Ali is a 12 year old who gets on the dabab (minibus) by himself every morning at 7:00 to go to school. He is dressed in his olive green uniform – standard throughout Yemen – and carries school books with him, sometimes stopping on the way for a snack. School starts at 7:30, when he gets into formation with other students and sings songs or learns new information about the school. He takes classes from 8:00 until 1:00, when he goes home, eats lunch, and then helps his father at his store until evening. No one takes attendance and no one watches to make sure he gets to school on time. He goes because he wants to.

“I want to go to college,” he says. “I don’t want to just sell fruit all day like my father.”

Ali represents a small but growing number of Yemeni children who in recent years are starting to recognize the value in education. The Yemeni government has made huge strides in the last twenty years to improve the system of public education in the country and to make it available for everyone. In a country where the literacy rate is roughly 50% and available funding for education is low, this is no easy task – and there is still a long way to go.

As it stands right now, Yemeni laws provide for universal, compulsory, and free education for children ages 6-15, although compulsory attendance is not enforced. Most officials speaking on condition of anonymity at the Ministry of Education were not even aware of the compulsory nature of primary education in Yemen, to say nothing of the ignorance of the general public of these laws.

The free public education system in Yemen consists of two parts: primary and secondary. Children start going to primary school at age six or seven, and after nine years the students receive an Intermediate School Certificate. The primary school curriculum is standardized throughout the country and includes basic subjects such as Math, Science, Arabic, and Islam; the idea of separating religion from state schools is unheard of. English is taught from grade seven, and there is now a British initiative to start teaching English starting from grade five in all of the public schools. After primary school, students attend secondary school for three years. At the end of the third year the students take final examinations and those who pass are granted an Al Thanawiyah (General Secondary Education) certificate, similar to a high school diploma. In normal secondary schools, a common curriculum is followed throughout the first year. After that, students are given the choice to take either the literary or the scientific track.

The intention of secondary schools is to prepare students for university. There are also technical secondary schools, vocational training centers, a veterinary training school, a Health Manpower Training Institute, and several agricultural secondary schools available to students who have either no intention of going to university or have a strong desire to specialize in something so they can go straight into the workforce when they get out of school.

Whether Yemenis take the normal or the technical secondary school route, most of them end up in the workforce regardless. It is estimated that only 10% of Yemenis attend university. The most recent government census taken in Yemen in 2004 is even more pessimistic: only 2.3% hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. According to the same census, only 12% of Yemenis have basic education levels, and a mere 8.2% hold secondary certificates.

These statistics can be misleading, as they represent only those students who complete these education levels with passing grades. Depending on the province in Yemen, the actual enrollment rate of students is much higher, with a total of 63.5% of Yemeni children ages 6-15 enrolled in the school system in 2004, up from 55.2% in 1994.

This increase is reflected mostly in the efforts made to encourage girls to go to school. In 1994, only 38.5% of girls throughout Yemen went to school. In 2005, this number jumped to 54.9%. Compared with the boys at 70.3% in 1994 and 71.4% in 2004, it is clear that a massive gap still exists between girls and boys education. In fact, Yemen is ranked dead last on the Global Gender Gap Index for 2007 – number 128 out of 128 countries listed.

According to Yemen’s Central Statistical Organization, three main reasons are given for the lack of girls’ education. One is that the fathers or heads of family will choose to educate their sons over their daughters. The average Yemeni has six children, and although public school is free, the books, school supplies, and mandatory school uniforms are not. Families are often forced to make a financial choice as to who to educate. A single school uniform can cost anywhere from YR 1000 to YR 4000, creating financial hardships on some of the poorer families.

Another reason is early marriage, which affects girls far more than it affects boys. It is not uncommon for a girl to get married at 16 or even younger, and for most new families this means that the bride’s responsibility becomes her household rather than her education. Most boys don’t get married until 21 or older, and unlike girls, they continue their education after marriage.

The last reason given is a cultural bias that there is no benefit in educating girls. Although Islam states that it is the mother’s responsibility to ensure that their children are educated, particularly concerning the Qur’an and Islamic tradition, the traditional culture in Yemen holds that a woman’s place is strictly in the house. There is a general sense that there is no use for a woman to quote poetry or know how to do math if she spends her days cooking in the kitchen and looking after her children. Over the summertime in Yemen, a debate raged in one of the local Sana’a newspapers over the positives of marrying uneducated women, the idea being that educated women are less pliable and more arrogant and pretentious. Although these ideas are slowly changing and more and more women are finding jobs outside of the family household, these ideas on women’s education are extremely pervasive throughout Yemen, particularly outside of the major cities.

This highlights another glaring issue, namely the difference between urban and rural education. While Yemeni laws provide for equal education for all, the fact is that most rural areas lack even the most basic education opportunities. Although Yemen has seen a major flight of its citizens from rural to urban areas in the past decades, over 50% of Yemen’s population still lives in the countryside, posing a significant problem for the Ministry of Education.

One of the major issues concerning education in rural areas relates to financial woes. Children are expected to help out at home in country farms more than they are in city apartments. A lack of uniforms and school supplies aside, some families simply can’t afford to lose the free help that children can provide. A related issue is that the government has to spend a lot more money to build a functioning school in the country for far fewer children, and thus is less likely to expend precious resources on countryside schools. Even with adequate facilities, a lack of teachers willing to teach out in the country compounds the issue, particularly those qualified to teach math and sciences.

Girls living in the country are especially unlikely to be educated. Many families will refuse to send girls to co-educational schools – often the only choice in the countryside – fearing their daughters might become corrupted by the mixed-gender interaction. Female teachers are especially at a premium, and a lack of bathroom facilities for girls is often cited as the primary reason why girls refuse to go to school. Extreme distance to the nearest school is another factor.

According to officials at the Ministry of Education, the major issues in general facing Yemeni education today include a lack of funding and organization as well as a huge problem with overcrowding. Three or four children are crammed into desks meant for two, and the high student to teacher ratio – which can be as high as 100 students to just 1 instructor – means that there is no way for a teacher to ensure that the students are learning.

Despite all of the above glaring problems in the Yemeni public education system, the system is not without hope. In many ways, the very concept of a national public education system throughout all of Yemen is little more than twenty years old. Until unification in 1990, public education in the North was limited to the rare school run by local initiatives or religious schools where children memorized the Qur’an, with no sense of unity between school systems outside of the school itself. Most children didn’t have access even to these options, and very few girls attended.

South Yemen was a different story. In the independent South Yemen of the 1970s, several educational plans were drawn up and implemented, eventually settling on a system of eight years of integrated primary school followed by four years of secondary school.

Reconciling the educational systems of North and South Yemen was not an easy task, particularly when the educational system was just one aspect of the many problems the fledgling Republic of Yemen faced after unification. Issues regarding education cited at the time included a lack of government leadership, a lack of Yemeni teachers, a lack of a budget for the country let alone for education, and inefficiency in management. Some officials remember starting work at the Ministry of Education not long after 1990 and smile to think how far they’ve come.

“We had so many different schools and so many kinds of education in all parts of Yemen that we used to think it was impossible to reconcile them all into one system,” recalled one employee. “We have a lot of challenges left to face, but just think! Thirty years ago there were few services and little opportunities. Less than 10% of girls went to school. Now it is 50% and growing, and even as high as 80% in some areas. Now we have schools and even TVs. And students are learning the same things in the primary schools, from Hudeida to Hadhramaut.”

“Do you remember the Institutes?” asked another official, whose query was met by a chorus of laughs and fast-paced chatter. When pressed for more information however, all the officials were silent and wouldn’t speak about these Institutes, even on condition of anonymity. “It’s political,” said an official with a wave of his hand, and quickly changed the subject.

Not unlike the current madrasahs of Pakistan, the former Institutes of Yemen were highly religious based schools. They taught the same things that the other schools did, but included extra studies regarding the Qur’an, Islam, and classical Arabic. One former student who lived at an Institute in the North about 20 years ago was willing to talk about it.

“We called them ma’aheds – Institutes – and not madrasahs, which mean regular schools here in Yemen. These Institutes started in the 1970s. The money for them came from Saudi I think, maybe from the government, but who knows?

Not a whole lot of students stayed there, just a very few of us, and certainly no girls. I don’t remember seeing any girls there at all actually, but I don’t think they were forbidden. Most of the students would only come from about 7:30 until 1:00 or so, like the regular schools, and sometimes come early or late for Qur’an study.

Those of us who were staying there would get up around 4:00 in the morning and pray the morning prayer, and then study the Qur’an until breakfast. I actually wasn’t very good at it and had a friend poke me and wake me up every time a teacher came around to make sure we weren’t sleeping.

After breakfast we would all form ranks and sing songs and sometimes have some competitions. I think schools still do this sort of thing now. Then we have regular classes until 1:00, math and science and Arabic and such. Then we would pray and have lunch and then it was naptime until the afternoon prayer. We would do our homework until dinner, and then pray the sunset prayer, and then memorize the Qur’an some more until the last prayer of the day. After that we would sometimes have sports or other activities, and then all go to bed. There were teachers in every room making sure we were studying the Qur’an or our other homework, or doing something related to Islam but I would still sneak out sometimes and steal some qat from a neighboring field. Like I said, I wasn’t a very good student. They were tiring days.”

In 2001, the government closed all the Institutes and transformed them into regular schools. Reasons given for this are different, based on the very few people willing to talk about them. Sometimes pressure from the American government is cited; others think that the Islah opposition party had control over these schools and President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s party wanted to put an end to this influence. Given the difficulty that the West has had with these kinds of schools elsewhere throughout the Middle East, it’s somewhat surprising that Yemen’s response to their Institutes isn’t held up as more of a success story for Yemeni education and the subsequent discouragement of radical Islam as found in other countries with schools such as these.

The Ministry of Education has had plenty of other initiatives with the goal of improving Yemeni education. Since 1997, the World Bank and the Ministry of Education teamed up in order to set strategies to achieve the expansion of basic education. Aiming specifically at increasing girls’ rural enrollment, this initiative eventually came to be known as the Basic Education Expansion Program (BEEP) and was implemented with a budget of about $60 million.

The success of this project was followed up by another project with the World Bank called the Basic Education Development Program (BEDP) with the goal of improving primary schools, specifically providing bathrooms, hand washing and drinking water facilities, boundary walls, and laboratory equipment. The cost of this program is $120 million and is specifically concentrated in four governorates.

The Ministry of Education is also looking towards the future with its latest program, the Basic Education Development Strategy (BEDS), which was implemented in 2002 in cooperation with various foreign development partners, including the World Bank and UNICEF. The goals include raising enrollment rates to 95% by 2015, improving the quality of teaching, upgrading the curriculum, expanding the availability of school space for girls, and enhancing community participation.

Certainly there are a lot of challenges to be met in the Yemeni school system. Maintaining a balance between urban and rural schools as well as girls’ and boys’ education while working within the confines of Yemeni culture is just part of the larger problems the system faces. Looking at the past and seeing just how far Yemen has already come however makes a future where everyone has access to quality education seem possible.