Interactive Radio Instruction for Somalis (IRIS) Project

IRI is a method of teaching by radio that draws out student participation with drama, songs, question-and-answer sessions, and other activities. Students as a group listen to the series of broadcasts while teachers facilitate the interaction.

This process takes place in Qur'anic or formal schoolrooms, non-formal basic education centres, refugee camps, or any setting that includes a teacher, a group of students, and a radio. Teachers are trained to facilitate the IRI broadcasts. Somali poetry is contributed in an effort to increase children's interest and connect them with their culture's language and art form.

Printed materials are another component of this initiative. When staff failed to find any existing Somali books for children, they wrote 2 basic reading books to enhance the programme.

Education, Children.

According to organisers, military conflict, refugee movements, and neglect have left eastern Ethiopia one of the poorest regions on the Horn of Africa. Pastoral Somalis comprise the overwhelming majority in this remote area. For centuries, they have moved across the desert with their herds, living a nomadic way of life that usually occupies entire families.

Organisers say that, while schools that offer basic education are scarce in this region, radios are not. Radio is a common medium for communication throughout the Horn of Africa; many families own their own radios.

Built to support the IRIS programme, a digital recording studio located in the town of Jigjiga (eastern Ethiopia) is housed in the government's Capacity Building Bureau of the Regional Educational Bureau building. Headed by a young woman named Halimo Hassan, "the program's success has come to rely heavily on the newly-acquired expertise of local employees like Halimo. Halimo commented during a recent visit by US Ambassador Brazeal: 'I thought I was going to be a secretary my whole life. But now as a digital producer in Ethiopia, I'm able to help the children of my region.' This optimism speaks for the promise of the IRIS Program and people like Halimo to significantly raise the educational standards of the children in eastern Ethiopia."