Education in South Sudan
The ECC developed a modular teacher-education scheme that operated at five levels, each involving a two-to-three-week course in Sudan that covered both academic and vocational topics.
[2] In terms of content creation, the ECC's materials for distance education has been written by southern Sudanese educationists, or those who have a great deal of experience in the region.
[4] Due to the longevity of the Sudanese Civil War conflict, which consisted of three sub-conflicts and spanned almost 50 years, only about 30% of 1.06 million eligible students were enrolled in primary schools in South Sudan.
[7] With more than 1.5 million persons and 90,000 in refugee camps, improved education is needed to pave the way for greater economic opportunities and reduce South Sudan's reliance on the main industry of oil production.
[4] Many school teachers have requested training and support to engage topics of anger management, guidance, counseling, peace education, and life skills with children afflicted by the war.
With the disruption in education due to cycles of war and political instability, the emotional effects on students extend beyond the classroom.
[4]After the conflict, many of the teachers who returned to schools faced a wide array of challenges: no pay, inadequate access to resources, overcrowded classrooms, deterioration of facilities, etc.
[4] Without any kind of substantive post-trauma protocol embedded in the existing curriculum, teachers are tasked with attaining support from the Ministry of Education for appropriate remuneration, student-focused leadership, and consistency among different educational policies and practices to address both student needs and mental health issues for those working in this space.
Like in most sub-Saharan countries, too much emphasis is placed on acquiring a university education and not enough on obtaining life-sustaining practical skills in a vocational or technical institution.
[citation needed] There are a number of environmental issues in South Sudan, the most notable being drought, exacerbated by famine and caused by desertification and losses in crops, vegetation, and livestock.
[11] Drought has compounded into a host of other problems: failure of crops, decline in productivity, shrinking food reserves, and hunger and malnourishment.
The effects of these problems have been disproportionally felt by women and children, and education has largely been viewed as a crucial element of the solution.
This is driven by the idea that women have the ability to leverage their indigenous ecological knowledge and experiences to drive socio-environmental change.
[11] An example of this is the Joint Environment and Energy Programme (JEEP) in the neighboring nation of Uganda, in which women environmental adult educators assist other women in working with fuel wood conservation technologies including fuel-saving stoves, tree planting agroforestry, and the conservation of soil and water via organic farming.
[11] Similarly, in South Sudan, the Ministry of Energy partners with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to create fuel-saving stoves.
[11] Some benefits of this ecological literacy include women gaining skills in organic, marketing, and traditional farming as well as food production, thereby creating a "knowledge forest".
[11] Such classes have not only equipped with South Sudanese women with the skills necessary to increase production and thus sales of food but also encouraged them to enter leadership roles in their respective communities and civic educators who have designed their own projects.
[12] The first of these nutrition centers in Sudan was established in Omdurman, and its primary objectives were to take care of children who are in the early or moderate stages of malnutrition and engage their mothers in the process.
[12] South Sudan is in desperate need of technical/vocational school graduates in order to build and maintain its infrastructure including: building roads, houses, water treatment systems and sewage plants as well as computer networks, telephone systems and electricity generating plants to power the entire infrastructure.
After the brief respite in the civil war in 2005, the number of students attending southern Sudanese schools more than quadrupled, with 34 percent female.
[2] The UNHCR has directed efforts to creating optimal conditions for the reintegration of Sudanese refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) by constructing and expanding schools and training centers and supplementing classes with educational materials.
[14] In addition, the UNHCR has engaged in efforts to train teachers, promote female education, spread discourse about stigmatized topics like peace-building, HIV/AIDS, and gender-based violence (SGBV).
[14] While the global awareness of education in South Sudan is growing slowly, the larger issue remains that there is an inequitable distribution of learning materials and minimal training for untrained instructors.
