CI-NEWS

Minister Asheri Kilo crusades for back-to-school; offers didactic materials to IDP pupils.

2019-08-25

No: 443

Convinced that “education is life in itself”, H.E. Dr Asheri Vivian Kilo, Secretary of State for Basic Education, has intensified efforts for normalcy to return and for schools to kick-start effectively after three long years of no school in the troubled regions.

The minister who hails from Bui Division in the North West region has used two two relief operations in Yaounde to sensitise her kith and kin to the value of education. She donated mostly school bags containing didactic materials for pupils in Yaounde. The St Joseph’s Anglophone Catholic Church Mvog-Ada was the main venue for the distribution of didactic materials to some internally displaced children, in Yaounde affected as a result of the Anglophone crisis in the North West and South West regions.

According to Minister Asheri Kilo, education is the key to the world. “A child without education is like a bird without feathers given that education doesn’t only prepare the youths for a better and brighter future but it is life in itself.”

She said most of children in the North West and South are illiterate because they have not been able to go to school, and doubted whether they really understand “the importance of education for the human being.”

In April, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) entered an agreement with the Ministry of Basic Education outlining its plan to enhance access to education for internally displaced children in security-threatened regions of the country.

The agreement will permit the NRC for the first time in many years expand its help to the North West and South Regions. The council has a record presence in the Northern Regions of the country.

Dr Vivian Asheri Kilo said both the government and the NRC “want to work together to ensure that the displaced young people have quality education in an environment that is suitable for them”.

She said this program is mainly for those who have dropped out of school and have stayed at home for about two or three years without sitting on a classroom bench.

“Sometimes it is difficult to reintegrate them in the classes that they left and so there is a program that the Norwegian Refugee Council is building such that children like this could catch up with the rest of their peers,” Kilo stated.

Since the beginning of the crisis in the English speaking Regions in 2016, many youths have not been able to go to school .Students were threatened and scores of schools been burnt in these regions.

600,000 children with no school

In 2017, several Anglophone groups called for a stop to the school boycott, calling it counter-productive, but were brandished as traitors by the separatists and school authorities who tried to reopen schools, and students who tried to attend them, were often kidnapped.

UNICEF, The UN’s children’s agency, estimates over 600,000 school-aged children aren’t attending classes in the Anglophone regions.

“Prior to October 2016, more than 6,000 schools were operational within the North West region. As of December 2018, less than 100 schools were operational; meaning nearly 5,900 schools were closed down with over 40,000 students out of school and over 40 schools burnt down,” said a July 9 statement by the Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa.

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Minister Asheri Kilo crusades for back-to-school; offers didactic materials to IDP pupils.