Education and Training in Ethiopia An Evaluation of Approaching EFA Goals

• improving girls’ opportunities to attend school;• building the capacity of local educational administrators to implement the ESDPand apply child-friendly pedagogic approaches;• extending the concept of special needs to include different kinds of learningdifficulties and counselling on them.Out-of-school young people. Young people in Ethiopia, whether they never went to school,dropped out of school or finished their school, face a daunting array of social andeconomic problems. Meeting the needs of young people calls for an integrated approach todesigning and implementing policies that combine social and economic goals. One of themajor challenges for policy makers is to embed youth employment policies into acomprehensive employment framework that covers education, training, labour market,enterprise development and social policies. In order to tackle young people’s problems inan integrated way, it is recommended to undertake cross-sectoral development activitieswithin the framework of the ESDP:• generating training and work for young people;• developing primary- and secondary level agricultural education;• generating entrepreneurship education and training for young people in formaland non-formal education;• developing the water technology and management sector of technical andvocational education and training.Teachers’ pre- and in-service training. The results of the joint review and mid-termevaluation of the ESDP revealed that teachers’ qualifications and working conditions arethe most urgent issue involved in the quality of education in Ethiopia. A huge country likeEthiopia has only one special needs teacher education institute with limited capacities.SNE is entirely missing from TVET teacher training. Finland’s sustainable developmentwork should continue on the basis of improved and extended concepts in the area ofspecial needs teacher education:• supporting the extension of pre-service special needs education teachertraining;• developing special needs education in TVET teacher training.61