$100 Mil Heading to Iraqi Schools

By Charles Mahaleris
Talon News
May 21, 2004

The World Bank, after meetings with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and the Iraqi Ministry of Education, has agreed to provide $100 million to help ensure Iraqi children have access to good education.

Last October, President George W. Bush explained the importance of rebuilding Iraq's schools, saying, "During the decades of Saddam Hussein's oppression and misrule, all Iraqis suffered, including children. While Saddam built palaces and monuments to himself, Iraqi schools crumbled. While Saddam supported a massive war machine, Iraqi schoolchildren went without text books, and sometimes teachers went unpaid. Saddam used schools for his own purposes: to indoctrinate the youth of Iraq and to teach hatred."

The president made a promise, stating, "As part of our coalition's efforts to build a stable and secure Iraq, we are working to rebuild Iraq's schools, to get the teachers back to work and to make sure Iraqi children have the supplies they need."

The United States appears to be living up to that pledge with the assistance of the World Bank.

Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Senior Advisor Dan Senor made the announcement of the World Bank's largess at Thursday's CPA briefing with reporters.

Senor said that the World Bank had agreed to provide a $40 million emergency grant to print new textbooks for the 2004/2005 school year in Iraq and Iraqi and CPA officials are finalizing a second grant of $60 million to finance the rehabilitation of Iraqi schools.

Senor said the $40 million grant was the largest ever provided by the World Bank and would "finance the printing and distribution of approximately 72 million textbooks for 6 million students in all provinces for the upcoming school year.

"This quantity covers over 600 titles for all 12 grades of the primary and secondary system," Senor added. "Criteria for the selection of textbooks to be financed by the grant give the highest priority to primary and secondary textbooks with special attention to final grades of each phase."

The World Bank Group's mission is to fight poverty and improve the living standards of people in the developing world. On Thursday, the World Bank had announced other development projects in India and Pakistan that would help watershed development, irrigation efforts, and community infrastructure improvements in those communities.

World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn visited Iraq last July when he expressed his support for a strong economic recovery in that nation.

"This is not a country without competencies or capacities and its real strength stems from an enormously rich history that gave us the Hamourabi Code," he said.

Last month, more than 250 Iraqi education, business, civic, political and religious leaders gathered in Baghdad a two day conference on the future of education in Iraq.

Ambassador L. Paul Bremmer has been very pleased with the efforts being made within the Ministry of Education.

"As we look to the construction of Iraq's future of hope, no ministry, no part of the government is more important than the Ministry of Education," he said in April. "Since September, the Ministry of Education has reorganized itself and refocused on central priorities and the children of Iraq are better for it. Now is the time to celebrate the success of the Ministry of Education."

Some achievements in education in Iraq include:

-- Trained over 32,000 secondary school teachers and 3,000 supervisors in effective instructional delivery and classroom management.

-- Rehabilitated more than 2,500 schools, with another 869 underway, by various U.S. civilian agencies, NGOs, international agencies, and the military. $53 million is currently being spent to rehabilitate 100 schools and clinics.

-- Created a four-year strategic plan for reorganizing and restaffing the ministry; rehabilitating the school infrastructure; retraining teachers; and creating the national dialogue and framework for Iraqi-led curriculum reform.

-- Nearly all Iraqi children have finished their exams from last year and are ready to start a new school year in the fall. All universities are reopened.

During a speech given in Las Vegas on Tuesday, First Lady Laura Bush praised the military for their work in helping to restore education in Iraq.

"Our troops and their coalition partners have refurbished over 1,000 schools in Iraq, so millions of children can study and learn again," she said. "I'm proud of the men and women in uniform, and my husband for leading this noble cause."

Other coalition member nations have also provided assistance to the development of better education in Iraq. The CPA reported on May 6 that Polish soldiers were delivering water containers and pumps to schools in Iraq's south central remote villages and Italian Task Force opened new schools near An Nasiriyah.