“Children in rural areas already live on the margins, many are orphaned, a huge number depend on food aid, they struggle on numerous fronts,” Unicef’s representative in Zimbabwe, Roeland Monasch, said in a statement. “Now these children are being denied the only basic right that can better their prospects. It is unacceptable.”
Widespread disruption of schools began in the aftermath of the March 2008 elections and continued beyond the presidential run-off poll in June, which was not recognised internationally because of state-sponsored political violence. But after the elections, many teachers failed to return to their classrooms because their salaries had become worthless following hyperinflation, and for fear of continued political violence.
In 2008, school attendance ratios in Zimbabwe dropped from 80 percent to 20 percent, said the Unicef spokesperson, adding that the few schools that opened in 2009 are charging fees in foreign currency, making them unaffordable to the great majority of the country’s citizens.
(Excerpted and adapted from www.irinnews.org)