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"Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world"

28 January 2013

The Congo is a huge country and the capital, Kinshasa, has a population of between six and eight million inhabitants, many displaced from the Kivus, an area devastated by war.  I have not been able to access any official document in which the exact population can be stated. 

Those millions of Africans constitute a variety of ethnicities, languages and customs with nothing in common besides sharing land, poverty and unreliable governments. Colonialism left traces of shame and injustice, but the Africans who have governed since 1960, now independent of Belgium, have contributed to the Congolese population being at the bottom of the list of the least developed countries in the world. In Kinshasa there are few advertising billboards, when compared to the barrage of billboards to which we are accustomed.  Most are for mobile phones or perfumery products.

UNICEF proposed to use billboards and murals to encourage parents to educate their children. The advertisements read “To educate a woman, is to educate people”. And it is not to say that parents do not want their children to go to school, not at all. They simply cannot afford it and when faced with the choice, they send their boys to school. This decision creates true segregation between boys and girls; one group goes to college, the other group is illiterate. When they have to opportunity to school them, it does not bother them whether education is mixed or not, what they want to obtain is equal opportunities for their sons and daughters.

In Kinshasa I saw that there are schools for girls and boys that are mixed and separate. The ones that I saw all had the same uniform: blue and white, so that it is very easy to recognise the schoolchildren on the street and to treat them with respect. Although the Constitution includes the right to free schooling, the reality is that families must pay indirect charges and costs that they cannot afford no matter how hard they try. We must remember that a high number of the population gets by one just one euro per day, they eat just one meal and make all their journeys on foot.

Why do they pay if free education is a constitutional right? It is because teachers are not paid regularly by the Ministry for Education.  And they work Saturdays.  And they teach up to 45 students per class in secondary level schools. And their wage is 40-50 dollars. One way or another, the teachers have to get paid, whether from the school fees or from contributions from parents.

It is urgent that Nelson Mandela`s statement becomes a reality. Urgent.


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