Inter Press Service - December 12, 2003
Moyiga Nduru

School enrolment of girls and their progress through the education system in South Africa is relatively better than in other regions of the continent. Overall, in 2000 there were more girls enrolled in schools than boys, a continuing trend in South African schools.

"Some 97.4 percent - of girls - enrolled in South Africa, a figure which is at par with boys," said Misrak Elias, head of the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) in South Africa. She described the enrolment rate as being "very high".

Since 1991, the gross enrolment rate at both primary and secondary level - for both boys and girls - has moved closer to 100 percent.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of girls out of school each year has risen from 20 million in 1990 to 24 million in 2002, according to 'The State of the World's Children', released by UNICEF on Thursday.

Of the 25 selected countries that fulfill one or more of the following five criteria, 15 are in sub-Saharan Africa. The criteria involve those with low enrolment rates for girls; gender gaps of more than 10 percent in primary education; countries with more than one million girls out of school; countries included on the World Bank's Education For All Fast Track Initiative and countries hard hit by a range of crises that affect school opportunities for girls, such as HIV/AIDS and conflict.

The 15 countries include Chad, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, Eritrea, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The most affected is Southern Sudan, which has been blighted by civil war for decades. UNICEF says to wait for an end to the conflict would be to dismiss the rights of generations of children.

UNICEF, working with the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in areas it controls, is trying to address the dire educational position of children in southern Sudan-- where as few as 15 percent of primary school-aged children are in school and girls represent only one quarter of this number.

"By the time the upper primary level is reached, there are hardly any girls left in school and at the territory's foremost secondary school, Rumbek, there is a solitary girl. Only 560 of the 8,000 teachers in southern Sudan are women, a mere seven percent," according to UNICEF.

Despite their achievements, girls in South Africa still lag behind in mathematics and science and are affected by violence in schools.

"Girls suffer from the exclusion from particular subject areas like maths and science and prestigious tasks like school prefects. Fewer girls than boys write these subject and they do not perform well," said UNICEF's Elias.

They also fall prey to sexual harassment by teachers. "We have a teacher who always prefers girls. When a girl submits her school project late he accepts it and when it's a boy he rejects it. And when a girl comes late to class he lets her in and when it's a boy he punishes him," said 13-year-old Tsoledi Mothapo, a member of the Girls Education Movement in Limpopo province in South Africa.

Mothapo, a male member of the group, was interacting with adults in Johannesburg on Thursday during the launch of the UNICEF report.

Thami Sseleku, director general of the ministry of education, said teachers who abuse children should be dismissed on the spot. "Sometimes parents turn a blind eye on such teachers because they see them as a source of resources," he said. "People must speak out about abuses and such teachers must be eliminated from our schools."

A survey on youth risk behaviour, released by Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang on Dec. 9, showed that 41 percent of children as young as 14 were having sex, nine percent had taken weapons to schools and half had used alcohol before turning 13.

In rural areas, social and cultural patterns combined with relatively poor quality of schooling place girls and their education and development in a disadvantaged and vulnerable position. Girls bear the heaviest burden for household responsibilities, including care of sick parents and siblings, and are first ones to drop out of school.

South Africa has the highest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world, with about one in 10 of its population of 44 million infected with the disease.

Thami welcomed the idea of interacting with children and injecting hope in them. "The young people who carry guns and loot in the DRC, Liberia and Sierra Leone have lost hope in their future. So it's important to interact with young people to avoid potential crisis," he said.

Poverty, too, excludes children from school. More than 350 million people, over half Africa's population, live below the poverty line of one dollar a day, according to the World Bank.
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