Ivory Coast: 'Gbagbo weapons cache' uncovered

Several generals pledged their allegiance to Alassane Ouattara on Tuesday

French troops have discovered several large arms caches in Ivory Coast that they said would have been used by former Ivorian leader Laurent Gbagbo.

The weapons, stored at villas in the main city of Abidjan, included mortars, cannons and rockets.

Mr Gbagbo is reportedly being held under house arrest in Abidjan.

French forces led an assault against him on Monday to force him from power. He had refused to accept defeat in a November election.

His rival in last year's election, Alassane Ouattara, who was internationally recognised as winning the poll, has now taken power.

During the stand-off between Mr Gbagbo and Mr Ouattara about 1,500 people were killed and a million forced from their homes.

The BBC's Mark Doyle says the French army took journalists to three innocent-looking villas in central Abidjan where they had discovered the weapons.

He says there were enough arms there to launch a new war, more evidence that the dispute over last year's polls were leading the country into chaos.

The French troops documented the arms before handing them over to African UN soldiers for safe disposal.

Earlier, five generals who had remained loyal to Mr Gbagbo pledged allegiance to Mr Ouattara, though there are reports that some soldiers and militiamen have refused to surrender.Risk of reprisals

US President Barack Obama has called Mr Ouattara to congratulate him and offer support as Ivory Coast tries to recover from the recent conflict.

Mr Ouattara's government said Mr Gbagbo had been placed under house arrest, without saying where, AFP news agency reported.

"Pending the opening of a judicial inquiry, Mr Laurent Gbagbo and some of his companions have been placed under house arrest," said Justice Minister Jeannot Ahoussou-Kouadio.

There had been confusion about Mr Gbagbo's whereabouts, with the UN retracting an earlier claim that he had been moved out of Abidjan.

Immediately after his arrest Mr Gbagbo had been taken with his wife Simone to Mr Ouattara's headquarters at Abidjan's Golf Hotel.

Mr Ouattara has promised that Mr Gbagbo will not be harmed, but rather "treated with dignity".

He has appealed for calm, and announced that a truth and reconciliation commission will be set up to "shed light on all the massacres, crimes, and all cases of human rights violation".

Both sides have been accused of atrocities.

Troops loyal to Mr Ouattara also began patrolling the streets of the southern city on Tuesday in an attempt to restore order. Despite their presence, sporadic gun and mortar fire was heard.

International human rights group Amnesty International warned that those seen as supporters of Mr Gbagbo were at risk of violent reprisals, despite Mr Ouattara appeals.

"Today in Abidjan, armed men, some wearing military uniforms, have been conducting house-to-house searches in neighbourhoods where real or perceived supporters of Laurent Gbagbo are living," the group said.

It quoted one witness saying he had seen a policeman belonging to Mr Gbagbo's ethnic group being dragged from his house and shot at point blank range.

Until a 2002 rebellion split the country in two, Ivory Coast - the world's largest cocoa producer - was the most developed economy in West Africa.

source:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13058331

EI celebrates International Women' Day

Women around the world continue to face systemic discrimination and inequality in education opportunities and access to decent work.

On International Women’s Day, educators worldwide are demanding greater investments in girls’ education and training opportunities leading to full employment and decent work for women.

The year 2011 marks the centenary of International Women’s Day celebrations. Since 1911, this day has been a global event, celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women in the past, present and future, and mobilising to address the challenges. Around the globe, EI member unions organise rallies, marches, fairs and debates, and reflect on the progress made to advance women’s equality, assess the challenges facing girls and women, look at ways to improve the quality of life and to actualize rights, and to empower girls and women in all spheres of human endeavour.

A strong delegation of trade unionists participated in the 55th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in February 2011. For the first time, gender, education and decent work were included together as priority themes in the UN CSW working agenda.

EI President Susan Hopgood said: “We know that investment in all quality public services is a key driver of development. As such, trade unions have serious concerns with the reduction to budgets that support public services which governments have undertaken in response to the current economic crisis. If Millennium Development (MDG) and Education for All (EFA) goals are to be achieved, the investment in the public sector should be increased, not decreased.”

EI Deputy General Secretary, Jan Eastman, added: “Strategies to improve access to education have been put in place in many countries. These have resulted in increased enrolment numbers for girls, and progress towards gender parity in primary school completion. High drop-out rates are still prevalent, however, and they are higher for girls in a number of developing countries, especially in secondary education, which is key for empowering girls. Drop-out rates are clearly associated with poverty, and also the related phenomenon of child labour. Girls face additional challenges because of the HIV epidemic, work in the home, and also of vulnerable, at risk employment in the entertainment industry or as domestic workers. When education is of sufficient quality, when girls are safe, fed, and pay no fees, parents will send them to school, not to work. Gender inclusive policies aimed at achieving quality primary and secondary education and ensuring universal access are the key to overcoming these development challenges and structural discriminations.”

At EI’s First World Women’s Conference in January 2011 – On the Move for Equality, nearly 400 teacher trade unionists from all corners of the world came together to discuss strategies for advancing and empowering women and girls in today’s world. “Our energies are focused on improving girls’ access to education, eliminating gender stereotypes in education, and fighting for decent work and good working conditions, including pay equity, for women. We are united to make our voice heard – the voice of teachers worldwide for equality and human rights,” said Eastman.

source:http://www.ei-ie.org/en/news/show.php?id=1544&theme=gender&country=global

Central African Republic: Teachers provide education despite on-going violence

EI supports teachers in the Central African Republic who struggle to bring quality education to their students despite decades of political violence.

The all Africa website has reported that due to widespread destruction and displacement, the educational sector has been badly affected by a dire shortage of teachers and adequate physical infrastructure. For thousands of children, classes take place not in solid buildings of brick, but in rudimentary “bush schools.”

UNICEF's chief education officer in the country, Farid Boubekeur, told the humanitarian news and analysis service from the UN Office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs that “needs are huge and funds insufficient. More appropriate infrastructure as well as qualified teachers are needed. Because of difficulties in the conflict-affected areas of the North, disparities in terms of access and quality are deepening.”

Many of the pupils attending schools in the northeast of the country were forced to flee their homes due to the conflict between rebel groups and government forces, and are now living in informal settlements in and around the village. According to UNICEF, there are more than 5,000 children of primary-school age and a total of 19 schools in the M'Brès Sub-Prefecture, 10 built of semi-perishable materials. Among the 76 teachers, 40 are pupils' parents, without any sort of qualification.

In line with country statistics showing an average of one teacher for about 94 students, the Ecole Ouande in the Linguiri village has two teachers, both contracted by the government, and one trainee. Unlike the two teachers earning a wage of 60,000 CFA (US$120), the trainee works for free, but is supported by parents who voluntarily contribute with 100 CFA each (50 cents).

Aid agencies have helped to build some 800 schools in the northwest, two-thirds of them “bush schools,” and have given basic teacher training to some 2,000 parents.

EI urges the national authorities to guarantee the employment of properly trained and qualified teachers; to stop resorting to unpaid trainees; and to provide decent teaching and learning conditions by building education infrastructures and paying adequate wages to teachers.

source:http://www.ei-ie.org/en/news/show.php?id=1528&theme=healthandsafety&country=car

WSF: Poverty and child labour undermine quality education in Africa

EI and its affiliates have participated in workshops on early childhood education and child labour in western Africa at the World Social Forum which has been held in Dakar, Senegal.

The World Social Forum (WSF) is an international event that draws thousands of people to exchange views on globalisation, human rights and workers’ rights. A special focus in this year’s forum has been African issues, in particular developments in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the lack of action on development and poverty in Africa.

Making their interventions, EI affiliated teacher unionists from SYNESP (Benin); SYNTER (Burkina Faso); BUPL (Denmark); GEW (Germany); GNAT (Ghana); NAGRAT (Ghana);SNEB (Niger), FESEN (Togo), joined members of EI’s Senegalese affiliates and EI’s Africa Region staff to discuss policies to enhance early childhood education, as recommended by the Education for All (EFA) program and the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Participants agreed that unions in western Africa must pursue their efforts to urge governments to take appropriate political measures for quality education. They expressed their concerns about how it could be that countries with limited natural resources, such as Cape Verde, Mauritius and Tunisia, were among the best performers in education, while the richest countries in the region justified their bad performances with budgetary restraints.

Teacher unionists also discussed the high propensity for child labour in the region, and articulated means to fight this practise which was depriving thousands of children from accessing education.

EI’s Africa Region coordinator, Samuel Ngoua Ngou, who took part in the workshops said: “It is not unusual for a child to start working at the age of five. The evidence shows that if a child does not get a basic education, he or she is unlikely to get it later as an adult.”

“There is no doubt that child labour is part of the daily reality in Africa. Despite the legal tools existing to fight it, including governments signing relevant international conventions, the questions is why nothing appears to be happening?”

Ngoua Ngou added that principal factors are the poverty which many families are experiencing, in addition to a lack of political will when the evidence becomes clear that children are not going to school either because there are none in the area, or because the teachers are unqualified.

General Secretary of the ITUC-affiliate CNTS Senegal, and President of ITUC-Africa, Mody Guiro, echoed Ngoua Ngou’s opinion: “It is more than urgent to change the current model of globalisation and put an end to the neo-liberal orthodoxy that has left millions of Africans with under-funded education systems, poor health services and virtually no decent work opportunities. From the WSF in Dakar we call for a new agenda with full employment at its heart.”

The GEW, one of EI’s German affiliates, which is launching a campaign for the eradication of child labour in the cocoa industry, said that it would bring the impact of the issues into classrooms by raising awareness of the conditions under which snack bars, often eaten in schools at lunch time, are produced.

EI applauds its African and German affiliates’ efforts to tackle child labour to reach the MDGs by 2015. It also urges all governments to allocate public funds in the fight against child labour and towards attainment of EFA, while ending the use of the global financial crisis as the short-sighted justification for cutting education budgets.

 

source:http://www.ei-ie.org/en/news/show.php?id=1523&theme=educationforall&country=global