Ethiopia's Education

The country I chose was Ethiopia, and the cultural issue I chose to focus on was education. While the WHO African Region had a literacy rate of 60.1%, Ethiopia has only a 41.5% literacy rate. The net primary school enrollment is surprisingly almost even between men and women. I had expected men to have a much higher enrollment than women, but the difference is only 6%. Males having a 55% primary school enrollment while Women are close behind with a 47% enrollment. However, when I researched more about Ethiopia's literacy rate, I found out that the native language Amharic is very complicated and has well over the characters in the English language, ( I found it has around 256 characters, while our alphabet has 26!). This definitely has an large influence on the literacy rate being quite low. Here is an article and video I enjoyed about, "Donkey boost[ing] Ethiopian Literacy." It goes on to tell how Donkeys are now used to drag around mobile libraries which are in fact boosting the literacy rate in Ethiopia. I am happy to see that Ethiopia has addressed their problem and found a temporary solution to gain interest and reason for people to become literate.