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Guide to Ethiopia

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Every Ethiopian school has considerable resourcing needs.

In country schools, classrooms can frequently be made of tree branches lashed together to make a shaded framework. These are only temporary structures, because the storms of the rainy season soon beat them to the ground.

Classrooms often have only some chalk and a blackboard and perhaps just a couple of textbooks to share between the 50 or even 100 children.

In many schools there are no proper tables and chairs for students to use. They frequently have to sit on tree branches laid on the mud floor, or children are sent out to the fields to find the largest stones which are then brought back to provide seating.

Because of the very high cost of cement in Ethiopia, floors are often made simply of compacted mud. These can soon become either dusty or very muddy, depending on the season. In either case, they can be very detrimental to the health.

The majority of country schools are still without any source of clean drinking water for their pupils and teachers. Yet wells can often be sunk for a matter of a few hundred pounds, providing a whole community with a healthy resource.

Toilets are an all too rare luxury, and even when they do exist, they almost never have a source of water connected with them in order to keep them clean and decent.

Computers are just starting to be seen in Ethiopian secondary and preparatory schools. Yet there are very many schools in the more countrified areas that, as yet, have no electricity connection whatsoever.

Where school libraries do exist, they all too often have very small collections of hugely outdated books, rarely chosen with the age and stage of their pupils in mind.

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