UK's ambitious South Sudan aid plan for girls' education on hold

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Created on Thursday, 03 May 2012 00:00

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Britain takes tough line on aid in response to South Sudan shutting down oil production, but US presses ahead with development work and humanitarian aid"

Mark Tran in Juba

South Sudan's economic crisis has already hit the UK's ambitious £52m programme to educate girls, a top priority for Britain's development programme in the world's newest state.

South Sudan shut down oil production in January in a dispute with Sudan over fees for oil going through Sudan's pipelines. The move, which the UK considers an own goal, has deprived South Sudan of 98% of its revenues, threatening to skew the Department for International Development's (DfID's) £360m aid programme towards emergency humanitarian aid rather than long-term development. As a parliamentary report said recently, the delivery of DfID's programme is already at risk before it has properly begun.

Long-term programmes for South Sudan – one of the biggest recipients of UK bilateral aid – are in limbo because no one knows how much money remains in government coffers. Some say the country will run out of money in August, raising the prospect that it will simply print cash – with the attendant risk of hyperinflation, as happened in Zimbabwe. Prices of food are rising fast, and long lines of cars and motorbikes outside petrol stations are a common sight in Juba.

Pending the new budget in July, the government unveiled an austerity plan in February, which halved operational costs and cut funding to the 10 states by 10%. In education, South Sudan has cut the budget to 4% of GDP from around 7% and stopped school construction. It has cut salaries across the education ministry by 10%, stopped teacher training and frozen recruitment of new teachers.

As a result, DfID has put on hold plans to build teacher training centres. The plan was to build 10 centres in four states that would train 2,000 teachers a year in four- to six-week stints. But all that remains on the drawing board.

This is a big blow for a country that needs to double the number of teachers to 60,000 to have any chance of reaching the millennium development goal of universal primary education by 2015. The qualified teacher to children ratio is 1:117.

Girls' education is particularly dire. Only seven girls for every 10 boys attend primary school; five girls for 10 boys at the secondary level. Only 9% of girls who enrol in grade one complete primary school, and only 2% make it through secondary school.

Working with partners, DfID had big plans for girls' education, tackling not just economic but also social and cultural barriers that prevent girls from going to school. DfID wanted to support 150,000 girls through primary school and 50,000 through secondary school. Currently, there are only 30,000 girls in upper primary school, aged between eight and 11.

According to Unicef, 64% (around 1 million) of children between the ages of six and 11 are not in school. Of a population of more than 8 million, almost 3 million are aged between five and 18.

The cultural barriers to girls' education are formidable. As in many African countries, women and girls in South Sudan are responsible for most household tasks, including collecting water. The average time spent collecting water can be up to eight hours a day in areas with limited water and sanitation. Even when girls do go to school, they can be subject to abuse by teachers. Last year in the town of Rumbek in Lakes state, protests broke out after some teachers were arrested for abusing girls. The state backed down and released the teachers after their colleagues went on strike.

And when fees have to be paid at secondary school level – and parents have to decide whether to pay for their sons or daughters to attend – boys get preference.

But while the UK is pulling back on its education plans, the US has decided to press ahead with its planned construction of teacher training institutes. This reflects an interesting split in approach to the current economic crisis.

Britain says it cannot bankroll South Sudan through this austerity period, a message that was reinforced robustly by the international development minister, Stephen O'Brien, in Juba last week during his talks with top South Sudanese officials, although not with President Salva Kiir, who was in China. Kiir's trip bore fruit as China, a backer of Khartoum, agreed to lend $8bn to South Sudan for major road, bridges and telecoms projects.

The UK international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, exasperated at South Sudan's decision to halt oil production, had pressed for a strong statement from the so-called Sudan troika – the UK, the US and Norway – that development funding would be curtailed, a position backed by the international development committee in the UK parliament.

But the Americans and Norwegians declined to take such a stand. In contrast, the US, which wields the most clout in South Sudan, is pressing ahead with its long-planned development work as well as being ready to provide humanitarian aid.

Some analysts argue that America's approach rather than Britain's is the better option. Kevin Watkins, writing on the Poverty Matters blog last week, said cutting long-term assistance for South Sudan will hurt vulnerable people and undermine the benefits of past aid investments. But DfID, aware of intense public pressure on the UK aid budget in times of austerity at home, feels that it has little choice but to take a tough line in South Sudan as long as the oil wells are idle.

Source: The Guardian UK