Education during a civil war

Appears in
Tekebash & Saba: Recipes from the Horn of Africa
Tekebash & Saba

By Saba Alemayoh

Published 2023

  • About

Literacy rates in Tigray, and Ethiopia as a whole, were quite low in the 1980s, but literacy of 51 per cent was achieved by 2017.

In 1950, Ethiopia had 620 elementary schools and enrolled just over 50,000 students – a very small proportion of school-age kids. At the time Ethiopia had a population of 18 million. Most of the schools were concentrated in the capital city (Amhara region at the time) and Eritrea. This was due to a combination of discriminatory government policy and Italian colonisation of Eritrea.