The State of Education in Puntland

[CismanMaxamud1]

In today’s world, a comprehensive education policy is the difference between prosperity and deep-rooted poverty. While it is difficult to state or for that matter articulate a concise definition of what is a good educational policy due to various competing ideologies and schools of thought, however, it is possible to list some of the key components that a successful educational policy should contain.

For example, like all good policies, the immediate impact of good educational policy should be either an overhaul of school system or amending existing school policies. Thus, the purpose of the policy becomes improving the school system. With that being said, for the past ten years the school system of Puntland, if we can call those loosely held-together schools a system, operated not only on an autonomous basis, but also taught curricula that was incompatible with traditional Somali methods (i.e., introducing Middle Eastern and North African school curriculum in Puntland).

Our students were being taught a language that was not their own, a history that was alien to them, and even worse, most of the students could not spot their state or their country on a map. Thankfully, about three years ago, a man named Abdi Farrah, or more commonly known as ‘Juha’, introduced the first school system in Puntland, and as a result Puntland enjoys the only comprehensive school system in the country.

During his brief three years in office, Mr. Juha, the Minister of Education for the federal state of Puntland in Somalia, implemented a comprehensive school policy whereby today the students of Puntland are able to enjoy a school system that enables them to attend 458 middle schools, 53 high schools, 28 vocational school, and have access to 4,000 highly trained teachers. More importantly, these schools for the first time in their existence share one curriculum that comes from the government of Puntland.

The process of creating an educational policy for the Puntland state became plausible after much deliberation, as fought for per Juha.

In order to improve the school system, we immediately decided to retrain our teachers as part of our commitment to provide better education that meets the need of our students.

The result of training school teachers was the creation of the first school for teachers in the country after the last government collapsed over 20 years ago. Located in Garowe, the Teachers’ Education College trains and graduates over a dozen highly qualified teachers each year, and these teachers go on to teach in Puntland and other parts of the country.

While the current educational policy of Puntland has matured, it still has a long way to go before we can judge whether it has either failed and consequently require a new policy or whether it has succeeded and our students get the benefit of a school system that provides them with education and the chance for a better future.

At the current stage of the educational policy in Puntland, the minister and his team have accomplished an institution that at the moment is functioning and will yield for Puntland society a class of students that will usher in a highly skilled workforce, better living standards, and hopefully a society that is able to meet its human capital needs.

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