SANAA, 27 November 2007 (IRIN) - Abdu Rabou Mohsen al-Shahali, 13, has been working as a street vendor in Sanaa since he left his village in Hajjah Province four years ago.

"My father decided to stay at home after losing hope finding a good job. He had been variously employed as a farmer, a qat [mild narcotic] seller, and a porter but none of these jobs provided enough money to sustain our family. We left him there and came to Sanaa in search of a better life," he said.

The child worker said he was determined to support his mother and two younger brothers at all costs. "It is a shame if I let my mother work while I am alive. It is better to have bread and water than send my mother and brothers to beg," he said.

Yemeni education officials are concerned about the increasing rate of school dropouts, which they say have led to increasing illiteracy rates.

Nearly half of all children not at primary school

According to the Ministry of Education's Comprehensive School Survey for 2006, 46 percent of Yemen's 7.4 million primary school age children do not attend school – leaving 3,971,853 in primary school. Altogether, 4,497,643 of children of all ages attend school.

"Getting children into school is easy; keeping them there is the harder task," Naseem-Ur-Rehman, chief communication and information officer at the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Yemen, told IRIN. He added that schools in Yemen do not have the welcoming learning environment that children need to be motivated to stay.

"[Yemen's] education system is very old and has not changed with the times. It is based on learning by rote, with teachers brandishing sticks to try and get their message across, but children are not interested in learning that way. Primary school education is not joyful learning," Ur-Rehman said. "There are many de-motivated and largely untrained teachers in Yemen who are pushing children out of school. One child who dropped out told me that his teacher had said 'you're dumb and wasting your time in school'."

There had been a lot of talk in government circles about education but little had been done in practice, he said. "There is a strategy for basic education development and education has moved very high up the government's political agenda… but implementation remains very low."

Poverty driving truancy

Ahmed al-Rabahi, president of the Yemeni teachers' trade union, told IRIN poverty was another factor behind truancy. "Poor families have to ask their children to go to work in order to contribute to the family income, so students leave school to work," he said.

He said schools had become unattractive: there was a lack of school activities and classes were overcrowded. The fact that a large number of school graduates fail to get jobs discouraged students further, and "students have difficulty understanding the curriculum and this leads to an aversion to study."

Urban-rural divide

In urban areas there is a small disparity between boys and girls in terms of attendance, but in rural areas this disparity is much greater. According to the Ministry of Education, Yemen has 14,090 schools. Of these 9,224 are co-educational, with 8,638 in rural areas and 586 in urban areas. "It is harder for girls to be in school as their parents are very conservative," said Ur-Rehman.

He added that the drop out rate among girls is far higher than that among boys, a problem somewhat masked when looking at national statistics. He said that in many rural areas students started school with 60 female students to a class but by year nine there were only 10 in the class, the rest having dropped out.

In rural areas girls go to schools initially to learn how to read and write, then leave school and focus on religious education at home. "That is because there are very few secondary schools [in the rural areas]. People say if they send their girls to primary schools, they can't continue their studies as there are not enough secondary education facilities. So they get a little bit discouraged," Ur-Rehman said.

There are 554 girls only schools in Yemen, of which 163 are in urban areas and 391 in rural areas.

maj/ar/cb

© IRIN. All rights reserved. More humanitarian news and analysis: http://www.IRINnews.org

IRIN news