Sometimes the teachers make it to school but the children don’t — when the fighting is too intense for them to venture outdoors. Sometimes teachers make it to school only to find it has been moved — to enable displaced children to continue learning. This is characteristic of K-12 education in war-torn Mogadishu — the capital of Somalia (pop.9 million), one of the world’s most dangerous cities. “I was on the way to school one day when intense fighting erupted and I had to seek shelter; by the time I got to school there were no students, they could not come because of the fighting,” recalls Abdulkadir Abdullahi, a primary school teacher in Mogadishu.
Although official statistics are hard to come by, Abdullahi says many of his colleagues have left the profession due to insecurity. “It is not only that we have to deal with the constant shelling and general insecurity, but sometimes teachers are specifically targeted for doing what they do by the fighting groups,” he says, adding that only those dedicated to the profession remain.
Fighting in Mogadishu, which has been going on for years between government forces and opposition Islamist groups, has escalated in recent months. A civil society source in Mogadishu, who declined to be named, says that teachers are targeted because “they are an obstacle to the interests of the fighting groups. The warring sides want to recruit young children as child soldiers”.
In the midst of continuous chaos and violence, teachers, students and their parents are confronted with a choice of obtaining a semblance of education or giving up altogether. “There is no predictability to the fighting,” says Sheikh Mohammed Ahmed, chairman of the Somali Formal Education Network (SOFEN), an umbrella group of 55 schools in the city and three other regions in south and central Somalia. “Yesterday you may have had a full school and today you may have no students or teachers because they could not brave the fighting.”
Ahmed says that SOFEN has established “emergency education”, where teachers follow the population whenever they are uprooted due to the fighting. “We go wherever they are. Some days we are teaching under a tree and if we are lucky, under a tent,” he says.
Since 1990, more than 1.4 million Somalis have been displaced internally, and at least 600,000 are refugees in neighbouring countries.
(Excerpted and adapted from www.irinnews.org)