Saturday June 2, 2007
Ethiopia is in the midst of conducting what I think is its third census, conducted about every ten years. It’s interesting to realize how important a census is in a developing country like Ethiopia. With still many unregistered births, the census is the only accurate measure of how many people there are, where they are, and how they’re doing. This is, of course, important for planning and monitoring and evaluation purposes. For example, one non-formal education provider mentioned that when schools report their enrolment figures they do so in the context of the school age population, and since they are either guessing or using data more than ten years old, the reported rates of school enrolment are unreliable, particularly in rural areas.
With a low adult literacy rate, and limited infrastructure, the government can’t just mail a census form out to every household, part of the point being that they don’t know how many households there are. So the responsibility for carrying out the census is given to the teacher training institutions and vocational schools and, for some highly populated areas, elementary teachers. For two weeks in May, Adwa CTE was full of students again, this time 900 student teachers from Abi Adi as well as other institutions, including our own staff, being trained as census counters. And last week and this week, they are all out, censussing. (Unfortunately for me, this means that I have no colleagues to work with, which is a bit frustrating.) I met with Meressa for a little while last week, and he told me about the census questions. It’s very wide ranging – one of the good things is that it identifies whether or not children are in school, and if not, why, which will be very useful in the efforts towards inclusive education.
The census in most parts of the country is taking place right now, but I read an article the other day that described how in the pastoral regions of Somali and Afar, the census will be conducted in November when the pastoralists return to their home areas. Ethiopia is buying some kind of satellite technology that is going to help them to identify where the people are.

On a related note, it’s interesting how little contact people in one area have with other areas. I was shocked to hear from one of my good friends the other day that he has never allowed his teenage daughters to visit Axum, half an hour’s drive away. Apart from growing up in a village to the east of Adwa, they have never been outside of this town. I guess it’s also partly a gender issue: a lot of people are afraid to give their daughters too many opportunities, for fear that they will get into trouble.)
I’ve been trying to coordinate a visit by some teachers in Adwa town to one of the villages nearby where the school is very good. There are public busses which go there, so travel does happen, but for these women who have pretty much lived their whole lives in Adwa, the thought of traveling on their own out of the town was very daunting. Part of it is lack of experience, but part of it is the lack of infrastructure. They know that the bus and the road will be uncomfortable (and not 100% safe); the bus may not go all the way to the school; to return to Adwa they’ll have to wait till a bus becomes ready and full, and this often means waiting overnight - since one of the women has a small baby, this would be impossible. So we’re going to try to send a large bunch of teachers to this school, using the college car or bus. It doesn’t really send a message of independent learning and motivation that I wanted the teachers to get, but ultimately, the point is for them to see well set up classrooms so they can improve their own, as there are no decent classrooms in Adwa town. If we get a few, then we won’t have to send people out into the wilds.Adwa town people expect busses. For rural people, these problems don’t stop them because they are used to them –there are no options. Freweyni’s housemaid went back to her village last week, about eight months pregnant. She took a line taxi to the end of the town, and then she had to walk the rest of the way because the roads to this place are not accessible by car. It was to take two days, as she would stop and rest in a village midway. My guard, Wendim, has promised to go and visit her at some point and bring us news of the baby. I asked Freweyni if she would visit (I knew she wouldn’t) and she said no, it’s too difficult to get there. Wendim is another example of the industrious rural walker, walking at least 2 hours each way from his home to mine every day. I went to a wedding around his house a few months ago, taking a bus towards Axum and then walking a long distance through fields to this home; apparently Wendim’s house is twice as far and over what looked to me like a difficult mountain ridge. He doesn’t seem to mind, though, and at least he has shoes.