Dr. Mary Joy Pigozzi is the Executive Director of the Educate A Child , a programme of Education Above All Foundation.

Education Above All Helps to make every Ethiopian child count – nextisafrica.com

Every child has the right to education, but this can be a challenge for a child born in Ethiopia, a country of approximately 126.5 million inhabitants located in the Horn of Africa. Acquiring an education in Ethiopia can be hindered by a number of barriers, including conflict in the North, poverty across the country, difficult terrain, and impacts of climate change.  Often, a child is faced with more than one of these barriers, impeding their education.

While efforts toward peace are ongoing, there is still instability in West Tigray, Oromia, and Amhara regions.  As a result, schools may be closed, it may be unsafe to send children to school, or children may have to engage in other tasks.  The ongoing conflict in neighbouring Sudan remains a destabilizing force, and Ethiopia hosts refugees from several other countries.  Conflict is known to increase gender-based violence, which often influences who goes to school.  Poverty underpins the lives of many Ethiopians; in 2021, the UNDP estimated that 68.7% of Ethiopia’s population was multidimensionally poor.  When families are financially distressed, education is often a difficult choice—the direct costs of schooling or the indirect costs of the contributions of a child’s work may be just too expensive for a family to allow a child to go to school.

​​​​​​​The country’s beautiful topography–including rugged mountains, flat-topped plateaus, deep gorges and river valleys–creates barriers, making the journey to school difficult or dangerous and hindering the delivery of school materials.  The topography and poverty are further exacerbated by climate change, which is increasing both floods and drought and having a significant impact on food security.  More and more Ethiopians are experiencing hunger.

What does this mean for a child’s education?

According to UNESCO, Ethiopia has 10.5 million children out of school, making it one of the top countries with the most children out of school. This is a truly sad statistic, and one that demands serious attention. Each data point is an individual, a person.

“I knew neither my mother nor my father as they both died when I was very little. Hordofa raised me along with his nine children,” remarks 14-year-old Wogene, a class 7 student in Ethiopia’s Oromia region. Orphaned at the age of 2, Wogene’s father, on the verge of death from an illness, begged Hordofa Balcha, a relative, to look after his only son.

Hordofa, a farmer, took Wogene in saying, “My worry has always been this boy… even more than my own children, for he has no one…” Despite the support from his adopted family, life has not been straightforward as Hordofa struggled to meet the large family’s needs.

Fortunately, Education Above All and imagine1day’s LEAP project provided Wogene quality primary education, setting him on a different course. Today, he goes to school with confidence.  “Wogene is an outstanding and disciplined student… He is [growing] every day. He so badly wants to change his life for good. He has a dream of not only having a brighter future, but giving better lives to others who have had a similar childhood. Quality education is the fuel for the vehicle that takes him to this destination…” says Rehima Aliyi, Wogene’s English teacher.

Ways to provide access to education

Since 2012 the Education Above All Foundation (EAA) has supported eight projects in Ethiopia. Through these, EAA’s Educate A Child programme (EAC) reached over 300,000 out of school children (OOSC), at a total investment of US$45 million, including US$21.7 million from EAA Foundation.  Equally important, is what solutions it takes to make the right to education possible for these children.

Because the barriers are dissimilar and affect every family differently, there is no “one size fits all”. Solutions to the OOSC problem need to be tailor made to both the challenge and to the local context. In this regard, EAA Foundation has worked with partners in Ethiopia on a range of solutions, including:

Leveraging synergies with other actors: Coherent and coordinated interventions can improve efficiency and overcome operational challenges. Faced with multiple and interconnected challenges of drought, conflict, hyperinflation and COVID-19, EAA  and its partners leveraged the capacity of other actors to mitigate and overcome these challenges and keep children in school.

Engaging communities:  Decisions about primary level education are usually made by families and community leaders.  Involving them in discussions and actions on the provision and management of education meant that villages became advocates for their children to participate in education.

Engaging school administrations:  Education professionals were provided support to assist them in their difficult roles.  Efforts focused on developing skills to work with formerly out of school children and to increase their abilities to use structures such as parent/teacher associations to build parental confidence in the value of education.

Facilitating child to child support:  Children can be the best advocates to other children.  Support went beyond advocacy, however, to building trusting relationships which served as “anchors” for children entering a new environment, especially overaged formerly OOSC.  These activities and skills also served to “up-skill” young people and allowed them to improve self-agency.

Integrating host and refugee communities:  Particularly in poor areas, refugees, who usually arrive with very little, can put enormous stress on villages’ limited resources.  Building bridges between new comers and those traditionally in the village through a variety of activities provided opportunities for building new, integrated communities.

Supporting school feeding:  With the combined barriers of climate change, poverty and, in some areas, conflict, addressing child hunger was key to enticing OOSC to enrol and stay in school. Using local resources and personnel, school feeding contributed to community cohesion in difficult times and served to positively enhance perceptions about the value of education.

Making facilities accessible:  This was accomplished in two key ways.  First, where schools did not exist within walking distance, classrooms were built with community involvement–ensuring that communities had a vested interest in the structures where they sent their children to learn.  Second, schools were upgraded to include water and sanitation facilities, enabling healthier locations where children spent time together.

Improving monitoring systems:  If the world wishes to move from platitudes to actually making access to quality education the right of EVERY child, we must move from estimates to real numbers that reflect reality so that changes made are real and not “ideal” or approximations.  EAA Foundation has done this through championing best practices in monitoring and evaluation including insisting on the tracking of each OOSC enrolled.

For EAA Foundation, if a child is not counted, that child does not count.  While it is a phrase that can slip off the tongue easily, it has deep and important implications for an education project.  Regardless of what approach has been taken to help children overcome the enrollment and retention barriers that they face, EAA Foundation  requires that each child be individually identified and monitored.  The numbers we report are not estimates, they represent the lives, hopes and potential of young Ethiopians who have been given an opportunity to begin learning throughout life.  An opportunity to change their lives and contribute to the betterment of their families, their communities and their nation—an opportunity that is made possible, one individual at a time.