Education Offers Hope in Liberia

The International Rescue Committee this week certified 285 Liberian teachers after successfully completing a three-year IRC-sponsored teacher training workshop.

“The training is designed to help the teachers create effective lesson plans and implement a curriculum according to national guiedlines,” explained Joseph M. Kolubah, an IRC education officer.

IRC conducted the training in nine camps for internally displaced persons in the Bong and Margibi counties, often under the extreme stress of the civil war.

“When everything else is gone or destroyed education is often the only hope remaining,” said Daniel O. McVitalis, the IRC’s education coordinator in Liberia, as he attended the certification ceremony in a school in Bong county northeast of the capital Monrovia. “No one can ever take the knowledge that you have in your own brain.”

The certification, which also shows that the teachers received sessions on gender-based violence and child protection, will make it easier for Liberia’s ministry of education to identify qualified teachers as it begins to implement the short-term goal of rehabilitating 25 percent of the nation’s destroyed schools.