In Togdheer region of Somaliland, over 70 per cent of the population is made up of pastoralists who migrate from place to place with their livestock in search of pasture and water. Migration of the population was found to be one of the impediments to pastoralist children’s access to basic education. The existing formal schools in pastoralist areas are under-utilized due to incompatibility to the lifestyle and socio-economic characteristics of the population. This called for designing mobile schools as an appropriate education-delivery model to make basic education accessible to children of pastoralist/nomads’.
Through mobile schools, a total of 690 pastoralist children (282 girls and 408 boys) who had been denied their right to basic education gained access in the eight targeted mobile schools. Amina Mohammed is one of the pastoralist children who benefits from one of the mobile schools.
Amina Mohamed is 14 years and comes from a family of six. She has four brothers and one sister. All her brothers were sent to schools in town since there were none in the village. She and her sister were left at home helping in herding and attending to domestic chores.
Whenever her brothers returned home for school holidays they would talk about their schools and show off their books. Amina and her sister envied their brothers and felt cheated being kept at home. Their parents would give them all manner of excuses as to why they were not sent to school like their brothers. The parents would tell them that there are no schools for girls in towns.
When Save the Children started Gorayahun Hose Mobile School in October 2004, Amina convinced her parents to allow her to enroll saying she could attend school and still help them with herding and domestic chores. She is now in Level II of the Alternative Approaches to Basic Education (AABE) and is able to read and write in Somali.
Amina now boasts to her brothers that she will catch up with them since her curriculum is condensed. After three years she can join a formal primary school at Grade 5, saving herself one year. What excites Amina even more is that whenever drought forces her family to migrate, she continues with learning since her school is mobile. Her brothers marvel at this idea of “a classroom that moves with her”.
Amina’s parents are comfortable with her schooling because the timings still allow her to help them with household chores. Lessons are conducted between 09:00 hours and 12:30 hours. Amina and her parents are also happy that mobile school teachers are child-friendly and caring, and that the subjects taught are relevant to the community. Amina likes English, Arabic and Somali subjects.
Unlike girls in schools that are not mobile, Amina finds the availability water and latrines in her school unique since her village lacks such facilities. Amina’s aspiration is to become a mobile school teacher so that she can help other village girls also go to school like her. This is very important to Save the Children because mobile school teachers are recruited from the community where such schools are established.