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In Kenya, life has almost returned to normal since schools finally reopened on January 4. A closure that lasted nearly 10 months to stem the spread of Covid-19. Today, thousands of schoolchildren are dropping out of school. The consequences of this long closure will be felt over several years.
In the classrooms, classes have resumed for a few days. It had been almost 10 months since James had been to school: “ I’m happy to come back to school. School is good because we read a lot and we grow up. I missed my friends! “Andrew is worried about his future:” we went almost the whole year without learning. If we don’t learn anything, we won’t find a job later. I stayed in the village for 5 months with my grandmother, I helped her on the farm.
2 to 3 years to catch up
Thousands of schoolchildren sent to the village to allow their parents to work in the city. It is also the choice that Samantha Kageha made at the start of the pandemic. “ I had to send my children to the village to stay with my mother, because here in Nairobi, I have to work. I hardly saw them for 9 months , she says . The school was sending me lessons on Whatsapp but I couldn’t send them to the village because they don’t have a smartphone. So I had to write the statements down on a piece of paper, then buy phone credit so I could call them and dictate the statements over the phone to my daughter who wrote them down. It was very complicated.
A distance education which turns out to be very tedious and a school dropout which is illustrated day by day. In some schools across the country, 30% of students have not returned. The Covid has also exacerbated social inequalities here. “ In Kenya, there is a disparity because there are parents who have access to the internet, to a computer, but there are also a lot of poor parents who do not have a mobile phone, no computer or computer. ‘internet, explains Lynus Oure, French teacher in Kenyan schools. So it surely worked for privileged parents. Maybe 20% of the kids have studied something. And so 80% lost a school year. Catching up on that, it will take maybe 2 or 3 years.
The consequences are serious: more than one in five teenage girls fell pregnant during the year. Some got married, underage, to avoid scandal. In large cities, begging among young children is now commonplace. A generation sacrificed while restaurants, churches, shops have almost never closed.
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