At the start of the year, Nora Coghlan from our policy team wrote about the education crisis in Zimbabwe. After a heated conflict between school teachers and the Zimbabwean government, it was feared that “2009 will be another lost year for education in Zimbabwe.”
Today, CNN.com has anarticle examining the state of education in Zimbabwe. While they note signs of the education system fighting back to normalcy, the price of education and continued lack of funding still make it incredibly difficult for families to send their children to school.
Watch this corresponding video that CNN ran a few weeks back:
Excerpts below, full piece here:
The country’s education minister in the year-old power-sharing administration believes it could be decade before standards are back up to Zimbabwe’s good past record.
According to the education department, 20,000 teachers have left the country in the past two years and half of Zimbabwe’s children have not progressed beyond primary school.
Many parents today are too poor to send their children to school. Rural schools — where pencils, desks and books are luxuries — are hardest hit.
When CNN visited a Mathabisana primary school in Umguza, in the southwest of Zimbabwe, headmaster Nonkululeko Ndlovu said that at one point teachers used charcoal as a substitute for chalk.
“There are no textbooks to talk about at the moment because I remember the last text books were bought sometime in 2000 or so, when we were still getting government grants but now we don’t have anything.
“Those text books have reached their shelf life. An aid organization donated 32 text books which we really appreciated and we are using those text books right across the grades, trying to impart knowledge to the kids.”
The New York Times and other media outlets are reporting that Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is openly boycotting cabinet meetings as a means of protesting President Robert Mugabe’s party. NYT characterizes this as the “biggest breach yet in the new transitional government.”
The catalyst for this step was the jailing Wednesday of Roy Bennett, Mr. Tsvangirai’s deputy agriculture minister-designate, a white farmer who is scheduled to stand trial Monday on three-year-old terrorism charges that his party, the Movement for Democratic Change, says are fabricated. But even after Mr. Bennett was grantedbail Friday after the news conference, officials in his party said their decision to disengage did not change.
“This is the time for us to say enough is enough,” said Thabitha Khumalo, a spokeswoman for the M.D.C.
Mr. Tsvangirai laid out a broad array of grievances. He accused Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF, of selectively using the law as a weapon to punish his parliamentarians, putting 16,000 of its youth militia on the government payroll, and remilitarizing the countryside on bases used in last year’s discredited election to organize a campaign of terror against his supporters.
While he stopped short of quitting the government, Mr. Tsvangirai warned that if the crisis were not resolved and a working relationship restored he would call for United Nations-supervised elections.
Thanks to good rainfall, Zimbabwe has been able to increase production of maize—the staple crop in the country—by 130% to 1.1 million tons. Despite this increase, however, 2.8 million people will still face food shortages this year, as the UN Food and Agriculture Orgaization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) report. Zimbabwe’s food security situation is still extremely tenuous, with basic necessities out of reach for most households. The report also warned that Zimbabwe could see the lowest-ever wheat harvest this winter due to high seed prices and electricity shortages.
“This year’s improved harvest comes after two consecutive years of poor production,” said the World Food Programme’s Jan Delbaere, who worked on the report, reports AP news agency. “Having depleted their food stocks and sold livestock and other assets to cope with the effects of the recent crises, many rural households are still struggling to survive.”
Today President Obama hosted Zimbabwe Prime Minister Tsvangirai at the White House to discuss the countries’ affairs. According to Politico magazine, during the meeting Obama pledged $73 million in assistance and said:
There was a time when Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa and continues to have enormous potential. It has gone through a very dark and difficult period politically… President Mugabe—I think I’ve made my views clear—has often times not acted in the best interests of the Zimbabwean people and has been resistant to the kinds of democratic changes that need to take place. We now have a power-sharing agreement that shows promise.
The Washington Post writes how diseases, from influenza to tuberculosis to cholera and now swine flu, are spreading ever more quickly in an increasingly globalized world. But so, too, are the tools necessary to combat outbreaks of disease: expertise, medicine, money and information.
Dr. Eric Goosby, a pioneer in the fight against AIDS, is President Obama’s choice to run the American effort to combat the disease globally, the White House announced this week. “The Pepfar program has already saved millions of lives in sub-Saharan Africa and other hard-hit areas around the world,” Dr. Goosby said in a statement. “But significant challenges relating to the prevention and treatment of H.I.V. remain.”
Zimbabwe’s leaders this week failed for the fourth time in a fortnight to resolve a series of contentious issues threatening to paralyze the country’s shaky coalition government. The crisis talks remained deadlocked after long hours of intense discussions, signaling a serious political problem besetting the new government. A fierce power struggle is raging behind the scenes as President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai intensify their battle for political control.
Growing evidence indicates battle-hardened extremists are filtering out of safe havens along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and into eastern Africa, bringing sophisticated terrorist tactics that include suicide attacks. The alarming shift, according to U.S. military and counterterrorism officials, is fueling concern that Somalia is increasingly on a path to become the next Afghanistan — a sanctuary where al-Qaida-linked groups could train and plan attacks against the West.
Zimbabwean political leader, nominee to be Deputy Agriculture Secretary and activist Roy Bennett will be joining political commentator and consultant Joe Trippi for a rare television appearance on the MSNBC show 1600: Penn Ave tonight at 6:00pm.
Bennett has been a leading voice for reform and action to end the humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe that has plunged this formerly proud nation into abject poverty. For his efforts, Bennett has faced harassment and arrest on trumped-up charges brought by repressive ruler Robert Mugabe’s supporters. Bennett was just recently released on bail and will be back in court next month, so make sure you’re in front of your TV or have set your TiVo, and tell your friends about this rare chance to hear one of Zimbabwe’s most important voices.
Joe Trippi has been working for weeks to help secure the release of Roy Bennett, rallying people in the United States and Zimbabwe to speak out. You can read more about that work on his blog.
Despite the new unity government that includes Bennett’s MDC party, Mugabe is still harassing and imprisoning political opponents and humanitarian and civil society leaders. An unknown number are still in the prison Bennett was just released from. Until these outrages end, rule of law is established and the unity government is pursued in earnest, it will be impossible for Zimbabwe to rebuild its shattered economy and infrastructure, take on widespread hunger, and end Africa’s worst cholera outbreak in 19 years.
But Zimbabwe can’t do it alone. That’s why we’re asking the African Union – the official guarantor of the unity government deal – to do everything in its power to support the new government when possible and put pressure on those within it who are acting in bad faith. You can add your voice by signing our petition to the AU here and follow our continuing Zimbabwe coverage right here on the ONE blog.
Great news, more than 100,000 ONE members have signed our petition to the African Union, asking that important political body to do everything in its power to help Zimbabwe’s new unity government succeed.
After years of misrule, Zimbabwe is mired in a humanitarian crisis that is wreaking misery across this former regional economic powerhouse. What were once some of the best schools and hospitals and most productive farms in Southern Africa are closed and in ruins, victims of the mismanagement, corruption and repression perpetrated by Robert Mugabe’s dictatorial rule. Hunger is widespread and cholera has killed almost 4,000 in Africa’s worst outbreak in 19 years.
Despite all this, there are finally signs of hope. Leaders from the long-oppressed opposition are now part of the government, alongside the still obstinate Mugabe, and they are making slow progress in tackling the enormous challenges facing Zimbabwe. But Zimbabwe won’t stay on the road to recovery for long, unless outside actors like the African Union take a leading role in supporting Zimbabwe wherever possible and sidelining those whose actions are hurting this nation in its most desperate hour.
Keep reading the ONE Blog for the latest news from Zimbabwe, as we’ll be continuing to cover developments there and bring you opportunities to get involved.
ONE is campaigning to ensure that the Congressional budget does not cut foreign assistance programs like Feed the Future that help people break the cycle of poverty and hunger.
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2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
As aid agencies warn more than 9 million people could be affected by a food crisis in East Africa, world leaders are failing to keep their 2009 promises to tackle the causes of chronic hunger and support farmers in the world's poorest countries.
