Can a Youth Boom Survive South Sudan’s Education Crisis?

At first glance, the work life of Paul Santino, the headmaster of a school here in South Sudan, resembles that of many educators.

He sits alone at a dark wooden desk in a room lined with books. Students and staff knock politely before entering. Every so often he makes his rounds, poking his head into classrooms, overseeing goings on around the schoolyard, chiding students for their uniform or behavior.

But unlike most educators, Mr. Santino has not received a salary in more than a year, nor has any of the staff at the Gumbo Basic School in Juba, the capital, nor any other teachers in the country.

Education in South Sudan is in crisis.

Plummeting attention from donors, including the United States, has left schools like Gumbo running on fumes. That schools continue to function in South Sudan comes down to the commitment of educators like Mr. Santino, 67.

“I like my job too much,” he said when asked why he bothered to come to work everyday without being paid. In the absence of a government salary, he has cut costs to support his wife and six children, he said. Parents also provide small stipends to the school when they can.

“The dire state of education in South Sudan is not a donor resource problem,” the State Department said in a statement, blaming instead a failure by the government to use public resources to fund basic services.

The country’s leaders have siphoned billions of dollars in oil revenue that could have gone to education, the statement continued, adding that South Sudan had treated foreign assistance as a “substitute for governance.”

South Sudan’s Information Minister, Ateny Wek Ateny, did not immediately respond to the criticism, but said that, while aid cuts had hit the country hard, teachers had displayed national pride by continuing in their jobs in the absence of pay. “There’s nothing South Sudan can do except to rely on its own, so that it can continue to exist,” he said.

Manuela Tiyu, a South Sudanese policy expert with Universal Network for Knowledge and Empowerment Agency, a nongovernmental organization, said school attendance shields children from forced labor and early marriage and provides stability in a country where many parents have suffered from decades of conflict and civil war.

But the lack of funding has forced many educators to rethink what an education can provide, especially in rural areas where there are fewer means and where children sometimes learn under a tree.

The embrace of education also signaled a rejection of the school system in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, which taught that people in the South were inferior to those in the North, according to Benjamin Machar, a professor of politics at the University of Juba.

When independence came to the South in 2011, it was greeted with a wave of optimism, and was supported by the United States and others. At the core of the dream was a desire to build a free school system that would break from northern domination and emphasize national pride, said Mr. Machar.

“We were thirsty for knowledge and we knew how to study to be the leaders of tomorrow,” he said.

Every morning he sets off from the mud house he built himself in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Juba to walk to the school. Every evening he walks home to cook dinner and read by candlelight, he said. The school depends on teachers like him, who make up for a deficit in official qualifications with a surplus of commitment.

“Without education no change will happen. It is a key for everything,” said Mr. Oba.

If he finishes his undergraduate studies in math, science and religious studies at the university, he said, he has already set his heart on a profession: He wants to be a teacher.