• Education for pastoralists

Education for pastoralists

This paper looks at the reasons why children, especially girls, from the nomadic community of Hawawir in Sudan are not being sent to school. Although a school had opened in a model village area where the Hawawir were expected to gradually settle, they were not only reluctant to move to the model village, but also few families agreed to send their children to it.

The study focuses on Hawawir women and men’s perceptions of knowledge and discusses possibilities and constraints for enhancing girls’ education in nomadic communities. To understand what knowledge Hawawir women and men consider as necessary in order to ensure a good life for future generations, the paper approaches knowledge in relation to the various coping strategies considered important in the local and national context and asks how and what kind of knowledge is transferred across generations. The paper analyses the extent to which formal education appears meaningful and attractive to women and men living in nomadic communities to explore whether educational programs could be better accommodated to the needs and coping strategies of people living nomadic lives.

Ways to enhance education in nomadic communities include:

• the model of the mobile schools and teachers should be further developed. Formal education therefore does not appear as a contradiction to a nomadic way of life, as in the case of village schools
• mobile schools should be multi-purpose–schools, the curriculum should relate to health-care, nutrition and para-veterinary
• formal education should not be seen as a mean to achieve sedentarization of nomadic community or as a means to change their way of life. Communities should be involved in the managing of schools
• mobile schools require motivated and well-trained teachers. Teachers should be able to accommodate education and the transference of a curriculum to a nomadic, pastoral society, and also be able to teach in subject that are not usually part of the formal education system
• to increase the number of girls attending school, female teachers should be employed

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