Thanks to a joint program by GPE and AFD that started in July 2014, Tillaberi, one of Niger’s rural areas, received 11 new classrooms last week. The classrooms are equipped with student benches and teacher desks, latrines, and water supply points, and are disability-friendly to provide education access to children with disabilities and special needs.
In Niger, a US$84.2 million grant from the Global Partnership supports an ambitious reform program centered around three main pillars:
- Expanding access to and retention in basic education in an equitable way, with particular focus on education infrastructure, girls’ education and school feeding
- Improving the quality of teaching and learning, through more and better pedagogical inputs and teacher/teaching skills with more emphasis on learning outcomes
- Strengthening management capacity, with focus on improving institutional capacity and incentives at the ministry, system and school level.
To improve access to school and retention of students in school, the GPE grant aims to extend basic education to about 75,000 additional children in rural areas. Twenty to 30% of these children will come from the districts with the lowest enrollment rates.
In particular, the GPE grant is used to build 1,245 equipped primary school classrooms and about 330 lower secondary school classrooms.