How GPE and its partners help children in Sierra Leone to get an education

Minirn is 12 years old and a 6th grade student in Boma School in Kenema municipality in Sierra Leone. Her parents are farmers, and she hopes to be a nurse someday. Minirn is on a good education path and might well fulfill her dreams. But it hasn’t always been that way. Minirn is part of a junior secondary tuition program along with 75,000 other girls. Her family received the money needed to pay her school tuition which made it easier for them to send Minirn to lower secondary school.  The program was funded through a $13.9 million grant provided by the Global Partnership for Education.

Besides benefitting from the tuition program, Boma School also received several new classrooms through the grant. There is even a ramp for children with disabilities.

The results

The grant implementation started in February 2009 and closed in September 2012. According to the World Bank which managed the project 255 new classrooms, 42 sets of latrines as well as 40 wells to provide drinking water to students have been built in Sierra Leone. About 1.7 million books and learning materials as well as pens, pencils, erasers, rulers, notebooks and Braille textbooks for visually impaired students were procured. De-worming for about 1.8 million children was also funded through this grant.

The grant also supported one year distance learning training programs of 1,000 primary school teachers and 260 junior secondary teachers. Evaluations indicate that teachers from this program are performing at a higher level than those who did not participate.  Most importantly, a framework for assessing primary student learning in Sierra Leone has been developed.

Coming out of a post-conflict environment

These are wonderful results for a small country like Sierra Leone (population of 5.8 million) that is still recovering from a complex, post-conflict environment. Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war, which lasted for almost 10 years ended in January 2002. The war destroyed institutions, infrastructure and communities – along with more than 1,000 primary schools. In 2007, Sierra Leone joined the Global Partnership for Education with a comprehensive Education Sector Plan, an important step towards the recovery of the education system.

According to the Country Status Report which is currently being finalized by the Ministry of Education, the country witnessed significant improvements in the education sector between 2004 and 2011.Soon after the civil war, only about 55% of the students enrolled were completing primary school. Now this number has risen to 76%. The transition rate to lower secondary school is 77% representing an increase of 5% since 2004 – and 45% of students enrolled in junior secondary school are girls.

The country’s school infrastructure now includes about 644 preschools, almost 6,000 primary schools (an increase of 38%), 888 junior secondary and 208 secondary schools (an increase of 291%). Schools are owned and operated by the government, the community, various mission agencies and the private sector.

With 26% of all primary-aged school children still not in school, there remains a lot of work to be done in Sierra Leone for the government, GPE and its partners, but we should all acknowledge that this is good progress to build on.

Moving ahead with a focus on learning

Kenema Municipal Primary School
© GPE/Prema Clarke

Sierra Leone is now in the process of revising its Education Sector Plan taking into account new education data, taking stock of successes and challenges and charting a realistic way forward to meet critical goals in the education sector.

Recommendations made by the Gbamanja Commission are being incorporated and there is now a focus on improving children’s learning. This Commission was set up by the President of Sierra Leone in 2010 in response to Sierra Leone’s weak performance in the West African Senior School Certificate exam.

The Government and the Local Education Group in the coming years will concentrate on the following:

• Improving the effectiveness and quality of teachers
• Ensuring a stable and skilled group in the ministry to facilitate monitoring and evaluation
• Implementing the recently developed strategy for Capacity Development
• Establishing a well-functioning national learning assessment system.

The Global Partnership looks forward to working with the Education Ministry and other partners to build on the current successes and helping to build an effective education system for the children of Sierra Leone.

We hope you’ll get involved in helping children learn and grow, and join our conversation on Facebook and Twitter.