USAID- Africa Education Initiative (AEI)

 Primary school enrolment in African countries is among the lowest in the world. Limited funds and a lack of adequate teachers, classrooms, and learning materials adversely affect the educational environment throughout most of Africa. The President's Africa Education Initiative (AEI) is a $600-million multi-year initiative that focuses on increasing access to quality basic education in 39 sub-Saharan countries through scholarships, textbooks, and teacher training programs. Eighty million African children will have benefited from AEI by 2010.

To implement AEI, USAID works closely with African ministries of education and higher education institutions, local and international nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector. AEI also seeks to strengthen and extend development partnerships between the United States and Africa by actively engaging African leaders and educators, the international development community, and U.S. interest groups.

Ambassadors Girls' Scholarship Program

In Africa, girls account for a majority of the approximately 33 million primary school-aged children who are not enrolled in school. AEI is working to bridge this gender gap by providing 550,000 scholarships by 2010, primarily to African girls at the primary and secondary levels. These scholars will grow into educated members of their societies and play positive roles in the education, political, and economic sectors of their countries. Support may include tuition, books, uniforms, and other essentials needed to ensure continued access to education. Scholarship recipients also benefit from mentoring activities from community members that promote self-development and provide positive role models.

Textbooks and Learning Materials

The goal of the AEI textbook program is to expand the quantity and to improve the quality of learning materials that are available for schools in sub-Saharan Africa by providing 15 million student textbooks and workbooks, teacher handbooks and guides, handouts, worksheets, audio tapes, posters, vocabulary lists, and visual aids. This program emphasizes relevant content, institutional capacity building, and the long-term sustainability of the partnerships between African institutions and American counterparts. Six American universities that serve mainly minorities are partnering with African Ministries of Education, universities, and various local nongovernmental organizations to develop and produce textbooks and learning materials that fulfill the priority needs of the host country's educational system.

Book Donations and Other Materials

AEI has sent numerous containers of donated textbooks and supplementary educational materials from the United States to 29 African countries. U.S. publishers and education institutions donate the books, and AEI funds cover the shipping and assistance in distribution. Book allocations from the donated materials are based primarily on the recipients' expressed needs and requests. Since 2003, more than 2.2 million donated books-valued at $25 million-have been shipped to Africa. These book donations often provide supplementary reading materials that are otherwise nonexistent. In Ethiopia, supplementary books were organized into sets for seven rural and urban pilot schools participating in the textbook and learning materials partnership's pilot phase. Similarly, schools throughout Senegal, mainly located in rural areas, received boxed sets of books, while in Uganda, supplemental learning materials assisted the Ugandan Ministry of Education in meeting its educational reform goals. Cross-cultural understanding is another benefit of book donations: the reading books sent to Africa sometimes include award-winning books and biographies of notable Americans.

Teacher Training

The pursuit of universal access to education places enormous stress on already burdened education systems in Africa. Recruiting, training, and supporting enough teachers to provide quality learning can be particularly challenging. To meet this challenge, AEI is developing, promoting, and expanding innovative methods for training more that 920,000 teachers and administrators to improve the quality of learning for millions of African children.

Working through USAID mission education programs, the International Foundation for Education and Self-Help, and African and international nongovernmental organizations, teachers upgrade their skills though pre-service and in-service training programs.

Innovative Activities
HIV/AIDS. AEI focuses on HIV/AIDS mitigation and prevention and increases the capacity of African education systems to manage the impact of HIV/AIDS on teachers and students. Programs include information about HIV/AIDS, introduce the teachers to an HIV/AIDS curriculum for their students, strategic planning for ministries, and close coordination with the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Beneficiaries of the Ambassadors Girls' Scholarship Program are provided with training on HIV/AIDS; in many countries the scholarship recipients are students who have been affected by the disease.

Involvement
The initiative also works to increases parent and community involvement in children's education through activities such as sponsoring reading programs involving community and schools, strengthening parent associations, and emphasizing the importance of educating girls. These efforts will help schools and school systems become more transparent and responsive to the needs of civil society.

Technology
AEI facilitates outreach to vulnerable people such as orphans, out-of-school youth, and other children marginalized by geographic location, ethnicity, or religion. In post-conflict countries AEI has assisted in the rehabilitation of schools to hasten the healing process. In many AEI countries the access to and use of information technology and interactive radio instruction have proved effective in reaching these marginalized or hard-to-reach populations.

Related Links

http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/initiatives/aei.html

Dr. Nicholas Freudenberg, "Changing Corporate Practices as a Strategy..."

The Changing Face of U.S. Families - from Immigration to Family Structure

By Lauren Moore on March 25, 2011 4:24 PM | 1 Comment

On March 15, 2011, Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center, and an author of theFuture of Children's latest volume, Immigrant Children, revealed that Hispanics will account for 58% of U.S. population growth this decade in the 33 states for which data has been released by the Census Bureau. In ten states, whites comprise less than half of the child population. The increasing racial diversity among U.S. children underscores a shift that is likely to make whites a minority in the early 2040s, reported the Wall Street Journal on March 25th.

Immigrant youth - defined as children under age eighteen who are either foreign-born or U.S.-born to immigrant parents - are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population today, with Hispanic children the fastest increasing among them. As William Frey, Brookings Institution demographer, commented in the Wall Street Journal, "That can tell you as much as anything how important Hispanics are for the future of children in the United States."

As noted in The Future of Children volume, immigrant children are more likely to experience poverty and face significant gaps in school readiness. To address these challenges, the Future of Children recommends three policy reforms - increased attendance in quality preschool, improved instruction in English, and increased attendance in postsecondary education - that would improve the school achievement of immigrant youth, lift their economic well-being as adults, and increase their economic and social contributions to American society.

Immigrant children are also more likely to live in households headed by two married parents than children of natives in their respective ethnic groups. Yet, these positive family arrangements are often complicated by stories like that of Emily Ruiz, a 4-year old girl born in New York who was detained by immigration officials and then sent back to Guatemala, separating her from her parents, after she and her grandfather were stopped by customs officials earlier this month.

As Nancy Landale writes in the Future of Children's Immigrant Children volume, "despite the wide diversity of the challenges that face immigrants and their families because of their unique patterns of immigration and integration, it is possible to identify some ways to alter U.S. immigration and integration policies to help sustain the pre-existing strengths of a broad range of immigrant families." See the volume for detailed explanations of these policy suggestions.

Differences in the living arrangements of children of immigrants by generational status suggest that as immigrant families spend more time in the United States, their family patterns progressively mirror those of the general population. In contrast to families with immigrant children, the changing landscape of American family structure includes a dramatic rise in non marital child births  and divorces over the last fifty years, as our recent volume on Fragile Families cites, and as was mentioned in a Times article on divorce in rural America. Compared with two-parent families, single-parent families face greater risks in terms of both family stability and economic security--risks that can imperil child well-being.

These demographic trends are important because they tell us who United States children are, the contexts in which they live, and the unique challenges they face.

Most recommendations in these volumes, and other Future of Children volumes, suggest prioritizing and investing in children now - regardless of their circumstances and often ahead of other interests. This is simply because investments in child well-being are the smartest ones we can make. The benefits both in terms of future productivity and the prevention of delinquent behaviors in adulthood, far outweigh the initial costs. Particularly when one considers that our children are coming of age in an aging society that will require unprecedented social expenditures for health and retirement benefits for seniors, the case for investing in children, our future workforce, seems to be an easy one.

And yet, without purchasing, voting, or lobbying power, the well-being of children can easily get lost in the debates, which is why knowledge and advocacy on the behalf of children is so critical. For more information, please visit our website for our newest volume on Immigrant Children and our previous volume on Fragile Families.