Helping African Children Shape Their Futures

Summer 2003

"My mother had been struggling to make sure I received an education, and because of a poor harvest we did not have anything to sell. It looked as if my mother would not have enough money to send me back to school," recalls Micheline, a 14-year-old Rwandan girl whose story was recounted by the U.S. Agency for International Development. But thanks to a USAID scholarship program, Micheline stayed in school and has big dreams for the future. "I work hard in school because I also want to help others one day. I hope to become a lawyer so that I can stop injustice happening," she says.

Micheline is one of 10,000 African girls who have received help paying for school fees, uniforms, supplies, and other items under the Ambassadors' Girls' Scholarship Program, part of USAID's Education for Development and Democracy Initiative.

SAIC has supported this initiative since August 2002, and has worked with USAID and other organizations since 1997 on a number of other projects to strengthen education, democratization, and economic development partnerships between the U.S. and the nations of sub-Saharan Africa.

While sub-Saharan Africa has made great progress in education and economic development, enormous challenges remain. For example, more than 40% of primary school age children do not even go to school, partly because the countries lack resources to train students and teachers.

President Bush recently announced a $200-million African Education Initiative to expand the scholarship program to provide 250,000 scholarships for African girls, train more than 160,000 new teachers, provide in-service training for more than 260,000 existing teachers, and take steps to increase community involvement in education. To implement these initiatives in southern Africa, SAIC was selected as prime contractor for the region covering Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zambia.

Girls' scholarships are emphasized because, according to the White House initiative, after grade four, each additional year of schooling for a girl leads, on average, to a 10% reduction in infant mortality and family size and a 20% increase in earnings.

In addition to supporting the education initiative, SAIC has worked with 15 subcontractors in 40 sub-Saharan African countries on 350 tasks under USAID's Leland Initiative. Named after the late Mickey Leland, a Texas congressman who died in a plane crash while on a famine relief mission to Ethiopia, the initiative seeks to enhance networking, access to the Internet, and broad-based use of information technology and information services.

Helping to establish educational partnerships at all levels has been an important part of SAIC's work in Africa. In one "school-to-school" program, for example, SAIC and its subcontractors in Swaziland set up a computer lab and provided Internet connectivity for the Saint Michael School for Girls, which is now linked with a middle school in Virginia, enabling the students and teachers to talk daily with one another. The successful exchange of information has resulted in improved curriculums for African and U.S. schools.

SAIC also provided wide-ranging technical, business, and educational support on many other initiatives. Among the success stories:

• At Makerere University in Uganda, students can access the Internet via wireless technology thanks to a state-of-the-art wireless communications network linking 18 campus buildings.
• Satellite networks, ground stations, and microwave links installed in 21 African countries have produced national operational Internet gateways in Mali, Madagascar, Mozambique, Rwanda, Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, Benin, Malawi, Eritrea, and Ghana, with Internet subscriber roles growing at about 10% per month.
• Eleven community resource centers have been established with more to come. With hardware and software integrated by SAIC, these centers facilitate computer literacy and training in other skills for local schools and the surrounding communities. They also provide mentoring, and health and social program development, including HIV/AIDS interventions.

Our work on projects such as these and the scholarship program mentioned earlier includes various kinds of educational and technical support such as systems engineering, educational technology, distance learning, and teacher training. We also provide business support such as economic and business analyses, contract management, business and marketing development, and customer-oriented response management.

SAIC's team on the new African Education Initiative includes Development Associates, Inc.; the Center for Development and Population Activities; Christian Children's Fund; and World Learning. For more information, visit the Education for Development and Democracy Initiative web site or the White House's Fact Sheet: Africa Education Initiative.

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