Africa Education Initiative (AEI)
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Students in Senegal reading from new textbooks.
Credit: R. Nyberg, USAID/Senegal. |
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Primary school enrolment in African countries is among the lowest in the world. Limited funds and a lack of adequate teachers, classrooms, and learning materials adversely affect the educational environment throughout most of Africa. The President's Africa Education Initiative (AEI) is a $600-million multi-year initiative that focuses on increasing access to quality basic education in 39 sub-Saharan countries through scholarships, textbooks, and teacher training programs. Eighty million African children will have benefited from AEI by 2010.
To implement AEI, USAID works closely with African ministries of education and higher education institutions, local and international nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector. AEI also seeks to strengthen and extend development partnerships between the United States and Africa by actively engaging African leaders and educators, the international development community, and U.S. interest groups.
Ambassadors Girls' Scholarship Program
In Africa, girls account for a majority of the approximately 33 million primary school-aged children who are not enrolled in school. AEI is working to bridge this gender gap by providing 550,000 scholarships by 2010, primarily to African girls at the primary and secondary levels. These scholars will grow into educated members of their societies and play positive roles in the education, political, and economic sectors of their countries. Support may include tuition, books, uniforms, and other essentials needed to ensure continued access to education. Scholarship recipients also benefit from mentoring activities from community members that promote self-development and provide positive role models.
Textbooks and Learning Materials
The goal of the AEI textbook program is to expand the quantity and to improve the quality of learning materials that are available for schools in sub-Saharan Africa by providing 15 million student textbooks and workbooks, teacher handbooks and guides, handouts, worksheets, audio tapes, posters, vocabulary lists, and visual aids. This program emphasizes relevant content, institutional capacity building, and the long-term sustainability of the partnerships between African institutions and American counterparts. Six American universities that serve mainly minorities are partnering with African Ministries of Education, universities, and various local nongovernmental organizations to develop and produce textbooks and learning materials that fulfill the priority needs of the host country's educational system.
Book Donations and Other Materials
AEI has sent numerous containers of donated textbooks and supplementary educational materials from the United States to 29 African countries. U.S. publishers and education institutions donate the books, and AEI funds cover the shipping and assistance in distribution. Book allocations from the donated materials are based primarily on the recipients' expressed needs and requests. Since 2003, more than 2.2 million donated books-valued at $25 million-have been shipped to Africa. These book donations often provide supplementary reading materials that are otherwise nonexistent. In Ethiopia, supplementary books were organized into sets for seven rural and urban pilot schools participating in the textbook and learning materials partnership's pilot phase. Similarly, schools throughout Senegal, mainly located in rural areas, received boxed sets of books, while in Uganda, supplemental learning materials assisted the Ugandan Ministry of Education in meeting its educational reform goals. Cross-cultural understanding is another benefit of book donations: the reading books sent to Africa sometimes include award-winning books and biographies of notable Americans.
Teacher Training
The pursuit of universal access to education places enormous stress on already burdened education systems in Africa. Recruiting, training, and supporting enough teachers to provide quality learning can be particularly challenging. To meet this challenge, AEI is developing, promoting, and expanding innovative methods for training more that 920,000 teachers and administrators to improve the quality of learning for millions of African children.
Working through USAID mission education programs, the International Foundation for Education and Self-Help, and African and international nongovernmental organizations, teachers upgrade their skills though pre-service and in-service training programs.
Innovative Activities
HIV/AIDS. AEI focuses on HIV/AIDS mitigation and prevention and increases the capacity of African education systems to manage the impact of HIV/AIDS on teachers and students. Programs include information about HIV/AIDS, introduce the teachers to an HIV/AIDS curriculum for their students, strategic planning for ministries, and close coordination with the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Beneficiaries of the Ambassadors Girls' Scholarship Program are provided with training on HIV/AIDS; in many countries the scholarship recipients are students who have been affected by the disease.
Involvement
The initiative also works to increases parent and community involvement in children's education through activities such as sponsoring reading programs involving community and schools, strengthening parent associations, and emphasizing the importance of educating girls. These efforts will help schools and school systems become more transparent and responsive to the needs of civil society.
Technology
AEI facilitates outreach to vulnerable people such as orphans, out-of-school youth, and other children marginalized by geographic location, ethnicity, or religion. In post-conflict countries AEI has assisted in the rehabilitation of schools to hasten the healing process. In many AEI countries the access to and use of information technology and interactive radio instruction have proved effective in reaching these marginalized or hard-to-reach populations.
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