Creating development in Cabo Delgado - training teachers for the rural areas of Mozambique

In the 3rd year of DNS education we are challenged for a 6 months period of teaching practice in Southern Africa. When I discovered DNS back home, in Portugal, what motivated me the most was the opportunity to teach, one day, in Mozambique- because I could make a huge difference there, where I speak the official language. 

Three years have passed since I started DNS and now here I am, writing you from the wild north of Mozambique, working as a teacher in “EPF” together with 260 future primary school teachers, a team of 15 Mozambican teachers and 1 Danish headmaster.

My working place is 3000km from the capital, Maputo. Here, close to Tanzania, development has been more hindered then anywhere else, this region was the main stage of 11 years of colonial war and 16 years of civil war. Everything was destroyed and abandoned. Atrocities that sound out of a horror movie were committed. Besides loosing schools, roads, hospitals, industries, specialized labor and farms, the population is still traumatized psychologically: you can feel a passivity, conformity and numbness towards life, which has been passed on to the new generation.

That’s where Humana has its wildest project, in the middle of Cabo Delgado province, 200km from Pemba, the capital and something my reader could slightly refer as civilization. We are surrounded by jungle and a small farming population. We have no electricity and we depend on the river to supply us with water. Everybody is mainly farming maize and beans, limiting our nutrition choices almost to that. The heat is tremendous, there is no mobile phone connection and elephants, snakes and lions roam around freely. That’s where Humana has one of its projects: where it’s more necessary.

Up here life is tough. The majority of the people are farmers, surviving with what they harvest, trapped in an endless and senseless burn-plant-burn activity. The dependence on natural factors, like the rain, is absolute. Elephants are a pest that can show up, have a banquet in your field and destroy months of hard work. One quarter of the children younger than 5 will not survive the rainy season, every fifth person is infected with the HIV virus and the majority of people here cannot read and write.       

Humana’s 36 Farmers’ clubs in the province are executing development programs designed by different donors. It is mainly focused on agriculture and what it takes to practice it. The Farmers’ clubs are not only giving out equipment and tools, they are educating the farmers to change old traditions that hold their production back.

Their biggest program now is the diffusion of the “jatrofa” plant, with which it is possible to create bio-diesel and give some energy independence to the poor. This project was created and financed by Holland, but the big job is to convince the farmers to do it: if you have no money and you survive from what you plant, why would you plant something that you cannot eat? When you deal with agriculture you are dealing with the people’s sustainability. They have experienced hunger and they are right to be skeptical about changes.

Despite the hardships and after many months of work many farmers have decided to start growing jatrofa and soon they will harvest it. The first seeds will be bought by our school center where we plan to use it to fuel our generator, hoping in this way to inspire more farmers to plant it and in the future to use it in their houses, tractors, etc. The Farmers’ club has enrolled so far 1800 farmers in the province, improving directly the life standards of more than 9000 people and many more indirectly.

But allow me to focus in the project I work for. EPF (Escola de Professores do Futuro - Teachers from the Future School, an African teacher training college inspired by DNS in Denmark) is the most complex and important project of Humana. It is present in all Mozambique’s 10 provinces and every year hundreds of Mozambicans try to pass the exams required to enroll it. These centers are not simply educating primary school teachers. They are challenging the students to become an engine of development in their rural communities. Many of my readers might feel romantic when think about Africa, or working for Africa’s development, or educating Africa’s new generation. Once you arrive here you’ll find out poverty is more than having no money: it is a complex human condition involving political, economical, social, cultural, etc, factors; and there’s no romance about it: poverty will challenge you everyday in unexpected ways which require extraordinary reactions.

So our work, besides educating primary teachers, is to change tendencies that hinder development in the culture. That’s why we called them teachers of the future; it is what we aim for them to be. A new generation of teachers are needed in this country, because the picture of education at present in Mozambique is an ugly one. It is normal in Mozambique not to have lessons because the teacher is busy with his private affairs; it is normal that the same teacher steps into the classroom drunk; it is normal to find classrooms with more than 80 students; it is normal to pay for your grades: with money or sex; it is normal for teachers not to get paid for many months; it is a normal day at school to write down everything your teacher dictates, without understanding or questioning it; it is normal to sit the whole day waiting for things to change; it is normal to choose to be a teacher for the social advantages it offers rather for any sympathy with children, love of teaching, etc; it is normal for a student to be required to work on his teacher’s field, to cook food, wash clothes, etc.  To work with education in Mozambique is not a fairy tale; it’s the biggest struggle this country faces.

Many EPF students come from this background and it’s our objective to change these tendencies, through them. They are brave young people who chose a change in their lives, they are motivated to be a different kind of teacher, but many times they are intimidated by reality. Humana’s ideal is to educate more than a primary teacher: the final product should be a community leader who can identify and meet the different problems that rural communities face. Of course that needs teachers to be competent, independent and creative, but what 500 years of Portuguese occupation taught was to repeat and obey, to wait for orders and not to criticize, so it is hard.

EPF itself is a small community which we use as a stage to rehearsal real life. Here students have good teachers who can give a good example and who can show how life and teaching can be different. So far 375 teachers have graduated from EPF in Cabo Delgado, and many of them occupy positions as headmasters and directors, due to the strong leadership, self-confidence and know-how they’ve learned in our school. Plus, another 90 who will graduate this year, making a total of 465 teachers. More than 85% of the EPF graduates dedicate their lives to work on the rural areas, instead of moving into the big cities for an easier life.

This year Mozambique faced some changes in its educational system. In order to meet the “Millennium Goals” designed by the UN to fight poverty, but mainly to reduce its deficit on the national budget (demanded by the IMF – the International Monetary Fund), Mozambique decided to compress its teacher training education from two years to one. In a country where teachers are already badly prepared this measure can be seen as a catastrophe. The government wants everybody to complete primary education but we know that’s not enough, because many children do it without being able to read and write after completing it. Now the low quality we had before has been sacrificed in order to meet quantity. Humana cooperates actively with the government of
Mozambique and we have communicated our profound disagreement with the changes, hoping they will not affect our school’s program.

In order for development to succeed in Mozambique, teachers at the primary level and teachers acting as community leaders in the rural areas are instrumental.

Thiago Almeida