KIWANJA, 19 July 2010 (IRIN) - It is a sunny day at the Mashango primary school in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC’s) North Kivu Province. That is good news for teacher Dusaba Mbomoya who is holding a geography exam under a roof filled with holes in a classroom where flapping pieces of plastic do duty as walls. Even the blackboard has holes large enough for students to peer through.

“When it rains we allow the pupils to go back to their houses,” said Mbomoya. Those who want to wait out the rain at school sometimes shelter in newly-constructed latrines put in by an international organization.

The dire conditions at Mashango are mirrored at schools around the DRC. They are the result of war but also chronic underfunding of a system where just 8 percent of the country’s annual budget is allocated to education, according to the World Bank. Mashango has no water or electricity and few books. Most classrooms are dark and crumbling with limited teaching materials.

With the government opting out, Save the Children estimates that parents are forced to finance 80-90 percent of all public education outside the capital Kinshasa, though under the DRC’s 2006 constitution elementary education is supposed to be free.

Teachers' salaries go unpaid which means parents must contribute to their wages via monthly school fees of around US$5 per pupil.

Large families and an average monthly income of just $50 means such fees are entirely unaffordable for large swathes of the DRC population - with serious consequences. Estimates from Save the Children and others suggest nearly half of Congolese children, more than three million, are out of school and one in three have never stepped in the classroom.

The World Bank figures from 2008 show primary school enrolment of 58 percent and a dropout rate in the first year of 20 percent. Just 29 percent of DRC students complete their first six years of schooling.

Venant Nkunda Banyanga, the director of the Kasasa secondary school in Kiwanja (in North Kivu Province, about 100km from Goma), sympathizes with parents who cannot afford to send their children to school. But he says he simply cannot afford to keep students who do not pay.

“Teachers are supposed to get $50 per month, but we are lucky if we get $40, and that’s from the parents,” he said, adding parents who cannot afford the fees sometimes get aggressive with teachers. Some have even been attacked.

Save the Children’s research shows that teachers’ pay is so low and so irregular that many take on other jobs, such as farming, taking them away from their classrooms and students.

The situation is particularly bad in North Kivu where hundreds of thousands have been uprooted by years of war. Some like Laurent Rumvu live in camps for the internally displaced. None of his five school-aged children are in regular education. With no work he simply cannot afford to send them.

“Our children do not go to school. We can’t pay the school fees,” said Rumvu who has lived in an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in Kiwanja in Rutshuru territory since 2008.

Ransacked

Schools in the area were closed for several months in late 2008 and early 2009 when fighting between rebel soldiers in the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP - now a political party) and the DRC army brought chaos to North Kivu. Children were forcibly recruited from schools by militia groups and the army and students and teachers were shot and abducted, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Schools were ransacked and many were occupied by either soldiers or IDPs.

At Mashango, school director Muhindo Mulenda said IDPs slept at the classrooms in the evenings, moving out during the days so students could continue their lessons. They burned desks and chairs for firewood - adding to the already dilapidated conditions. After the war, he said 120 fewer pupils returned to classes.

At Kasasa, CNDP soldiers occupied the school for several weeks, taking books and causing damage. Some pupils were killed during the fighting, and Nkunda said others were traumatized. “Of course the war has had an effect,” he said. “Imagine going to school after your parents have been killed.”

Getting displaced children back in school is a priority for international agencies including the Norwegian Refugee Council. DRC country director Ulrika Blom Mondlane believes school protects children from violence and abuse and provides a sense of normality for those who have been uprooted.

To help IDP children catch up with their classmates, the NRC offers an intensive tutoring programme for IDPs aged 13 and over. It has also built 15 schools and trained teachers found in the camps to teach IDP children.

“Education is extremely important to the future of Congo,” said Mondlane. “With large numbers of displaced children it is extremely important to invest in education in this humanitarian crisis.”

“Bad government”

Kasasa student Shirambere Tibari Menya, 22, lost four years of his schooling to war.

Most recently, he fled to Uganda during the fighting in 2008 and is now close to finishing secondary school. But one obstacle remains - a one-off series of final exams which all DRC pupils must take before graduation. Tibari is confident he will pass and would like to go on to study medicine but says his family does not have the $12 he must pay to take the tests.

“I don’t accept that I’m going to lose another year, but you can see that we are studying in bad conditions,” he said. “For our parents the main activity is to go to the fields, but they are raped and attacked so we have the problem of food and no money.

“I blame the government. We are in a bad country with a bad government.”

Kasasa secondary school head Nkunda also holds the government responsible for the problems in the education system. “Why doesn’t the government pay me? I only have one pair of shoes,” he said, pointing to his battered brown footwear.

He worries about the effect the DRC’s ailing education system and all the disruption is having on the younger generation. “It’s a big pity,” he said. “They might be able to get jobs, but they won’t be good workers as their intellectual level is diminished.”