Despite significant progress, there is more work to be done to transform education in Sierra Leone: the quality of teaching needs to be improved; financial constraints on parents need to be reduced; remote areas must have better access to schools; and gender inequalities must be eliminated.
Partnering with GRID3 to gather data on school coverage
To tackle these and other challenges, the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary of Education has partnered with GRID3 to further strengthen the country’s nationwide education strategy. Accurate data is essential to decision-making, and the goal of our partnership is to identify innovative approaches to collecting, analyzing, and using geospatial data that can lead to the improvement of educational outcomes for all students, and especially improve outcomes for girls, students with disabilities, and children living in remote areas.
A major achievement of our partnership is a recent school coverage analysis. Using data on existing school locations taken from Sierra Leone’s 2019 Annual School Census, as well as GRID3 data on population estimates and settlements, we identified gaps in access to education services based on the number of school-age children who were not living within a three-mile radius of a school.
Sierra Leonean schools are classified into four school types (pre-primary, primary, junior secondary, and senior secondary). Using these classifications as a baseline, we also identified three key characteristics of interest: school ownership (public/private), school location (urban/rural), and school quality (below or above an exam pass rate threshold).
One of the major findings of our analysis is that primary schools have the highest coverage rate, as 99% of children ages 6-11 live within a three-mile distance of a school. Coverage rates for pre-primary (ages 3-5), junior secondary (ages 12-14), and senior secondary (ages 15-17) schools, however, are much lower (54%, 71%, and 53%, respectively). We also observed how other factors, such as the geographic remoteness of a community and other social, economic, and social factors, also affect access.
Comments
Is there the same chance also for Burkina Faso???
With my NGO www.lernen-duerfen.ong we are activ since 11 years in an extremly remote area. For this we know: we need also this support!
To whom we have to make contact?
With hope to your answer
Claudia Papenhausen
Founder of Lernen duerfen e.V.
Thanks to Dr Sengeh for this article. I note that this was published in March this year. I would like to know what is the progress of the undermentioned commitments made in this article, this being five months after is was written. See commitment highlighted below:
"This information will inform policy for programs that invest in the development of classrooms; construction of schools; and extra support to specific schools"
"For a start, we will accelerate the improvement of access and quality of education in Sierra Leone through the current GPE program implementation and COVID-19 grants and a new World Bank-led multi-donor trust fund for education".
Great