Madagascar education drive overwhelms schools

Madagascar is victim of its own success in promoting education as thousands of pupils who enrol for primary school have had to be turned down owing to lack of capacity, according to a senior education official.

Since coming to power after a political crisis in 2002, President Marc Ravalomanana headed an aggressive campaign to persuade kids to go to school, launching free primary education, including free pens and books.

School enrolment on the Indian Ocean island of 17 million -- one of the world's poorest countries -- has risen drastically, to 82 percent in 2002/03, compared with 48 percent a decade ago, according to latest statistics.

Analysts say Madagascar, a vast Indian Ocean island off the coast of east Africa, is on track to meet its U.N. millennium development goal of getting all children into school by 2015.

But drop-out rates remain high, with only 39 percent of school-going children managing to complete primary school.

Officials say they are overwhelmed with the number of children wanting to enrol.

"We don't have exact figures but there are a lot of children for whom we simply don't have the capacity," said Marze, the director of primary education.

In some schools, there were more than double the number of pupils applying for the available places, he said.

"We had a campaign to encourage parents to send their children to school, but it seems it was too successful," Marze said. "There's been a massive boom in interest. We urgently need more teachers and more classrooms."

Marze said the education ministry was in talks with parents' associations to find places for the extra pupils.

"We are working with parents to solve this issue. But it could be a month before we know the scale of the problem."

Three quarters of Madagascans are subsistence farmers earning less than a dollar a day.

President Ravalomanana is opening up the country to foreign investment and trying to stamp out corruption and bad governance after years of mismanagement under former strongman Didier Ratsiraka.

By Tim Cocks

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