Kadro Mostaf, an 11-year old female student from the remote village of Qeydar Edde in Southern Somalia is now daring to dream and ream big… of going to university and later build a large comfortable house for her family.
Just four years ago this dream was just that…a distant dream as she walked 30 kilometers with her family when the 2017 drought paralyzed their village, and destroyed their livestock.
With no livelihood means, her family settled in Dhursheen Shibeel IDP Camp on the outskirts of Hudur’s Bakool Region.
“I want to graduate from university, and I want to work and build a house for my family” Mostaf, who had never gone to school before as her parents can’t afford to cover her school fee said.
There was no fully-functioning school available for IDP children in Hudur, which led her to lose any hope to ever acquire education.
She stayed at their IDP shelter and helped her mother with the household chores.
Kadro and her sister were among the first IDP students who enrolled in the newly-rehabilitated school, said Mr. Yusuf Hassan, the Hudur Primary school Principal.
“Kadro and her sister did not know how to write and read. However, over the last four years they have made significant progress and now they are literate” he said.
Through local transformative finance, the United Nation Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), under the Joint Programme Local Government (JPLG) and the Southwest State is implementing a Joint UN Programme on Local Governance and Decentralized Service Delivery (JPLG) for Somalia, which develops local governance capacity, broadens civic awareness and participation, and supports fiscal decentralization and local development.
This fund supports local transformative projects in 32 districts across Somalia.
In southern Somalia, the Hudur District consists of a total population of 93,049 residents and 18 Internal Displaced People (IDP) sites.
The entire district only has 4 primary schools, which were unable to serve this large of a population, which resulted in low student enrollment and a general lack of hope, but luckily the district received funding from the Local Development Fund (LDF), which is managed by the United Nation Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), under the Joint Programme Local Government (JPLG) and the Southwest State.
The LDF project was intended to create an enabling environment and improve local government service delivery.
In this regard, Hudur District prioritized the rehabilitation of Hudur Primary School which was severely devastated.
In early 2019, the district benefited from an LDF grant and completely rehabilitated Hudur Primary School, and constructed an additional two classrooms, built eight segregated latrines (4 for boys and 4 for girls).
The existing classrooms’ roof was very damaged, the walls looked worn-out.
Currently, the school is serving 743 students.
The number of girl students increased 249 percent in the last two years.
Moreover, the school is the only school that enrolled internally displaced school-age children from affected areas, where it had 246 students, 56 percent of them are IDPs.
The school building was run-down, and there were not enough classrooms for the students forcing them to study at home.
The water and sanitation facilities were inadequate.
All these factors contributed to the dwindling rate of school enrolment in the area.
The school provided free education, created job opportunities and returned the hope of the local communities.
It received additional support from the Somali Recurrent Cost & Reform Financing Project funded by the World Bank (RCFR) and GPE (Global Partnership for Education) through the Southwest Ministry of Education.
UNCDF’s Regional Programme Manager, Dmitry Pozhidaev, stated: “UNCDF works to improve the public investment function of our partner local governments across Somalia. But, a public investment is much more than bricks and mortar. It is the content that makes changes in the lives of people. Hudur Primary School is the example of a public investment that produces multiple positive impacts on the access to education for host and IDP populations, empowerment of girls and employment creation.”
This intervention is changing lives in southern Somalia like young Kadro Mostaf who has a at least a dream to look forward to that was not there in the first few years of her life.
WN/as/APA