Say Yes, Summer 2007: Getting the messages for prefabricated classrooms

School children run toward a prefabricated schoolroom

More classrooms are needed in Turkey if all girls and boys are to enjoy their right to a basic education. Photograph by Uğur Gümüş © UNICEF Turkey 2007

A telethon jointly organised by the television channel NTV, the UNICEF Country Office and the UNICEF National Committee in partnership with the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) and the Ministry of National Education (MONE) raised over 1.6 million new turkish lira for prefabricated classrooms in April. But more schools and classrooms are still needed if 100% school enrolment is to be achieved, especially among girls.

The village of Eskin woke up early on April 23. Inside the low, scattered houses, the children were the first to wash and dress. Here in the province of Mardin, 1,000 kilometres from Ankara, rural people see celebrities only on TV. But on this particular day, Cansu Dere and Mehmet Akif Alakurt, stars of the popular soap opera Sıla, filming on location in the province, were due to visit the village. What’s more, renowned talk show host Tayfun Talipoğlu was coming all the way from İstanbul to appear large as life in the old school yard. For a precious hour or two around noon, the whole community would be in front of the cameras — and all of Turkey would be tuning in live.

For Turkey’s children, April 23, celebrated as National Sovereignty and Children’s Day, is always a special occasion. But what made the 2007 celebrations so exciting for the children of Eskin was the national telethon jointly organised by UNICEF and the television news channel NTV to raise money for prefabricated classrooms. It was, in fact, an extraordinary day for boys and girls throughout the country — and especially for the girls.

Schoolchildren in the village of Eskin, Mardin.
Photograph by Uğur Gümüş © UNICEF Turkey 2007

No room at school

The fact is that Turkey does not have enough schools for its 10.8m primary school children, and the schools do not have enough classrooms. Despite the decline in the pace of population growth, 1.4m boys and girls reach primary school age each year. Many existing schools have also become overburdened as a result of rapid migration from rural to urban areas and from poorer provinces to crowded suburbs of major cities. The extension of compulsory primary education from five years to eight as of 1997 multiplied the demand for school buildings.

Over the past ten years, MONE has mobilised resources. World Bank loans totalling hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent constructing, renovating, extending and refurbishing extra schools and classrooms. Schools have also been constructed and equipped under the grant–funded EU Support for Basic Education Programme. Private donations have poured in, benefiting from 100% tax relief under the 100% Support for Education Campaign.

Nevertheless, the problem remains acute. A fifth of primary school students are still studying in classes of 50 or more. This is in spite of the fact that some children of primary school age, most of them girls, are still not attending school at all!

Şarkı Söylemek Lazım (We Need to Sing a Song) was one of the highlights of the We’re Adding Schools! telethon.
Photograph by Sema Hosta
© UNICEF Turkey 2007

Barriers to girls

When MONE launched the girls’ education campaign Haydi Kızlar Okula! wıth the support of UNICEF in 2003, there were numerous obstacles to be overcome. In many parts of the country, communities saw no point in girls attending school, given the limited roles envisaged for women in traditional society. Many conservative families were also unwilling to educate their daughters, particularly beyond the age of about 11, because they did not want them to mix with boys and men at school or en route. Some parents were willing to send both their daughters and their sons to school, but in cases of financial difficulty, sons were given preference over daughters. Daughters were also more likely to be called on to help in the home instead of attending classes.

Enlisting the support of community leaders, field workers went from door to door seeking to overcome these preconceptions. Efforts were made to meet the needs of children who were unable to go to school due to poverty. On condition of ensuring that their children attended school, the poorest families, as determined by standard systems, were supported with cash transfers. Within three years, over 220,000 girls and an unexpected 100,000 boys who had either never been enrolled or who had been enrolled but had later dropped out, started to attend school regularly.

Missing the bus

Yet ironically, the progress made by the girls’ education campaign only exacerbated the deficit of physical facilities. Moreover, overcrowded school facilities provided families, community leaders and officials still unconvinced about the benefits of girls’ education with a powerful excuse for keeping girls at home. Children studying in such unfavourable circumstances often dropped out or were unsuccessful.

In villages like Eskin, where the stone schoolhouse could cater only for grades 1–5 — and where older children had to make a daily journey of 10km to the district centre of Kızıltepe in order to complete their primary education — the school bus continued to leave without a single girl on board. That, however, was before the construction earlier this year of a row of four new prefabricated classrooms.

The prefabricated solution

Who first had the idea of making use of prefabricated buildings to make up for the loss of schoolrooms? The credit has been given to the governors of Şırnak and Siirt, who noticed that some of the prefabricated shelters used after the 1999 earthquake in northwest Turkey were no longer being used, and had the brainwave of reconstructıng them as schools in their own provinces. More prefabricated classrooms later went up in nearby Şanlıurfa as a result of donations by the private sector and the Turkish National Committee for UNICEF.

Public authorities were understandably cautious at first: they did not want to be accused of building anything less than permanent schools in disadvantaged provinces, especially in the Southeast. But the case for prefabs proved compelling. They are quick and easy to procure and construct; they come complete with sanitary facilities; they can be moved elsewhere if and when they are no longer needed, and if properly constructed they are proof against earthquakes. Contrary to popular belief, they also last for as long as 35 years.

In 2006, the Turkish National Committee for UNICEF managed to raise US$150,000 for prefabricated classrooms. Agreement was reached whereby the provinces of Mardin, Diyarbakır and Kırşehir, which were chosen for the initial implementation upon a proposal from the Directorate General of Provincial Administrations of the MOI, would match the donations by allocating an equal amount of public funds for the same purpose.

Instant success

This, to cut a long story short, was how Eskin got its practical new classrooms. It took less than a month to put them in place. As a result, the girls of the village are expected to be able to continue their education for at least three more years. The visit of the mass media to the village on April 23 was not merely a celebration of this event. Its main purpose was to assist television viewers to conceptualise what an enormous difference the instant school extension could make to the lives of children — and so to encourage millions of Turks to make donations that would permit the construction of at least a hundred more classrooms.

In the event, the poignant interviews conducted by Talipoğlu with village girls helped to attract 125,000 SMS messages and hundreds of larger donations, and to ensure that the telethon raised over 1.6 million new turkish lira — enough to construct 124 classrooms. The slogan for the day was +Okul Ekliyoruz! (We’re Adding Schools). Decisions are now being taken on where those extra schools are most needed.

Sezen Aksu with child participants in the telethon

Singer Sezen Aksu with child participants in the We’re Adding Schools! telethon.
Photograph by Sema Hosta © UNICEF Turkey 2007

How to telethon

The telethon demonstrated the enormous potential for cooperation between UNICEF, the media and the public in the interests of Turkey’s children. The ministers of National Education and the Interior personally took part in the programme by telephone. Besides the live broadcast from Mardin, with Talipoğlu and the Sıla stars, the NTV programme for the day included a celebrity knowledge contest and an unusual live studio interview with legendary pop singer Sezen Aksu. Aksu performed one of her new songs for the first time in public — and asked for money for perhaps the first time in her life. There was also a one–off edition of the singing talent contest Şarkı Söylemek Lazım (We Need to Sing a Song) which is normally shown on another channel and in which a host of musical household names teamed up with child singers.

The all–star turnout owed much to the efforts of Talat Halman, President of the Turkish National Committee for UNICEF and formerly Turkey’s first Minister of Culture. It also represented the culmination of a long–standing ambition and weeks of tireless effort from UNICEF Country Office and National Committee staff. While information notes were prepared for all those taking part in the telethon, potential corporate donors and partners were mailed or visited in person. A call–centre was set up and accords were reached with telephone operators and banks. An intense communications campaign was undertaken to ensure maximum publicity. NTV personnel too were unsparing in their efforts to make the event a success.

Joining forces

April 23 was chosen for the telethon because it was the day of the year when citizens were most likely to show generosity towards children. For the same reason, two other organisations concerned with the well–being of children chose the same date to stage fund–raising telethons of their own on rival popular channels. This could have meant awkward competition, but in practice there was only friendship and cooperation. There were no losers, and the only winners were Turkey’s children.

A hundred classrooms — or even a few hundred — will not even begin to put an end to the national shortage of school buildings. But the telethon has served as one more reminder of an important problem. Further donations to the national authorities, the Turkish National Committee for UNICEF and other non–governmental organisations (NGOs) working in education are expected to follow. The need for schools and classrooms is set to remain a prominent national policy issue.

A change of fortune for Zehra?

Tayfun Talipoğlu interviewed Zehra live on national television from her home village of Eskin in the eastern province of Mardin.
Photograph by Uğur Gümüş © UNICEF Turkey 2007

It is ten years since Turkey extended compulsory primary education from five years to eight. But for girls like Zehra, from Eskin village, it has yet to make a difference.

Zehra and her friends, slim, nervous young teenagers, their long hair tied back, face the television cameras in sweaters and long skirts, or even jeans. Presenter Tayfun Talipoğlu stresses that they have not failed to complete their primary education but been prevented from doing so.

I went to school for five years. I haven’t been going since last year, says Zehra. My friends and I couldn’t study any more because there isn’t a middle school in our village.

Middle schools are nominally a thing of the past. But the little village school still only provided schooling for grades 1–5. From grade 6 onwards, Eskin children had to travel to the nearest eight–year primary school in the district centre of Kızıltepe, which straddles the road to Iraq.

We wanted to go but our fathers couldn’t trust us, Zehra explains, speaking on the NTV–UNICEF telethon.

Why didn’t they trust you? asks Talipoğlu.

They said, It’s not that we don’t trust you; it’s the world that we don’t trust.

But there’s no such thing as a five–year education any more?

We resisted but it wasn’t enough. This is the custom in our village. Girls don’t go to school. They sit at home, they do the housework, and they wait for their fortune.

How long do they wait?

Some of them get married when they are 14 or 15. Some have even got married at 13.

According to Zehra, if even one villager had sent his daughter to the school in town, just ten kilometres away, her father would have sent her. But families must conform to the social norm.

The tradition here is like this: girls don’t go beyond grade 5. Some of them have never been to school at all. For example, my grandmother never went. It’s a kind of … rule.

There is no such problem for boys.

Actually the girls are harder–working than the boys, Zehra remarks. The boys sometimes run away from school and end up being disciplined.

There are village boys who have become teachers, she explains, but most of them want to earn a living by driving trucks to and from Iraq.

As for Zehra herself, she once dreamt of being a doctor.

I didn’t want children to die. I didn’t want pregant women to lose their babies. I wanted the ill people of my village to come to me and get better.

Those dreams just might come true. Now that Eskin’s school has a row of smart prefabricated classrooms, Zehra and her friends can resume their primary school education without leaving the village. In theory, they can look forward to opportunities which women have been denied for countless generations. In practice, time will tell.

Children can’t wait

Yakut Temüroğlu–Sundur
UNICEF Country Office, Education Section

When we were working in the field for the Girls Education campaign, we frequently came up against the problem of lack of classrooms, especially in Diyarbakır, Van, Ağrı and Şanlıurfa. We heard that there were classes of 80, 90 or even 100 students. When enrolment started in Ağrı, we had school principals telling us that all the seats were taken. Some of them were using every available space in their schools for learning. But still it wasn’t enough. Nor is it acceptable in our culture to have boys and girls all squashed together in such classrooms.

The campaign has had to overcome several obstacles, including parents’ attitudes, child labour, early marriage, problems with the quality of education and so on. But a lack of schools has been the first or the second obstacle to getting girls into schools. And the problem is still there.

I strongly believe in providing prefabricated classrooms as a solution for this problem. You cannot persuade parents that education is of value to their children if you do not provide good conditions. The children cannot afford to wait 2 or 3 years for a school. The classrooms we have provided so far are a drop in the ocean. We cannot stop here. We have to continue talking about it, to mobilise the private sector, to collaborate with other campaigns …

Not just a rural problem

Ertan Karabıyık
UNICEF Country Office, Education Section

Lack of schools and classrooms is a big problem in rural areas. But we also come across the same problem in rapidly–growing districts of İstanbul, İzmir and Adana. The unanticipated process of migration has caused schools in some places to empty while schools in other places are full to bursting. In Esentepe, İstanbul, we went to a school with 5,700 students, and as many as 90 in some classes. The teachers could not even take the register properly.

The impact of lack of classrooms on the girls’ education campaign has been two–fold. First, the quality of education drops dramatically when classes are very crowded. Secondly, in villages, when girls complete grade 5, they then have to go to an eight–year primary school, which usually means either bussing or boarding school. By this time the girls are 10 or 11 years old and the parents just don’t send them. There are boarding schools with 300 boys and only 50 girls; the rest of the girls are out of school.

The Haydi Kızlar Okula! campaign has had a catalytic effect. Şanlıurfa has received a lot of funds, second only to İstanbul, as a result of public spending, private and corporate donations, the 100% education campaign and the efforts of other organisations and campaigns. And prefabricated classrooms have become an important instrument.