Social Work :: Guuram Primary School (School Without Walls)

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Social Work

Guuram Primary School - School without boundaries

The Rendille tribe has for centuries lived as camel pastoralists in the semi-desert of northern Kenya, surviving in a region that still today offers no alternative strategies for survival. Schooling has been limited to a few recently established centres with concentrations of settled Rendille, who largely depend on income from external sources. The majority of the Rendille still live in nomadic settlements, as the ecology of the region demands, and as a consequence their children are deprived of education.

Opened in February 2001, the “Guúram Primary School” is
a mobile school that provides quality education to girls and boys aged 6-12 years living in Rendille nomadic settlements away from centres where primary schooling is available [“Guúram” is the Rendille word for mobile].

The school serves a group of 5-6 Rendille nomadic family settlements [2-300 households], and makes it possible for them to settle in areas suitable for feeding their livestock without interrupting education of the youngest children and without interfering with their natural lifestyle.

Classes are taught in the shade of large trees. Facilities consist of textbooks, exercise books, pencils, and a school bag for each pupil. Each teacher has a blackboard, some charts, teacher’s guides, a table, a chair, and a metal box for storage. A basic medical kit is also provided for the school.

Subjects are taught in accordance with the national primary education curriculum. The basic language of instruction is Rendille as recommended by the Ministry of Education and education experts. All teachers are Rendille. The school is the only school today to offer the children basic readers in Rendille. English and Swahili are taught as separate subjects.

The school has raised the number of children receiving education in its catchment area from less than 5% to an approximate 70% of school-aged children. The remaining children herd animals or help at home instead of going to school. To attract more children to the school, the district education authorities have included this school in a school-feeding programme providing a daily meal.

An active parents committee encourages parents to bring their children to school and follows up on cases of absenteeism.

The school was started as a lower primary school with three teachers, teaching standards one, two and three. The school was officially registered in 2005, and the Ministry of Education has since added two more teachers teaching standards four and five. The children are hereafter mature enough to leave home and proceed to standard six at boarding schools in Korr, Ngurunit or Laisamis. The children who have come from this school are doing well in their new schools.

There is now free primary education in Kenya, but it does not reach out to the remote pastoralist communities. Initiatives to start up schooling in these remote areas will sensitize the Government.

The school is winning increasing recognition among educationists in the region as a better way of teaching young nomadic children, attaining better results for the children. The close proximity of the school to home gives parents an opportunity to observe education at close hand.

In 2004, the school received the first runner-up prize in the Commonwealth Education Fund’s Innovative Project Annual Competition 2004. The prize is given to schools demonstrating innovation and commitment in enabling access and retention in basic education for marginalized children. The fund is managed by Action Aid Kenya, Oxfam and Save the Children.

The initiative to establish the school was taken by Nairobi-based scientists Lisbeth Riis, Ph.D., and Mikkel Grum, Ph.D., who, with help from willing contributors bear the cost and provide the administration for the three lower primary classes. Recognition of the need for mobile teaching stems from Mikkel’s childhood, when he, with his parents and siblings, lived seven months with the same Rendille nomadic settlement.

Continuous private funding is crucial to ensure that there are enough teachers to maintain a good academic standard. The number of teachers deployed in the area is alarmingly low. In the few existing schools, examples of two teachers deployed to teach up to five classes simultaneously are common. These children will leave school with very little learning obtained.

Contributions to the school are welcome: