Untitled Document

EFA: Honduras Aims at Universal Primary Education
By WENDY GRIFFIN

In various international conferences on development, Third World countries have asked donors to help them achieve universal primary education. This is the origin of the project known as EFA—Education for All.
The first premise of this project is that Honduras has achieved 100% coverage as far as ensuring access to schools, and what is needed is to improve the quality of education.

Casual discussions with people in remote areas reveal that people do not agree. On the bus from San Pedro before arriving in Copan Ruins, the bus stops in the town of Santa Rita. The mayor has found over 20 communities which had no teacher and no school.
The municipality of Santa Rita is paying 6th grade graduates slightly more than L1,100 a month to teach school. Classes are held in churches, clinics, etc, because the Ministry has no school there. But EFA is not allowed to pay for ongoing, reoccurring costs, such as teachers´salaries.

The first goal of EFA is 85% of the children will graduate from sixth grade by age 12. In order to achieve this, new textbooks and workbooks for grades 1 – 6 in Spanish and Math were printed. In February 2005 they are supposed to be distributed to all the schools in the country, along with the new national curriculums for pre-Basic (kindergarten) and Basic Education (grades 1-9).

This is a massive logistical effort, not previously attempted by Honduras. Many rural schools such as those in the Tawahka area have been operating with no teaching materials.

A second goal is to raise the grades and test scores of the students. This project will be subject to constant evaluation. If the test scores or grades do not go up, the donors will withdraw support for the project, reports Vilma Pagoada, formerly coordinator of EFA for the Ministry of Education. This is unfortunate. Well funded, well thought out interventions in the US such as AmeriCorps have frequently been found to have minimal effects on grades.

The EFA project also includes the change in teacher training from Normal Schools to requiring primary teachers to be university graduates of the National Teaching University (UPN). Bilingual intercultural education and Special Education are also part of the project which began in 2003, but whose efforts will begin to be felt this year in the public schools.

Observers of Honduras will wonder how the Ministry plans to get 85% of the children to graduate from elementary school by age 12, when half of the children currently drop out before beginning fourth grade. Some children never go to school at all because their families do not have money for uniforms, shoes, notebooks, or because the family needs the child´s labor to take care of other children or in agriculture.