Getting to school

Achieving universal primary education

Physical mobility and transport barriers that prevent rural children from attending primary school can be substantial but are often complex and hidden. The situation is particularly severe in sub-Saharan Africa where, with few exceptions, more than half the children in any age group fail to attend school regularly.

Research by the University of Durham with children, teachers and parents in Gomoa and Assin districts in southern Ghana identifies transport availability and costs as a significant barrier to rural children's regular school attendance.

Children may have to walk up to six kilometres to go to school, after they have done household chores and other types of work (often involving transporting goods). At one off-road village, boys and girls from about the age of ten regularly carry heavy loads of firewood to the district headquarters to sell before they go to school - a total journey of around ten kilometres.

Bad roads and inadequate or expensive transport commonly prevent children living in more remote areas from attending school regularly. Other transport and mobility-related factors influencing school attendance include:

• Age, gender, birth order, physical disability and family socio-economic status may affect which children are able to travel long distances to school, particularly if travel is unaccompanied and involves unreliable public transport.
• Local agricultural conditions and associated economic production patterns affect the daily chores that a child is expected to perform, such as herding cattle and collecting water and firewood.
• The distances between the locations of these activities and the transport available affect how much extra time a child has.
• Inadequate and/or costly transport for moving farm produce and other goods may cause families to use their children, especially girls, as porters, which delays or prevents their attendance.
• Where public transport is costly and/or irregular, boys may be able to use bicycles to reach distant schools; the time girls spend on domestic tasks (and sometimes cultural conventions) tend to restrict their opportunities to cycle.
• Teachers are often reluctant to take up positions in more remote village schools because poor transport options will isolate them from regular interaction with colleagues and other people of similar social status. Such villages may be without adequate teachers for long periods; teachers posted to these locations may take regular unofficial absences.

Children and teachers face many difficulties getting to school in rural parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Insufficient evidence exists however, concerning the extent and nature of impacts on school enrolment and attendance.

A new study is starting to develop this work on children and mobility in sub-Saharan Africa. Where linkages are found, imaginative context-specific solutions will be needed. These might include:

• promoting wider availability of bicycles (as the recent Shova Kalula National Bicycle Programme has done in South Africa by providing subsidised bicycles), bicycle repair courses for girls and boys in school, girls-only buses, or distance learning.
• research that directly involves children (both in and out of school) to establish both the issues and potential solutions
• using public sector transport to achieve educational goals, including running mobile libraries with information and communication technologies, travel allowances for teachers, organising school transport and so on n

Gina Porter and Kathrin Blaufuss
with Frank Owusu-Acheampong
Department of Anthropology, University of Durham,
43 Old Elvet, Durham, DH1 3HN, UK
r.e.porter@durham.ac.uk

See also

Improving policy on children's mobility and access through development of a participatory child-centred field methodology/toolkit, Project Pages
www.dur.ac.uk/child.mobility/

Children, Transport and Traffic in Southern Ghana, International workshop on children and traffic, Copenhagen, Denmark, by Gina Porter and Kathrin Blaufuss, 2-3 May, 2002

'Living in a Walking World: Rural Mobility and Social Equity Issues in Sub-Saharan Africa' World Development 30 (2) pages 285-300, by Gina Porter, 2002

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