ERETSHA: In this little village nestled between Seronga and Gudigwa, students walk to school every day in an effort to use education as a key out of the dire poverty that has troubled the people of Okavango for many years.
But to learn here is a daring feat requiring endurance in the most challenging conditions a child should never experience.
To learn and enjoy your right to education as a child in Eretsha, a minor must sit under a shrub used as a classroom for hours and hours with a torn uniform that fails to keep the cold away. They must endure the pain of coming to school on an empty stomach because of the dire poverty that has a stranglehold on households here.
They must bear the disadvantage of only hearing about computers and not seeing them or using them. Tather they must depend on the drawings of their teachers to see what a computer looks like. They must endure to learn, a great injustice that thwarts the noble right to education.
What touches the heart even more is the sight of these students happily walking to school every morning blissfully ignorant of the fact that their lived experience is an injustice.
Until recently, Eretsha’s primary school operated with just four classrooms — four modest spaces meant to serve an overwhelming 290 students. Students sat shoulder to shoulder, some on the floor, others spilling through doorways, as teachers struggled to be heard over the din. The strain was visible: fractured learning, exhausted staff, and results that painted a bleak picture. In 2023, examination pass rates in the region slumped to join some of the lowest in the country.
In one classroom, a table arrangement of students showing their performances, was an eyesore to behold. Students had a target of at least reaching 50% but most students performed below 36% which is not surprising in an environment where government has invested the bare minimum.
In 2024, a lifeline arrived when Wilderness Safaris donated two additional classrooms, bringing the total to six. It was a welcome gesture — but still far from enough.
“The new classrooms helped us breathe,” said one teacher during Mmegi’s recent visit. “But we are still stretched thin. There aren’t enough desks. There aren’t enough teachers. And our students come to school hungry.”
The challenges of education in Eretsha don’t exist in isolation. The village sits on the edge of breath-taking wilderness that is home to elephants, hippos, and lions. What tourists see as paradise, locals often experience as peril. Livestock are regularly killed by wild animals, and children must walk long distances to school along paths where elephant herds roam freely.
“This is our daily reality,” one parent told Mmegi. “Our students learn under trees and sometimes don’t even eat at school when it rains because the kitchen is not built in.”
With no electricity in homes or schools, students can’t study at night. Many drop out before completing primary school. For those who finish, the road ahead remains bumpy with poor exam results, no access to vocational training, and almost no formal employment opportunities in the area.
The Eretsha chief, Kgosi Boitshwarelo Mosenyegi, shared that villagers were a people without proper healthcare, whose children had no classrooms and whose sick patients had no complete health post to turn to.
He shared that the people of Eretsha were a people with little job opportunities and a people without electricity to keep the lights on during harsh winter nights.
“This village has many problems. “Our children don’t have enough classrooms to learn, and their teachers don’t have accommodation to stay at. “Even the head teacher lives in a house without electricity and there is no electricity in the schools. “Our health post remains incomplete.”
The legislative representative of the people of Okavango East, Gabatsholwe Disho, was quick to add that the plight endured by the people of Okavango has been long and taxing, an injustice sketched from the day the country gained Independence.
“The situation here is dire,” he told Mmegi. “Our people don’t live the same life others live in other parts
What was even more shocking for Mmegi to learn was that only four teachers out of 11 have accommodation. The four who have accommodation include the headmaster, the deputy headmaster, Head of Department and senior teacher. This team, which comprises the senior school management, lives in houses without electricity.
Some teachers opened up to Mmegi about the poor living conditions they endure.
“We live in one room houses because we don’t have options here.” “When I arrived here for the first time I cried, I even faking being sick so that they could send me out of here. “I even thought about quitting this job. “I can’t even think of building a family here because who honestly can get me pregnant here,” one teacher said jokingly, but the pain was louder than her attempts at humour.
The result is a cycle that feeds itself — poor education leads to unemployment, which deepens poverty, which in turn sabotages any real chance of educational reform.
Despite the odds, Eretsha’s youth still wake each morning and make the trek to school. They carry exercise books in plastic bags, wear uniforms that barely fight off the cold, and cling to hope with a quiet resilience.
But hope alone is not a strategy. Without serious investment in rural education, infrastructure, and wildlife conflict mitigation, Eretsha’s children risk becoming another lost generation —trapped not just by poverty, but by a system too distant to care.
When quizzed by Mmegi about why conditions at the school were deplorable despite government’s heavy annual investment in education, Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Child Welfare and Basic Education, Agreement Jotiya, said that that billion pula budget was mostly for recurrent expenditure and not for critical infrastructure improvement.
“Less than 10% of that budget can be used for infrastructure investments which includes building classrooms and facilities for learning.” “Yes, government invests a lot in education but most of it is tied up in recurrent expenditure,” he said. Outside the school yard, the wilderness reminds everyone who’s really in charge. Elephants trample crops in the night. Lions have been spotted near the village, halting school for days. Parents fear the bush paths their children must walk each morning.
In Eretsha, the wildlife is both a wonder and a worry. The land is rich, but the people are poor. The tourists fly over in small planes, chasing sunsets and safaris. Down below, families wait for harvests that won’t come and jobs that don’t exist.
Driving from Seronga one can see scores of farms with tons of plastic bottles hanging over the farm fences. A local villager shared with Mmegi that the bottles contain stones and are connected to a string which can be pulled to make a noise that scares away elephants.
This is certainly not an environment where students finish school. Some leave to herd cattle.
Others follow their parents into fishing or farming, others scrape by through working in safaris or at the Delta as tour guides.
But still, they all go to school.
They sit in those six classrooms and some outside in shrubs too cold but they try to listen. They read slowly and try their best.
They are the children of Okavango and they deserve better.
