Education in Ethiopia
Girls' educational attainment is adversely affected by gender stereotypes, violence, lack of sanitary facilities and the consequences of sexual activity.
[3] Although the existence of inscriptions prove that literacy preceded the adoption of Christianity as the recognized religion in Ethiopia, by the time of the earliest surviving records formal education was controlled by the church.
[5] Until the early 1900s, formal education was confined to a system of religious instruction organized and presented under the aegis of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
In the process, these schools also provided religious education to the children of the nobility and to the sons of limited numbers of tenant farmers and servants associated with elite families.
[7] In 1925 the government adopted a plan to expand secular education, but ten years later there were only 8,000 students enrolled in twenty public schools.
Moreover, urban inhabitants, who did not have to pay the tax but who were predominantly represented in the schools, sent their children at the expense of the taxpaying rural landowners and poor peasants.
Under the pressure of growing public dissatisfaction and mounting student activism in the university and secondary schools, the imperial government initiated a comprehensive study of the education system.
[4] The ESR criticized the education system's focus on preparing students for the next level of academic study and on the completion of rigid qualifying examinations.
The report was not published until February 1974, which gave time for rumours to generate opposition among students, parents, and the teachers' union to the ESR recommendations.
The national literacy campaign began in early 1975 when the government mobilized more than 60,000 students and teachers, sending them all over the country for two-year terms of service.
By 1991, when the Derg was overthrown by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), infrastructure had been destroyed, there was little access to education and extreme poverty was widespread.
There should be continued expansion and improvement of quality in both primary and secondary education to prepare students for different career options in the growing economy.
[14] The World Bank survey of 80 teachers found that 80% reported general dissatisfaction with procedures for up-grading with 50% considering it was influenced by political connections and 27% by relationships to committee members.
Parents and children could dislike mother-tongue teaching because the mother tongue could be learned at home while Amharic and English provided work opportunities and access to higher education.
Lack of dictionaries and grammar books meant that teachers had no guide to the proper use of language and textbooks were the only written material to help students with reading.
Instructors at Addis Ababa University (AAU) found students' English so poor that they confined assessments to written tasks rather than alternatives such as presentations or debates.
[32] The Berhane Hewan package of interventions, in rural Amhara from 2004 to 2006, demonstrated that girls' school attendance could be improved by increasing the age of marriage.
Apart from corporal punishment, mainly older boys beat up girls to harass and degrade them or in retaliation for a refusal to initiate a sexual relationship.
Other reasons included unapproachable instructors, boyfriend's lack of support and belief that they could not compete because affirmative action had allowed them to be admitted with lower grades than men.
They do tend to have better resources and more practically skilled instructors than public TVETs but they have been reluctant to allow their workshops to be used for co-operative training and occupational assessment.
Since 2011, they have to have a BSc or BA related to secondary school subjects plus a one-year post-graduate diploma in teaching (PGDT) which includes a practicum accounting for 30% of the credit hours.
[14] There was some doubt about HERQA's competence to fulfill its mission since the majority of members were from agriculture and would thus not be able to insure quality and relevance throughout the higher education sector.
[49] Business process re-engineering has recently been introduced across the public sector to improve effectiveness and efficiency from "scratch" but this has received only limited support from universities.
HERQA has recently changed its name to Education Training Quality Assurance Agency (ETQAA)[49] The Federal government provides a block grant to universities based on student enrolment but unrelated to performance and lacking in accountability.
Previously, the three university bodies were strong and provided quality assurance but now the president had all the power with assemblies reduced to meetings and only a skeleton senate remaining.
[49] MU had implemented BPR to the extent of having policies and a one-man quality assurance office that lacked resources or support from top management.
[57] It is possible to improve the match between graduate training and employer requirements when relevant organizations interact with university faculty and manage to obtain money for laboratories and equipment.
The Centre for Disease Control Ethiopia and the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) together with university faculty assessed medical laboratory education.
The United States President's fund for AIDS relief provided money for equipment, including an uninterrupted power supply and consumables.
[citation needed] Ethiopia faces many historical, cultural, social and political obstacles that have restricted progress in education for many centuries.
