Main Barriers to Education
- Conflict & displacement
- Sexual violence
- High cost of schooling
Interventions to Barriers
- Community mobilisation
- Classroom construction
- Systems of accountability
- Parental & school committees
The government in DRC is determined to realise the six goals of EFA. It has articulated a national vision to make the country an emerging centre of knowledge and expertise by 2030. To bring these ambitions to fruition, the government has elaborated a national action plan to achieve EFA and a strategy paper on growth and poverty reduction. Still, an estimated 59 percent of the population subsists on less than US$1.25 per day and social sectors are routinely underfunded; education was allocated just 13 percent in the 2013 national budget. Furthermore, demographic pressures are unrelenting and dictate the need for schools, teachers and pedagogic inputs.
These challenges have had a disproportionately negative impact on the education sector and by extension the country’s most vulnerable – children and youth. In the DRC, girls and boys face a plethora of economic and socio-cultural barriers to education: 71 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and boys’ schooling takes priority over girls’. Although age six is the official age for school enrolment, only 54 percent of six-year-old children attend school and the average age of first grade students is 10.
To confront these barriers, EAC has partnered with Caritas Congo ASBL, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and UNICEF. Together, these projects increase access to quality education, provide scholarships, train community members and bolster the government’s initiatives to enhance learning outcomes in reading, numeracy and life-skills development in children across the country.
Geographic Location: Central Africa
Languages: French (official), Lingala, Kingwana (a dialect of Kiswahili), Kikongo, Tshiluba
sources: UNICEF, Worldbank, UNESCO
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, EAC is supporting the International Rescue Committee to implement the Enrolling Out of School Children in South Kivu and Katanga Project to ensure that 47,750 Congolese children who are currently out of school have access to quality formal and non-formal primary education.