Africa Renewal – Jocelyne Sambira
“A small, dusty, sparsely furnished building of mud bricks serves as a classroom for pupils at a primary school in Buterere, a town on the outskirts of Burundi’s capital. The room is packed with a sea of small bodies in khaki uniforms, some sprawling on the dirt floor trying to balance their notebooks and write at the same time. The lucky few who get desks are tightly squeezed together on the same bench, elbows touching as they scrawl notes while the teacher talks and writes on a chalkboard. The metal sheet that serves as a roof makes the room hot and stuffy. According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), school attendance surged from 59 per cent to 96.1 per cent between 2005 and 2011. The number of girls entering school for the first time was actually higher than the number of boys…Children as old as 10 or 12 were enrolling for the first time, Concilie Nizigiyimana, a state inspector for schools in the rural province surrounding Bujumbura, the capital, told Africa Renewal. “Most of the families in the area couldn’t afford to send their kids to school,” she says. “So when school became free, we received a huge number of children. Some classes hold as many as 100 pupils for one teacher. Burundi could easily be the education poster child for the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).”(more)