LESOTHO is one of a few low income sub-Saharan African countries whose high level of commitment to education is matched by equally high levels of budget allocations to the sector, and this is bearing fruit.
The country has reached parity in participation of boys and girls at primary school levels and the overall level of participation in education at this level has increased steadily.
Programmes including school-feeding, provision of school material and text-book renting have positively reduced the burden of additional education costs on parents and made schooling much more accessible to children from poor and low-income families.
In terms of the fulfilment of education rights, some of the things we look at that allow us to say whether the right is fully realised include access, whether there are schools, the distances that have to be travelled from home to school, levels of discrimination in accessing schools between boys and girls and between economic classes and minority groups; the quality of the education experience including, the level of education and capacity of teachers, the number of hours children spend in the classroom on a typical school day, the availability of text-books and other instructional materials, school infrastructure including classrooms, desks, black-boards, chalk, toilets, access to water and food during the school day and the school curriculum.
In terms of the many factors that promote access to primary education, Lesotho has done very well in the past 10 years by reducing the distances travelled to school, significantly improving school infrastructure and therefore the number of hours children spend fetching water for cooking in schools, making exercise and textbooks widely available and extending the school feeding programme which is essential to keeping very poor children in school.
The Ministry of Education, working together with the National University of Lesotho, has also made it possible for unqualified teachers to receive professional training resulting in professional diplomas and degrees, through a tailored in-service training programme during school holidays.
However, the programme to achieve full realisation of education rights for everybody is still bedevilled by a number of problems that reflect failure to act in other areas:
While we have achieved gender parity in primary school, there are still a number of young boys kept out of school by the herdboy problem, which needs to be addressed by stricter enforcement of laws against child labour.
Early childhood education is still mostly in the hands of private suppliers and the levels of subsidisation are so low that it is inaccessible to the poor. There is global recognition of the role of early childhood education in preparing children for school.
Government should provide more funding and oversight for this very important area of education to ensure quality and standards in the provision of services.
While the overall levels of literacy in Lesotho are high, the percentage of people who are considered functionally literate is low and the percentage decreases further when one takes into consideration the levels of literacy and numeracy required for parents to fully participate in their children’s education.
In order to make education participatory and more democratic, more funding should be allocated to adult literacy and education programmes meant to raise the overall levels of social inclusion and citizen participation in public life.
Lesotho is far from reaching the 10-14 years of compulsory education that have become standard in terms of the realisation of the right to education.
As a low income country, it is clear that there are resource issues at stake; however the country should begin to progressively move towards making the first three years of secondary education free.
There needs to be stronger enforcement of labour laws to protect children from all forms of child labour and a supportive policy environment to get all children to complete primary school, get more boys participating in early childhood education and achieve parity in the participation of boys and girls in secondary education.
The move towards development of own curriculum and control over the quality and standard of the Standard Seven examinations is welcome and should be applauded.
This move should be supplemented by a more participatory programme of education, including establishment of democratic student structures in primary and secondary schools to encourage student participation in recognition of the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, strengthen the role of parents in education through school governing bodies and other committees and through an on-going national dialogue on education through a variety of platforms provided by government, civil society and the private sector.
While it is primarily the responsibility of government to provide the right mix of inputs that contributes to the realisation of the right to education, which the government has done fairly well, the outcomes (results) are the only optimal measure of how well the system is doing.
Results from regional evaluations indicate that Lesotho pupils perform below the regional average in literacy and numeracy.
Unfortunately for policy-makers in the education sector, the issue of outcomes has to be addressed alongside the other issues of access and rights realisation.
Improvements in public education outcomes are fundamental to avoiding the victimisation of the mostly poor families that rightly claim their right to free education when compared to the outcomes for the children of the middle-class who can afford to pay for private education, and to avoid pushing children of the poor to the margins of society through inferior education.
Relebohile Senyane is Lead Implementation Officer for a Sadc Child Budget Network (Imali Ye Mwana) a project of Idasa. Imali Ye Mwana’s focus is on supporting child rights organisations in the Sadc region to use budget analysis as a tool for policy advocacy.
Relebohile holds an MA Degree in International Training and Education.
