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“The UN Millennium Project has been a unique undertaking… [to] ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling…”
UN Millennium Project, 2005[1]
Quoted above is Target no. 3 of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG). There was a time when declaring resolutions held the imagination of the people in the developing world. When in 1986, the United Nations body, the World Health Organisation (WHO) posited the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion declaring action to achieve Health for All by the Year 2000, the drought-stricken citizens of third world countries greeted this news with marvel and great faith.
Even as crunch-time closed in and the feasibility of success grew more unlikely, the hopes of the people remained steadfast and were further bolstered, with the WHO giving cautious assurances of success in its various health service initiatives across the African continent. And 6 years post-deadline? Polio is still very much in the picture, unfortunately, and the prospect of a disease-free world gets pushed further away as even more robust disease pathogens materialise spontaneously, marring the globe demographic with the similitude of a microbial minefield.
More recently, the UN’s spate of grandstanding resolutions is focused on the dilemma of education and with the benefit of hindsight, one would expect the UN to procure a programme better oriented for practicability and yielding results. It appears however that, instead of taking remediative action against the bites of failure, the UN develops the skin of an armadillo and builds up an ignominious backlog of nonaccomplishment.
Since affirming the Education For All (EFA) commitment at the World Education Forum, 2000 in Dakar, Senegal, the agency in charge of execution, UNESCO, has attained little success in its endeavours, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. A current regional overview declares all education indicators in its countries registered below world and developing nation averages, with gross pre-primary enrolment ratios (GER) of below 30%. The EFA Global Monitoring Report 2003/04 stated that only 58% of children of the primary school age were enrolled in 2000. This net enrolment ratio (NER) means over 40% of the world’s out-of-school children, i.e. 44 million, reside in the region, more than half of them girls. In this litany of woes, the gaping disparities between girls and boys enrolled was also cited, with values as low as 0.15 recorded in the Congo.
It went on to bestow the Sub-Sahara with one of the lowest literacy rates, stating “only 60% of the population [between 15 and over were] able to read and write”, two-thirds women[2]. The optimists might say there is still a long way to go before 2015, but even an illiterate Sub-Saharan can tell that in the end, the so-called concerted efforts to ensure universal accessibility to education will merely constitute overpriced whitewash.
To be fair, the EFA venture is well-meaning, and indubitably many have selflessly devoted substantial mental resource to its implementation, but with due respect these venerable plenipotentiaries have been operating from their cocoons of super-elevated air-conditioned office units, working with information obtained purportedly from their ‘eyes and ears’ in the field, who themselves are individuals who only pop into the region on a quarterly basis and are thus unable to gauge if what they just observed was genuinely documented or doctored data.
This assertion is backed by a study undertaken by Professor James Tooley and Pauline Dixon, of the E.G. West Centre, University of Newcastle. Conducted in Makoko, a rural settlement in Lagos Nigeria, their research revealed that, contrary to the view held by the EFA development experts, public education proved retrogressive to the education drive in developing countries, not private schools.
By chancing upon a sample public school without warning, they found a disturbing attitude of negligence to duty among teachers and a relatively idle, steadily shrinking student population. This observation stood in stark contrast to the experience at a private school, where they claim “an educational revolution” was taking place. The student roster there was burgeoning daily with children, who were kept pleasantly occupied in studies by their teachers, some of which were formerly employed in public schools. Truancy and teacher absenteeism, unlike in public schools sampled, were practically unheard of - this, despite the fact that about 90% of these students pay tuition of $17 per term and are children of fishermen that earn barely $50 per month.
Tooley and Dixon report that at least 68% all school children in Makoko attend private schools. One would wonder then, given the obvious efficacy of the private education formula, why it has been summarily shunned by the international development experts. In this statement to explain the failure of public schools, the school administrator, who will no doubt say the same to these experts, tells it all lucidly, “Parents in the slums don’t value education. They’re illiterate and ignorant. Some don’t even know education is free here…”[3]
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Writer Profile
Manny Maurice
Manny Maurice is a youth activist and Vice President of the Future Leaders Network, Nigeria. Also a petroleum engineering graduate, he enjoys penning down commentaries on burning socio-political questions, and runs a blog of his opinions at http://thepayzone.blogspot.com.
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Comments
Sandy Mae Gaspay | Apr 18th, 2007
This article is an eye opener for everyone. This just goes to show that achieving the millenium development goals requires a consolidated effort between the helpers and the "helped".
Zorica Vukovic | May 30th, 2007
Very resourseful and moving article!
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