Table 10. Enrolment in Somali Primary Schools by Grade and Gender, 1997

Emphasizing that the raison d’être of an education system is to provide for active, meaningful and enduring learning by students, Heneveld (1994:3) observes that in many African countries the conditions essential for such learning are lacking:

Most primary schools in Sub-Saharan Africa suffer from very poor conditions for learning: dilapidated or half-completed buildings, insufficient desks, overcrowded classrooms, few or no learning materials, poorly educated and motivated teachers and choral recitation as the dominant mode of instruction.

For Somalia the conditions described by Heneveld are magnified by the unstable system of governance that (a) exposes schools, teachers and pupils to insecurity; (b) adversely affects the collection of public revenue, part of which could be allocated to the improvement of teacher education and incentives (see discussion on Indicators 9, 10 and 11); and (c) hinders the development of a viable above-school infrastructure for planning and managing the education particularly with regard to teacher guidance, monitoring and assessment / evaluation of pupils’ learning. The recent literature on primary education in Somalia (e.g. Bennaars et al., 1996; Development Solutions for Africa, 1998; Retamal and Devadoss, 1998; UNICEF-Somalia, 1998a & 1999; UNDP, 1998; Wamahiu et al., 1999) highlights severe inadequacies with regard to physical facilities, instructional materials (including pupils’ textbooks and teachers’ guides) and most important, dearth of classroom teaching-learning approaches that actively involve the pupils and thus facilitate the internalisation of knowledge and skills. Wamahiu et al. (1999:19) summarise their findings on teaching-learning approaches as follows:

With little to motivate them, and armed with training (if any at all) in traditional pedagogical methods, [teachers create a classroom culture that] is not very child friendly. Observations carried out during seven different lessons in the case study schools reveal that the talk-and-chalk methods dominate the classroom process; the only activity that pupils engage in, apart from answering teachers’ questions, is writing notes...The teachers tend neither to inspire confidence in the pupils nor to create a pleasant environment that is conducive to learning...In the majority of cases, the teachers do not have any scheme of work, long term plans, record of work done or lesson plans.