As African countries overhaul education, a school succeeds against the odds

Here at the Chiseka school on the rural outskirts of town, many children attend class outside, sitting among weeds in the shade of a towering blue gum tree. There are 1,531 students, six classrooms, no running water and no light bulbs.

Yet Chiseka has the best academic record in its district by far. Last year all 40 students in the eighth grade passed their exams. And 30 did well enough to qualify for secondary school -- a significant achievement in a country where less than 30 percent of students finish primary school.

Chiseka vividly shows one of the biggest challenges Africa faces today: Saving a generation that is growing up with hardly any education. One in two African children don't finish primary school, and millions don't go at all. Those who do often end up in crowded schools with untrained teachers.

Malawi is one of several African countries that are now overhauling education, in an effort to meet the United Nations goal of having every child of the right age enrolled in primary school by 2015. Countries such as Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania are working with donors and the United Nations to improve schools and train teachers.

But Malawi stands out because it is designing its ambitious 10-year education plan itself, in the belief that only a program designed by Africans for Africans will work in the long run. It gives children books by Malawi authors and teaches them science through their own environment. And it touts Chiseka's recent success as a sign of slow but steady progress.

The aim isn't to produce doctors or engineers, but simply to teach everyone to read, to do enough math to hold down a basic job and eventually to write a check and balance a checkbook. What rides on that goal is the future of the next generation, and ultimately the country's own chances at development.

"We want to learn, we try hard to get an education. I want to be a teacher someday," says Jeffrey Joseph, 14, a slight and timid eighth-grade boy at Chiseka, the son of a farmer.

Jeffrey, sitting beside the village's hand-pumped well, is uneasy at sharing a dream he knows will be difficult to achieve. He scratches nervously in the dirt with a stick. He is embarrassed that he has never read a book, and can barely speak English, the language of education in Malawi beyond the fourth grade.

"That is how life is," he says softly in Chichewa, his native tongue. "If you are born into a poor family that is your destiny."

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Malawi, nestled beside a great lake in Africa's far southeast corner, is landlocked, short of natural resources and one of the 10 poorest countries on Earth. Its educational problems are shared by most of the African countries south of the Sahara.

The figures are dismal: In more than half of African countries, only 50 percent of children finish primary school and 12 percent complete high school. Only in a handful of countries -- Botswana, Ethiopia, Seychelles, Sudan and South Africa -- do more than 90 percent of primary students go on to high school. Even in Zimbabwe, years of chaos and violence have destroyed one of the best education systems in Africa.

Some African countries are now trying to rescue education. Kenya has allotted more money for schools and is closing the gender gap at younger ages. Tanzania has raised the pass rate of children leaving primary school from 22 percent in 2000 to almost 62 percent in 2006 through more teacher training and community support. Ghana has drawn up a plan that uses distance education to train more teachers, among other changes.

Malawi has a bold history of educational reform, not always successful. In 1994 Malawi was the first of at least 10 African countries to abolish primary school fees.

Today that decision is seen as a colossal blunder, premature in a country tragically unprepared for the consequences. Overnight, enrollment nearly doubled in a school system already woefully short of teachers, classrooms, textbooks and other teaching aids. The government hired many teachers right out of secondary school, and gave them just three weeks of training.

"We were recruiting every Jack and Jill who just wanted a job. They were not qualified," says Augustine Kamloneera, director of planning at the Education Ministry.

Malawi quickly learned that a generation of children cannot be educated simply by ordering it to happen. For the promise of universal primary education to mean anything, the country had to find a way to train teachers fast and reduce class sizes.