Video from group n° 034

Our Video:

Our paper:

In 1987, the Brundtland Commission's report defined sustainable development as "development, which meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". This concept supports strong economic and social developments, added to the ecological ones. Education is definitely part of the social development.

As a matter of fact, education is a powerful instrument in order to reduce poverty and inequality, improving health and social well being and laying the foundations for sustainable economic growth. Since 1990, world’s leaders set the goal of giving all children a primary education, thus they could have the opportunity of going further and accessing higher levels. It is even the second of the eights’ Millennium Development Goals. Achieving this objective means building classes, training and improving teachers and their lessons. Moreover it is also about removing the main obstacles hindering class attendance: scholarship fees and the lack of transportation.

Nowadays schooling rates are increasing, East Asia, Central Europe and Latin America have more than 90% of their children going to primary school. However Sub-Saharan Africa is still suffering from lateness: 38 countries are far away from achieving the objective. Unfortunately, if education should allow the social development it is also dependent of the economic development. Therefore poor countries do not allocate enough budgets to education (which can be exacerbated by a lack of fairness and rationality in the distribution of available resources), which result in a lack of infrastructure, human resources and precariousness of learning conditions.

Kenya is one of these country, 17,6% of young Kenyans never learnt to read or write. Due to a tight budget building and maintaining schools is impossible, consequently number of schools isn’t sufficient and existing ones cannot dispense all the class. In addition, training and paying teachers at a decent salary is also a cost that the government cannot afford. Teachers went on a strike this summer to ask for a transparency of government budgets and a wage increase. Furthermore bad weather condition did not help, some schools were destroyed by flooding and couldn’t be rebuilt. Last but not least, the lack of infrastructure also leads in a deficiency of roads and means of transportation. As a result, children have to walk for a long time in the hot sun or the cold night, on steep roads or crossing dangerous rivers, all alone or meeting wild animals. Sometimes they walk for 6 hours a day to attend their classes, which show their willingness of changing their future.

In our opinion, we had the luck to be born in France, education is free and schools are next door. It allowed us to be aware of the problems that our world is facing, thus we do not want to turn a blind eye on this situation. As we demonstrated it education is the key to an indispensable social development, and seeing that many developing countries succeed in the MDG we wanted to react. This video has one purpose: make you face facts of what is happening in Kenya. We want these children to have the same opportunity we all had in our life.