Millions for textbooks bogged down in Afghanistan

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(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-23 09:51

KABUL: Day laborer Sayed Sekander spent more than half a day's pay on textbooks for his third-grade son, stuffing them into a dirty rice sack to take home. He will wait before buying any for his two daughters.

Only a handful of students in Sekander's son's class received books this year, so everyone else is buying copies, sometimes illegal, from market stalls in Afghanistan's capital, even when they can hardly afford them.

"My son told me, 'I have to have books so that I can pass the tests,'" Sekander said.

Like so much else lost to corruption and bureaucracy in this tumultuous country, it has been found that millions of new books promised and paid for by donors were never delivered to schools. Other books were so poorly made that they may not last a second year.

About a third of the textbooks ordered for 2008 were never delivered to the provinces, according to interviews with officials from all 34 provinces, Education Ministry records and contract documents.

The fiasco shows how difficult it is to get even the most straightforward aid project done in the troubled country.

At the Mir Bacha Kot school for girls outside Kabul, there can be no sixth-grade English class, because there are no sixth-grade English textbooks. Students pore over worn-out fifth-grade books instead.

The missing textbooks only compound the troubles of the education system in Afghanistan, which is already suffering from a shortage of trained teachers. In Bamiyan, Adda says, some teachers just graduated from sixth or seventh grade themselves.

Those textbooks that do make it to classrooms are too often printed on thin paper, glued instead of stitched, and full of errors, school officials say.

"Sometimes when a child tries to turn the page, it tears off in his hand," says Fida Mohammad Qurishi, the education director for eastern Nuristan province.

About 45 million books were supposed to arrive before classes started in March last year from the United Nations and American and Danish aid agencies, at a total cost of about $15.4 million.

But there were delays even before a printing contract was signed. And that was just the beginning of the problems.

"The editing process took more than a year," says Anita Anastacio, whose community education program uses government books. The books were edited and re-edited because a 2006 print run had produced copies full of mistakes, she says.

Some book templates weren't finished until about May, says Abdul Zahir Gulistani, director of curriculum development.

As it became clear the books would come very late, the Education Ministry asked the US military to help.

US forces delivered 13.5 million books in July, at a cost of $7 million. But many of those books didn't make it to schools until students were starting final exams three months later.

Part of the problem is safety. The Afghan army escorts trucks of books into areas controlled by the Taliban, sometimes hidden under sacks of rice or vegetables, says Eng Mohammad Zia of the Danish government aid agency, known by its acronym DANIDA. But books also get stuck in provincial capitals because there is no coherent distribution plan of distribution or because money gets lost somewhere along the line, according to Danish and US military consultants.