NIAMEY, Niger, July 16, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – The Islamic Bank of Development (IBD) has pledged $84 million to assist the overwhelmingly Muslim northwestern African country of Niger to integrate more than a half-million students enrolled at Islamic schools into the national education system.

"Two systems have developed since colonization and independence, completely separate from one another: the formal French school and the informal Qur’anic schools," Khalil Enahaoui, regional coordinator for the IBD program, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported on Saturday, July 16.

"Our goal is to bring these two together by emphasizing bilingual, Franco-Arabic teaching."

With more than 50,000 locations, Islamic schools have attracted thousands of students across Niger.

These schools, traditionally free of charge and with flexible schedules more suited to children working in the fields, have long constituted an essential way of learning for much of the population of this country, one of the poorest on earth.

"We learn about who we are and how we must behave," said 10-year-old Haoua.

"Everyone I know goes to Qur’anic school."

Faced with only 7,600 formal schools and an illiteracy rate cresting above 84 percent nationwide, Niger is in the first year of an ambitious decade-long education plan that aims to boost literacy and numeracy and create a stable and most of all employable population.

Enahaoui suggested that the influence of these schools reached far beyond basic literacy.

"If we leave the Islamic schools to develop wildly, we won't be able to control them," he said.

"Pushing these schools out to the edge of society only radicalizes students and teachers and feeds prejudices and assumptions," argued the IBD official.

"To ignore these schools is to sow the seeds of violence and ignorance."

Some of the Islamic schools are informal while others are more structured, loosely supervised by the Ministry of Basic Education, one of three ministries handling education issues in the country.

Critics say the problem with the IBD program is that it groups formal Islamic schools, where students receive a balanced secular and religious education, with informal Qur’anic schools, where only the Noble Qur’anic is studied.

This, they caution, could artificially inflate school attendance figures and literacy rates.

Teachers will be reviewed according to standardized guidelines and those deemed unqualified to teach will be offered positions as classroom assistants, according to AFP.

"We've never depended on money from outside to survive, but we would be happy to be more formally integrated into the school system," said Oumaru Kiassa, a teacher at the Chateau Un Qur’anic school in the capital.

His school, under the IDB program, will also offer basic hygiene and health classes, French and numeracy.