{"id":3728,"date":"2006-12-30T23:00:27","date_gmt":"2006-12-30T23:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/hope-in-africa.html"},"modified":"2006-12-30T23:00:27","modified_gmt":"2006-12-30T23:00:27","slug":"hope-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/hope-in-africa.html","title":{"rendered":"Hope in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Primary education in the Sub-Sahara is booming:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Mali is a template for those challenges. One of earth\u2019s poorest nations, it also has the world\u2019s second-highest birth rate, behind only neighboring Niger. It lags even most African nations in the share of children in primary school.<\/p>\n

Yet a crusade is under way to get Malian children out of thatched huts and arid fields and into classrooms. Thanks partly to newfound economic growth, Mali more than doubled its spending per child between 1994 and 2004 to educate youngsters aged 6 through 14, the Education Ministry reports. Mali is also a favorite of donors, whose contributions to basic education there nearly tripled from 1999 to 2004, according to Unesco. <\/p>\n

In each of the past five years, Mali has averaged 667 newly built first- through sixth-grade classrooms and 1,962 freshly hired first- through ninth-grade teachers.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur No. 1 priority is to send all the country\u2019s children to school,\u201d said Bonaventure Maiga, a technical adviser at the Education Ministry. \u201cPeople are more and more aware that school is an absolute necessity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even this, however, is not nearly fast enough for Mali\u2019s parents. Unwilling to wait until the government catches up with the torrent of would-be learners, they are creating their own school system side by side with the official one, building caked-mud classrooms and recruiting teachers, even if the teacher\u2019s sole qualification is having made it through the ninth grade. In the past few years, the so-called community schools have grown faster than the public schools.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Primary education in the Sub-Sahara is booming: Mali is a template for those challenges. One of earth\u2019s poorest nations, it also has the world\u2019s second-highest birth rate, behind only neighboring Niger. It lags even most African nations in the share of children in primary school. Yet a crusade is under way to get Malian children…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nHope in Africa - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/hope-in-africa.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hope in Africa - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Primary education in the Sub-Sahara is booming: Mali is a template for those challenges. One of earth\u2019s poorest nations, it also has the world\u2019s second-highest birth rate, behind only neighboring Niger. It lags even most African nations in the share of children in primary school. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}