Liberia

The Situation

Except for the two years from 1997 to 1999, Liberia was in a constant state of conflict from 1989 until Peace Accords were signed in 2003. Over 250,000 people, most of them civilian non-combatants, lost their lives in the civil war. More than 1.3 million people were displaced, including hundreds of thousands who fled the country.
It is estimated that at least one in ten children may have been recruited into militias at one time or another. Seeing their families and friends murdered, tortured and raped has equally traumatized countless children.

These years of civil war and decades of poor governance have devastated Liberia's formal public education system - almost an entire generation has missed out on formal primary education as many schools were destroyed and families struggle to afford sending their children to school. There is thus a tremendous need for basic primary education and accelerated learning opportunities for primary-aged children, ex-combatants, boys and girls, who have not had a primary education.

"Peace begins in the minds of Children"
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Our Target

Unless the hundreds of thousands of children who have missed out on school in Liberia manage to get a good quality education, the cycle of poverty will go on. Our overall goal is to increase the capacity of the Ministry of Education and communities of Liberia to improve access to basic quality education, enabling all children affected by armed conflict to learn, develop and play in safe and protective environments by 2010.

We will help the government to:

• Ensure that by 2010 47,000 children in four counties have accessed primary education
• Ensure that by 2010 more than 184,000 children in 222 schools will benefit from quality education
• Validate good practice models to protect children, particularly girls, from physical, sexual abuse and exploitation in primary schools and roll these models out to schools
  

  Visiting Liberia
  Josie's blog
• Allocate a minimum of 20 % of the National Budget to Education - 40% of which is allocated to primary education, and to ensure that by 2010 all children have access to free primary education

How Liberia measures up

• It is estimated that almost 600,000 children are out of school in Liberia
• The enrolment for boys is believed to be 50% compared to the enrolment for girls at just 24%
• Retention rates are extremely poor: the percentage of pupils completing full primary education was recorded as 35% for boys and 26% for girls in 2000
• More than two-thirds of the teachers are untrained, most teachers are poorly paid or not paid at all
• The provision of education is not free - the majority of the population cannot afford US$20 per child per term to send their children to school

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