Free Education – if you can afford it!

A friend alerted me to the article below posted yesterday.  In Swaziland we’re being deluged with cries of parents and kids alike to help them get back in school – the new school year started last week.

 

We’re now serving around 4500 orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) each day in Swaziland.  It costs about $150 to put a primary aged child in school for an entire year.  High school is around $750.  70% of Swaziland lives on less than $2 a day.  You do the math.

 

You can help put kids in school here (pull down the “Swaziland Orphan Fund” menu.) Any amount can help!  Take a moment now, post a donation of any amount, and make a comment (even anonymously if you want) on this blog, “I made a difference!.”  It will be interesting to see how many people we can get to do this!  How many kids can we put in school this year?

 

For more information please read the article below:

 

Mbabane – The new school year opened with hope – and hunger – in
Swaziland this week: an estimated 140,000 orphans and vulnerable
children are among the small, eager faces in the mountain kingdom’s
classrooms. Poverty and the AIDS pandemic threaten to make an early mark
on the next generation.

“Besides their not having the proper school uniform, the orphans
don’t have warm clothes,” said Zwane Georgina Zwane, a teacher at
Motshane Central Primary School.   “It breaks my heart to see them shivering in class on a cold day.

Many of these children also come to school on an empty stomach and it
is difficult for them to concentrate in class before they get their
meal at school during break time.

This year she has even more to worry about with regards to orphans
and vulnerable children because principals have refused to accept OVCs
back into class.

School fees

This follows a standoff between the Swaziland Principals’ Association
(SWAPA) and the Deputy Prime Minister’s (DPM) office, which is
responsible for paying fees for the children.

“We’re going to treat them like any of the students – if there is no
receipt to prove that they have paid the deposit for the school fees,
they wont be allowed into the classroom,” said SWAPA President Charles
Bennett.

SWAPA is demanding that the DPM’s office pay the deposit this week or
the students will be sent home. Some schools have already done turned
pupils away.

This is a setback for Swaziland’s pursuit of Universal Primary
Education – goal two of the eight United Nations Millennium Development
Goals.

Free Primary Education was supposed to be launched in 2008, but a
shortage of funding forced its delay. Finally introduced last year,
there has been significant improvement in facilities and staffing for
2011. The government has provided mobile classrooms to many overcrowded
schools and also hired more teachers.

However, the OVC controversy threatens to overshadow this.

Vulnerable children

One in four Swazis in the age band from 15 to 49 is infected with
HIV; the high death rate of people of reproductive age means a huge
number of children are now growing up without parents. Aggravating this,
about 70 percent of the one million-strong population lives below the
poverty line of less than two dollars a day.

Corruption alleged

“I haven’t sent them back home, but they will not receive any lessons
until government pays the deposit,” said Motshane Primary School
principal Lucky Zwane. “They’ll just hang around the school.”

He said the school was left with more than $21,000 in debt last year
in connection with the OVC Fund. ?”Government pays much less than the
budgeted fees and it releases the payments very late in the year and we
get into trouble with suppliers,” said Zwane.

“We received payment from the DPM’s office sometime in October last
year and I struggled to run the school with the available funds,” said
Zwane. He said the shortfall was crippling schools.

The government’s set rate for OVC students in Grades I-III is also around half what public schools charge other students.

“What’s worse, government is refusing that we ask parents to add onto what the state is paying,” said Zwane.

For this year, the government is promising to pay only a third of the
amount as a first-term deposit. Deputy Prime Minister Themba Masuku has
refused to commit on when the fees will be made available to the
schools.

Financial pressure

Although the government of Swaziland is very near broke, running out
of basic materials such as stationery, Masuku said his office was able
to set aside $5.5 million to pay school fees for destitute children.

“With this money we can pay deposits to all the schools,” said
Masuku. He said government had to re-examine the list of students who
had applied for the OVC Fund because some of the children did not
qualify.

The government finally released the list of students that it will pay
for on Jan. 19, and it contained a surprise: almost all of those who
made the list are orphans. The government now appears unwilling to
sponsor children who are vulnerable because their parents are out of
work.

“Some parents are unemployed, but they can find means of paying
school fees for their children,” said Masuku. “The DPM’s office will not
pay for such children.”

He said government is working on the Children’s Protection and
Welfare Bill 2010 which will spell out precisely which children are
supposed to benefit from the OVC Fund. But this will see significant
numbers of children who previously had their fees paid by the government
sent home.

“We’re undergoing difficult economic crisis and we can’t afford to
have people who push their responsibilities to government,” said Masuku.

Critics note that the decision to restrict the scope of the OVC Fund
follows a firm recommendation from the International Monetary Fund in
November to the government to protect expenditure in education and
health despite the financial crisis.