But the three-room school house is the pride of this tiny village of thatched huts in southwestern Burkina Faso, where chickens scratch the dust for food and the local Lobi people eke a meager living from fields of sorghum and millet.

Here, on a recent steamy afternoon, some 27 first graders take turns reading sentences from a blackboard. Not in the official French language, but in Lobiri, one of Burkina's 60 local dialects.

"I know how to write letters," they chant slowly. "I know that school is good."

School is also a luxury for many children in Africa. The United Nations has pledged universal access to primary education by 2015, as part of its Millennium Development Goals, but right now, roughly half of African children never finish sixth grade, according to UNICEF.

One of the world's poorest countries, Burkina Faso ranks at the bottom of just about every development indicator, and education is no exception. Only about a quarter of Burkinabe children finish primary school. But the country is pioneering a program aimed to reverse these bleak statistics.

The improbable silver bullets: Tiny, feeder, or satellite classrooms in remote villages like Bakono - where the nearest, full-service primary school is a 4-mile trek through the bush.

"Satellite schools are playing a really important role in expanding education in communities that are particularly poor and disadvantaged," said Joan French, UNICEF country director for Burkina Faso. "Especially when it comes to girls' education, because families are less willing to allow girls to go far from home than boys."

Nearly 300 satellite schools, teaching first through third grades, have been built since Burkin a Faso launched the village-based programs a decade ago. The government hopes to reach 1,000 by 2010.

Unlike traditional schools, where female students are invariably in the minority, prodded parents send roughly equal number of boys and girls to these village classrooms. After third grade, the thinking goes, children will be old enough to walk the miles to town, to continue their studies.

Behind bare-bones classrooms like Bakono's, where the only writing materials appear to be a battered black board and a piece of chalk, lies a richer philosophy. Village elders teach children about local traditions. Women coach them in popular dances and songs.

First grade is taught entirely in local dialect. Children learn French during the second year.

"If we want to teach a child history, we need to start with local history, local customs," explained Theophile Kienou, primary school director for Poni province, where Bakono is located. "It's from that point that a child can then learn about the history of Burkina Faso, the history of Africa, world history."

The initiative appears to be working. Since 2002, primary school enrollment has jumped 7 percent, French says. She largely credits the proliferating satellite schools for the growth.

In Bakono, roughly 30 percent of the village's primary school-age children now attend class, teachers say, compared to only 5 percent four years ago, when the school opened.

"This school will change many things in the village," predicted 46-year-old Kielte Noufe, head of Bakono's parents' committee. Clad in a T-shirt and dirty pants, his face weathered by age and poverty, Noufe said all six of his children were now enrolled in school, to get the education he never did.

"A child who succeeds in school can raise a family up," Noufe said. "A child who learns how to read and write will invest in this village."

The distance to traditional primary schools is not the only obstacle to learning here. In a country where per capita income is about $300 a year, the few dollars needed to buy school supplies was considered prohibitive.

A few years ago, the government scrapped text book fees. Primary school is free. Even so, families are reluctant to send children to class when they could be helping out at home.

"We try to make parents aware of the importance of school," said Diroute Innocent Hien, one of Bakono's two teachers. "But they say they cannot afford to send all their kids to class."

Parents aren't the only ones with reservations. One teacher at Bakono complained about his low pay. At roughly $50 a month, he said, it was roughly three times lower than at traditional schools. And officials say they can't meet spiraling demand by other rural villages, who have heard about the satellite schools by word of mouth or on the radio.

Fringed by mango and acacia trees, Bakono is one of the country's poorest regions. Many of the village's 250 or so residents regularly emigrated to nearby Ivory Coast to work. When civil war broke out there three years ago, most were kicked out of the country.

Those expelled include Ousse Ini Couadoure, cradling an infant as she sat on the porch of the Bakono school. Five of Couadoure's eight children grew up in Ivory Coast. As foreigners, she said, they were barred from attending school. Now, she says, they are too old to get an education.

But Couadoure has enrolled her three youngest children at the Bakono school, including one daughter.

"I want to send my kids to school, but this year life is difficult," she said, referring to a drought, which has hard hit Burkina's largely rural population. "Food is expensive. And if there's no money to buy school supplies, my daughter won't be able to finish her studies."

Across Africa, sending girls to school is often considered wasteful for other reasons. Girls marry and leave their homes as young as nine years old. Educating your daughter, an African saying goes, is like watering your neighbor's garden.

Even in Bakono, several girls dropped out of primary school classes this year when they became engaged, teacher Hien said.

The satellite schools are partly battling the trend by getting mothers like 23-year-old Awa Lai involved. Lai is among dozens of village women recruited to teach traditional songs and dances at a satellite school in Tapira, a village about an hour's drive from Bakono. Lai's slight 8-year-old daughter, Jenoba, attends class there.

Unlike many of her counterparts, Jenoba is not even engaged. Her mother has other plans for her daughter.

"I'd like her to be educated," Lai said, giggling shyly, as her daughter plays with friends nearby. "I want her to be a teacher."

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