On a hot day outside of Gemena, the capital of Equateur province in the north west of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a group of children aged 6 to 10 performed a play that brought the audience of hundreds to burst with laughter and delight.

A girl with tight braids gathered in a ponytail wore an impeccably white shirt and dark blue skirt of her school uniform. She played the role of Alice Albright, CEO of the Global Partnership for Education. A little boy with a stylish dark suit and shiny shoes played Maker Mwangu Famba, the Minister of education of the DRC, complete with similar eyeglasses as the minister’s. Around them, other children played the roles of the provincial governor, the commissioner for education, the school director, the teachers and students, parents, and even the interpreter!

A brand new elementary school

The children were recreating a scene they had observed a year before, when the minister and Alice Albright came to Gemena to lay the first stone of their brand new school. The original building of Kanzi primary school had dirt walls and a thatched roof. Water leaked inside when it rained.

A year later, two brand new buildings with cement walls and tin roofs house 6 classes, from 1^st to 6^th grades. The buildings were funded as part of the $100 million grant from the Global Partnership for Education.

Classrooms are freshly painted and have neatly aligned rows of new desks. The children received new textbooks in French, mathematics, science and civic education. The footballs distributed last year were proudly displayed by several teams in red and blue jerseys who ran along our cars when we arrived.

It was a festive day in Gemena. We felt the energy and joy of the community as they celebrated the new school, and joined them with hopeful feelings that the better school conditions were a step toward better learning.

Contrasts in a vast country

Landing in Goma the next day showed a much different landscape, not just geographically but in its education system as well.

Goma, the capital of North Kivu, is located on the shores of Lake Kivu, at the border with Rwanda. The city has known its share of natural disasters—the nearby Nyaragongo volcano, still active, left a long trail of black lava rocks when it erupted in 2002, destroying part of the city. Conflict involving neighboring countries and various rebel groups has plagued the region over the past decades.

Mboga primary school sits on the side of a rocky path in the outskirts of Goma. During the conflict, the school had been completely destroyed, but these days, its buildings are clean and well-appointed with nice desks and clean blackboards. The welcoming committees of different nearby schools, with children singing while their teachers conducted, were just as lovely as in Gemena.

But looking at the faces of the children around us, I didn’t see many smiles, and the stares were severe. It is easy to tell that the people of Goma, particularly its children, have experienced the worst that life could throw at them.

The struggles of cost and quality at Mboga primary school

We watched as teacher Jean-Paul Nyibizi led a lesson in a 3^rd grade class, where boys and girls looked alike, with closely cropped hair and the same uniforms of white shirt and navy pants. It was almost as if the girls were trying to hide. The children closely followed the instructions of their teacher, raising hands to answer questions, clapping in rhythm to congratulate a good answer, but the questions asked were very simple, maybe more relevant for kindergarten students.

Mboga primary school welcomes 363 students, 150 of whom are orphans. There are 11 classes, from 1^st to 6^th grade, starting at 7:00 am and finishing at 12.35 pm. The school employs 10 teachers, but three of them are unpaid. This is a common problem in the DRC, where parents often have to contribute to school operating costs because the education budget isn’t sufficient to cover all expenses.

Right outside of the 3^rd grade classroom we met Tegera, a 12-year old boy who looks not a day older than 8. He attends a nearby school and only speaks English because, since losing his family during the conflict, he’s been spending time with the soldiers of the UN peacekeeping force called MONUSCO. He now lives with a host family and says he wants to be a teacher when he grows up. Tegera was clinging to his teacher, Matthieu Nyota, who is helping him, but it’s not clear whether this boy will be able to fulfill his dream.

Choosing hope despite huge challenges

The two visits left me both hopeful and concerned. Both schools received support through the US$100 million grant that the Global Partnership allocated to the DRC in 2013 and that will run until 2016: in Gemena, the school was rebuilt and refurbished thanks to the grant. In both Goma and Gemena, the textbooks were purchased thanks to the funding. The grant was approved by the GPE Board in 2012 following the endorsement of the DRC’s interim education sector plan by the country’s education partners.

Overall, the grant has already supported the distribution of more than 20 million textbooks around the country. School construction, teacher training and support to school administration are concentrated in the two target provinces of Equateur and Kasai Occidental.

But the quality of education that children receive is low and the primary school completion rate, at 69% on average, must be improved.  School is not yet fully free, despite the law adopted by the country in 2010, and parents often bear the costs, or don’t send their children to school.

Despite these challenges, I choose to be hopeful and to believe that the Democratic Republic of Congo is on the right path to improving its education system, even if the path ahead is long.