Children’s voices reciting the Qur’an echo down the narrow alleyways in one of Mogadishu’s residential neighborhoods where three or four generations of Somalis share small, concrete block homes behind high white walls and dark wooden doors.
In a communal goat stable, children sit under a mango tree, learning to read and write. Only a few metres away, a clan elder teaches older children Qur’anic verses in an old storage room.
Parents scrape together what money they can to pay the teachers at the makeshift schools. Wealthier families send their children to more formal schools or bring the teachers into their homes.
Despite the collapse of Somalia’s central government in 1991 and the chaos that followed, parents, teachers and aid agencies have managed to piece together a private education system that ranges from preschool to medical school.
While some schools receive support from overseas, most are the work of local people, especially Somali clerics anxious to protect the country’s moderate brand of Islam.
”We accept nothing from anyone. We are running our own schools,” said Mohammed Issa Mohammed, a clan elder who manages 18 Qur’anic schools.
He said he wants to maintain his schools’ independence — complaining that some Arab donors have tried to introduce extremist ideas into schools — but added he would consider outside support with no strings attached.
Because most Somalis are poor and have no money for tuition, many children are left out of the nascent school system. A socio-economic survey of Somalia by the UN Development Programme and the World Bank, released on January 14, found that only 16,9% of primary school-aged children attend school.
”There are a lot of schools, but the main problem is that people can’t afford the school fees,” said Ali Ahmed Farah, headmaster of Jabuti school funded by the international aid agency Concern Worldwide. He said his school has empty classrooms but not enough money to hire teachers.
Most children spend their days at home or scavenging through abandoned buildings and garbage dumps for food and valuables.
”Children in Somalia are either learning or looting,” said Abdulrachman Abdullahi, the chairman of trustees for Mogadishu University.
A former army officer who defected to the United States in 1987 during the dictatorship of Mohammed Siad Barre, he returned seven years ago to help rebuild his country by establishing the first university in Somalia since war broke out in 1991.
The university now has 6 000 students enrolled in nine programmes, including engineering, nursing, agriculture and computer science.
Somali professors from Ohio University regularly teach in Mogadishu and the schools are developing plans for even greater cooperation in the future.
”We’re trying to convince Somalis that education is a commodity, like rice and oil,” Abdullahi said, explaining how the university primarily relies on student tuition fees for operating costs and donations for books and equipment.
Abdullahi was ridiculed when he began work in 1997, but now other universities have opened in Somalia to meet a growing demand.
In 2003, Somali doctors and former university professors restarted Banadir University’s medical school. The school started with 22 students, half of them women — a remarkably high ratio for any form of education in the predominantly Muslim country.
Salad Farah Gutaleh, the dean of the faculty, said medical students would undergo six years of training. The medical school was desperately needed ”because most of the Somali doctors have fled the country,” he said.
”When the government collapsed, there were 960 doctors in Somalia and now there are only 250 doctors countrywide, of which 120 are in Mogadishu,” he said. ”Twenty-six doctors have been killed during the civil war and this has discouraged those who fled the country from returning.”
On December 25, Sudan’s Al-Neeylain University opened a branch in Somalia. Funded by the Sudanese government, the university already serves 4 000 Somali students at the main campus in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, and plans to serve thousands more in Mogadishu, said Tarikh Ahmed, the Sudan’s ambassador to Somalia.
But so far, Mogadishu University is well ahead of the others and has begun construction at a new, eight-hectare campus north of the city. Everyone involved in education predicts that if a peace agreement is reached, and a central government formed, students will quickly, and enthusiastically, fill classrooms again.
”We don’t have money, but we have a big vision,” Abdullahi said. – Sapa-AP