Off the wire
• Kenya urges Africa to devise strategies to unite continent  • Kenya eyes 20 pct increase in tourists from S. Africa this year  • China Focus: New law, blacklist target bogus professional associations  • World Bank to assist EAC achieve full integration  • Kipsang, Kimetto to miss Rio Olympics as Kenya to name final squad  • Feature: Ebola survivors establish football team to heal wound  • (Recast) Roundup: Militants kill 8 policemen in Egypt, IS claims responsibility  • Xinhua world news summary at 1530 GMT, May 8  • Roundup: 4 Italian police injured in clashes at Austrian border  • Chinese cuisine remains great unknown in many cases: Spanish expert  
You are here: 　 Home

South Sudan plans to reinstate 1 mln children to schools

Xinhua, May 9, 2016 Adjust font size:

South Sudan unity government plans to return more than one million children to schools after two years of civil conflict in the young nation.

Deng Deng Hoc, the new Minister of Education, Science and Technology told Xinhua that his ministry will prioritize bringing back more than one million children who are out of schools because of the cycle of retaliatory ethnic conflict that caused mass displacement.

"So the priority is to establish more schools to enable these children mainly in rural areas to go to school," Deng said in Juba on Sunday.

The minister added that another issue to be tackled is quality education in the country.

"We need to improve the education standards and do more work mainly in early childhood education, primary education, and secondary education," Deng stressed.

Deng noted that the majority of teachers are high-school graduates and Primary school certificate holders, who need further training.

"So we will be doing more training to upgrade the skills of our teachers and their knowledge," he said.

Deng said under his auspices, many teachers shall also be recruited. Currently, teacher-pupil ratio in conflict affected oil-rich region of Upper Nile, for instance, could reach 1-150.

Jonathan Veitch, UNICEF's Representative in South Sudan had earlier said the world's youngest country had the highest number of children out of school due to the unrest.

He said more than 1.8 million children, or more than half of the child population in the country, were out-of-school due to conflict.

According to the agency's statistics, even before the conflict erupted in South Sudan in 2013, at least 1.4 million children were unable to attend school.

Civil fighting erupted in December 2013 in the country, leading to one of the world's largest humanitarian emergencies with 2.3 million people forced to flee their homes, among which 650,000 fled to other countries and 1.65 million took refuge in UN mission camps inside the country.

President Salva Kiir and former rebel leader Riek Machar formed a unity government on April 28, halting more than two years of civil war. Endit