How AIDS undercuts education in Africa

Consolata Kiara, head of school health and nutrition in the Education Ministry, says her department is "concerned in all areas," because AIDS "may impact on enrollment ... [and] on the teacher supply."

Kenya, which spends 40 percent of its official government budget on education, stopped hiring teachers in 1998 as part of a structural adjustment plan imposed by the International Monetary Fund. When a teacher dies, children are simply grouped into larger classes or worse. "We know there are classes that are not attended to," says Patrick Birgen, spokesman for the Teachers Service Commission, which employs all public school teachers.

Urban Jonsson, the UNICEF regional representative for Eastern and Southern Africa thinks the AIDS crisis makes it immoral for donor nations to tell developing countries to cut their education budgets. "All these countries need more teachers and better teachers and better-supported teachers, not less teachers," he says. "That's very short-sighted."

Mr. Jonsson says the crisis in education caused by AIDS will become an economic crisis and in turn a political crisis. "The education system [across Africa], apart from being underfunded and marginalized in terms of political priorities, is now being devastated by this disease."

Kenya, where about 500 people are dying of AIDS daily, was relatively slow in coming to terms with the epidemic.

It was not until this past December that President Daniel arap Moi declared AIDS - which had infected some 10 percent of his citizens - a national disaster.

A national AIDS education program has yet to make its way into the schools. Peace Corps workers will start implementing it in September by training teachers in AIDS awareness. The irony is bitter -some of the Kenyans who will teach youngsters about AIDS prevention have themselves been diagnosed as having the virus.

Many observers wonder why teachers -at first glance among the most educated and well-employed of Africans -are catching AIDS at such a high rate. No one seems to have a scientifically or epidemiologically based answer. But it's true that teaching is not among the most prestigious professions in Africa and it pays quite poorly. Primary-school teachers are predominantly women, often infected with HIV by philandering or polygamous husbands.

But above all, the infection rate among teachers shows how AIDS cuts across all sectors of African society. That's now quite clear to Monica Omwoyo who lost four colleagues at the Olympic Estate primary school. She struggles to find an answer to the question of why teachers at such a successful school would contract HIV. "The government is trying to make people aware of it, but people are careless," she says. Some people, she says, want to satisfy their bodies no matter the consequences: "Even if they know there is AIDS."

(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society

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