This activity focuses on increasing enrolment and reducing school drop-out rates.

It consists of:

• establishing and strengthening ‘boarding schools … suitable to the area [so as to increase] access to education [by] children, especially girls, orphans, and victims of harmful customary practices, and handicapped children’;
• introducing in drought-vulnerable areas ‘incentives in registration, water provision and other areas … in order to decrease [the] number of drop out children’;
• analyzing and expanding ‘best practices of other places in education implementation’;
• ‘applying alternative technology to better improve accessibility of education’;
• creating ‘a uniform curriculum that takes the mobility pattern of pastoralists into account, in order to improve the low rate of participation of pastoralists in education’;
• expanding ‘primary schools and o-level/pre-school education in all schools … consistent with the national standard’;
• upgrading ‘first level primary schools that have large numbers of students going to secondary school level’;
• strengthening ‘practice-oriented integrated adult education’;
• designing ‘strategies to enable girls to finish their schooling’.

COMMENTARY

1. Increasing ‘participation’? In the context of development, the term ‘participation’ refers to a people-centered approach as opposed to a top-down approach. Thus, ‘increasing participation in education’ is a good match with the intention in this sectoral strategy of taking into account ‘the mobile lifestyle’ – that is, the livelihood of people in pastoral systems. Increasing participation means finally listening to their voice and adapting the provision of educational services accordingly. For the time being, this is not reflected in the description of this activity, where the meaning of ‘participation’ seems reduced to simply ‘using the service’.
2. Increasing access? This activity is part of a sectoral strategy that acknowledges an accessibility problem in pastoral areas, resulting from a failure, in the past, to provide educational services that take into account the livelihood of people in pastoral systems, especially their mobility. Despite its focus on participation, this activity appears locked onto a view of formal education from the perspective of a settled lifestyle and thus limited to the model of static schools: ‘boarding schools’, ‘primary schools’, ‘o-level schools’, ‘incentives to reduce school drop-out’. School-based provision of educational services is clearly not new, and very much part of the tradition of service provision that has produced inadequate accessibility in pastoral areas in the first place.
3. A curriculum that takes pastoral mobility into account. Under this activity, the policy intends to create ‘a uniform curriculum that takes the mobility pattern of pastoralists into account’. What ‘uniform’ refers to is left unexplained. An adaptation of the curriculum used in pastoral areas, especially for formal primary education, that made it more representative of the livelihood of people in pastoral systems in its pedagogical approach, language, and examples would be consistent with the intention to take ‘the mobile lifestyle’ into account, not only to attract pastoralists into education but to improve its quality and efficacy.
4. Adult education. This activity includes strengthening ‘practice-oriented integrated adult education’. In a context that has long suffered from the poor accessibility of educational services, adult education is key also to the successful formal education of children — especially functional literacy and numeracy. The ‘family learning’ approach previously recommended in these contexts ‘considers learning to be a social undertaking. Literacy programmes based on this approach combine adult basic education for parents with education for children. Because intergenerational learning already plays a strong role in knowledge transfer within nomadic communities, family learning appears to offer a good fit with existing socio-cultural norms’.[1]
5. Alternative technologies for improving accessibility. This activity includes ‘applying alternative technology to better improve accessibility of education’. There is no explanation of ‘alternative technology’. In light of the overall intention under this sectoral strategy — achieving a provision of educational services that finally takes into consideration the livelihood of people in pastoral systems, and especially their mobility — ‘alternative technology’ is likely to refer to new ITC opportunities for mobile and distance learning. A similar approach was envisaged in Kenya a few years ago, albeit one still to be realized.[2] These are important opportunities that could be assessed and developed at the level of regional states.

[1] S. Krätli and C. Dyer, Mobile Pastoralists and Education: Strategic Options (London: International Institute of Environment and Development, Education for Nomads Working Paper No. 1, 2009), p.1.

[2] Ministry for Development of Northern Kenya and Other Arid Lands (MDNKOAL), Getting to the Hardest to Reach: A Strategy to Provide Education to Nomadic Communities in Kenya through Distance Learning (Nairobi: MDNKOAL and Education for Nomads Programme, 2010).

d. Improve the relevance and quality of education (p.59) »