The education of nomadic peoples in East Africa: review of relevant literature

In the context of a renewed committment to Education For All (EFA) at Dakar, this study examines the apparent failure of most attempts to provide educational services to nomadic groups. The study focuses on Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. It provides an insight into the challenges, constraints and opportunities for using education as part of an intersectoral approach to meet the development needs of nomadic communities.Key findings and recommendations from the report include:there have been many attempts to establish education services to meet the learning needs of nomadic pastoralists, but for the most part they have failededucation policies often appear to antagonise nomads' culture at many levels: in their principles and goals, in their explanatory paradigms; in their solutions and implementation; in their approach to evaluation few formal (mass) education programmes has performed with any degree of success: the limited examples have either been delivered within a non-antagonistic cultural environment and a sympathetic local education structure (Somalia), are "planted" into an existic pastoral support ideology (Iran), or are matched by pastoral development policies successful in decreasing labour intensity and freeing children from the household's labout demands (Mongolia)overall, the non-formal approach has proved more successful and cheaper to implementopen and distance learning appears to be one of the most promising appraoches. However, less has been achieved in using these apporaches for the education of nomads than had been seen as the potentialthe resilience of gender inequalities is such that they are unlikely to be addressed by isolated initiatives and will require a comprehensive approach as well as endurance and imagination if they are to be overcomethere is an emerging consensus that nomadic populations should be involved in the planning and implementation of initiatives for them in terms of curriculum. programme focus and delivery. However, there are no obvious examples where pastoralists have been "in the driving seat" - participation has bee, at best, consultativewhat is needed is not a variety of unco-ordinated projects, each operationg on the basis of its own paradigm of development, but rather a national pastoral multisectoral strategy developed in conjunction with representatives of the pastoral communtites and recognising their specificity.