Development Ratings

Africa Educational Trust targets people who have missed out on the opportunity to gain an education or skills, often due to civil war and conflict. Girls and young women, rural and ethnic populations, people with disabilities, nomadic herders, former child-soldiers, and refugees and internally displaced people are particularly targeted. Activities include:

• Grants for school construction: Local communities build classrooms, storerooms and toilet blocks funded by AET. Teaching and learning materials are developed. Basic school libraries are set up.

• Development of secondary schools: Expansion of secondary school classrooms, the provision of text books and laboratory materials, and the development of BBC World Service audio materials help improve the quality of secondary schooling. This helps balance the emphasis of development agencies on only primary education. HIV/AIDS orphans in Swaziland are funded to attend secondary school.

• Teacher training: AET works in partnership with universities and colleges to train secondary school teachers and teacher trainers. It also trains government and local authority staff and NGO workers.

• Distance learning: The Somali Distance Education and Literacy Programme (SOMDEL) is run in partnership with the BBC World Service. Over 43,000 young people in Somalia/Somaliland have completed literacy and basic education courses using weekly radio programmes, text books and afternoon classes run by volunteers in towns, rural villages and refugee camps. To add to residential courses for higher education, university level distance learning programmes are broadcast.

• Vocational skills training courses: Local partners provide courses relevant to the local job markets and young people’s interests, such as in driving, carpentry, tailoring, health care, and computing.

• Examination systems development: AET has helped the Somaliland Education Ministry to set up and run national examinations that are reliable and standardised. The work includes curriculum development, building examination centres, and training staff, moderators and invigilators.

• Research studies: For DfID, AET researched alternative education approaches in Africa. A study on the education needs of pastoralists was presented to local ministries and development agencies.

In addition, AET still provides partial and emergency scholarships to young people of African origin to study in the UK and elsewhere. 5,000 students have been funded overall. In several countries, AET supports local authors to write booklets of stories and information on local issues such as health, nutrition, human rights and the environment. These are used in level I of the distance learning. Over 100,000 have been published and distributed. To support girls to attend school, local women are trained to act as ‘school mothers’ for girls in their village, or to run courses to encourage women to become teachers. In the UK, African women’s organisations have been supported to provide community research and advocacy courses.

AET has a regional office in Nairobi from which it manages operations and relations with local partners. There are 3 offices in Somalia and 4 in Southern Sudan. There is a complicated physical arrangement of local NGO partners, offices and AET staff to cover the different institutional funding requirements. The future strategy is to expand the same education focus in Uganda, Swaziland and Kenya, and to explore the possibility of working in The Democratic Republic of Congo, another conflict-torn country.