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Delivering Education in Developing Countries: Challenges and Priorities
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Cream Wright
Chief of Education Program Division, UNICEF
Transcript of the keynote speech 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
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — Good morning, everyone. I'm Marilee Kutsia. I'm one of the co-coordinators of this conference. I'm here to introduce our keynote speaker—Dr. Cream Wright.
Dr. Wright is the Chief of Education at UNICEF and has worked there since 2002. Dr. Wright has worked on education and development projects in over 30 countries with a number of agencies, including United Nations agencies, the World Bank, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
From 1980 to 1989 Dr. Wright served as director of the Center for Research in the Education of Secondary Teachers at Milton Margi Teachers College in Sierra Leone. There he designed teacher education programs, developed research proposals for international funding and spearheaded a network of school-based action research projects. His work led to the establishment of a strong technical network in the region, the Education Research Network of West and Central Africa.
From 1989 to 1997 Dr. Wright was managing director of REDI, an international consulting firm based in Africa. He managed a wide range of technical assignments in areas such as policy analysis, research studies, community development, curricular design, project design and program supervision and management.
From 1997 to 2002 Dr. Wright served as a special advisor and head of education at the Commonwealth Secretariat, an intergovernmental organization aimed at achieving the Millennium Development Goals set by the U.N. There, he oversaw the education and development work of the organization and the services provided to its 54 member countries.
Dr. Wright holds a PhD in education in developing countries and a master's degree in educational planning and development from the University of London Institute of Education. Dr. Wright's extensive background and education in development made him the ideal candidate to give the keynote address for this conference. With no further ado, I'd like to welcome Dr. Cream Wright.
Dr. Cream Wright: Thank you very much, and good morning. Let me say it's a pleasure and to share some ideas with you. First of all, I'd like to thank the young colleagues for their initiative in organizing this and bringing together so many key people in the field. People have been saying we have to meet more often, and thanks to the young people here we found a chance meeting all the way out in California when we're probably from neighboring countries but never get a chance to meet.
What I propose to do as the keynote is give a sense of where we are with some of the most challenging goals that the world has set itself in education, both to give a sense of some of the progress we have made but also some of the very major obstacles that continue to challenge us and the dynamics of change. It seems to be getting better but in so many ways it is getting worse.
I also want to show how much we have learned over the years, the tools we now have at our disposal and how the next generation of young inspired people wishing to work in this field can engage constructively to make a difference. Hence, the rather ambitious title of "Changing the World with Education"—it's not about me changing the world, it's about the inspired young people changing the world. But what I hope to provide is some insight into how some of this can be done.
First then, looking at education and development, let's see where we are and how you can help. It used to be that many years ago when many of us were studying there was a field—and probably still is a field—of comparative education where you have to look at different education systems, what they're doing and how they're doing. I would submit that since the Millennium Development Goals of 2000 and—in fact going back to 1990—there has been a coming together in the world. Instead of disparately looking at different systems we've all been galvanized into concerted action in trying to make change in education. These goals, if nothing else, have focused our attention on how the world as a whole can achieve certain goals, rather than studying different systems.
The reality is that the very first of these goals—which was due in 2005—that of gender parity in primary and secondary education, has already been missed by quite a number of countries and many regions. And the reality, if we look at the statistics and analyze this is, that the world is also likely to miss quite a few of the goals that were set for 2015 unless something really special is done. This is not to say a lot has not been achieved, particularly if you track back from the 1980s.
So two of the most ambitious goals look at education currently—the Millennium Development Goal and the second one, which is about achieving universal primary education—particularly ensuring that by 2015 children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling—and, I might add, a full course of quality primary schooling.
At UNICEF we are also interested in the third Millennium Development Goal about promoting gender equality and empowering women. The target is to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005 and at all levels no later than 2015. The critical thing about the gender goal is to see that it goes well beyond parity. It's not about the number of girls in school, it's about how the power of education can actually empower women so that the status of women in society can be transformed in many of these societies.
Those are the main goals we're working towards. And this is really a quiz for later—I'll be asking a question later, a fill-in-the-blanks. These are really options for graduates to pursue and across the top we are looking at locations, people who might find opportunities with government both in developing countries and developed countries, with NGOs and community-based organizations, with multilateral agencies—World Bank and so on—with bilateral agencies, or in the private sector. And the fields which are most relevant in supporting pursuit of these goals are either in research, monitoring and evaluation, planning and programming, or policy development.
Let me say a special word. As head of education for UNICEF everywhere I go I say this, that our focus on education is not because we're an education agency because we're a children's agency primarily concerned with children's rights, with facilitating those rights and safeguarding those rights—with the well-being of children everywhere.
We want to look at the rights of children and the plights of children, and the realities that we have to face. Despite our best efforts, analysis shows that in 2001 and 2002 there were somewhere around 115 million primary school-age children who were out of school around the world. This varies by country and by region, and the worst regions are South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. It also varies by gender. And this is particularly acute in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, but also in the Middle East and North Africa.
Within countries there are also geographic disparities—in rural and urban areas there are huge differences in terms of children in school and out of school. Most importantly, there is disparity according to wealth or poverty.
There are also very significant disparities which again emphasize why we're involved with girls' education and focused on gender issues. There are very significant differences based on mothers' education. In other words, primary school-age children whose mothers have little or no education at all are less likely to be in school than those whose mothers have some particular complete primary education.
We're increasingly interested in the fate of orphans and vulnerable children because of the incidence and the impact of HIV/AIDS around the world but also because of the many conflicts and all the disasters that mean children are much more vulnerable—they are likely to be orphaned and so on.
And the statistics and the data have shown—depending on whether that parent that's lost is the mother or father or whether both parents are lost, it seems that children fare better if it's only the father that is lost rather than the mother. And, of course, they fare worse if both parents are lost.
Traditionally, there has been and continues to be disparity based on disabilities. Children with disabilities are less likely to be in school in most developing countries. And there are disparities based on the impact or the rate of HIV/AIDS infection in any given country.
I think importantly for us we also highlight the fact that in many, many countries there is still a huge difficulty in terms of programming from a human rights-based approach—abbreviated as HRBA. We have invested in education on the basis of root economics, on the basis of returns on education and on the basis of social demand—but, despite the rhetoric, hardly on the basis of education as a right. Because when you take seriously education as a right, one child out of school is one child too many and many, many countries still do not pursue this kind of approach.
Added to that, we have the complex difficult of coping not only with access but with quality and with learning achievement. What good is it to have children in school if the quality of education is so bad they're probably better off being somewhere else? And what good is it if they stay and complete school and end up not learning a lot? These are not separate things that are sequential—they need to go together and they need to be achieved at the same time or it's not worth pursuing the goals.
So that's the range of challenges. I'll just quickly run through some illustrations. There you can see percentage of children out of school. If you take Eastern and Southern Africa with 21.4 percent and you take Western and Central Africa with 24 percent you can see the huge percentage there. But also, that of course compares as well with South Asia with 42.3 percent. So you can see how the world stacks up, how different regions of the world stack up, in terms of the children out of school. That's a real challenge to us in terms of what we are missing and what we should be addressing.
Looking at it this time disaggregating by genders - there are more girls out of school in almost every region but you can see it's more acute for South Asia and also for West and Central Africa.
Interestingly, 24 percent of boys of primary school age are out of school compared to 28 percent of girls of primary school age throughout the world. When you look at urban/rural locations it means that 30 percent of rural children of school age are out of school compared with only 18 percent of urban school-age children. And for the wealth disparity, 38 percent of the poorest quintile, the first 20 percent of children in the world, are out of school compared with only 12 percent of children from the richest 20 percent. For children whose mothers have no education—36 percent of school-age children whose mothers have no education are out of school compared with only 16 percent of children whose mothers have some education.
There are all sorts of variations of this analysis and there's a new publication jointly done by UNICEF and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics that goes into greater detail in this type of analysis, if you're interested. That's just another variation of this by region, showing the gender disparities. By mother's education, for West and Central Africa there is a huge difference that mother's education makes to the chances of a child being in school or out of school, and the same thing in Eastern and Southern Africa. And by household wealth again, just by region, it's quite significant there for West and Central Africa and the Middle East and North Africa—almost everywhere, actually, you can see there is significance.
One interesting aspect of the analysis I'd like to share with you is the issue of orphans. We looked at both 6-10-year-olds and 11-14-year-olds. You can see how the likelihood of them being at the right stage of schooling for their age gets worse or better. If both parents are alive the likelihood is very good. If the father has died, the likelihood seems to be not that bad, but if the mother has died the likelihood is worse. And if both parents have died, of course it's worse. And the pattern is repeated for both age groups so there must be something there. There's a lot of need for further analysis on that, but that's where we are.
Now, of course, children don't just live out there on their own. They live within families, within communities and within countries. So a lot of what happens to children depends on which countries they're in, which families they're in, which communities they're in and what is happening in those communities. And this is the basis on which we design a lot of our programs that are based on countries. There are many countries that have emergencies due to civil conflict, wars and so on. There are countries that declared an emergency because of natural disaster—the recent earthquake in Pakistan or the tsunami countries and so on—where things happen suddenly. There are countries that do not explicitly have emergencies but are prone to these threats, prone to natural disasters—recurrent flood in Bangladesh, recurrent drought and threats of famine in parts of West Africa, East and Southern Africa. There are countries that are prone to political unrest and civil conflict, even though they are not explicit emergencies.
And there are countries that may not be any of those things but where they are prone to rights violations, where it's difficult—in other words, they are not real democracies in a sense and it's difficult to guarantee the rights to basic social services. And then there are countries that are coming out of difficult situations, post-conflict reconstructions—countries that have been through a civil war, some kind of disturbance, and are now in the process of constructing themselves.
And interestingly, the other categories of countries are variously called fragile states, LICUS—low-income countries under stress—in other words countries where, for whatever reason, governments are either unwilling or unable to provide and to guarantee basic services to children.
And a final point to make on that is that it would be good if those things happened one at a time but the reality is that we often face compounded challenges. In any given country you can see several of these challenges conspiring, almost, to defeat our efforts to bring about achievement of these goals.
A quick point on progress, just to say that when we look at progress since 1980 many of these countries with a lot of difficulties have achieved some quite impressive rates of growth—average annual rate of inching into the education system have been impressive when you analyze the data for 1980-2002. Unfortunately when you project, many of these same counties that have performed so well probably need to do three times as much if they're to achieve the 2015 goals that were set out there. So it's not rocket science to predict that many of these countries are simply not on track to achieve the 2015 goals and that if they are to achieve those goals then something dramatic needs to be done now to either boost their rate of goals or to give them a quantum leap, something that will put them on the right trajectory for achieving these goals.
Having painted a set of pessimistic pictures, I'd also like to say that tremendous work has been done over the years and we do have a wide array of instruments available to us to meet some of these challenges. I've just listed these in three broad categories but you can look at them in various other ways.
There are a number of bold initiatives and intervention models that we know can be applied that we know work, some of them because we have worked on them and we have introduced them and others because countries have been innovative enough to bring them about.
A few examples here—the School Fees Abolition: there has been debate about this for a long time. The impact of the cost of education on households and what prevents poor families from sending children to school. A few countries have taken a bold political decision and said, "We're going to do it anyway." And they've done it. It's been chaotic in some countries—Malawi and Uganda—but they've come out of it in some way better off or worse off. One thing we have learned is there is definitely an immediate surge in enrollment, much more than any kind of strategy we could have introduced. Just one policy measure repeatedly in case after case has brought about an initial surge in enrollment. The difficult has been in retaining that surge and making sure the education system doesn't unravel under the pressure and making sure that quality of education is protected in those circumstances.
We are now running a lot better and we've just had a major meeting in Nairobi, with nine countries, about how to take this forward much more systematically in a much more sustained manner.
There is another strategy we'll call the essential learning package, which I'd like to say comes from what we'll call the silver lining that is in every dark cloud. In Afghanistan, a major war-torn country, in Iran after the earthquake, in several provinces in Angola after a civil war, and currently in Southern Sudan—you can literally get millions of children back into school within a single school year, not so much by any major educational means but by heavy logistics—by the equitable and massive distribution of resources for learning. So an essential learning package—somehow you get 5.2 million children back into school in Afghanistan. And then we turned around and looked at countries —Niger, Chad, and so on—and see they don't even have that many children out of school and yet they've been struggling with 40-60 percent enrollment levels. So we think that you can use this as a package for impacting on the problem.
Schools for [Learning Class] is emerging but also is something going back to an old model. In many of the countries in Eastern and Southern Africa there are certain multiple factors—impact of HIV/AIDS on the population, repeated droughts and threat of famine, social violence and all of these. And the normal protective mechanisms in society within the family and communities are under stress and are breaking down. We had a major meeting with 13 governments in Eastern and Southern Africa where they're suddenly saying, "We need to look to schools again as the vehicle for service delivery so that children not only learn in schools but they receive the care and support they need in schools." Their nutritional status, their health status, can be checked and supported in schools and schools become the environment where children are safe and protected and receive some of the support that they no longer get from the extended families and from communities. And many say this is simply returning to the old models of what schools used to be in the early years.
We, UNICEF in particular, have worked hard on this and incorporated it into everything that we know about quality, right from the school environment—whether it's got water and sanitation, whether it's got recreational facilities, whether it's geared for child-centered learning and child-centered pedagogy, whether teachers are trained in the right way, whether schools are managed with the best interest of the child at heart or not.
And basic tools like School in a Box—the famous or infamous School in a Box, whereby UNICEF says we can kickstart schools in the most devastated areas within days and weeks, not months or years, because we'll bring the box that literally has in it everything for a teacher and 60-80 kids to start a school system going.
Some of the more interesting tools we now have at our disposal are more innovative finance and mechanisms to make things happen. One of the first ones introduced by the British government is the front-loading of financing for short-term progress. That is to say, instead of providing support to a country—let's say $80 million over 10 years, maybe $40 million in the next year or two—can make a major difference. In other words, there's recognition that there are windows of opportunity in the short term and if you invest heavily enough in them they can make a difference. It's much more significant than investing on a gradual path over several years.
The second one is more reliable long-term budget support that goes for sustainability. It's no longer the case of quick projects for four or five years and then suddenly a country finds it's out of the loop—for some reason it's no longer in favor with donors or partner agencies and therefore it loses track. Instead there is a more reliable means of support in countries. External assistance should be a bridge that takes countries from where they are now to where they want to be and where they can be self-financing and self-sustaining. And that bridge needs to last the whole journey, whether it's a 5-year, 10-year or 15-year period. And many countries have not been able to see that in the past in terms of development assistance.
And a third innovative mechanism is actually diversified sources of financing. Increasingly, the private sector is playing a bigger role in supporting education and we're finding more constructive ways of engaging with the private sector within countries themselves as well as from outside and certainly tapping into multinationals in terms of supporting not just education but health and other social services.
Also, the channels for supporting countries—it used to be called spheres of interest. In other words, if a donor country has a presence, in certain countries it supports those countries. And now a donor country can use proxy funding or silent partnerships to support and finance an education system, even though it does not have a presence in that country. For instance, most recently Canada has decided to channel some quite significant funding through UNICEF to support reform and educational change in Northern Uganda because Canada does not have a huge presence in Uganda, although it has some presence there. So it's interesting that we're having those tools at our disposal.
I think what is most importance is the level of expertise and experience that has evolved in the field. In the countries themselves, government—both in developing and developed countries—and agencies in the field have developed a lot of experiential knowledge. We now know a lot better what works in practice, how to get things done…the little things that have worked on a small scale—how do we make them work nationwide or on a wider scale.
At the same time universities, think tanks, and research institutes have gone a long way in terms of developing the kinds of theories that help us better understand what we're dealing with. I came here directly from Oxford University because we've just been building a partnership with Oxford University on education and conflict. They have centers there that have been doing work over the years on conflict in society and prevention management and so on. And on the other hand, UNICEFvin almost every country there has been a major conflict—not only in trying to prevent something but trying to restore normalcy using education as one of the main tools. So how do we marry these sorts of strands of expertise to help countries?
Importantly, we're learning that it matters whether you involve those who are supposed to be the targets of this—children and youths—as resources. In many countries, Mali for instance, we have children's parliaments in schools that discuss the running of the school and what is in the best interest of children and influence policies about education at that level. So child participation is a very important tool we have developed as well.
Now, all of this is happening out there partly because we have been working on what I call an evolving aid architecture. In other words, many of the donor countries and many of the developing countries are coming together to rewrite the rules of how development is done and how external support for development is provided. And I'll just run through some of the major elements of this evolving aid architecture.
I think the most significant one is leadership, country leadership. That also ties in with the idea of alignment and harmonization. There is absolute agreement and insistence on country leadership. In other words, development is not something you do to a country—it's something a country achieves on its own. It means in the long term the country owns the process of development and it can be a much more sustainable process.
In that regard, external support to countries needs to be aligned with what are the national plans and what are the national priorities—not what are the priorities of the donor country, but what are the receiving country's national priorities. And all these external forms of assistance need to be harmonized in order to reduce the transaction cost. A good example of this is the United Nations reform process that is now going on where, in some countries we're envisioning a sort of UNICEF or UNDP and so you have just one U.N. country office where all the support that the U.N. as a whole can provide is located in that single office and the government deals with that country office.
Second are partnerships and networks. I've just given a few examples there—United Nations Girls Education Initiative, which is hosted and led by UNICEF; the Education For Movement and the Working Group on Education, which is led by UNESCO; the FFR Initiative which is anchored in the World Bank, the Interagency Network for Education and Emergencies; the Interagency Task Team on Education and HIV/AIDS; etc. In other words, various interest groups are coming together—instead of everybody operating in isolation—to form partnerships and networks that can act in a much more coherent and sustained manner.
Ideally, if developing countries get their act together, provide good governance, and make the right investments they can be assured of the right level of support from external partners on a consistent and long-term basis. These frameworks also enable setting the budget support—instead of financing special projects you provide funding to the education budget so that a government can enhance its own financial mechanisms to make that work. In some cases, in fact, support is just to a general budget rather than to any particular sector.
In countries like Liberia and Southern Sudan we often use education as one of the most important peace dividends in post-conflict situations. In other words, what do they have to show in Liberia? What do they have to show in Southern Sudan? One of the main things is that there is hope for the future—children are back in school and they're negotiating the future instead of fighting over the present.
So changing the world with education involves a number of things. It's not a static situation—it's a very dynamic situation. It's about restoring education in emergencies. When everything is broken down in society, how do you bring back education and use education as a means of restoring normalcy? It's about providing education in fragile state—where the government doesn't reach out everywhere, where there are marginalized populations, how do you provide education, health and other services?
It's about using targeted as well as systemic interventions. In other words, we all want a good education system that is fully inclusive, that is sustainable. Unfortunately, that doesn't exist in most places so we have to target the most vulnerable populations and make sure they get an education service while at the same time advocating for the whole education system to be much more inclusive.
It's about building bridges across sectors. Education does not operate alone. If you don't have good health, good nutritional services, if you don't have care and protection in society and you don't have all these other issues, education may not function alone and may not deliver.
It's about harnessing the knowledge we have from doing things in practice. It's also about tapping into the knowledge that comes from good theoretical work. And through these two means, we hope to build a practice—both theory and practice—for policy development as well as for action.
It's about partnerships that build synergy and better efficiency. And most importantly, it's about accompanying countries—helping to build their capacity, using their own systems so their systems get better rather than parachuting in money or some technical assistance and five years later evaluating them and telling them where they've gone wrong. It's being there for better or worse, taking the good times as well as the bad times, and being prepared to fail with countries as well as to share in their success stories. That's what accompanying countries is about.
So what should an inspired graduate do about all of this? Well, there are a number of things. In the UN agencies you can fill in these forms that appeal, send your CVs, apply, make inquiries. But that's why it's good for young, inspired people to work in many of these agencies. And secondly, I would say, would very much welcome and are looking for young and inspired people to join the team, not only in headquarters and seven regional offices but also in 157 countries in which we operate and have education programs.
There can be attachments from the university into some of these agencies. I know Oxford does that. We do that with Columbia, for instance. We just supported a group of students to be out in Gambia and a group was out also in Kenya to study the impact of the school fee abolition. So we work with them because students can do a lot of very intensive work and can bring new insights to understanding what is going in these countries.
There are currently more formal applications—the Young Professional Programs, operated by UNICEF and other U.N. agencies. The World Bank I think also has a scheme on that. And a country on regional levels or even at a global level can be involved. We have had instances of graduate students working on a consultancy team as part of a consultancy firm or part of a university team. I have now at least two graduate students in my section who will simply volunteer their services, offer their services, because they want to investigate. That usually is part of the first step to being employed because once somebody proves to be that good you don't want to let them go.
I think we're at a major crossroads. For those of us who have spent a lifetime in this field of development, or specifically education and development, we feel this might be a century like no other. There is increasingly everywhere you turn in developing countries tremendous political will to make things happen. Whether the political leaders themselves have it and their populations are pushing for that, there's been a great amount of participation from communities in developing poverty reduction strategy papers or proposals and in developing sector plans for education. There have been increased national investments in the education sectors. In many, many countries external assistance is really a very small fraction of the total funding for education. And it's been allowed to distort things in the past but increasingly they are realizing most of the funding for education comes from national resources.
Countries are willing to make tough policies and take bold initiatives. There's also, as I said earlier, been consistent and increased external aid to sector budget support. More donors are committed to meeting the targets that are set for official development of systems and there is more long-term funding that's now replacing the limited project funding.
But most importantly and most excitingly, it's about the increased knowledge we have of what works. We feel now that we can do almost anything, if only we bring together the willpower and the resources. The strategies are not the issue. We think we know what to do. Best practices have been widely documented, visible intervention models have been developed and we have learned very important lessons from targeted interventions as well as from reform in education systems. And it's in that light we want to think that this, for many of our young graduates and graduate students, is an exciting time in which you can actually change the world with education.
Thank you.
Marilee Kutsia: If you have questions, raise your hand and we will call on you.
Dr. Cream Wright: Okay. Shall I deal with these and then if there is time for more —? Okay.
Early childhood—we do a tremendous amount of work on early childhood. In fact, in our new medium-term strategic plan early childhood is actually being split. It used to be one of the top priorities in our five priorities in the last medium-term strategic plan. Now it actually is split into two. Half of it is in education and half of it is in child survival, which I'm not sure is a good thing for early childhood development and education.
Just quickly, we are very much interested in this and invest heavily in this everywhere for a very simple reason. First of all, we are concerned that a lot of the problems in the education sector have to do with children not starting school at the right age, children not being well-prepared for starting school and hence either don't enroll or drop out before they complete a primary cycle. And the key to this really is actual preparation, so we invest in early childhood from the point of view of—my colleagues would challenge and say learning starts at birth and some of them say even before birth. Learning starts a long way back, but apart from learning itself actual preparedness for school—in many communities we look at what we call the rhythm of schooling. By the time a child gets to six or seven years of age, they start being involved in little household chores and that takes up so much of their day.
Now, if you don't have any kind of system where those children spend a few hours away from those chores and away from home—whether it's with grandparents or other children, community and so on—then those chores begin to compete with school. Because by the time it's time to start school, those chores are so important—whether they're income-generating or otherwise—that the parents are reluctant to release them and so it's postponed year after year. Just to get children into the rhythm of schooling early on—we talk about early childhood as booking a place for schooling later on.
And then we know of all the development things that are important, particularly for disadvantaged communities. That is, children can be supported through community-based childcare and early childhood development and learning. This gives them a better chance not only of starting school but of progressing in school. And most importantly, the solid research evidence out there shows that early childhood education does make a difference in terms of performance in primary school and the likelihood of completing primary education.
For all these reasons, it makes sense to us to invest early rather than be engaged in remedial work later on in the system. So it's very important for us and we're interested in that.
Quality as opposed to whether there's a tradeoff within quality and just access—we see this as a false dichotomy because it's access to quality education. It's not just access to anything. And that has been the problem in the past. For us, quality is a very wide and all-embracing concept. It ranges from the physical facilities, the environment of the school, the governance organization, as well as to the classroom practices—the way teachers are trained. And it's all of those things that we have invested in what we call a child-friendly school.
We don't think there's a tradeoff. You don't call a building a clinic because it's got four walls. You call a building a clinic because of some other things that it's got and because of what goes on within that building. Similarly, you don't call something a school because it's got a roof or something like that. It's more about what else it has and what goes on within that. You'll be shocked that in some countries 60 percent of what are called schools have no water and no sanitation, no toilet facilities and so on. And you wonder: why would you want to send your child there?
So for us, quality is about all of these things—about the nutritional status of children, about the environment…and children do play, you know. These things that are called schools have no provision for something called play, which children do a lot. And the whole governance is in whether children speak out, whether they are listened to, whether they are active, or whether they are passive and dominated by a culture of school violence and school punishment and all that sort of thing. These are all aspects of quality.
So it's not just pedagogy and school results. That's why we call it a child-friendly school. And we very much believe that every school should be a child-friendly school or we begin the quality. And for child-friendly schools it's not so much a status the school achieves—it's the path that a school begins to travel. So even in the poorest areas—in the schools in Northern Uganda and various places—there are very poor rural areas but you can see child-friendly elements where everything is run on a basis that takes the best interest of the child in doing this.
So we'd rather not make that dichotomy between quality and access, that it has to be access to quality education or it may not be worth the investment. For countries that just count numbers we try to point out to them the quality issues that are important.
You were mentioning the Middle East and North Africa. If you look at what they achieved—which is the yellow, the average annual rate of intake between 1980 and 2002—they have to do something just slightly better if they are to achieve the 2015 goal. There are a number of things to say about that. You've observed that the lowest things we have there are for the industrialized countries. That's because they're starting from a very high base already. There is only so much increase you can have if you have almost every child in school already anyway, so the average annual rate of increase doesn't need to be high. But given the fact that there is some there—0.3—it shows the difficulty of reaching that last 2-3 percent who are maybe the [roamer] children in whatever or children of immigrants or whatever in some of these communities. But even in these communities it's difficult to reach that kind of percentage.
You have these spectacular performances in some of these regions in African and South Asia precisely because they started from such a low base. When some of these countries started with 15 percent enrollment there's nowhere to go but up, so it's not surprising that they've achieved so much. But then you have the population dynamics—population growth and also the population profile, that such a huge percentage of the population in these countries is of school-going age. And this is why that has been achieved, but even as that is being achieved the challenges have been more intense if they are to reach the 2015. In other words, the more these countries achieve the more they have to do to get on target for 2015.
And what we're saying is that the business of gradual progression—you might as well tell these countries now that they have failed to reach the 2015 goal. They're never going to make it. You need to do something spectacular, like get millions of children to school or certainly increase the quality and our school fee abolition that brings millions of children to school at once—something that gives a quantum leap to progress, otherwise the gradual business of just going on along is not going to work for these schools. And that's the point I was making there.
Do we have time for any more questions?
Female Voice: You talked about children who have had the death of a parent, especially if it's the mother and correlating with the child being out of school. And I was wondering, if that's the case, whether the education system is the correct venue to fix that problem. Are there other institutions, civil society institutions, that are dealing with that problem if the education systems and schools are overburdened. There are a lot of different programs you mentioned going on within schools—programs for HIV/AIDS and other support systems. Is this something that should be creating new institutions and new opportunities and venues or is this something that can be taken care of by the school systems?
Dr. Cream Wright: That's an important question. It depends on where we are taking this from. The concern here has been particularly with the HIV/AIDS group lobby. Their concern is that children affected by HIV/AIDS where a parent has died or they've become orphaned or they're just vulnerable or they themselves are infected that through stigmatization or various other things their right to education is threatened. So that is the concern behind this kind of research to see what are the chances of not just getting in school but in fact either being in school or progressing adequately in the school system. Are they at the right stage of school for their age and so on? That's what was looked at in this sort of research.
And the pattern that seems to emerge quite clearly is that while the child is not just an orphan—it's the status of an orphan that has an impact on this. When both parents are alive they have a fairly good chance of being in school, but if only the father has died there's still a reasonable chance. It seems there's something about mothers being alive that is more beneficial for children than just fathers being alive. And of course if both parents are gone…
And the question is: what do you do to deal with that? As I mentioned, this is why 13 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa came together to talk about schools primarily for learning, yes, but also cases where you have the extended family system that used to cope with this sort of issue but now is breaking down. Children now are in households that are headed by children themselves with the elder girl caring for her siblings and so on. Or they're with grandparents who have limited means to support and foster those children.
The government is saying, "What are the institutions we have for tackling this?" And there have been all sorts of institutions. There has been a revival of the idea of boarding schools, with all the problems they bring. But increasingly the government are seeing the one institution which can bring children together and provide a wide range of services is the school.
Now, this has implications of course—you're right. It means that these countries are looking at schools differently. Is it possible to finance the Ministry of Health so that regular school health inspections are done, health checks are done, health support is given to schools? Is it possible to mount nutritional programs so that every child in school receives nutritional inputs through a school meal, even a take-home ration so that the household doesn't suffer?
In other words, there are a lot of mechanisms. Inasmuch as it will all be done in the school, the school becomes the vehicle through which the planning and implementation of this can be conducted. And this is not so much an agency policy—it's what the governments themselves are saying when they're looking around for how to deal with in the face of a breakdown of traditional support systems and mechanisms.
On that note, I'm told my time is up. Thank you very much.
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