School fees again

The season of school fees has just passed and it has become “safe” for us to go back on the streets without meeting constant requests for financial assistance.
In the first 2 weeks of each term we are frequently asked to help with school fees – in the office, in the street, by children and parents alike. It is such a big event on the calendar and one which puts a lot of strain on many family finances. On a recent trip to a parish we passed a cattle market – apparently they are particularly busy at this time of year because people sell their cows to pay school fees.
The French word used here for school fees is “minerval” which I have been unable to find either in my dictionary or on Babelfish, the Altavista translator.
Everything in education here is in transition. There is free universal primary education, although at one end of the scale parents are willing and able to pay large amounts of money for private schools, while at the other, in the more remote parts of the country, the free education is not universally taken up. While there is still some way to go with this implementation, there is also an ambitious drive to extend education for all to S1-S3. This is obviously creating a huge demand for school buildings and for teacher training. It is happening in a country with an annual population growth of more than 2% and about 50% of the population under 18, so there is no prospect of the need for new schools being met any time soon.
The roles of public schools, private fee-paying schools and church-assisted schools have still to be worked out, too. Finally, to complicate matters further, the relative importance of French and English in education is changing as Rwanda becomes more Anglophone. You have to be trilingual to get into higher education, but most primary schools are still Francophone.