How to Help Congolese Kids?
Here is an excerpt from the series I have running in Slate.com this week:
According to UNICEF, 60 percent of the children in the Democratic Republic of Congo have access to primary school, and 29 percent of those who enroll complete fifth grade. The proportion of young people who have access to secondary schooling is much lower. Besides the cost, other reasons children may not be able to go to school include having to work, parents preferring to send sons to school but not daughters, or families being displaced by conflict and not having physical access to schools.
In April 2010, aid agencies Catholic Relief Services, International Rescue Committee, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Save the Children appealed to the Congolese government to double its education budget and called on the international community to significantly increase foreign-aid expenditure on education in the DRC. The Congolese government reports in its 2010-16 Development Strategy for Primary, Secondary, and Professional Education that “public financing of the education sector has fallen drastically … from 24 percent of public spending in 1980 to 7 percent in 2002. Despite efforts undertaken in the past several years to adjust spending in favor of education, the situation has worsened to the point that only 4 percent of public spending was allocated to the education sector in 2009.” Many teachers in DRC do not receive their wages and have to ask their students for money. According to a World Bank report, 40 percent of teachers in Aimé’s state of North Kivu go unpaid because the government doesn’t have the funds.
I will let policymakers decide what to do with this information, and I dearly hope they do something, especially those at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
But I will propose my own idea, from the perspective of a journalist who observed the life of an impoverished, 14-year-old Congolese boy for a year within the context of an entire culture — LIBRARIES. How can people learn if they don’t have any books?
