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Educational
difficulties
The mother-language of the
Maasai-Community is Kimaasai, whereby school education is conducted in
Kiswahili and English. The experience has shown that the Maasai-children are
stressed during their first year in primary school because every lesson and
every topic is taught in Swahili-language.
As a consequence
many of the children have immense difficulties in following the lessons in
primary school. Therefore they get demoralized and it happens often that
they run away from school or result to poor attendance and performance.
There are of course those who struggle hard to learn the Swahili-language
and are able to follow properly the lessons in class. Many of these kids
could do much better if they could get an opportunity of
Pre-Primary-School-education, particularly in Swahili-language.
It is also important to
mention that formal education in the Maasai-Community is not yet popular as
a necessity of life. The actual statistics show that about 90% of the
people are illiterate.
In the past, the Maasai did
not face many difficulties by lack of formal education because they
concentrated on pastoral land-use. Since about twenty years ago much of the
community grazing land has been utilized for other purposes of national
interest. As the people became aware of their situation of loosing much of
their grazing land they considered other possible alternatives. They
realized that these alternatives, like seeking employment or trading, needed
some kind of formal education.
Education
for
the pastoralist
community
Afya Bora on
realizing the problem
linked to the
nomadic lifestyle of the Maasai community,
decided to establish mobile Pre-School classes, which normally move with the
pastoralist community. Therefore the main intention of this project of
Pre-Primary-Schools in this community is to fill the gap of the missing
language knowledge and a modern education orientation.
However, many of these people
are lacking the necessary routine of sending their children to attend the
daily classes in primary schools. The Pre-Primary-School-education is
therefore a good start to sensitize the parents and their children for this
purpose.
After establishing the
Pre-Primary School system and the parents getting used to the procedure of
sending their children to school every day, it is interesting to discover,
that they are now starting to send their children also for primary education
on their own will.
(Read more about the
Mobile Pre-Schools...)
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