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Challenges in Education—Developing Effective Educational Systems

Transcript from the April, 2006 Conference: Education in the Developing World, sponsored by the Graduate School of Business International Development Club and the Stanford Association for International Development

April 2006

Moderator

Joel Samoff 
Professor of African Studies and Political Science, Stanford University

Panelists

Jeanne Moulton
USAID Basic Education and Policy Support Activity

Augustine Mahiga
Ambassador of Tanzania to the United Nations

Budd Mackenzie
Trust in Education

Chris Bradford
African Leadership Academy

Introduction

Our first panel is a diverse group of practitioners and leaders who have contributed to this field in incredible and invaluable ways. Leading our discussion is Joel Samoff, a professor of African Studies here at Stanford. With a background in history, political science and education, he is primarily concerned with public policy as well as research. Professor Samoff works regularly with international agencies involved in African education. He is the North America editor for the International Journal of Educational Development and serves on the advisory boards of the Comparative Education Review and Development and Change. Please welcome Professor Joel Samoff.

Joel Samoff: Thank you for the introduction. I'm pleased to welcome you all to this first panel, the title of which is "Challenges in Education." Each participant will discuss what she or he sees as major challenges in education. Our starting point itself is a challenge.

I've just returned from the meeting of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa. That's an umbrella organization that includes all of the education ministers in Africa and most of the major agencies that provide aid to education in Africa.

It's clear that when you think about education in Africa or education in the third world, there's a dual of picture: the rosy picture and the not so rosy picture. It would be tempting to say this is simply a question of perspective; that whether the glass is half full or half empty depends on what your perspective is and where you're starting from. But, that's not really true. Think about it. If the goal is to get to San Francisco from here and you're making very rapid progress down the road towards San Jose, you're not going to get there. The fact that progress is rapid doesn't mean that it's moving toward the goals that have been set. Therefore, as we think about challenges to education and about the rosy picture and the not so rosy picture, we need to think about whether the progress that's being made moves in directions that are ultimately productive and ultimately lead toward the sorts of goals that Professor (Keynote speaker Cream) Wright (of UNICEF) outlined—the Education For All goals and the Millennium Development Goals.

The rosy picture emphasizes that there has been progress.

  • There are more children in school.
  • There are more adults who get access to education.
  • There has been progress toward a gender parity.
  • There have been efforts to improve the quality of education.
  • There is increased attention to HIV and AIDS both in schools and in schools' roles in thinking about that issue outside of school.
  • There is increased attention to non-school education.
  • There is increased attention to early childhood education, to the importance of educating very young children.

But then, there's also the not-so-rosy picture. It seems clear, as Professor Wright showed and as the annual global monitoring reports show, that progress—whatever or wherever it is—is still not sufficient to reach the goals that have been set.

  • There has been increased foreign funding to education, but that has carried with it increased dependence on that foreign funding. That has it's own set of problems.
  • There is limited systematic evaluation of what's going on in education and limited ability to learn from the experience.
  • Perhaps most important, we lose sight of the fact that events and the situation external to education may be the most important obstacle. Ultimately, poverty is the most important obstacle to progress toward the education goals that have been set.

That's the background for our discussion. I will introduce the panelists very briefly.

Jeanne Moulton who will be talking about delivering education services in fragile states. She's a senior associate as Creative Associates International. She's a very experienced specialist in education who has worked for many years on education in Africa, in particular, but in other parts of the world as well. In addition to her own direct work, she has regularly undertaken research and evaluation, often reaching critical conclusions and highlighting how it is that people who are very committed to the positive goals, nonetheless pursue strategies that are problematic.

Ambassador Augustine Mahiga is Tanzania's ambassador to the United Nations, recently Chair of the United Nations Security Council. His background is in political science and international relations. Especially relevant for our discussion this morning is that he and his wife are currently in the process of creating a new secondary school in Tanzania where they are trying to address both the immediate shorter term and then longer terms of providing access and quality education in Tanzania.

Bud MacKenzie will address the question, "Are we gaining in the war on poverty and losing the war for hearts and minds?" His background is in law and business. He's the founder of an organization called Trust in Education which is a grass roots nonprofit corporation that provides education and economic opportunities in Afghanistan. He's just back I believe, since all the messages I had from him were from Kabul.

Chris Bradford will speak on the primary and secondary education gap in Africa. He's the cofounder and chief operating officer for a really interesting initiative, the African Leadership Academy, a nonprofit Pan African secondary boarding school that is to open shortly outside Johannesburg, South Africa and that will recruit students from any different backgrounds across Africa and will work on both education and leadership.

Jeanne Moulton: Thank you, Joel. I would like to talk about goals, in particular about an apparent shift in the goals and rationale for education in developing countries particularly in the context of U.S. foreign policy. Let me start with giving a brief history of what I think the shifts have been since the education and development field was born.

In the 1960s and 70s, the emphasis was on education as contributing to human resources and manpower development. For example, when I went to graduate school, we took courses in education planning; how do you decide what human resources needs are going to be met by the education sector. In the 80s, I think there was a general shift away from that toward education for the poorest of the poor and programs focused on adults and children in the poorest communities of the world. Then, in the 1990s, education for all was the focus, particularly basic education for children in primary schools, a concerted effort by the international community. This is where money and attention went. A lot of what Professor Wright talked about was in this context.

Now, these three historical eras, as I might call them, all look at education with an underlying rationale for economic growth and development—albeit education is a universal human right. Of course, that's always a motivation to support it. But, I think even stronger than that was the belief that education is important because it leads to economic growth and development.

A shift that I see coming—and I'm not absolutely certain about this, but I'll be provocative—is away from economic growth and development as an underlying rationale toward governments. The new perception of the value and purpose of education is to curb fragility, to help failing and recovering states provide services to their citizens. So, the goals of education become subordinate to the goals of improving government. The goal becomes improving the delivery of education as a service that government owes its people, as Professor Wright says, "Restoring normalcy in the education sector."

Let me just talk a little bit about fragile states. The current U.S. foreign policy, as you probably know, has three pillars—diplomacy (which has always been one), defense (which is becoming much more important), and development. The people in the development world of U.S. government policy are saying, "What is our role?" The importance is focusing on fragile states because they are not able to control some of the dangerous elements.

What is a fragile state?

  • It is one that has not failed yet or has failed and is beginning to recover. Failed states are those where its central government does not exert effective control or isn't able to deliver vital services to significant parts of its own territory.
  • Failing states are those in which the central government's hold on power or territory is tenuous.
  • Fragile states are countries emerging from or on the brink of conflict.

The game of which states are fragile seems to be an enjoyable one, and each organization has its own list of states and indices of criteria for states. But, just in case you're not familiar, I'll run down a list of some of the fragile states on most lists. Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Indonesia, Pakistan, Colombia, Haiti, Georgia, Bosnia, Albania. Then there's a long list in Africa— Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Burundi, and Somalia. You get the picture. As a consequence, what used to be U.S. support for education in developing countries is being sort of bifurcated into support for countries that are in what's called transitional development, that are stable and countries that are fragile states.

Getting back to education, what are the implications for those of us who work in education? I want to raise five questions or issues that come up. If we're shifting our focus from education for economic growth to education for improving governments.

  1. First of all, is basic education for children the goal of education for all, which has been with us for 15 years at least? Is that still our top priority or does post-basic education become relatively more important? Do we invest more now in secondary and higher education institutions?
  2. Secondly, is universal access still a priority? Dr. Wright told us very clearly about the Millennium Development Goals and the EFA goals. One of these is access. Is that really still a priority in fragile states?
  3. Third, what is the role of education in supporting governments. If that's what education is supposed to do now, how does it do it? Is it simply sort of piecemeal curricula that teach peace, democratic values and so on? Is it activities that address patterns of fragility? For example, what can we do to decrease corruption, elitism, organized violence, public disengagement, lack of capacity?
  4. Fourth, what is the role of the education sector in addressing the youth problem. With the focus on basic education we haven't spent as much time looking at this problem that faces every civilization of what to do with its young men, in particular, as well as women. What is the role of education in that?
  5. Finally, if education is a universal human right, which indeed it has been declared to be, and if a fragile state becomes a failed state and cannot provide it, then who is responsible for the education of the children in that failed state? Is it the international community or who else? Thank you.

Augustine Mahiga: Thank you very much. I'll try to relate the presentation by Dr. Wright in the context of Tanzania. Tanzania became independent in 1961, and the first 10 years in education investment were geared to developing higher education for the purpose of making qualified personnel to take over from the administrators of the colonial regime. Up to 20 percent of the resources were devoted to a very few selected students from primary school into secondary school and especially at the university.

But that was providing less than 1 percent of education. As Tanzania moved towards a more egalitarian policy, the following 10 years were geared towards providing universal primary education as a basic human right and in order to impart the basic skills of reading and writing. The policy of universal primary education continues. As the country was progressing towards providing universal primary education, Tanzania went on to invest more and more in primary education. This is very consistent with the Millennium Development Goals which seek to have universal primary education for both girls and boys by the year 2015.

But, the experience has shown that investment in primary education—the first six years of education – has not necessarily reduced poverty, increased agricultural production, or added value in terms of employment in the Tanzania context. It is only now that we are realizing, because of the priority of primary education, that Tanzania has the lowest enrollment in secondary school in the world. After realizing that, there is growing investment into secondary education.

But, even with this emphasis, it has proved to have some shortcomings. One is that both public and private secondary schools tend to give priority to reaching a family in the urban settings rather than in the rural areas. There is also an inbuilt bias against girls. There is more enrollment of boys at certain school levels, although at the primary level we are very close to attaining gender parity. In terms of competitiveness in the global economy, it is proving true that after primary school competitiveness is less and there is a need to have a balanced provision of education between primary and secondary education.

It is in light of these constraints that my wife and I are trying to establish a model school to address three basic inadequacies or disparities in Tanzania.

  1. The first one is, of course, to respond to the growing need for secondary schools to answer the challenge that Tanzania enrollment in secondary schools is one of the lowest in the world.
  2. Second is to address the question of quality. As Tanzania is approaching universal primary education, the expansion has not met the needed qualities. You find in one classroom, there are over 150 students and sometimes up to 200. The rate of producing teachers to meet this demand is very low. There is a growing need to have teachers and to have quality education and the expansion of secondary school. So, our intention is not only to meet enrollment, but also to meet the gender disparity and at the same time to provide quality education at that secondary level.
  3. The third is the access to education as well as the quality. Because of the bias towards richer families and urban households, we would want to build a school where there is a deliberate and conscious effort to extend schooling to the underprivileged in society, not only the girls but also orphans, victims of HIV, disabled, and all those excluded and marginalized societies including deliberate effort to subsidize their education.
  4. Finally, we have realized that since there cannot be boarding schools in every village, day schools do not necessarily provide the best educational requirements, especially to girls. Girls going to day schools are away from home and become victims of many factors that reduce retention of students at secondary schools. So, we want a girls' boarding school with quality education to meet excellence, service, and performance goals and to provide leadership. This is what we were explaining yesterday about the Bahati School. It will be a model school for the government, and answer the questions of access to secondary education, quality, and retention of students at that level.

Bud MacKenzie: I'm going to answer the question most often asked by my friends which is, "MacKenzie, what the heck are you doing in Afghanistan?" I was there just two weeks ago. Three years ago, I read an article on the front page of Parade Magazine written about Greg Mortenson, a man from Montana building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

By the time I finished the article I said, "We can help that man." It took me six weeks to get a hold of him. I said, "Greg, how much money do you need?" He said, "$25,000." I said, "Go find another village. I know my community, and I know they'll support it." $60,000 later, we sent it up to him. Lo and behold, it cost $60,000 to build a school in a village in Afghanistan. After that and considerable reading and meeting with Afghans who invited me over for dinner, I realized that education is a wonderful thing to provide to a community but it's a long term solution for people who have very short term needs. There's no food on the table tonight. You can't just stop at a school. So, I got sucked in a little deeper and deeper, and now it occupies about 60 percent of my day, six days a week. it's that compelling.

So, what do you do? First of all, if you haven't read it already, read the book The End of Poverty written by Jeffrey Sachs. There are 6 billion people on this planet, 3 billion of whom live on less than $2 a day. We need to wage a war on poverty. There is one thing in the book that particularly struck a cord with me: developed nations don't need to give to the poorest of poor until they're wealthy; we need to get them to the bottom rung of the ladder and they'll pull themselves up from there. I'm 100 percent convinced that's true.

I'm 100 percent convinced that it's also true that you need to go to the bottom rung of the ladder. The trickle-down theory is of little or no consequence to the person who is below the ladder.

So, how do you do that? You do that by going to the village, meeting the leaders, developing programs for them that are very simple. We can provide two things that they don't have. They don't have capital; they don't have savings to invest in the future. We have that capital. We can also provide them know how. What you know already is enough to launch an entrepreneur in a country such as Afghanistan. It's so inexpensive. You can put a family in business for the rest of their lives with $500 worth of sheep. That's what I'm discovering. Education is very easy to transport down the road. Teachers are $50 a month. Whatever it is that we learn in this village can be transported down the road to the next village.

What are the challenges? Of course, one of the major challenges is women. I've been to the village twice and I've met one woman. I never see them out walking around as the men do. I'm not able to go and say, "Hi, my name is Bud MacKenzie. I'd like to talk to your wife." But, I'm getting very close. This time I came from creating a men's shirra, the leader of which has told me there will be women on the shirra by the time I come back. We have also suggested to them a women's shirra, and they have embraced it. It is doable, but we have to go directly.

Are we winning the war on poverty? The answer is no. The amount of commitment that we're making is way below what everybody in this country thinks we're making. The other problem is that there's a tendency to only work in macroeconomics and not in microeconomics. We need to devote more resources at the bottom rungs of the ladder.

The other problem in Afghanistan is that they see it as a bunch of foreigners are coming in to town, making a lot of money, and not spending any. There's a cook at the place where I stayed who said, "Oh, I know what NGO means. That means 'Not Giving Out.'" There's a certain amount of truth to that. There are people in the NGOs over there that are frustrated as well. So much large scale planning, so many experts that the money doesn't get spent.

Am I encouraged? Yes, I am. I'm also very encouraged with the notion that the private sector can do it. I'm only from the city of Lafayette (Calif.). Now, the support has grown from Lafayette to Moraga, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Danville, Walnut Creek, and Concord. I'm a real advocate for Nike's "Just Do It." Just do it. Get on a plane, get over there, discover what needs to be done and start solving the problems directly. I now have a tremendous belief in the ability of the private sector to do it and to take on more responsibility for ending poverty. We can, in fact, impact it and do it. Pick something of a manageable size; don't pick an entire city. There's a lot of talk about getting out into the villages. Let's quit focusing all of our energy and our money in the cities, and let's get out in the villages. That's something that we can do.

I can talk with you on the issue of humanitarian aid and the humanitarian world. Up until three years ago I was pretty much a Little League dad. I volunteered around the community and helped with a number of community things. But, I didn't really have a vision of the world beyond. It took me 35 years to realize that you'll spent a considerable amount of your life finding people who fit into two categories—those that see the glass as half full and those who see the glass as half empty. It's very, very difficult at times to see your glass as half full.

The realization I've come to over the past three years is this. The more you devote to others, the more you give from your own glass to others, you turn around someday and discover that your glass is full. I want to impart that to you now, because you will in fact discover that's true. Thank you.

Chris Bradford: Good morning. It's somewhat surreal for me to be here since it was only very recently that I was sitting there as a graduate listening to distinguished panelists like those next to me wondering how I might be able to make an impact. For the past two years I've been working with colleagues I met at Stanford to launch African Leadership Academy, a Pan African boarding secondary school for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds, designed to inspire future African leaders.

The question I often get asked is, "How did a guy from Western Michigan get involved in this work and end up in Africa?" I suppose I've always been somewhat interested in international development. When I came to Stanford I had the opportunity, with an African friend of mine who is now a partner on this project, to really evaluate what the issues in development are on the African continent. As we thought about this question, we felt that the key issue is an undersupply of homegrown African leaders, and by leaders we mean agents of positive change. If there's going to be meaningful, rapid progress on the African continent, we believe we need these agents of positive change to be working across all spheres of African society—political, economic, social. As we think about these agents of positive change, what characteristics do they need to have? It seems that one of the important characteristics they need to have is a good education, an educational background that will enable them to create jobs as entrepreneurs or enable them to end oppression or reduce the spread of disease.

So, if we need educated leaders on the African continent, why is there an undersupply. That's when we discovered the gap. We've heard a lot from Ambassador Mahiga and Dr. Wright about this gap. To put it in context again, 71 percent of children in Africa get some form of primary education; 32 percent of children get some form of secondary education. That's a factor of 2.2; millions of kids falling by the wayside. This is not because there's some rejection of the importance of education in Africa. My experience with the African students who have come to our summer camps is that regardless of their socioeconomic background, these are some of the hardest working and most enthusiastic people I've ever encountered when they think about the importance of education and its value to their lives.

When you look at the returns to education on the African continent, it's clear that education is important. Africa has the highest returns to education of any continent in the world; 38 percent returns to primary education, 25 percent returns to secondary education, 28 percent returns to tertiary education. Those are about three times the returns to education here in North America. Education is an investment in your family's future.

So, what is going on? Why aren't there more kids going to secondary schools in Africa? Why is there this gap? Why are millions of kids not able to progress to secondary education? We've heard some of the reasons. World Bank-mandated programs are pushing primary education and getting meaningful growth in the number of students in primary schools, which has been great. But, these are cash-strapped governments that have diverted resources from secondary schools or have not been able to keep pace with the need for secondary schools as Ambassador Mahiga described in Tanzania. There are then a lot of kids who are all dressed up with nowhere to go. One of the compelling moments for me that made this an important thing for me to do with my life was when I had read article about was one of the top performing students in the whole country on the O level exams which are taken after 10th grade. She lived 150 from the nearest finishing school where she could take her O levels, and she was working as a maid. After the article was written, she got a job as a bank teller in a town down the road. If the article had been written in the U.S. there would have been thousands of dollars flowing to get this person further education. But there are inefficiencies in the system.

There are obviously roles for a lot of governmental and nongovernmental organizations to step in and make a difference. We wondered what the role of private or independent education is. I have some background in secondary education. Is there an opportunity to create private or independent schools that can address these gaps?

That's how the African Leadership Academy concept was born. We started out by looking at waiting lists at private or independent secondary schools to see if there is, in fact, a gap in private education. We found that there was. In Kenya there 29 private secondary schools with an average waiting list of 70 students. One secondary school has a waiting list of 600 students. There is a huge excess demand for private secondary education. We saw similar figures in Ghana, Botswana, and on and on. We saw that there are already 60,000 African children enrolled in private schools that are charging $5,000 or more a year despite these huge waiting lists. So, there's a potential market opportunity here. What you've seen, particularly in the most developed nations in Africa like South Africa are for-profit entities stepping up to develop chains of schools. So, we said, what if we started a nonprofit entity that could address both of these issues, the lack of capacity in the public school system and this excess demand in the private school system.

What are we? We charge fees to those students who can pay. That is what allows us to subsidize 50 percent of our students on full scholarship from our own internal operating surpluses. We bring those students in and give them a unique curriculum in leadership and entrepreneurship. We hope we will inspire a passion for Africa, to create those leaders that can inspire positive change.

Joel Samoff: As you've heard, each of the panelists has put a series of items on the agenda. The next part of our strategy this morning is to offer each of the panelists a couple of minutes to pick up on one issue or another that they're colleagues raised and then to comment on that. After that, we'll open the discussion up to all of you.

Jeanne Moulton: We have two gentlemen here who are beginning secondary schools in African countries. So, I have a burning question I'm going to ask. I referred to the problem of youth that every country faces; how do you point your young people in a constructive direction? This is what you're doing in your schools. But, as you said, you're also only reaching a very, very, very small portion of the populations in those countries. In former times that small group of people who went to secondary school—usually boys—became elite in the government. I presume that's not your goal. My question is what is your goal in terms of the few lucky ones who get to go to your school, how do you help them to spread something more broadly through their peers?

Augustine Mahiga: The approach has to take into account two factors. Whether it is a primary or secondary, it has to be related to employment generation. That also depends on investment in some kind of vocational schools. At the primary level, after literacy it would be useful to impart some basic skills that would increase the versatility of graduates to be able to carry out certain functions. At secondary school as well, where the productivity is higher, the schools should not be ends in themselves. They have to be geared towards some basic preparation to undertake vocational occupations.

There are the strong students who academically would continue further. But, those who are less strong should be given an opportunity to have some employment. That is a function of curriculum development. You cannot make business people in secondary school, but you can improvise to develop creativity in the curriculum that would make them go into vocational training. The planning of education has to be integrated. Get out of the box of a primary or secondary school and enable the recipients of primary and secondary schools to be able to diversify and take advantage of available opportunities that have to be created both by the government and the private sector, to enable employment creation not only as employees but also as entrepreneurs in their own way. I learned yesterday that the VIJ (Village Entrepreneur Initiative) is one of those ways where you create jobs either through employment or self employment in both urban and rural areas.

Bud MacKenzie: What do the women need? They need to have education to a marketable skill. When conditions are so bad, they need to have the ability to go somewhere else and live, quite frankly. You can get to them, unlike the men. So, I would urge you to go and become part of the process. Education and the economic side of life has big buzzwords called "adding value" to what they already do.

Here's an example. The potatoes come out of the ground in September. Everybody runs to Kabul to try to sell their potatoes; they get a penny a pound. Trucks from Pakistan come over into Kabul, load them up with potatoes, run them back over the border and put them in storage sheds. Six months later, they come back and sell them to the Afghans for 50 percent more than they paid six months prior. What do you do? Build storage sheds. How much is a storage shed? $4,000. They'll recover their investment in about a year and a half or two.

They can make jams. They bring apricots and sell them on the market for pennies on the dollar. They can no longer get jam from Pakistan. I'm talking to the Business School here. I'm talking about that it doesn't take large plans to make significant impact on the lives of people who are basically agrarian. There's no need to get to the point where they can go work in the city. In fact, their lives are really quite good on the farm. It's beautiful, the air's good and clean. They just need to get above subsistence living. Chris Bradford: I wanted to address Jeanne's question, as well. She asked about the "problem of youth." I see my role as reframing that into the "potential of youth." I loved it when Dr. Wright said, "Inspired young people can change the world." That's what I believe.

Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu were 26 years old when they started the ANC Youth League, which really started to drive the end of apartheid. Bill Gates was 19 years when he started Microsoft. I believe youth can change the world. I believe we have a role at the African Leadership Academy and at other schools in Africa to inspire kids not to think of their future on the African continent as elites and necessarily being in government, although there are very important roles to play in government.

We need to inspire youth to be leaders in the social sector, to be entrepreneurs, break down Pan African barriers to trade and create robust businesses that employ and serve millions of people. That's the challenge that we have. What we've tried to do is create a curriculum that can serve as a model, that inspires that sort of leadership and those sorts of entrepreneurial activities in the children that we serve. Our biggest weakness is that we only serve a very small number. We need to figure out how to serve as many as possible.

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