I want my children to come up bright. And to become somebody great in society.
We wake up at 4:00 in the morning.
Have to put the water on the fire.
Prepare them for school.
Two kids I have, Alex and Joyce.
This program is the first of its kind in Liberia.
And I see my daughter there.
They make Joyce learn new things,
they make her to be sharp.
I expect for her life to be bright, very bright.
Liberia has gone through some of the worst days of its history.
These gangs of armed kids now rule the city. Soldiers of the various rebel factions who
are battling each other for control of Monrovia.
We’re dying not on a daily basis, but by seconds.
As I’m speaking to you now, people are dying.
The virus spreads through contact with bodily fluids and is fatal in up to 90 percent of cases.
The crisis we’ve had in this country.
We need to be able to position ourselves to move in a more positive direction,
having a more realistic development agenda,
where were we are taking care of future generations,
preparing them to take the lead in terms of moving the country forward.
But the education sector has suffered and is still suffering. We still have issues of
a very high illiteracy rate, overcrowdedness in school, overage children in school,
100 and something kids to one teacher, nursery or kindergarten schools with stiff-back benches.
Memorize all of these pages. Kids get to fifth grade and they cannot read.
If you want to improve your educational system, you must start from the scratch.
Early childhood development is focused on the entire child.
Physically, socially, social-emotional, cognitive thinking, problem solving.
An environment where the classroom itself becomes a teacher,
where everything in the classroom is an opportunity for a child to learn.
It speaks to everything about who that child is and what that child is growing into.
In the ECD centers, it’s learning through play, where children are given that space to explore.
And through that exploration they get to learn. If we have a system which is more relaxed,
I think that enhances not just their physical growth, but also their mental growth.
So it prepares them for more academic work as they move upward.
There wasn’t any policy. We needed to have more awareness about early childhood development.
Since we started working on creating the awareness and taking it to the community,
it has had a different approach altogether, particularly with the parents.
After the war now, it is too late to go back to school. So that gap is there. If you have
good early childhood programs, where children learn well, where parents are involved in their learning,
children are able to complete school and be able to support themselves.
My school days were very hectic. It was hard. It was rough. Fourteen children, from my father.
I’m the sixth born. And out of the 14, the most educated man is me.
I used to pray to God that one day when I have kids, I will make sure that they go to school. And at the right age.
So this is why, myself, I took interest in education.
… show the picture of an elephant and then show the picture of a snail.
Right? So the elephant is what? Big. The snail is what? Small …
I have learned so many things. They taught us how we should talk to our kids,
what should we do to make them feel good, and sometime let the child do his or her own thing that
she wants to do, to make the child free.
We still have a lot of challenges. If you look at what the allocation in the national
budget for education, it’s about 13 percent of our national budget.
It’s just because of a lack of funding we have not been able to replicate to other markets.
It still is an issue although it has improved considerably. But for education, we’re still grappling.
This intervention is supposed to serve as a model. After all of this upheaval,
I think we need to be able to position ourselves to move in a more positive direction.
Our leaders are not considering: you have babies that are being born who should be the future leaders.
If people go to school, if people get educated, of course we have economic gains.
You reduce the strain on the budget for security. You reduce the strain on the budget for health.
Let the people understand that your lawmakers need to make a decision concerning this.
This is where they should start spending money. Money should go into this program.
If I know that my child is secure, I can go out and work. If I know my child is going to become somebody
later on tomorrow, I can do whatever it takes to make my child become that person tomorrow
We are building a society of children who can make decisions,
very socially, emotionally, mentally strong, who will not have to repeat what happened in the past.
We do all we can do, in the small corners, do what we can do to rebuild our country.
Because if we don’t do it, who will?