Ethiopian speed schools give child labourers a second chance

When Genet’s father died four years ago, it cut short her fledgling studies, forcing the 12-year-old Ethiopian girl to drop out of school and take a babysitting job to help her mother make ends meet.

But a charity’s accelerated schooling programme has helped Genet and more than 2,000 other children in Ethiopia get back to the classroom this term - resuming studies disrupted by conflict, poverty and child labour.

“I’m happy to go back to school for the second time,” said Genet, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, adding that she felt especially fortunate because her younger brother still has to herd cattle to help the family scrape by.

Standing in the yard at Loya Primary School, she showed off a large name tag reading “meteorologist” - one of the individual responsibilities assigned to each of the 25 pupils in her second-chance classroom in the Sidama region.

“It might rain today,” she said earnestly, explaining that her classmates had jobs ranging from plant carer to newsreader.

Children enrolled in the 10-month speed school programme cover the same learning outcomes as others would in the first three years of school - and eventually rejoin mainstream classes in the fourth grade.

“We really work with the most vulnerable children at the margins, who have been denied the chance to learn,” said Caitlin Baron, founder and chief executive of Luminos Fund, the education charity behind the accelerated schooling programme.

“The government has done its part in order to make education access possible. But ... the system is so stretched (that) when children are at the margins ... there’s no practical way for the government schooling system to actually provide remediation and give children a second chance.”

Still, access to education has improved significantly in Ethiopia over the past two decades with primary school net enrollment tripling between 2000 and 2016, according to the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF.

Four years ago, the government began replicating the Luminos Fund’s model and more than 200,000 children were attending state- and partner-funded speed school classes in 2020.