Education

School children in the Amran governorate of Yemen during a lesson. USAID programs support rehabilitating schools and helping to improve literacy rates among young students.

USAID

Yemen suffers from low-quality teaching and facilities and high absenteeism rates at schools.  Just 63 percent of school-aged youth in Yemen completed primary school in 2010, and one in four third-graders cannot read at all.

Together with the Yemeni government, USAID is undertaking a comprehensive effort to improve school attendance (especially among girls, who make up the majority of out-of-school youth in Yemen), to make Yemen’s schools cleaner and safer, and to improve reading skills, especially in early grades. In partnership with Yemen’s Ministry of Education, USAID is funding a new reading curriculum and helping to coach teachers on reading instruction skills.

Our impacts in this sector include:

• Professional development training to more than 16,000 educators since 2004
• Restoration of more than 200 badly damaged or outdated schools since 2004, which has improved the learning environment for more than 42,000 learners.
• Installation of solar panels to power schools and rooftop water collection systems, which are used to provide water for latrines and school gardens.