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Panel on Funding and Allocation: Prioritizing Educational Goals
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
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Moderator
Martin Carnoy Panelists
Robert Prouty
Maya Ajmera
Lynn Murphy
Ken Lee, Senior Advisor |
Now that we've heard some of the priorities and challenges to education in the developing world, we're going to shift our focus to funding these goals. Given the amount of funding that's available from NGOs and international organizations and agencies, there are still a lot of choices to be made. So, this panel will focus on how to allocate these resources to most effectively fund our goals in education. I'd like to introduce our moderator for this panel, Professor Martin Carnoy from the Stanford University School of Education. Professor Carnoy has written on issues of economic policy, the economics of education, and extensively on education finance issue. Please join me in welcoming Professor Carnoy and the rest of our panelists.
Martin Carnoy: Hello, I'd like to thank Stanford Association for International Development (SAID) for organizing this conference and bringing all of you together to hear these very interesting speakers. As you heard, the question this afternoon is about funding education. We heard this morning about education goals. One of the interesting things about education goals in the developing world is who sets these goals. The international agencies have a big say in actually determining what they consider important in education. In part, those goals that you heard earlier reflect some notion of demand for education in developing countries. There's almost a universal sense all over the world, not just in developed countries, that a definition of human well being has to include education. In fact, education is generally considered, in most countries of the world, one of the most important priorities that people have both for children and for adults. You may know that Stanford University is now involved in a huge fundraising program called the International Initiative in which one of the three areas they're interested in is human well being. In that area, education and health are the most important priorities.
Many of the details of how to translate this general demand for more and better education, particularly in very low income countries, is developed by experts in the bilateral and international agencies. So, how do these agencies decide how to pursue these general education goals? How do they choose investments and how do they choose to deliver resources to fund these projects? This panel is going to give us insights into how that happens and maybe how they're thinking about changes that might occur in the way that's done.
Let me introduce them alphabetically. Maya Ajmera is a really incredible person. She is founder and president of The Global Fund for Children, a grant-making organization investing in community based organizations serving vulnerable children around the world. She also founded The Global Fund for Children's book publishing venture, which is called The Global Fund for Children Books. She is going to be able to tell us a lot from the NGO side. Ken Lee is the senior advisor to the U.S. Agency for International Development. He works in the Bureau for Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade. Prior to joining USAID, Ken worked 18 years as an international consultant and educator. He certainly can talk to us about bilateral issues. Lynn Murphy is one of our former graduate students from Stanford. She got her PhD from my department. I was not her advisor, but I know her well. She now works for the Hewlett Foundation as a senior fellow. Interestingly enough, she did her dissertation on NGOs and their new role in relationship to the large international agencies, specializing in the situation in Africa.
Robert Prouty is the acting manager of the Fast Track Initiative of the World Bank. The Fast Track Initiative is a partnership of donor civil society groups who purpose it to accelerate progress toward the 2015 Millennium Goals. The Millennium Goals have been set by a group of international agencies and nations in which everyone is going to have good quality primary school education by 2015. Maya, would you like to start?
Maya Ajmera: Sure. It's a pleasure to be here. I have to recognize Clara Schmidt who was an Ascher Summer Fellow last year at Global Fund for Children. So, thank you for having me here. I'm going to start off by telling you a very quick story. It's become quite a famous story. I had graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a scholarship. My professors in India had literally said, "Go out, visit the grass roots and travel a lot." And, I did. I got off at the train station at Bhubaneswar.
I don't know if you've ever been to India, but trains are whipping by and there are hordes of people walking around. I came off the train and I saw 40 kids in a circle with their tiny siblings with tattered work books in deep learning, and there was a teacher there. I went up and spoke to her in Hindi, but she spoke Oriya. We somehow communicated. I said, "What's going on here?" She said, "Well, these kids live on the train platform. They don't go to school. They don't know how to read and write. They work and play here; this is their home."
One day, a teacher named Indrajit [Kirana], the school teacher, said instead of getting these kids to go to school she was going to bring the school to the kids. She created the Train Platform School. I was blown away. I said, "What does it cost to run a school with 40 kids and two teachers?" It not only gives basic literacy but also human rights awareness, life skills, and gets them matriculated into government schools. She said about $600 a year.
That's when the idea was born for me. I started looking for innovative community based solutions run by extraordinary leaders at the grass roots level. I started thinking that we could be a broker of small amounts of capital to innovative grass roots organizations, listening to leaders who develop their own solutions. That is really the key to the work of The Global Fund for Children. The other piece on the allocation side is we really focus on children of the last mile. I'm talking about the 100 million who cannot actually read and write, and the 200-300 million children who go in and out of school, the 1 in 6 children who work, children who are caught in the web of trafficking and prostitution. These are children who are invisible, who may not even have identity cards. These are girls and children who are hidden, who are working, within homes, or are in early child marriages and who have never been able to go to school.
This is where we focus our work. I really look to community based organizations to provide that capital and educational services where the public system has failed to reach these children.
I think the CBOs do an excellent job of that. I want to make something very clear. A lot of people have used (the term) NGO a lot today. NGOs and CBOs are sort of the same thing but a lot of people use NGO to refer to these big international groups. I'm calling CBOs those organizations led by local leaders who have developed their own solutions.
We have four areas that deal with children and youth where we tend to allocate our resources. These are schools and scholarships—we look at innovative ways that schools get to children like Train Platform Schools, Boat Schools, schools run for AIDS orphans. Also, child prostitution and trafficking and hazardous child labor. We're against hazardous labor, but we're not against labor per se. So, how do children work and go to school? We're very interested in that sort of model. And the education of vulnerable boys, which we believe is becoming a global crisis as we're starting to see literacy rates and numbers of boys versus girls in school plummet. I think the best investment in development can be girls and women, but we need to invest in boys, as well.
I gave you one example of the Train Platform Schools. Let me give you another example from Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a mostly waterway country. There are a lot of children who live in villages who don't go to school. Girls especially are denied access to school. This is because children either have to travel quite some distance and their parents don't want them to go or because of cultural tradition.
A young man there started something called the Boat Schools. Basically, he took a boat with a computer powered by solar energy, created a library and had a teacher on the boat and went to a village. The school came to the village, and the girls came onto the boat every day and learned their reading, writing, and arithmetic. We found this organization when they were about a $50,000 organization. He was literally getting money from communities, from small European funders, but he had never reached the United States in terms of getting some funding. So, we gave a small grant of $5,000 to fund a couple of Boat Schools. This past year, after four years of funding this organization, the literacy rate results that they've gotten are incredible.
We were one of the instigators of them getting the Bill and Melinda Gates Access to Learning Award. They were awarded a $1 million grant to replicate that school in 100 Boat Schools within the waterways of Bangladesh.
Now the government of Bangladesh is starting to look at replicating and scaling this even further. I see the role of The Global Fund for Children as being a catalyst, of strengthening these CBOs, and leveraging additional resources so they are able to reach children of the last mile that the government and public systems cannot reach.
I just want to say quickly that Global Fund for Children is starting to look into private schools for the poor. In our travels throughout the world, we are starting to see little schools that are privatized crop up in urban slums. Poor people are willing to pay, even if it's 50 cents a month, to see their kids educated. Now, the qualities are very different in each of these private schools. But, we can't ignore the phenomena going on around the world. So, Global Fund for Children is now starting to look at some areas where we can be helpful in this movement, whether it's providing teacher training or curriculum development or merit-based scholarships or helping to create associations for private schools in a country. I could talk forever, but she says stop.
Ken Lee: As you said, I'm with USAID, so I have to put the sponsor's message in the front that says, "Don't treat anything I say as the official policy of the U.S. government." We can go from there and have a more freewheeling discussion. I want to talk about criteria that we're given, criteria that we choose, and criteria that we should probably consider more even though it makes us feel uncomfortable when we're making a decision about allocating resources within and to the education sector.
We are a government agency and that clearly sets parameters within which we have to do what we do. We are accountable to and guided by Congress, and sometimes we are told by Congress precisely where we will spend our money, both in terms of programs such as basic education or particular countries. You can imagine a number of countries where we have to spend our money. That's important to understand when you look at how resources flow to the education sector.
In addition, we are a member of the executive branch. I know that sounds like high school government class, but we are often guided in what we have to do by presidential initiatives. There are currently 16 different presidential initiatives, I believe, that impact how we are able to engage ourselves in development issues, particularly in education. In addition to that, we are part of the executive branch and have to coordinate quite closely with the U.S. State department. I know one of the panelists this morning talked about the "fragile states." The fragile states strategy and issue is an evolution of the executive branch's discussions, and we are responsible and accountable to that branch. So, when one looks at what USAID is doing, keep in mind there are criteria that we are given and not that we choose, for better or worse. Those create parameters within which we have to make choices and decisions.
Second, there are criteria we choose. I'm going to go through a number of criteria that I think have been particularly important to the agency currently that I think you'll enjoy hearing about. One was mentioned earlier by the ambassador as well as by the United Nations representatives in regard to country driven strategies. We have a great field presence around the world. Our USAID missions are located in country, and that gives us a great opportunity to work local institutions, governments, and the whole group of stake holders to look at where is our comparative advantage. Where can we fit in a country-driven strategy, where we can coordinate and collaborate with country parties to both design and then to implement? Second, we try to leverage our resources.
Despite the fact that we do have a fairly large sum of money in some ways, we're actually quite limited, in part because of the constraints that we're given on how we spend money. But, we're not the biggest player in development. We don't have the same kind of money as the World Bank, for example. And, we don't have the same kind of money as the private sector. I'll come back to that in a moment. But, as a consequence, we really need to look at how we can increase our impact. Sometimes that means trying to address things at the policy level, but sometimes it means finding great organizations whose projects we can look at, fund, then replicate and scale up throughout a country or a region. It varies, but that's always the lens through which we're looking. How can we get the greatest multiplier effect from our investment? How can we mobilize other resources to help our resources have a greater impact?
Third, alliances are very important to our current way of doing business, and particularly alliances with the private sector. The amount of money that was flowing 20 or 30 years ago from the developed world to the "less developed" world, a lot of it went through donor organizations. That's just not the case now. The vast majority of funding that's transferred goes through the private sector and private institutions. If you don't understand that, you're just not going to have the kind of impact you'd like to have. You have to figure out a way to coordinate and work with that sector. Whatever your personal feelings about the nature of their work, that is where the resources are moving and you need to figure out how to connect to that. So, we have a great deal of emphasis on trying to figure out productive ways to collaborate with the private sector. Indeed, sometimes the private sector is willing to collaborate precisely because USAID will put its name on a project. They see that as a risk reduction strategy from their perspective. So, we try to find ways to make that appealing to them and identify great groups to work with where they'll feel confident getting involved because we're involved. We're increasingly trying to take a sector-wide approach despite the fact that we have $390 some million in basic education earmarked. We have been trying to expand our focus to look at education as a sector-wide endeavor, as a system. You can't just look at basic education anymore; you have to look at basic, primary, secondary, and higher all together. Indeed, we've had an increasing focus on higher education institutions as institutional platforms that can then provide the institutional capacity for not only short and medium term, but long term, ongoing human capacity development as it relates to the needs of the education sector and other sectors. So, I think that you can anticipate some changes in investments that are trying to capitalize on that system and sector-wide approach.
Fourth - and it was brought up again this morning - an increasing amount of time and energy is being dedicated by our agency to look at issues related to youth and how we engage youth in our program, not just as beneficiaries but as the agents of change in their countries. If you do not see them as agents of change, then you're ignoring them in terms of all the energy, talent, and skill they can bring. We're trying to find better ways to do that. Related to that is an effort to try to make sure that our investments focus on education that is relevant. I say it's related because if we're engaging youth in educational opportunities that frankly aren't relevant to the economic opportunities or lack thereof in their country, then we're basically wasting money. We need to make sure that education gives them tools that they can subsequently apply to better not only their lives, but the lives of their communities. So, those are also key criteria. That gets into some investments that we're making to increase workforce development. It's different approach than the 1960s in terms of human resources and manpower planning. It's much more integrated with the private sector and broader investments. We can discuss that further by email, perhaps.
Lastly is criteria that we probably need to consider even though it makes us uncomfortable. What if our investments in education are actually not the best way to allocate our resources? What if our educational goals and objectives are better served by investments in other sectors? What if investing in economic growth activities at the microenterprise level would actually get us closer to and be more efficient in achieving the outcomes we have in mind for the education sector? I'm not saying we don't want to invest in education resources. Clearly, we invest tons of our resources on education. But, I think we need to challenge ourselves with the question of not how should we allocate money in education but whether we should. Under what conditions is it a good investment and under what conditions would it perhaps simply be a poor investment because the other investment opportunities would actually be of greater service? I'll highlight something that Bud said earlier when he talked about working with the Afghani citizens providing sheds. If that provision of sheds increases local income and then allows kids to go to school who otherwise wouldn't have gone to school or if it pays for small private schools that they otherwise wouldn't have been paid for, maybe that $600 was better spent buying a shed than it was buying books or something else in the education sector. I put that out there to be provocative.
Lynn Murphy: I am very happy to be here this afternoon and sitting on this side of the table. I kind of feel in some way that I'm some sort of a testament. I recently finished my PhD here at Stanford, and it was definitely through the social networks, the intellectual resources, and through faculty and alumni that I was able to both pursue my studies of NGOs and what was going on in Africa and also consult with a number of different organizations. I was consulting with the Hewlett Foundation while I was trying to write, before I joined them officially.
I would just say to all of you who are here as students today to just keep doing it. I am able to actually have a job in the Bay Area. I think often students sitting here think that we're at an arm's distance from a lot of the activities that are going on in D.C. and in other parts of the world. But there are incredible opportunities around.
So with that and with Ken's provocative thoughts, that is my job now - to sit and think through all of these complicated issues. I just wanted to start with why would a foundation invest in education anyway, of all the things in the world that you can invest in? There are arguments that education is a public good, it's in the government's domain. It should be the government that is providing more and more monies to support recurrent [costs to] budget. There are no easy answers. There's no magic bullet. It becomes really unclear what you should do when you really start looking at some of the empirical evidence about what really works.
I wanted to start with the story of how Hewlett began its interest in supporting universal basic and secondary education in the world. Actually, the interest within the Hewlett Foundation began within the Population Program. Hewlett actually has five big programs and currently, three of those are interested in this.
The Population Program began to think about all the outcomes it was interested in such as good reproductive health outcomes, low fertility, and what was going on with women. They kept finding that education was the best predictor of what was happening. In a sense, education is the independent variable for all these outcomes they were interested. So, the Population Program first began to think about supporting some advocacy grants to keep universal education up on the political agenda.
It also embarked upon a research project housed at the Academy of American Arts and Sciences with an economist in public health and a demographer. That happened about five years ago. Since that time, the Foundation's investment portfolio as a whole has taken a much more international look.
The second program of the five is the Education Program. It has been moving more internationally, supporting investments in things called "Open Contents." They're very interested in the role of technology internationally to improve teacher training classroom instruction. The newest program, the Global Development Program, also became really interested in the issue of universal education. They became interested in a few different ways. If you think about economic opportunities and equitable growth, it's really hard to ignore education. But, I would also argue that just the fact that this SAID conference is about education says to us how front and center education is on the global political agenda, and it has been for quite some time.
My job is to work with these three different programs that have different ideas about what exactly they do with their grant-making strategies and try to find the intersection between them, developing a long term investment interest in supporting universal education. A lot of the conventional wisdom out there is saying, "Why would a foundation invest in education?" The rationales that we come up with are for the human development kinds of argument—poverty reduction and also on the grounds of equity.
Let me say really quickly what the Hewlett Foundation has invested in. What we've done so far has been exploratory grant-making. It's my job to kind of take it into what they call a "formal initiative." Up to this point they've done some grants in advocacy. One of the groups that Dr. Wright mentioned this morning, the Global Campaign for Education, received a grant for keeping the political pressure up, to keep Education For All up on the political agenda. Another group at the Council of Foreign Relations called the Center for Universal Education has been also keeping the political pressure up and convening people to talk about these issues. Another group is the Basic Education Coalition. They've provided a few research grants, one very global grant trying to look at what happens if you pull in demographers and those from public health to actually look at education? What fresh perspective might they lend to it? They've also actually funded a study in Kenya to look at the school fees. It's a longitudinal study over five years to look at whether fees are the barrier to getting kids enrolled in schools. The study is still ongoing, so I can't report what those findings are, but I think everybody will be really interested in that. They've also done some grants around technology, supporting different kinds of instruction.
How are those investment decisions made? As I said, there are these three different programs that have different takes on what they would do, so there are both organization opportunities or constraints in the sense of how do you find the intersection within those three programs? We've already found things that foundations can do. Foundations have particular kinds of assets. They have the political powers of convening and disseminating. They can get people together. They have intellectual assets in the sense that they can get people within the foundation or hire them to help think through really complex, thorny problems. Then, they have the financial assets. I would argue that foundations' funding should take risks. It's not risk-averse funding. We should be kind of challenging some of the paradigms and really see where the levers of change really are.
Thinking about the criteria that have been used, I would argue that a lot of them have been criteria about equity—equitable growth, equitable access to information, equitable inclusion particularly in the interest of girls. But, there are also things that foundations do —they try to find synergy. In October of 2005, the Hewlett Foundation joined the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa. This is a consortium of six big foundations that have made an institutional commitment to support higher education in Africa and involves $200 million over the next five years. I know one of the pieces is working on broadband and various things. The Foundation is also thinking through how to support think tanks in the developing world to develop the knowledge infrastructure so that the ideas aren't always coming out of D.C. and London, but actually coming of the countries themselves.
I'll stop by saying that going forward, how we'll put these together and come up with a really coherent investment strategy is my mandate, and I will look forward to answering questions and working with some of you to help me think that through.
Robert Prouty: I want to start off, first of all, by thanking you all for being here on a quasi holiday weekend. To have such a turnout is pretty remarkable. It's also very encouraging for all of us who have long looked to Stanford for kind of the intellectual ferment and agitation around some of these ideas that we deal with constantly, including this topic today of resource allocation. So, I'm looking forward to the discussion session that will follow.
I want to say a few words about the Fast Track Initiative, commonly referred to as the FTI. The Fast Track Initiative is the only operational response that's been put in place by the international community to the Education For All (EFA) goals established in 2000 and the lending development goal of universal primary education. FTI was created in 2002 and is housed at the World Bank, but it's certainly not a World Bank institution. I say that partially because the World Bank doesn't put much money into it. That's been one of the frustrations, actually, of the Fast Track Initiative. The World Bank houses it and puts in just over half of the operating costs, which run about $1 million a year. But, it essentially doesn't finance any of the funds.
The Fast Track Initiative has put two funds in place. It aims to cover something in the range of 10-15 per cent of the increased external financing costs associated with universal primary education. There are two funds, the larger of which is called the Catalytic Fund. This is currently dispersing about $150 million a year. There's also a capacity building fund that goes with that called the Education Program Development Fund, which will disperse $19.3 million this year. Currently, the Fast Track Initiative is providing support to 54 low income countries. It has currently endorsed education plans in 20 countries. These are essentially a certification to the donors that this country is ready for full financing. There are six other countries about to be endorsed, and we expect the number of endorsed countries to go from 20 to about 60 over the next two years. There are, roughly speaking, 30 multilateral and bilateral partners and United Nations' agencies that are part of the Fast Track. This is essentially the umbrella group that manages a lot of the dialogue around EFA as it comes to resource allocation.
I want to speak a little bit about the resource side of things and how decisions are made. Let me talk about three general factors. First, there is the contrast between the country-driven and the donor-driven approaches. When we talk about the criteria on which we make our decisions, we will often make it sound as if the only consideration is what's happening and the impact at the country level. But, that would be a false impression. I wish that were so, and it's something that the Fast Track Initiative certainly has in part dealt with how to get the donor community working together in support of country-driven strategies.
But, the sad fact is that I believe I am not exaggerating in saying the bulk of international financing for aid in education is driven by donor country factors rather than recipient country factors. That's changing, but the portion of aid that is directly dependent on implementation from the country of origin remains remarkably high, well over 50 per cent in the case of many countries.
The second set of considerations as relates to resource allocation has to do with needs versus performance. To the extent that the country issues are what's driving resource allocation decisions, in many ways you could say the history of this dialogue has been the history of trying to find the balance between a needs-based approach and a performance-based approach; give money to a country because they need it or give money to a country because they're likely to use it well. Again, the Fast Track Initiative is a part of something we call the Monterrey Consensus, which is essentially a quid pro quo that says if you put good programs in place then we will finance them. Many agencies have similar sorts of things. The World Bank, for example, has IDA ceilings of amounts that are allocated per country which are based a whole range of criteria having to do with performance as a starting point; is the country likely to spend the money well?
A third area that we often don't talk about is the level at which the financing is being received. Is the money going to the country at the central level into central ministries and then being diffused in some way through existing programs or is there some process for putting money in at a lower level, for instance at the country level. The Fast Track Initiative has tried hard to find ways of ensuring that the funding goes down to the country level. We're not always successful, but certainly we are able far more when we are able to disperse directly down to the country level. That's certainly one of the issues that comes up when we're trying to decide how to make allocation decisions; where will we able to put the money in and what will the political factors be that prevent it from getting down to the service delivery level.
I'm just going to throw out a few questions. Again, a lot of these issues could be debated at great length. I thought maybe I would also end with a few provocative ideas as Ken did. These are areas that have to do with how we make resource allocation decisions. There has been a lot said today about the gender gap. This gets into the question of needs-based. Do you put the money in areas where you have determined that there's a specific need and try to channel the funds in that direction? My own observation is that the gender gap is very real, but in general, we addressed it at the wrong level. The gender gap has largely been closed. It doesn't mean there are not a lot of issues there. It just means that the gender gap, at higher levels of the system, is so astonishingly enormous that it has just always struck me as odd that we put all of our efforts on closing the gender gap at the primary school level. So, one idea I put out there for you is that although the gender gap is there, we need to revisit how we're dealing with it and revisit, in general, whether there's a need to move well beyond primary school levels.
One more point I would put out there as a general failure of the international community when it comes to resource allocation is that we've generally not linked resource allocation to outcomes. The astonishing fact is that in the majority of developing countries we do not yet know about whether children are learning at adequate levels or not. In general, we know they are not learning at adequate levels; we do not have a single good measure of learning that is agreed upon across countries. I believe that's one of the biggest challenges that needs to be resolved, certainly within the next year or two if we have any hope of ensuring that schooling with good quality comes about.
I'll end with one last comment. We have somehow slipped into what I believe are very much "good guy, bad guy" paradigms. NGO: good guy—multilateral: bad guy. I think, from my own experience with this work it's much more complicated than that. I have certainly seen many wonderful things happening at the NGO level. I actually spent more of my life working at the NGO level than at the multilateral level. But, I think that there clearly is a case to be made in terms of resource allocation. One side or the other side working alone is almost inevitably going to get it wrong. Thank you.
Martin Carnoy: Since we're ending with a bunch of questions, let me try to provoke you into a discussion amongst yourselves. I think we have two groups. At one level, for example, the Global Fund for Children has the luxury of seeing local needs and can fill them progressively through the foundations, some of which are quite large but can take risks without really worrying about what the consequences are since almost any project might have some positive effective. The other end is the bilateral and multilateral agencies that are in some form or other spending tax dollars and therefore really have to be accountable to at least the donor country constituencies that provide those tax dollars. Therefore, they have to show some results.
Yet, speaking to Bob's last point, do you ever collect any evidence of outcomes? Obviously, if you fund a local school, you can see the effects. But even there, when you provide funding is there sort of a correction system that takes place where you find that you did or didn't do something good? Does that inform the next level? Do you build evaluations into your investments so that you can then make wiser decisions the next time?
Ken Lee: Actually, we do have a lot of investments in evaluation and assessment. Unfortunately, to be honest, in the 1990s the agency went through a lot of difficult financial times and lost a lot of personnel. One of the things that, unfortunately, was placed lower on the ladder of priorities was assessment and evaluation. We relied heavily upon our NGO/CBO contracting partners to do that, but we weren't providing them with the same level of funding to do that.
Now, I will say to our credit and hopefully looking to the future, when our former administrator Andrew Natsios came in, he recommitted the agency to that type of investment, recognizing that if we're really going to get the best out of our taxpayer dollar, we need to learn very carefully from what happened in the past. We rely on universities and the broader community to take the initiative and provide us with information. But since 2001, we've been increasing our investments in that area and indeed, the unit I work with is putting a lot more money into that. I just got back from doing four weeks of project assessments that hopefully shaped about $150 million of investments going forward. So clearly, we try to do that.
Robert Prouty: One of the challenges for us has been this question of monitoring and evaluation because it can be very closely linked with "raising the flag" kinds of behaviors where you do certain things that we can point to and say, "We did that." So, on the one hand, you need to have some sense of the impact of the overall support that you're giving. On the other hand, it ought to be some impact that is meaningful at the country level but not just so that you can raise the flag and say, "We did it." Often, donors get involved in doing things that are flashy and showy, but don't necessarily have huge sustainable impact.
In the Fast Track Initiative, one of the elements of the education plans that countries must put together to have endorsed for financing is an acceptable monitoring and evaluation system. So, that's all there. But, to be completely frank, this is an area that has been virtually a complete failure internationally for the past 20 or 30 years. I say that simply because we do not, in developing countries with very few exceptions, have any reasonable way of systematically tracking trends in terms of learning achievement over time, Certainly one of the ultimate and proximate goals of any education system has to be of learning achievement. We're not doing that, and the international monitoring of the Education For All process does not yet track learning achievement. This is simply an unacceptable place to be half way through the process between 2000 and 2015.
I have maybe one last comment in terms of the tracking of goals. The fact is that we also don't have a good sense of who is still out of school. We have numbers that are bouncing all over the place. They've been as high as 130 million; they've been down as low as 82.5 million. We don't have a good sense of that and in particular, we don't have a good sense of which are the most vulnerable populations that are still being deprived of educational opportunities. And, classic case in point is children with disabilities. We don't know what percentage of the children out of school are children with disabilities. And yet, estimates run from as low as 10-15 per cent to as high as 40 per cent of the remaining out-of-school children. It's an area that's getting a lot of lip service; we're doing impact evaluations and various other things. But, there is not yet a credible, systematic architecture in place for monitoring and evaluation.
Maya Ajmera: I'll just say that at the Global Fund for Children, we see trends since we're at the grass roots. We really listen to our partners. So, when we started doing the portfolio on the education of vulnerable boys, that literally came from our partners; "We have to do something for our boys." We heard it across the board, and we developed a portfolio. It didn't come from us.
I will also agree that the monitoring and evaluation is very difficult. I will admit it. It has been very difficult at Global Fund for Children because each NGO, each community organization, has a different way of evaluating their successes and their outcomes. Then, you put all that together to show the world, and it is very difficult to standardize it. So, I would like to say that for us, since our grants are up to $15,000 and we're catalysts to local groups, I'd like to call ourselves "knowledge generators." We're really creating knowledge and leaving it to the multilaterals to figure out the standardization process and scaling up. Actually, even with the Boat Schools, they're now reaching thousands of children. One of the areas that they're going to have to figure out is how to standardize their results across the board.
Lynn Murphy: I would just say a few things. One is that if you're a Hewlett grantee, you can always apply for a little additional money to do an evaluation. That's one way the organization has tried to deal with seeing whether something good did or didn't happen. I would also say that the Foundation hiring me to try to deal with the interests between and to work with these three programs, to try to see how to think through all the issues in education, is a commitment. It' s not setting up a monitoring and evaluation system, but it's saying, "Let's think through this rather than just pour money into places when we don't really know what the good investments should be." Many people know there are trends happening to funds more randomized, controlled trials and things like that to figure out which are the best investments. There could be a huge debate about whether or not that's the best way to go about figuring out which education interventions work and work better. But, that's definitely something that's floating around the Foundation to address those issues.
Ken Lee: One has to keep in mind the complexity of trying to really do a good evaluation, to really look at this issue of return on investment. It's incredibly complicated in a development environment—not to say that it shouldn't be done because it's clearly complicated. It's complicated, but it has to be done. Indeed, I think universities have a leading role to play in that, given the intellectual firepower gathered at a campus like Stanford. But, you also have to keep in mind that for every dollar that somebody wants to spend on evaluation, there are 30-50 other organizations, institutions, and community groups who are saying, "We have a need that has to be addressed today." There's a feeling of triage anyway in the development community, and that sort of accents it. So, it's important work to do because you want to make sure that your investments are most productive they can possibly be. At the same time, when you're looking at some of the needs we've talked about today like Africa, it's really hard to say: "Okay, we'll put that money into that program on evaluation," instead of trying to do more here where we think we're doing good work. It's a tension and it's a difficult one.
Martin Carnoy: I think it's interesting that most of the money that has been invested has gone into increasing the quantity of schooling. Even in terms of what you are doing, Maya, it's basically to provide education for kids. I think it's totally rational to do that because I think you can really see the returns on that. The quality thing on that is a much more complicated issue.
Let me ask another question. Getting back to this issue of economic growth and where to put resources, should we put resources in education? This morning we heard about eradicating poverty, that one of ways you can really increase education in general is to reduce poverty. Then, people will be more likely to be able to get their kids in school, even through private solutions. So, even in terms of foundations and the Global Fund for Children, how do you think about balancing putting money into education versus putting money into poverty eradication or health? Ken, you raised this provocative question and I'd like to pursue it a little bit.
Maya Ajmera: I'll take it from two angles. I want to just talk a little bit about what we're doing for youth and the increased high unemployment rates, young people between the ages of 14 to 22 who have not very many skills and are or will be unemployed. These are young people who have been in and out of school. They've actually got some form of schooling—maybe one, two, or three years, but dropped out. It's very interesting. One of the reasons they drop out is that it's not interesting and doesn't have very much relevance in their lives. One of the things I keep seeing around the world through my colleagues is the entrepreneurial energy of young people and how to harness that. So, we started funding CBOs that are actually doing asset building for youth. That is not vocational training. I'm talking about building real businesses with real equity positions as young people. We've funded several groups in Mexico, one group that actually makes goat cheese. These are former street children who are boys and went to school for a year or two that have actually learned how to make, market, and sell goat cheese. They actually have small equity stakes in this goat cheese production business, and they actually sell to all the embassies in Mexico. It's pretty extraordinary. I can give you lots of examples of that where we want to start investing in this idea of asset building for youth.
The other one is private schools for the poor. As students, when you put on your backpacks and travel around the world, really keep your eyes out for these small little schools. You will see metal roofs and five or six kids learning, and it's a private school. Parents pay $1 or 50 cents a month. There are some real problems about teacher quality and accreditation. But, parents are paying. We need to start learning from that and start thinking about how we can be beneficial in helping to support that movement. And, you can also let the market do what the market's going to do. But, those are two things that at least Global Fund for Children is looking at.
Ken Lee: I think part of it is it's just important to ask the question. I think traditionally, there's been, "We're going to fund education. We're going to fund education. We're going to fund education." "Basic education. Basic education. Basic education." I think it's really important to put this question on the table, given the objectives in the education arena in terms of helping youth and others. I think it's a good point that we've done a great job at the primary level, but we've done a horrible job at the secondary and post secondary level. But, to ask that question is, I think, itself a creative act in the sense of what it can bring to the table. It helps you see decision points and tradeoffs. If you're not asking those questions, you're not seeing some of those decision points and tradeoffs, and you are at greater risk of misallocating resources. Education resources are allocated within a whole set of society's resources. One has to think carefully about that, I think.
There's a book by C.K. Prahlad called The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. I'm sure the Graduate School of Business at Stanford is wise enough to put that book in front of you. It's a really important book in terms of looking at this notion that there's a whole market out there and a whole group of people – young and old—who are very entrepreneurial that needs to be tapped, and it can be done so in a way that has great social benefits, as well. There isn't necessarily a contradiction between advancing the market and advancing social benefit, although there can be. Please don't get me wrong on that. But, one has to look at how one can capitalize on the potential self-reinforcing elements there. So, I would recommend that for people's consideration, as well.
Lynn Murphy: I think perhaps Martin trained me too well when I was a doctoral student here because I have no easy answer to that question at all, nor by thinking through the empirical evidence about where the return is seen—at the individual and societal level. It's a hard one. It's difficult when you think about the link between education and economic growth. As I said, the conventional wisdom and part of the rationale for why the Hewlett Foundation has an investment interest in education is the whole idea of eradication of poverty. I think everybody assumes it's necessary. You have to have an education to be competitive and take advantage of any of the economic opportunities. Compared to other investments, it becomes really difficult to think through. But, because it's so front and center on the global political agenda and because there are some many rationales for why do education, it still sits there.
I'm kind of giving a personal comment, but I think that we're asking schools to do basically everything. Now, we're asking schools they need to be feeding children. There's evidence saying if you deworm children, they'll have better learning outcomes. But, this is also within an environment where there's a collapsed health system. So, we're really looking at schools to be the providers of all sorts of social services because, in most communities, it has become the only presence of the state.
Robert Prouty: I believe there's just no point in asking that question anymore. I don't see it complicated at all. I see it as clear and obvious. Of course you invest in education. I don't think anybody questions whether education, in general, is a good investment. The international community has clearly answered that question for itself, at any rate. Between '99 and '02, the average external financing for basic education was $1.6 billion per year. Between 2002 and 2004, it's gone up to$3.1 billion. This is a kind of little known fact. It's doubled it's financing for basic education in the last five years.
Just last week, the Chancellor in the U.K. Gordon Brown announced that the U.K. would put $15 into education in developing countries in the next 10 years. That's $1.5 billion a year, which would be the equivalent to the doubling we've seen over the last few years, if it all goes into basic education (which it almost certainly won't.) But nonetheless, we are seeing huge inflows into education. And, girl with secondary education is three times less likely to be HIV positive than a girl without secondary education.
So, I don't think there's any question that education should be financed and it's a wonderful investment. The question is how do you make the marginal decisions about resource allocation? It does little good to talk about the returns to education as a whole. Clearly, where you put that money into education makes a huge difference. Do you put it into a classroom, a textbook or into a teacher? Those are the kinds of things we are trying to sort out, and I think that's what this panel is all about. I think it's also right that at times, you put it into latrines and not into schools at all. But, I think we've gone beyond that question to how we do it.
Martin Carnoy: Now, we'd like to have questions for the panel from the audience. I'll take groups of four questions.
Ken Lee: In regard to metrics and pushing back, part of pushing back is asking for their help and to say, "Look, even though you want to count all these things and they need to be counted, what kind of technical expertise and what kind of financial resources can you provide to us to do that?" It's not cost free to do even in other kinds of things they're looking at.
In terms of looking at your phrase "not all that counts is countable," part of that is also developing a working relationship wherein the partners themselves can have the experience of working with the "beneficiaries" who I prefer to refer to as the agents of change that we're supporting and funding, so that they can actually be involved in that process and they can see that not everything that counts is necessarily countable or if we're count it, we've got to come up with different ways to do so.
I'm not going to touch the main purpose of education question quite yet. Maybe I'll come back to it.
In terms of science and technology investments, I can only speak for the agency. It is a very important issue within the agency right now and also within the State Department in terms of how can we direct more of our resources to supporting those types of educational approaches both at the broad K-12 level and at the secondary and tertiary level, and with particular regard to getting women involved in science and technology in developing countries.
Lynn Murphy: I'll take a quick stab at a few thoughts about the purpose of education. These aren't necessarily parsimonious thoughts. In one of the examples that Maya gave, there is an increasing number of children out there who I would say have sampled or tasted education in a way. They've gone for a few years, then dropped out. They dropped out because the education wasn't relevant for them or that's what they say. So, it really makes us question what the purpose of the education that they were getting is. In other cases, there are people from areas where their entire family supported them to get through primary, secondary, and tertiary school and there's the question of giving back. In some ways, the expectation is to give back to their own family because they gave to them so much to get there. So, it becomes really difficult, when you're taking a global perspective of all this, to really answer what is the purpose of education. Among everybody in this we could find some commonality, but we'd find a lot of differences in our views about what our own life paths of education have been. There is a book coming out of MIT where there is a series of essays on that. Joel [Cohen] has spent a lot of time reflecting on these issues. So, I would direct you to that.
I would say that secondary, tertiary, and science education is exactly where foundations have historically supported higher education institutions in Africa. They've been thinking about supporting those kinds of investments. I know that the Population Program at Hewlett is also trying to fund the next generation of demographers and economists within Africa. That way, there are people within country who have the same level of expertise as those who are from the international arena.
Robert Prouty: There was one question specific to World Bank funding in the form of a loan. For education, World Bank funding is almost all in the form of a loan. Increasingly, grants are given in health. The Fast Track Initiative is all grants; it's not loans. With regard to the question of whether loans increase fragility, there has been a lot of debate about loans versus grants that I won't be able to solve here. But, there's no question that the architecture of World Bank financing is that the countries pay back and then the payback is redistributed. So, that forms the basis for the ongoing stability. The World Bank has been a remarkably stable source of financing over the last 30 or 40 years as bilaterals go up and down. I think there's a role for that stable financing which is probably only possible if there's that same structure. The problem if the World Bank converts to a grant mechanism is that it relies very much on recapitalization on a regular basis. There doesn't seem to be an environment out there right now where one can rely on that kind of recapitalization. The World Bank is just the collection of countries around the world that put money in; there's a recapitalization every three years. Unless there's a guarantee that whatever is given out in grants will be given back, it would just gradually dwindle down to zero. To maintain some sort of stability, it has taken the position that it has to have that money coming back. Again, the Fast Track is something else.
Maya Ajmera: I'll address what is the main purpose of education. I'll just give you our touchy feely vision statement from Global Fund for Children. It is "where all children become productive, caring citizens of the world." I think of productive as meaningful employment, to be able to take care of your families. Caring means to care for the people around you [unintelligible] [give] back. That's what I think the main purpose of education is.
It's been interesting for scientific education. We've been starting to see some very innovative CBOs that are providing science education at the secondary levels as a supplement to the education that they're receiving in public schools because they're not getting it there. This is happening in a big way in India, for example, and for all the right reasons because of the onslaught of technology. So, there are some NGOs doing some of that work.
Martin Carnoy: Let's take another round of questions.
Male Voice: When you have organizations like Coca-Cola sponsoring educational initiatives, how do you deal with the fact that sometimes their trying to promote their own goals? Like Coca-Cola is educating people to get more people to buy Coca-Cola. (Three other questions are unintelligible)
Maya Ajmera: I'll take the last question. At global fund for children, we actually go out and search for great groups. We have an open process and open letter of inquiry online which gives everyone the chance to provide a letter. But, we actually go out and search. We go into a country cold and meet with a lot of people and come across a lot of great groups. We've been able to find some groups that would never have been able to find us.
There was another question about considerations and donor funding. Are you talking about the funding for international work going up at the country level, private philanthropy or across the board?
Robert Prouty: I'll answer the question about the funding going up. I don't know for sure why the funding has gone up. There's no question it's been high on the international agenda. At Fast Track, we've tried hard to make sure it's on the G8 agenda and discussed by international leaders every year, which it has been for the last three years and will be again this year with Russia in the lead. We just got back from a meeting in Moscow trying to make sure this has a prominent place on the agenda. It's hard to be sure, but there's certainly international consensus around the idea that this is a good investment. In terms of the donor considerations, we have developed what we call an indicative framework. We've developed this for developing countries where you try to pledge to do certain things. For instance, you try to make sure that you have a certain number of hours for teaching each year, that the schools are open and available and the teachers are there, you try to keep repetition rates down to a certain level, try to have a certain amount of money for education and so on. We've tried to develop that for donors as well, trying to aim for trying to reduce the amount of tied aid and getting more funds down to the service delivery level, trying to make sure we have joint supervision missions and so on. One of the absolutes under the Fast Track Initiative is that all donor partners agree that they will not have separate missions to check on how countries are doing but that they will do it jointly and will have shared indicators to reduce the transaction costs to donors. Those are the kinds of things that we're trying to work on.
Lynn Murphy: We're a different kind of a foundation than The Global Fund for Children. I have inherited the grant making portfolio coming in and I certainly plan on spending a lot of time in Africa because I'm very well aware of the issues there and the capacity issues of writing those kinds of grants and adhering to the constraints of the foundation. I think it's a personal commitment that people have to going out and doing that.
As to the interaction between the domestic and international, the Comparative International Education Society that Martin was just the past president of is certainly one where I think those conversations happen. I think at AERA they even have a section that tries to deal with international issues. But, it's certainly not systematic and I don't know of any formal channels. I think it happens in classrooms, it happens in these kinds of things where some of the parallels are striking. But other than conferences, I don't know of any forma channels. In conferences, sometimes you do have those [unintelligible] working domestically and internationally. There are often people who are wearing both hats, so they have to speak to the school improvement literature here and think through how you think about that. Certainly, I would also say that happens because a lot of people are trained here in the U.S. who are going out and doing a lot of the international work.
I would also argue that the increase in funding is because there's been a lot of political pressure that's come through things like the Global Campaign for Education that has very tight links with Gordon Brown.
Robert Prouty: We took them to Moscow with us.
Lynn Murphy: Yeah. This is quite of what my dissertation argued, but there has been a huge push by these NGO advocacy groups to penetrate the international aid architecture. What they were able to do is keep education on the agenda and keep more ODA flowing for it.
Ken Lee: To follow up on that point, the way you phrase the question talking about security concerns and things of that nature, I think it would be unrealistic to ignore the fact that there are a variety of variables that go into decisions about funding education. One of them is obviously that we live in "post 9/11" world. There is certainly a constituency that has emerged that wants to fund things related to education and job relevant education for youth supposedly as a strategy that will help reduce the possibility of instability or other tensions resulting from unemployed or underemployed youth. Now, whether or not one believes that all the causal links have been made there adequately is a whole different issue. But, it certainly has been something that has mobilized interest and could be a fact one could look at in terms of trying to explain donor interests in certain types of education investments.
In terms of working with the private sector and the interest of a private sector party in pursuing some of its own goals, that's a challenge. It's true for any of you, as you engage in collaboration with another organization or person—where do your interests intersect and where do your interests depart? How do you come to grips with are the departures so troubling that you don't want to accent the things where you can have your interests intersect? It's not an easy answer to your question, but I think it has to be looked at in each particular case. To be honest, there were things in the post-tsunami relief in Aceh where our agency backed out because of certain things that we thought were culturally inappropriate that we thought could have a negative cultural impact that we thought would be real problematic. So, we said we would do all kinds of other things because there was plenty of work to be done there. So, you make those calls each time.
I'm going to go back to something Robert said because I can't resist. He's totally right; everybody's going to keep investing in education. The world is not going to stop investing in education. That's just not going to happen. Congressional people who go to Congress each year are given the choice to invest in kids worldwide and basic education. They're not going to say, "No, I don't want to do that." But, there are two things I want to keep in mind, at least from the AID perspective. At our missions, we have a limited amount of discretionary funding. Let's say we have $10 million that we in a particular country. We have to ask that at-the-margin question, "Is it best invested in the education sector or is it best invested in microenterprise development and microcredit so that other things can happen that can support outcomes in the education sector." That's one of the tradeoffs I wanted to put out there.
Second, and this is really going to be potentially provocative and Rob and I will have to talk about it more. When we look back at the EFA investments 15 or 20 years from now and we do the return on investment evaluation and assessments as we've talked about today, are we going to feel that we put in the right amount of money, too little, or even too much. Since I'm in Palo Alto, I'm going to use the phrase "dot com." Are we overinvesting in this? Again, I'm not saying that's the position of the U.S. government. Please do not quote me out of context on that because we are supporters of the EFA and we're active contributors and work on it all the time. The point I'm trying to make is that as development professionals, we need to put those questions out there. You are the world's up and coming development professionals. All I'm saying is that we have to ask those questions so we can keep thinking about how we get the best performance possible in a world with limited resources and abundant needs.
Martin Carnoy: Thank you very much. I think this was a really interesting panel, and you were really frank and honest about what's going on. Let me just try to summarize what this panel has been about. I've been doing this for more than 40 years since I did my thesis on economic returns to education in Mexico in the early 1960s. The thing that impresses me is that most countries of the world really increase the quality of their labor forces by investing in more education rather than higher quality education. There might be good reasons for this, although I'm not going to get into it now. But, I think that's something to think about. A lot of the investment that has been talked about here has really been about more education, increasing access to education. Strangely enough, that really might make sense. The second thing is that almost all the investment decisions in education have not been based on evidence. They've been based on what people thought would be a good thing to do, but not really based on any hard evidence. There used to be rate of return studies in education. It turns out that most of them were probably incorrectly measured. In any case, that gave a rationale that there was at least an economic return to education; how high or low it was is another story. But, the point is that at least that was there and at least as far as the purpose of education, at least there was some reason to believe that it contributed to economic well being. I agree totally, and I think one thing you can take away from this panel is that they're going to lots of investment in education and there's very good reason for that. Education has become far important today than it was 30 or 40 years ago because 30 or 40 years ago, people without education could get decent jobs. Today, that's not true. For one reason, a lot more people have education. For another reason, knowledge-based economy is based much more on knowledge than brute strength of working in a factory and being able to coordinate physically and build a car or fill a soup can. Nowadays, there's a much demand for education, both because more people have it so you have to have more and more education in order to get a good job and because there's actually higher demand out there for those kinds of jobs.
The last thing I would leave you with from this panel is that, although it wasn't discussed openly, there is an implicit underlying fact. That is that the national governments determine what is happening in education. Even if the international agencies and the NGOs go in there, you hear over and over and over again the fact is that to some extent, what is going on is out of the control of these people on the panel here. It's really what's going on locally. A well organized state government really creates a well organized education system. If there's a problem in India with the fact that the public schools aren't very good, the private sector comes up. But, in fact, that's a government decision too. They're allowing these private schools to flourish because they're basically saying, "We don't' really want to take care of it." How much those are regulated is a state decision. How much risk they're going to allow people to take on these little schools is a state decision. Either they want to regulate them or they don't; let the people take the risk rather than have the government basically guarantee that schools are going to be accountable to some degree or other. So, I think it's very, very interesting and one of the great domestic lessons is if the government doesn't really want to have a high quality education system, you're not going to get a high quality education system. That's the long and the short of it. It doesn't matter if the World Bank wants one or AID wants one, the fact is that it's not going to happen. I want to reflect what Jeanne Moulton said earlier.
So, there has to be more education because education's really important and increasingly important. Secondly, the local state government is going to determine how good and how much of that education there is. It's independent of the outside agencies who can contribute, but can't really do it. I think your panel has given you some excellent, interesting insights on how different types of agencies out there trying to make these hard decisions about how to do this and how to really improve situations, look at these things. I'd like you to give them a big round of applause.
Female Voice: I'd like to thank our panel for speaking. Now, I'm going to introduce professor David Abernathy who is a retired Professor Emeritus in the Political Science department here at Stanford. He's also the faculty advisor to Stanford Association for International Development. Professor Abernathy specializes in African politics, decolonization, and development and is currently teaching a course on NGOs and development in low income countries. He has won a number of awards including the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for distinctive contribution to undergraduate education.
David Abernathy: I think this has been a terrific conference. It's addressed a very important issue at an educational institution, and what better than an educational institution to reflect carefully upon education itself. We've had a terrific set of speakers. I've been struck by how thoughtfully, concisely, and quickly they have covered a wide range of topics. We haven't had a second to sort of slow down from beginning to end. That's the way time should best be spent. We all owe a vote of thanks to everybody on the first page of your outline, that is to say Stanford Association for International Development, the Graduate School of Business International Development Club, particularly to [Marilee] and [Palin] and Pete, but to everybody else on this list. They have put a tremendous amount of work into it. Let's give all of them a round of applause.
David Abernathy: Who did you see up on this stage, and what does that tell you about who the major actors are in the field of education globally and what, in fact, you might think about as potential career opportunities for yourselves? Note, and this is not be accident, that there are actors from international and multilateral organizations who have been on the stage—the United Nations, UNICEF, Dr. [Mejia] as representative to the United Nations Security Council, and the World Bank. So, the international and multilateral world was up here. Countries—we have a representative from USAID and a representative from the country of Tanzania, a first and a third world country. There's the world of nonprofits. There are nonprofits that give out money such as the Hewlett Foundation. There are nonprofits that would like to receive money such as The Global Fund for Children. Most of these are, in fact, fundraising organizations as well as fund dispensing organizations. There's the world of consulting, Jeanne Moulton. Then, you have individuals. Bud MacKenzie is a little league dad and all of a sudden something happens; he moves over to Afghanistan. Dr. Mejia and his wife are working to establish a school, essentially as individuals. So, we move from the largest level of multilateral organizations all the way to individuals in whatever sector we wanted to find them who engage in this issue. What that suggests is there are lots of opportunities across sectoral lines and across unitive analysis lines. Opportunities for partnerships are also important. This whole Fast Track Initiative is a whole way to put those various pieces together, connect the multilateral actors with bilateral actors and with profit making and nonprofit sector actors. There's a huge area of partnerships that are across levels of analysis and across sectors. Those might be areas where you could, in fact, create such things or begin to manage them as we move into the future. So, who was up here says something both about the subject and who the actors are, as well as what role you yourselves might play in the future.
What did these people say? There are a lot of things they said, but I want to focus on three ways they helped us to think about the subject. First of all, they helped us to live in a world that has really moved beyond the old, classic left/right spectrum between capitalism and socialism in which capitalism is sort of a right-wing, conservative approach to issues of growth and the left is concerned about the distribution of the gains from growth, but not so much about growth. Left and right tended not to talk each other. The left focused on governmental solutions, the right on private profit solutions. We've moved beyond this, and I've been struck by the combination of conservative approaches to left-wing problems. To the extent that poverty and poverty alleviation is the problem, a them that's has been announced over and over again is the importance of entrepreneurial solutions to those kinds of problems. To have a private school for the poor is an idea that wouldn't have occurred 10 or 15 years ago. All of a sudden it becomes a feasible kind of idea. So, how do we combine conservative approaches, focusing on the poor not as charity cases but on entrepreneurs themselves, which can actually engage them in reducing their own poverty.
A second theme is the importance of linking the big picture with the small picture. We move from the big picture presented so ably by Dr. Wright of enrollment trends over time in the world. Then we move right down to the small picture of the tiny little school there on the train platform. What this suggests is that those of us who work at the small-scale level, in a particular school or classroom, need to keep in mind the big picture of which we are a part. Those who work at the big-picture level need to keep in mind what's happening in that Boat School or that Train Platform School at the level of the classroom. It's important to go back and forth across those kinds of levels.
Finally, it seems to me one of the important things that has come out of this conference is the focus on the school or the school system, not just in its own right as measured or evaluated by literacy or enrollment rates, but what kind of role that plays in the larger society. We've had a focus on the issue of employment which keeps coming up over and over again. We've had a focus on the issue of leadership including in the political arena. We've had a focus on conflict which many of these people, when they come out of school, will be dealing with—a conflict-ridden society. I've been struck by what wasn't talked about, in a sense, which are some very good ways of solving some of those problems of connecting the school system with its larger environment. To the extent that we're dealing with conflict out there, we boys did a lot to create conflict. It was good that somebody mentioned that it's not just the education of girls but the education of boys to be doing something other than killing each other as child soldiers. So, the understated boys' education tends to be quite important in this area. To the extent that we're talking about leadership, why not spend more time on adult education because it's adults who are in positions of local and national leadership who might learn both kinds of leadership skills. So, we need to move beyond thinking of children as the only recipients of education and focus more on an often illiterate adult population, as well. To the extent that we have a focus on job creation, it may be less what the school teaches in its curriculum as how the school is run and managed that can give people the leadership positions for jobs. How does the school run its own democratic situation? How does it run its own school farm? How you manage and get the school engaged might say more about employment creation outside the school than a particular curriculum that focused on job creation.
Those are some areas that were not perhaps sufficiently addressed, but that do address this linkage between the school system and the environment, which the conference quite properly stressed. I want to thank the organizers for giving us that opportunity to think about these kinds of issues. Thank you.
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