Education in Somalia: History, destruction, and calls for reconstruction

Abstract

In pre-colonial traditional Somalia, education was dispensed through informal systems of communal interaction. With the arrival of colonialism in the mid-late 19th century, formal programmes of learning were slowly but steadily established. These were limited in scope and were essentially designed for the purposes of colonization. With independence in 1960, the education sector developed very quickly with pre-1991 civilian and military governments building hundreds of schools, training tens of thousands of teachers, adopting the Latin script for the writing of the Somali language, and successfully implementing nation-wide literacy programmes. But with the collapse of the Somali state in 1991, all modern systems of learning in the country were destroyed by the fighting factions, and Somalia has since been a country without any formal programmes of education. This paper first looks at the history of education in Somalia, then it describes and analyses the nature as well as the magnitude of destruction, and ends with an urgent appeal to the international community to come to the rescue of Somalia's children, and help resuscitate and reconstitute the country's structures and forms of learning.