Concern Blogs

By Nicki Sugrue

Jean Kwizerimana, 15, is a sixth-year student at Rugendo Primary School in Burundi who received a school uniform and supplies from Concern Worldwide.

September is the beginning of the school year in Burundi, but for many children it is just like any other month. Twelve years of civil conflict, which ended in 2005, left the country scarred. Reconstruction has been slow, significantly impacting the quality of education and the standard of schools available. Many families do not have the means to send their children to school and, even when they do attend, there is a high drop-out rate due to large class sizes and a lack of school materials and infrastructure. Read the rest of this entry »

Children in class in the Future Kids School in Mathare slum, Nairobi. Photo: Kenya, Concern Worldwide

By Sylvia Wong, Education Officer, Concern Worldwide US

Last month, I was in Kenya visiting Concern’s education and nutrition programs with high school students and teachers. The drought crisis in the Horn of Africa still hadn’t hit the headlines, but one week after we left the US that changed and news spread around the globe that “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” was upon us. The most severe drought in 60 years along with record highs in food and fuel costs meant that over 12 million people were facing extreme hunger and potential starvation in East Africa. Read the rest of this entry »

Girls in Phombe Primary School, Nsanje District in Malawi, where Concern is supporting the community to encourage the education of girls. Photo: Malawi, Concern Worldwide

By Joseph Scott, former Communications Officer with Concern Worldwide in Malawi

For some years, daily life in the community of Mtumba village in Nsanje district was dictated by the darker side of local culture. Years of upholding traditional practices, such as girls leaving school to get married, produced a vicious cycle of illiteracy that has severely hampered the development of Mtumba as a community. Literacy levels in Mtumba  are very low. In a community of about 1,500 people, only three girls have completed their primary school education.

And, unfortunately, these are now married: “It’s disappointing to note that all girls in our village are rushing or are being forced into marriage,” says Lilian Kastomu, one of the girls who completed primary school but is now a mother of two, adding, “that’s why I decided to join the Mother Group to encourage girls in my village not to make the mistake I made.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Louise Yarsiah leads the women of WANEP in song in Liberia. Photo: Jenny Hobbs, Concern Worldwide

By Jenny Hobbs, Education Co-ordinator, Liberia

Few people are aware that a group of women – calling themselves the Peace Women, dressed in colourful lappas (Liberian cloth), bright white t-shirts and white headscarves, were instrumental in bringing peace to Liberia. Their story, which begins with the simple act of sitting along the streets for months under the hot sun or torrential rains of Liberia, led to the exile of alleged warlord Charles Taylor in 2003, now awaiting his verdict in The Hague.

In 1998, women from all tribes and religions in Liberia united in their common goal for an end to violence, and played an essential role in the decommissioning of young rebels to install peace and democracy in a war-torn country. The movement took place under the auspices  of the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP). Today the work of these Peace Women continues. Here in Liberia, 75 women gather on a dusty football pitch to hold a 40-day fast and prayer meeting in solidarity for the women and children in neighbouring Côte D’Ivoire, where over 77,700 refugees have fled to Liberia. Read the rest of this entry »

Children in Grand Bassa with school curriculum materials provided with support from Concern. Photo: Ester Havens, Liberia

By Jenny Hobbs, Education Coordinator, Liberia

When a girl starts school in Liberia, she arrives full of enthusiasm and hope. Squeezing onto a bench with children her age—under a corrugated roof, in a make-shift building—she looks to her teacher ready to learn. But, without books to read from, a desk to lean on or a pencil to hold, progress is slow. Her teacher is an untrained, unqualified, unpaid volunteer. He struggles to control the overcrowded class and yearns for a curriculum to follow, textbooks to use or a decent blackboard to write on.

Concern Liberia is working to address these issues in 30 remote schools in Grand Bassa County. Constructing classrooms, separate toilets for boys and girls and providing furniture is just the start. Textbooks and other essential learning items like blackboards, pencils and copybooks are also being distributed. Read the rest of this entry »

By Joan Bolger, Communications Officer, Concern US

Abebech Tito, a mother of children attending the Concern-supported Alternative Basic Education center in Wolayita, Ethiopia. Photo: Ethiopia, Concern Worldwide

There’s a saying in southwestern Ethiopia and not surprisingly—in an area ravaged by drought for three months of the year—it relates to water. Loosely translated it goes: it’s impossible to win back the water after your bucket has fallen over.

Abebech Tito, a mother of five, told me this through the school fence near her children’s classroom as she considered how her life might have been different had she not dropped out of school at Grade 8. She delivered the proverb with a smile and a shrug. “It was my own foolishness,” she added.

Her village of Fango Bijo is located in the Rift Valley in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (SNNPR) region of Ethiopia, where recurrent drought and the prevalence of malaria is notoriously high. “A child died of malaria last year here,” she says, tipping her head towards the Concern-supported Alternative Basic Education (ABE) center that her children now attend. Read the rest of this entry »

Eager to begin classes, trained facilitators have begun classes under the shade of this tree while the ABE center is being built. Photo: Ethiopia, Concern Worldwide

By Joan Bolger, Communications Officer, New York

Schools come in many forms in Ethiopia. The best ones are usually built with brick walls, lined with mud floors, furnished with desks and chairs and served by trained teachers.

In parts of rural Ethiopia however, where villagers are often cut off from roads or where searing heat in the dry season makes traversing long distances by foot impossible, there are several thousands of schools up and running against all the odds.

I  visited one last month in the tiny village of Adacha Ellio, in Ethiopia’s Wolayita region.  Children here have to walk barefoot for up to 8 kilometers a day through dried river beds, steep ravines and dusty, hot terrain to sit on the ground and listen to their teacher under the shade of a tree. There are no desks, no chairs, no blackboard and no books but there are students, 40 of them at a time, who come here eager to learn.

Read the rest of this entry »

Concern-supported teachers’ training session gets underway in Djinguiniss, Niger. Photo: Amayele Dia, Niger, Concern Worldwide

By Amayele Dia, Program Support Officer, Niger

Niger is the least developed country on the planet—according to the United Nations Human Development Index. Its people survive on very little, most on far less than $1 a day, and every year in Niger, the population endures what is called a “hunger gap”—a period of roughly 4 months when the food from the last harvest has run out, but the next harvest is not yet ready. In some years, like this one, failed rains lead to crop failure, and the hunger gap is much longer and much more serious.

Niger is one of the toughest countries imaginable in which to live or to work. My job is to help Concern tackle the root causes of poverty here through such programs as education—to give the poorest people in this very vulnerable nation a foothold to begin the long, hard climb out of extreme poverty.

No contribution in this country is too small to make a difference—and if education is supported by the international community here, it will be a powerful, liberating social and economic force. But it is a step-by-step battle, and the stakes are high. Read the rest of this entry »

By Cecial Adhikari, Water and Sanitation Program Manager, Nepal.

Completed School Toilet (with seperated facillity for boys and girls)

“I enjoy staying in the classroom where I can concentrate on studying,” fifth-grader Lalit Khatri told me when I spoke to him at the Pashupati Primary School in Dashera village located in the Jajarkot District of Nepal.
Through its local partner, Nepal Water for Health, Concern recently implemented a program to improve water and sanitation facilities at Lalit’s school in efforts to promote basic health for the students of this rural region. I was back to visit with the children and teachers and see how the project was impacting their lives.
Nepal has the poorest drinking water and sanitation coverage for its population in South Asia and a correspondingly high rate of waterborne diseases. In the area in which Concern works, the most prevalent diseases are: dysentery, diarrhea, typhoid, hepatitis and cholera. The cholera outbreak in 2009 claimed over 200 lives in Jajarkot District.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ange Kamugisha, Education Liaison Officer, Rwanda

Rachael and Sarah pictured carrying out household chores in 2009 when Concern went to check why they'd dropped out of school. Photo: Rwanda, Concern Worldwide

I cannot imagine the sadness of watching my child grow up without the chance to go to school, learn to read and write, or have opportunities to achieve her potential.

And yet, here in my native Rwanda, each time I meet an out-of-school child, I feel a measure of that sadness.

Lack of access to basic, quality primary education is one of the root causes of extreme poverty, and disproportionately affects girls: the majority of the world’s 72 million out-of-school children are girls. Read the rest of this entry »