Guinea-Bissau parents coax truant teachers back to school

“If we cancel our lessons and go back to Bissau, it would be very difficult for us to come back to work once the strike was suspended because of the remoteness of the islands and difficulties of transportation,” said primary school headteacher Joao Gomes.

“So we prefer to stay in the village and reach an understanding with the parents of the pupils,” he added. “There is trust, and that makes it work.”

The farmer and fishermen parents of Orango Grande’s schoolchildren are well aware that things are unlikely to change anytime soon after what UN education and culture agency, UNESCO, has described as “40 years of institutional instability.”

– Lack of support –

The National Institute for the Development of Education (INDE in its Portuguese acronym) says just 30 percent of the curriculum on average was completed in primary and secondary schools in the last 20 years.

And parents in a country, where the average citizen makes just $620 a year, according to the World Bank, frequently cannot make up the massive shortfall.

“Most of our classmates ended up leaving because they can’t pay,” said Eugenio Gomes, a pupil at the Ho Chi Minh school.

A UNESCO report from November showed that Guinea-Bissau’s households nonetheless contributed 63 percent of the country’s total educational expenditure.

Even taking into account the country’s “meagre” budget, the report said, the proportion earmarked for education was one of the lowest in Africa.

Against this backdrop, “life expectancy is 50 years, 70 percent of the population live below the poverty line and 50 percent of adults can neither read nor write,” it added, hindering the country’s development.

“Successive governments tout education as one of their priorities, but they don’t care if the teaching is of good quality or not,” said Braima Djalo, of the National Institute for the Development of Education.