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]
What with the cancers of teacher absenteeism, lack of teacher commitment, corruption and the misdirection of resources gnawing away at the public school system, one could very well do without such nonsensical and utterly pointless education, even if served on a platter of platinum. And yet bodies like Oxfam and the UNDP, working in concert with UNESCO, persist in financing these black holes with elaborate funding programmes, then sit back and fret over the vacuous expression of their brainchild.
The success story of private education bears from the existence of economic security in the system, thus making it simultaneously entrepreneurial and accountable. By demanding fees, the private school administrators ensure they have a ready source to meet the costs of operational expenditure, especially the emoluments of their employees, the teachers, who in turn feel vocationally secure and willing to conscientiously dispense their tutoring duties. On the part of the parents, they can justifiably demand qualitative education for their wards and petition the administrators for improvement in service if dissatisfied. This is clearly lacking in the government school system, where piece-meal salaries are withheld for months, sometimes years on end, and disgruntled teachers either neglect their responsibilities or ‘abandon ship’ for better prospects, most times private schools, where they are being paid better and on the regular.
As a domino effect, the students are left to their own devices, and parents cannot clamour for a resolution because they reason rightly that government would not feel obligated to ‘non-paying customers’, as it were. Ultimately, by supporting free primary education, UNESCO and its partners are advocating an education system which is not self-sustaining but self-depreciating and will eventually crumble under its own congenitally-enfeebled structures, churning out literacy-starved urchins with certificates hardly worth the paper they are printed on.
Apologists of the UN and its string of global betterment initiatives that ran awry have over the years been especially proficient at laying the onus of guilt on guest countries where these programmes were implemented - with good reason. Greed is an exaggerated sense of need, and nowhere else does it find better expression than the impoverished sovereignties of the Third World, where their leaders, suddenly thrust into a vantage position to allocate wealth, pursue increasingly inventive stratagems of graft and aggrandisement. Case-study scenarios are boundless, with the most infamous of late being the arrest of an African state governor at the British Isles, who performed a ‘Houdini’ act and conveniently escaped Her Majesty’s ‘hospitality’. Indeed, the Organisation finds the quandary of governance inadequacies grave enough to list it among the four foremost reasons for shortfalls in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, enumerating tell-tale signs to include public maladministration, debasement of the rule of law, disregard of political and social rights, an arrant shortage in sound economic policy and dereliction of civil society engagement[4]. These symptoms plague the majority of third-world states and present a near-implacable barrier to achieving the EFA’s laudable, if ambitious, objectives. That the UN, fully aware of their compromised condition, still channels the bulk of EFA outreaches through leaky state conduits is bewildering.
The tragedy of it all is the game-plan is entirely different on paper. According to the EFA brochure released by UNESCO, key drivers of the EFA Initiative are the host governments, civil society organisations and development partners, each delegated with clearly delineated roles to interactively propel the universal primary education programme to fruition. In turn, the participatory functions of the UN are the facilitation of partnership developments and coordination of partner actions. How it plays out in reality is almost laughable.
It appears the networking summits hosted by the UN are little more than glorified tea parties, mere fora of dialogue than events of real coordination. Directly afterwards contingents jet back to their constituencies, where they shelf the summit paraphernalia and apparently carry on with their respective agendas totally out of synch with each other. As a result, the funding agencies are stretched by distracted proposals to fund several unrelated pilot schemes, technical support from concerned agencies are dislocated from scaled-up EFA investment plans, and country-level deadlines of implementation are missed.
Inconsistencies like these make it possible for a country like Nigeria to contemplate investing heavily on such ill-advised projects like provisioning primary schools with hundred-dollar laptops[5], when its school libraries suffer a perennial paucity in comparatively more valuable, and considerably less expensive, books. What is more, the UN supports this misguided trajectory of activities.
Clearly, a sense of direction is lacking, and with it the institutional resolve to see through the penned-down writs and resolutions designed to reform the literacy landscape for the world’s destitute. By adopting an unobtrusive modus operandi, the UN makes the egregious error of lulling in the complacent calm before the storm, inadvertently tolerating the incongruities of unscrupulous states in order not to ‘rock the boat’ of diplomatic relations, until the dying minute is breached and the mad scramble commences to rescue the charring chestnuts of Sub-Sahara’s illiterates from the fire, ineluctably to nil effect.
This rudderless situation should be checked immediately, and this can be done by taking expedited measures to reinforce the operative capacities of the UN Development Groups and Resident Coordinators in respective host countries. More specifically, they should be accorded overarching powers of supervision to ensure national education policies are streamlined with those of the MDG implementation policies and regularly evaluated for strict compliance.
Implementing this may prove daunting primarily due to the political ramifications, whereat nations may protest an affront to state sovereignty, but by advocating its requisiteness as a Fast Track Initiative, and given that these countries are signatories to the Dakar accord which typifies the EFA International Strategy as a flexible document, the required administrative modifications in the chain of command of the host education ministries should be acquiesced to without undue pettifoggery. Only then will the channels of funding from source to destination be reliably monitored and accounted for.
Ascertaining secure funding conduits is only half the problem, however. While providing primary education at no cost is an altruistic and laudable gesture, the methodology by which this is to be attained in the third world is impractical. The only way it may be envisioned to work in its present format is as a temporary measure, because ultimately the external funds will run out, and it must be realised that for any country crawling out the dregs of mediocrity, dynamics of development are propelled by economics, not education.
When, for instance, Nigeria sold the bulk of its offshore oil blocs recently to China’s oil multinational, CNOOC[6], the caveat for this exchange was CNOOC’s commitment to invest in Nigeria’s dilapidated refineries, steel and power industries, as well as general infrastructure. No mention of educational leveraging was made in the agreement.
If the ideals of education are accelerated in isolation, national economies of scale stand to retrogress, because more qualified individuals will be graduated than the employment market can absorb, the endpoint of which is unemployment at an unprecedented magnitude. In other words, to ensure education remains a priority, incentives to motivate private sector investment must be factored into the literacy drive. For such collaboration between the educational and private sectors to prove mutually beneficial, an overhaul in the present formal education system of the Sub-Saharan region is required, more specifically, a deliberate emphasis on technical secondary education.
This branch of education, which focuses on specialization of technological skills by its students in various scientific fields such as machinery workmanship, mobile telephony, telecommunications, electrical/electronic engineering, food processing and the like, not only equips its graduates with the requisite expertise to be easefully assimilated into technology-intensive companies or industries, but also enables them pursue entrepreneurship using their expertise in these disciplines.
This is very important in developing countries, where the early conversion of education certificates into paying vocations is crucial. In the past this tier of education has existed largely in the form of informal apprenticeships. By sponsoring the establishment of technical high schools, a wide variety of industry-based concerns in the private sector will be ensuring a steady string of well trained professionals into their employ and considerably scale down expenditure on orientation and employee training programmes. Additionally, as school proprietors, they can ensure other students not inducted into their companies do not wallow in the unemployment flanks by according them loans upon graduation to set up their own practices in the form of company shares, as part of a special micro-franchise scheme.
These shares will serve as collateral to obtain bank loans of a stipulated substantial value and may be paid off as their businesses break even. This generates the multiplier effect of progressively expanding the company capital base, thus making education funding a viable business investment. It would then justifiably be in the interest of these companies to further amplify the quality of staff recruited into its rank and file by investing from the earliest stage, i.e. primary education, and committing finances even up to the tertiary levels by proffering scholarships, paying salaries, stocking libraries, or equipping laboratories and workshops. The novelty of such a conjecture requires that more in-depth analysis be undertaken to exhaustively surmise its merits, but suffice it to say here that the prospect of sustaining primary education most veritably stands a better chance as a synergy of books and business.
In closing, let it be stated that although the EFA Initiative was conceived through years of painstaking preparation involving professionals drawn from every conceivable field, by all accounts a true labour of love, its execution thus far has lacked the precision of thrust and tenacity it deserves. Researchers like Dr. Tooley whose heels are lodged deeper in the grassroots are very important to this pursuit and their calls for a drastic reformation of guiding principles need to be heeded and acted upon with great urgency, not ignored.
The UN must wake to the galling reality that it wages war with an implacable aggressor: illiteracy. The options of attack are fast tapering with each passing second. If victory is desired by 2015, this is one dogfight that will not be defused by dialogue.
REFERENCES
1. “Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals,” UN Millennium Project 2005. Overview. 2005. xii, available at http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/reports/fullreport.htm.
2. EFA Global Monitoring Report 2003/4: Regional Review - Sub-Saharan Africa, available at http://www.unesco.org/education/efa_report/zoom_regions_pdf/ssafrica.pdf.
3. Dixon, P., and Tooley, J., “The Failures of State Schooling in Developing Countries and the People’s Response,” Index of Economic Freedom, 2006, available at http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/chapters/htm/Index2006_Chap2.cfm
4. “Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals,” UN Millennium Project 2005. Overview. 2005. p 15, available at http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/reports/fullreport.htm.
5. “Taiwan’s Quanta Selected to Build $100 Linux Laptop,” accessed May 15, 2006, available at http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS9223907457.html.
6. Hogg, C., “China Oil Firm Buys into Nigeria”, accessed May 20, 2006, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4594058.stm.
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