By: Mohammad Assyaghi

Translated by: Mahmoud Assamiee

SANA'A, May 31 (Saba)- The National Strategy for Improving Basic Education aims to promote level of attending this type of education from 77 to 95 percent till 2015 and reducing gab of attending school from 25 to 11 percent.

The strategy aims at reducing illiteracy among children outside school from 47 percent to lesser than 30 percent and mainly targeting female students.

Minister of Education Abdul-Salam al-Jawfi told Saba that the educational meeting of the fifth annual joint review to carry out basic education strategy to be held in Sana'a during the period June 2-4 will discuss with concerned ministries and donors the annual achievement of level of carrying out the national strategy for improving basic education in 2008.

The meeting will also include a review of vision, duty and policies to reshuffle ministry of education and presenting statistical survey to 2008, 2009 in five governorates, besides comparing them with results of 2007-2008 to find positive and negative points.

Minister al-Jawfi made it clear that the ministry carried out last year 33 activities in field of family and school motivations represented in distributing bags, tools, school uniforms, food assistances, rewards and health care. All this helped families to bring their children to school.

The ministry also maintained thousands of schools.18. 5500 schools have been built and maintained last year. The ministry also provided 30 percent of school furniture.

Concerning qualifying teachers and improving their living conditions, al-Jawfi indicated that the ministry has qualified last thousands of teachers whither on central or local level. Furthermore, the ministry signed contracts with female teachers to teach in rural areas. It also created incentive systems to encourage teachers remain in rural areas.


According to state document issued by Ministry of Education, the numbers of years every student spends to finish basic education is 18 year with increase of 9 years to finish this stage. While the number of students who graduated from basic education in due period in 2006-2008 were 181 male students per thousand and 195 female students per thousand and 188 female and male students per thousand from the two sixes.

However, infiltration from basic schools still growing, especially among female students in rural and remote areas due to early marriage, poverty, distance schools and absence of female teachers.

The document showed that the ministry of education constructed last year 1224 schools and built 404 classrooms on central level. It also completed building 194 classrooms and qualified 226 others. It maintained 194 classrooms and built 660 administrative rooms. While on local level, educational projects reached 2018. They were for building and maintaining schools.

The document includs issues and problems associated with planning carrying out and following up educational ministry's annual plan to 2007-2008-2009. These issues and problems are discussed in many workshops, meetings and visits. They targeted cadres who only provide educational service and at the same time reduce numbers of activities of the fifth year plan targeting school, student and local society.

The ministry plan's component are not clear, a mater makes it difficult to identify between activities of early childhood and those targeting basic, secondary and illiteracy education.

Concerning human resources, the document, which will be presented to discussion in the educational meeting to the annual revision next Tuesday, said the ministry suffers from increasing number of employees in the ministry's divan and education offices in the Capital Sana'a and governorates.

In addition, there are numbers of absent labor force and great difference of distributing teachers between governorates which led disturbances and executive faults pressing ministry's reshuffle in the framework of reforming ministry of civil service to solve these faults.

According to analyzing study conducted 2007 over education employees, one third of the ministry's employees hold diploma certificates or under diploma and 34 percent have bachelor degrees. According the study, 43 percent of employees have secondary school certificates and 42 percent hold diploma after secondary school.

The document indicates that there is no unified framework to education offices in districts and governorates which contain great numbers of bi-structures suffer from prime problems concerning labor force which affects negatively on its managements.

Bad distribution of employees on educational and administrative jobs and lower level of qualification of some workers in teaching filed, besides great number of teachers are not qualified some of them carry only secondary certificates are the main problems.

The National Strategy for Basic Education approved by the ministers council in 2003 got $ 500,000 000 from donors to and got other funds from the government to improve basic education and encourage girl to attend school as well as carrying out educational projects.