First aid room at hospital -Nzerekore Hospital, Forest Region.
Credit: IRIN |
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More than two years after being rushed out of Côte d’Ivoire to escape a civil war, hundreds of Guinean children are still missing out on school because of a shortage of teachers and classrooms.
At the same time, doctors and medical staff say they simply cannot meet the healthcare demands of all the people who fled back to Guinea.
“The war in Côte d’Ivoire has forced a lot of families and young people to come to seek shelter with us,” explained Lamine Amara, the government administrator in Beyla, a large market town, that lies on one of the three main roads to the Ivorian border. “We were not ready and many children have been left outside the school system.”
According to humanitarian agencies working in the Forest Region of southeastern Guinea, the social indicators of the local population have become markedly worse over the past two years.
The unresolved crisis in Côte d’Ivoire, where the north is still held by rebel forces, and the continuing presence of refugees and returnees, without property and often without work, weigh heavily on an already feeble social infrastructure.
The situation is particularly difficult around Beyla in the north of the Forest Region, where the thick canopy of trees further south gives way to a savannah area dotted with rice fields. The area is difficult to access because of the poor roads. Lorries heading north often break down and the drivers of public transport vehicles are often reluctant to go there in the rainy season.
“It is the worst of times in Beyla,” said Dr Yonoussa Diallo of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “It’s a catastrophic situation for the local population and things can only get worse”.
It takes four hours to cover the 130-kilometre journey from Nzérékoré, the capital of the Forest Region, to Beyla, even in a four-wheel drive vehicle designed for poor roads.
The nearby border with Côte d’Ivoire and the cultural and commercial ties which bind Beyla to the trading communities in the rest of West Africa have made this poor region a much sought after destination for people fleeing war.
“Some have left children, others have tried to make a new life here,” said Amara, the local administrator. “Guinea is their second home. But the price is high both for them and for us.”
According to UNICEF figures, based on a polio vaccination campaign started in September 2004, nearly 36,000 people had moved into Beyla’s 14 sub-prefectures. Most of them headed for villages along the border with Côte d’Ivoire.
“These people do not get any outside help, all the health and educational structures are on their knees,” said UNICEF's Diallo.
Various humanitarian agencies are present in the region, running vaccination campaigns and school feeding programmes and providing medical supplies, among other things, but the humanitarian needs are enormous.
According to Diallo, the malnutrition rate among children under five years old was 16 percent, twice that of Lola, a town 170 km further south, near the Liberian frontier. "And it is certain that the situation is worse than the figures indicate, because of the worsening situation in Côte d’Ivoire," he said.
Up until September 2004, the Beyla prefecture had no information about the people who had sought refuge there, because it had no means of tracking them down. “The only indication we had was the huge problems we were having in schools with sanitation: classes were full to bursting and children were getting sick,” said Amara.
The lack of school equipment, which was already acute in this impoverished region, became critical in the first few months after Cote d'Ivoire plunged into civil war as more than 100,000 Guinean migrants left their homes there and flooded back to their country of origin.
A Liberian women working on rice at the Kountaya camp, Kissidougou area, Forest Region.
Credit: IRIN |
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"Because of our poor infrastructure and the lack of teachers, the level of attendance in schools is very poor: the number of children goes up, but it’s not the same for teachers," said Souleymane Yalla Camara, regional education officer in Beyla. “Most schools have to get by with just one class”.
According to official figures, a secondary school teacher in Beyla can expect to have 100 pupils in his or her class, as against 60 pupils in a primary school.
Local schools had already been badly hit by a lack of state funding before the influx of returning migrants began in late 2002.
Starved of aid by western donors in view of its poor record of governance, Guinea has found itself increasingly in the red. The state is therefore incapable of providing proper financial support for an already weakened local educational system.
"The state can’t give us any teachers, so we have been asking those who have retired to come back," Camara said. “But the demand is high and the parents’ means are very limited."
According to statistics provided by the local authorities, five per cent of the children in state schools this year come from Côte d’Ivoire. Others have been registered in the 40 or so private French-Arabic schools in the prefecture. These offer the type of basic Koranic education similar institutions provide in the north of Côte d’Ivoire.
The same staunchly Muslim Malinké people live on both sides of the Guinea-Côte d’Ivoire border. Beyla has taken in numerous Guinean women and children, most of them born across the border.
These families place added strain on the health structures, already incapable of looking after the needs of local people, according to health officials.
“With so few medical staff and drugs, 65 per cent of the village dispensaries here don’t function,” explained Dr Diarra Sekou Camara, Director of Health in Beyla.
"All the health centres, which are there to look after village communities, are short of basic medicines," said Camara. "They have no vehicles and very few personnel. People don’t want to work here because of the transport situation and the difficulties of everyday life".
"There has been no public funding since 2002, we try to get by for now, but if it continues like this, there will be real difficulties ahead."
Due to a lack of resources and vehicles, there has been no registration of people coming back from Côte d’Ivoire and more than 11,000 people, including 2,200 children missed out on the last UNICEF vaccination campaign in October 2004.
"The people working here are not motivated,” one of the few doctors at Beyla hospital warned. “There has been a complete abdication of responsibility because there is just no way to work properly.”
Three of the doctors there have come out of retirement to help out.
"There is a whole generation of children who will grow up hungry and won’t go to school," said Camara. “The children are being sacrificed and the whole region risks falling apart”.
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