Shared values, cultural diversity and education :
What to learn and how ?

The "Teachers Fellows"

Loga, Niger

The "Teachers Fellows" project, launched by the "Help and Action" Association, aims at schooling the unschooled students so that they can help re-launch their schooling process. A significant increase of attendance, regularity and success rates is expected by means of this pair approach, always concerning their milieu school.

The intervention of the Help and Action association in this project is based on the school development as an educational resource center for the community. All those that passed by the school must be able to help the community. Thus, even if they leave without a diploma, the students can be useful in the village by providing their acquired know-how. The parents realize that their schooled children can learn about exploitable elements in their own milieu and encourage them to do so. The project lies upon the unschooled and unemployed youngsters, who are, by their deceiving example, one of the first obstacles to the younger children's registration. In order to stabilize them, Help and Action rests on their school knowledge, although rudimentary, in order to train them in the improved production techniques. To value them, they reinforce the knowledge acquired by the younger students by organizing remedial classes, but especially by completing the educational offer of practical courses.

One of the problems of education in Niger is the system's inadequacy to the country's realities. Apart from this problem, there is also an unbalance between cities and countryside areas. Thus, according to the United Nations indicators, not only the schooling rate is one of the lowest in the world, but also the students who do manage to attend school leave it later without real competence. On the other hand, the acquired know-how-to-be and know-how-to-do are not yet taken into account for the students' training and evaluation in Niger.

Abdou Zakaria
Aid and Action - Niger
Tel.: +227 73 22 20
E-mail: aeaniger@intnet.ne

Partner Institutions
Ministry of Education of Niger

1997