Crisis and University

Madagascar has now 2 presidents, 2 prime ministers, two of everything. What is not doubling is money, jobs, and resources for the people. Probably the university is not on top of the major worries during a political crisis, nevertheless students are suffering from this situation too.

The university of Toliara has very little means. Not sure if they are given very little means, or the money addressed to the university are getting lost on the way. The point here is that in order to study, to learn, to become the society of the future, you need some basic stuff; very basic sometime, nevertheless necessary.
Torun H. Rognes is one of our predecessors here in Toliara. Like us, she was doing a research. She decided to look into the work conditions of the students. Her article is not flattering, but it is published in Talily (special number 13-14-15/2008), a university journal.
The university campus is at about 5km from the city centre and is lacking the most basic facilities. It hosts about 2000 students, but there are NO functioning toilets or showers. The students are forced to go “in the nature” around the campus, even at night…


the campus:


The rooms are not sufficient to host the growing number of students, so rooms planned to be shared in two are shared in four or more (4 beds, all the personal belongings, 1 table in common, a cooking corner, in about 10-12 square meters). Some students are placed in rooms initially constructed for other purposes, they hang plastic foils to get privacy from other students, also because those rooms are often not divided by gender.
We visited some of them, the place to cook consists of small electric elements, with no switch; students have to very carefully connect the cables to use them to cook their rice.



The classrooms are not enough for all the students and the courses. According to Torun, the acoustic is not adequate, and there are not enough chairs for everybody: students have to bring chairs from their own rooms.
The teaching hours are also heavy: courses start around 7.30 and go on for about 8h, only interrupted by a lunch break of about 1h. The professors, don’t get paid very well, so they are often doing side researches to make a living. The result is that they concentrate their work with the students in few months or weeks, and they are absent for other months.
Furthermore, the university can’t provide professors for all the courses so some of them are just “missionaries” from other universities: they have 10-12 hour courses per day, for 7 days a week for a couple of weeks; then 1 or 2 days after the end of the course, the students have to take their exam.
Clearly, this rhythm is not allowing the students to have a normal learning process.
Torun reports also that the university library is small, with 18 tables and about 8000 titles, most of them quite old. A few other libraries offer some more titles, but have quite limited opening hours.
Without going too deep into the amount of computers and the access to internet, we can just say that they are almost non existent and that students write their papers and thesis by hand, so they have to pay someone to write the last version on a PC. With three main consequences:
-students can’t access enough resources (internet),
-they often don’t know how to use a computer (!!),
-and they miss the very important learning process that is done while revising a paper.
We could continue by telling that scholarships for students are few and small, and that many need to work beside their studies. We could tell about the danger of prostitution for the poorest girls (especially hoping to get a vazaha, maybe to marry). Or tell about the impossibility for most of the students to travel, in order to get material or do research. But you probably got the idea…

What we can add is that there is a crisis, and a lack of resources.
The problems described above are only getting worse.
Furthermore, the electricity is scarce in Toliara, and at the University campus it is often without it for many days, leaving the students in the dark…
How is the society of the future going to be, when even the privileged group that can go to University, are suffering from impossible working conditions?





Italiano: abbiate pieta' e' troppo lungo... magari tra qualche giorno. ;-)