Addis Ababa on track to meet SDG in access to education

Addis Ababa is on track to meet Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of ensuring all students have access to education.
According to the annual education statistic report of the city administration in the year 2019/20 the Gross Enrolment Ratio /GER/ and Net Enrolment Ratio /NER/ for preprimary education in the city is relatively high at 103.96 and 96.62 respectively. As the report states the number has shown a great increase from the last academic year 2018/19 which was 98 and 87 percent respectively, the highest in the country at the time.
In growing Educational Accessibility in 2019/20 the city administration has increased the number of pre- primary schools to 1,206 from 1,143.
The GER and NER for primary schools in Addis Ababa stood at 137.4 and 97.9 percent in the year 2019/20 which was an improvement from the 2018/19 year.
The national GER target for primary school is 103 percent by 2020, which seems possible to achieve.
The Gender Parity Index (GPI) for Addis Ababa primary education system is 1.15, compared to the national average of 0.9, which means that there are more girls enrolled in primary education than boys in the capital.
The GER in the secondary education in Addis Ababa stood at 99.6 percent for grade 9 to 12 and the NER reached 58.4 for the same grades.
The gender parity in Addis Ababa’s secondary education system stood at 1.16 in 2019/20 which was 1.10 in the prior period.
At the city education bureau, school expansion has been higher in urban areas, mainly because of better infrastructure and the role of the private sector in education.
While many preschools and secondary schools are located in Addis Ababa, access is limited to the urban poor children whose parents cannot afford to pay school fees. Furthermore, quality of public schools continues to be an issue, transition from grade to grade is a bottleneck for many and many who attended school fail to acquire basic skills as a result of unskilled teachers, irrelevant teaching and inadequate learning materials.
Despite these challenges, the education bureau has been doing a lot to tackle issues in regards to quality education.
In Addis Ababa, the percentage of appropriately qualified teachers in primary education is at 17.6 percent .The rate of qualified teachers in secondary schools from grades 9 to 12 is at 13.75 percent.
On the positive side, the pupil to teacher ratio is 26 students per teacher in grades 1 to 8 in public schools and 19 students per teacher in private schools in grades 1 to 8 and 18 students per teacher in grades 9 to 12.
In the capital, the survival rate to grade 8, that is, the percentage of students who completed primary education – was 80 percent, which is far above the national average of 53 percent. The repetition rate for primary (Grades 1-8) in Addis Ababa is only 2 percent, the lowest in Ethiopia.
In regards to delay in schooling, 11 percent of children aged 5 to 17 years in Addis Ababa attend school with two or more years of delay.
According to the report, there was significant success in progress of tackling matters related to school dropouts and grade repetition.