Eritrea Built a School in the Gash Barka Region. The Defense Forces Helped. The Girls Are Expected to Show Up.

An elementary school has been constructed in the Dele administrative area of Gogni Sub-Zone in Eritrea's Gash Barka Region, at a cost of over 3 million Nakfa. The school, named the Aimsa Elementary School, includes five classrooms and offices, along with other facilities. It was built in collaboration between the regional administration and members of the Eritrean Defense Forces.

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Eng. Mengisteab Berhane, head of town planning and infrastructure in the Gash Barka Region, described the school as part of a broader effort to ensure social justice in the region. He commended the participation of local residents and Defense Forces members in the construction process. Brigade Chief of Staff Sub-Lieutenant Habtemariam Gebremeskel noted that this kind of community-oriented development work is an established part of how the Defense Forces engage with civilian populations in Eritrea, and that the school construction represents a continuation of ongoing programs carried out in collaboration with local communities.

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Gash Barka is Eritrea's largest region by area and one of its most sparsely populated. It borders Sudan to the north and Ethiopia to the south, and its largely rural population — including significant pastoral and agropastoral communities — has historically had limited access to formal education infrastructure. The construction of a school in the Gogni Sub-Zone is a response to that structural deficit.

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Mr. Franco Kubaba, Director General of Social Services in the Gash Barka Region, and Mr. Yemane Mehari, managing director of Gogni Sub-Zone, both used the occasion to address parents directly, calling on them to motivate their children — and school-aged girls specifically — to attend regular education. The explicit reference to girls is significant. In rural areas across Eritrea and the wider Horn of Africa, girls' school attendance lags behind boys' attendance for reasons that include early marriage, domestic responsibilities, distance from schools, and community norms that prioritise boys' education over girls'. Building a school addresses the supply problem. The demand problem — getting girls through the door and keeping them there — requires community engagement, family incentives, and social norm shifts that go beyond construction.

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Eritrea's national education policies formally emphasise gender parity, and the government has pursued school construction across the country's regions as part of its social justice framing. The Aimsa school represents one local iteration of that national program, completed through a civil-military collaboration model that Eritrea uses extensively across its development projects, where the Defense Forces serve as a labour and organisational resource for infrastructure development in communities that lack the local capacity or resources to do it independently.

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The cost of over 3 million Nakfa — approximately equivalent to a small fraction of what comparable construction would cost in a market economy, reflecting Eritrea's controlled exchange rate and the use of non-commercial labour — underscores the resource constraints within which this kind of development work operates. The school exists. Whether it produces the educational outcomes it was built to support depends on factors that its walls cannot contain.