N O R R A G N E W S Versions/NN19.pdf · Some donors and basic education from 1990 to 1995 26-30 by Kenneth King Donor policy and practice related to Education for All since Jomtien

N O R R A G N E W S

NORTHERN POLICY RESEARCH REVIEW AND ADVISORYNETWORK ON EDUCATION AND TRAINING (NORRAG)

NUMBER 19 June 1996

SPECIAL THEME

EDUCATION FOR ALL - FOR WHOM??

AN ISSUE RELATED TO THE MID-TERM REVIEWOF EFA IN AMMAN JORDAN

Editor

Kenneth King

Editorial Address

Kenneth King, Centre of African Studies & Department of EducationUniversity of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9LL, Scotland UKTelephone (44) 0131 650 3879; telex 727442 unived G.

Fax: (44) 0131 650 6535; Email: [email protected] or [email protected]

Co-ordination Address

Michel Carton, Institut Universitaire d'Etudes du Développement (IUED), Post Box 136, RueRothschild 24, 1211 Geneva 21, Switzerland.

Telephone: (41) 22 906 5900/1; Telex: 412584 iued CH;Fax: (41) 22 906 5994; Email: [email protected]

June 1996 Norrag News page2

LIST OF CONTENTS

EDITORIALby Kenneth King

HISTORY & DOCUMENTATION 1-9

The EFA discourse from 1990 to 1996 1-4by Kenneth King

Obstacles to reaching the EFA goals: questions from qualitative research 4-6by Elsie Rockwell

Five years after Jomtien: who will deal with basic learning needs? 6by Juan Carlos Tedesco

Documentation of EFA 7-9by Kenneth King

REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES 10-20

Regional meetings en route to Amman 10by Kenneth King

EFA mid-decade review: East Asia and the Pacific Region 10-12by Sheldon Shaeffer

Comments on the key themes from the EFA mid-term review for 12-14West and Central Africaby Dorothy Komm

The mid-decade review of progress towards Education for All: 14-17a perspective from Eastern and Southern Africaby Anna Obura

Who has the power to define basic education? 17-18by Birgit Brock-Utne

Education for All in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) 18-19by Ernesto Schiefelbein

Summary report of the EFA mid-term review seminar 19-20of the Latin American Regionby Maria Luisa Jaurequi

THE SYNTHESIS REPORT 21-25


A measure of the Education for All (EFA) initiative: 21-22more than half full!by Harbans Bhola

Education for All: achieving the goal. A comment on 22-25the working document for Ammanby Kenneth King

DONOR DIMENSIONS 26-49

Some donors and basic education from 1990 to 1995 26-30by Kenneth King

Donor policy and practice related to Education for All since Jomtien 30-32by Lene Buchert

Education for All: an ODA response 32-33by Terry Allsop

Where are the Dutch since Jomtien? - the implementation 33-36of basic education policy of The Netherlandsby Kees van den Bosch

Italo-Palestinian development co-operation and Education for All 36-37by Lavinia Gasperini

Canada's response to the Education for All initiative 37-41by Karen Mundy

INDIA: District Primary Education Programme 41-43by Jandhyala Tilak.

Changes in NORAD's support to the education sector with 43-46a focus on basic educationby Sissel Volan

Towards a master plan for primary educationn in Sri Lanka 46-49by Angela Little

AUDIENCES FOR EFA 50-75

Adult literacy and development after Jomtien: a brief 50-51review and introduction to the ILIby Daniel Wagner

Literacy in the industrialIzed world. A new perspective 51-53on Education for All


from Index Presskit

'Education for All': a slogan for the millennium; 53-55'non formal primary education': a foundation for the 21st centuryby Alan Rogers and Carol Morris

Towards free basic education and literacy for all in Ghana 55-60by Wim Biervliet, Leo Dubbeldam, and Juliana Adu

Primary education versus adult literacy: basic education in Gujarat 60-63by Caroline Dyer

Women's literacy in Uganda 63-67by David Archer and Sara Cottingham

When all is only some: adult basic education after Jomtien 67-68by Simon McGrath

Mozambique: does EFA still have a chance? 68-70by Luis Tiburcio

Education for women and girls 70-72from Index Presskit

Gender and primary schooling in Africa 72by Christopher Colclough

Policies and practices geared towards Education for All in Chile 72-75by Beatrice Avalos

NUMBERS GAME 76-96

The numbers' game: what we can do in order to get better 76-79information about educationby Wolfgang Kuper

Aid to basic education: rhetoric and reality 80-81by Roy Carr-Hill

Poverty and demand for primary education: evidence from Morocco 81-84by Sobhi Tawil

The prospects of education for all in Ethiopia 84-85by Tekeste Negash

Education for all? A brief summary of the challenges facing Niger 85-87by Shona Wynd

Education for All: follow-up actions and achievements 87-90in China (1990-96)


by Zhou Nanzhao

Some questions on Thai educational development 90-92after the world conference on Education for All, Jomtien 1990by Pisitphol Kraipipadh

Education for All in Kenya since Jomtien 93-96by Daniel Sifuna and Francis Gichuru

NN 18 - THE DEBATES CONTINUE 97-99

Educational research environments in the developing world: 97-98a brief revisit 1980 - 1996by Sheldon Shaeffer

Learning to cope - by the market? 99by Bernd Baumgartl

NORRAG BUSINESS 100-101

NORRAG and the Working Group on International Cooperation 100in Technical and Vocational Skills Developmentby Michel Carton

Note on NORRAG expertise 100-101

NORRAG reviewed 101

LAUNCHES 102-103

Institute for the Study of Education and Society (ISES) at the 102University of Edinburgh

Books, publications, materials 102-103

MEETINGS 104-109


EDITORIAL

Kenneth King

We go to press just a few days before the Amman Mid-Term Review of the Education forAll (EFA) decade. It was thought appropriate to dedicate the whole of the issue to EFA.In so doing we were aware that many other organisations as well as governments wouldbe taking stock of progress. NORRAG has had a particular interest in tracing andtracking shifts in donor policies; and hence there is quite a range of different commentsfrom bilateral agencies, it being assumed that a good deal more was likely to be availableon the main multi-lateral co-sponsors of Jomtien and of Amman. There is also somefascinating insight into the mix of donor involvement in partcular countries.

We also felt that it would be useful, given the emphasis on primary schooling within muchbasic education debate, to encourage a number of our members on both sides of theAtlantic to reflect on the other dimensions of basic education, and particularly on adultliteracy. Again we have some general discussion on approaches to adult literacy as wellas some valuable insights into work in country (e.g. India, Ghana and South Africa).

A third area which we guessed in advance would be important for Amman would be aconsideration of what we have termed 'The numbers game'. So much in academic andprofessional life these days is taken up with calculations of efficiency, and evaluation ofoutcomes. But as several of our key papers in this section point out, we are dealing withextremely fragile data when it comes to figures for world illiteracy, unschooled children,working children and much else. In these matters, we are disappointed that in the sixthyear after Jomtien, we have to admit to so much imprecision even when it comes to therelatively straightforward figures (it would have been thought) for donor flows into basiceducation.

NORRAG is assisting in the organisation of one of the Open Dialogue Sessions


Kenneth KingEducation/African Studies, University of Edinburgh

Just over 6 years ago, NORRAG brought out a special issue of NORRAG NEWS (no 7) to coincidewith the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, during March 5-9, 1990. It examinedthe 'prehistory' of the World Conference in the negotiations in the agency world, and analysedthe way that the several different drafts of the Declaration and Framework for Action had beeninfluenced and shaped by the agencies, professional education lobbies and by the nine different

regional meetings.1

There had been those associated with the preparation of the Jomtien Conference who haddesired a very strong, and binding commitment to Education for All. They had wanted aCHARTER rather than a DECLARATION, and they had wanted targets that were really takenseriously by the nations of the world. In the event, Jomtien did not succeed in setting bindingtargets, but it may be useful for those readers analysing the state of play at this midpoint to bereminded what those 6 suggested targets were:

The Framework for Action suggested the following aims, the first of which was in the earlychildhood area.

Countries may wish to set their own targets for the 1990s in terms of the followingproposed dimensions:

1. Expansion of early childhood care and developmental activities,including family and community interventions, especially for poor,disadvantaged and disabled children (Framework 1990: 3)

It can be seen that although it was very important for the World Conference to install earlychildhood care and development in the Declaration and get it onto the agenda for the decadeahead, there is not even the beginning or the hint of a suggested target for this level ofeducation. Just 'expansion'. Later in 1990, the World Bank's Primary education policy paperpointed to the efficacy of pre-schools, but indicated that for most developing countries 'publiclyfinanced pre-school experience for all children is not feasible', but private, NGO and community-supported pre-schools should be encouraged (World Bank: 23). It will be interesting to see if atthe Mid Term Review point there is any sense of important progress. If so, the examples in policyimplementation terms are likely to come from countries like South Africa, Thailand and Chile. Forinstance in the Report of the Latin American mid term review it is clear that all countries referredto the gradual increase in pre-primary education but noted that private pre-schooling hadoutstripped the expansion of publicly owned pre-schools.

2. Universal access to, and completion of, primary education (or whateverhigher level of education is considered as "basic" by the year 2000(Framework: 3).

This was one of the suggested targets that had provided greatest controversy when theFramework had been at the final drafting stage in Jomtien. Indeed there had been difficulty with

1The collected volume of NORRAG NEWS from the time of the Jomtien Conference (No. 7) to1995 (No 16) is available from the Coordination in Geneva.


even getting the notion of a deadline into the text. And it had taken the personal intervention ofthe late Jim Grant, executive director of UNICEF, for the phrase 'by the year 2000' to be in thetext at all. There were arguments pro and con, and especially from those countries which knewthey couldn't achieve EFA by the end of this century. On the other hand, without any time line,the suggested target could be seen as just an aspiration. In the decade that has seen thespread of the discourse of audit, accountability, efficiency and measurable outcomes, it wasperhaps inevitable that there should be a suggested deadline, and without it, of course, therewould have been no Amman, no mid-term review to see what progress had been made.

There is an important sense, therefore, in which the addition of a particular year into the textmade EFA a Project. It was of course only a suggested deadline for the Project Completion, andthe level that was universal was left to the discretion of the particular country - it could be 5years in some countries and 9 in others. But making EFA a 'millennium project' was strategicallyvaluable, not only for engaging donor funding but also at the level of national governments. Forinstance, the Government of India came to Jomtien with a major document already entitledEducation for all by 2000: Indian perspective (NIEPA 1990) precisely because the notion of adeadline of 2000 had been circulating in the background documents and earlier drafts of theWorld Declaration.

But there is another effect of the wording of this particular suggested target that was influential.As we shall see, this is the only one of the 6 bullet points in the Declaration where the worduniversal is used. All the other items, relating to early childhood education, adult literacy andother essential skills merely used words like expansion of provision (pre-school and basicskills) or increased acquisition (of life skills via media) or reduction (of the illiteracy rate).Only school education merited the idea of Education for All. In a real and literalsense, therefore, EFA at Jomtien was only about Schooling for All (SFA), and notabout skills for all, or literacy for all.

It will be intriguing to see if the mid term review in Amman seeks in any way to reschedule thesuggested target, but it is already clear that whatever the attractions of the millennium date as agoal, individual countries have already set different dates (e.g. Ghana has chosen 2005 for theachievement of Free, Compulsory Universal Basic Education). But strategically it has held on tothe Jomtien notion of there being a time-line.

3. Improvement in learning achievement such that an agreed percentage ofan appropriate age cohort....attains or surpasses a defined level ofnecessary learning achievement (Framework: 3).

The third bullet point of the six also related to primary schooling, and made the crucial argumentthat neither universal access nor universal retention was sufficient; there needed to be seriouscontrol of quality and of achievement. Here in the build-up to Jomtien, the examples of Northernindustrialised countries were thought to be relevant, since many of these had secured universalaccess and retention but were still faced with major issues of learning achievement. By contrastin the preparations of the mid term review there were no parallel regional meetings in Europe orNorth America. Only in regional seminar for East Asia and the Pacific did industrialised anddeveloping nations sit down together.

4. Reduction of the adult illiteracy rate...to, say, one half its 1990 level bythe year 2000, with sufficient emphasis on female literacy to significantly


reduce the current disparity between male and female illiteracy rates(Framework 3).

Like the primary school suggested target, the adult literacy target also aimed at the millennium.But the scale of what was suggested was fundamentally different. There is not even a hint ofuniversal literacy but an illustrative indication of what a nation might undertake. In contrast tothe language of inclusion for primary schools, there is the important little word 'say', to suggestsomething very provisional in the possible actions on adult literacy. It can be seen from severalof the articles in this issue of NORRAG NEWS that commentators do feel that literacy has beevery much the poor relation of primary schooling these last 5 years. Many of the large nation-wide literacy campaigns of earlier years took place in confessedly socialist regimes in thedeveloping world, and were justified in terms of mass mobilisation, and sometimes drew strength,both moral and physical from the old Eastern bloc. With the collapse of these forms of socialistgovernment in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the widespread rise of multi-partygovernment, these great national campaigns have become much less common, and there hasbeen an interest instead in more technical and research-based approaches to adult literacy.

5. Expansion of provisions [sic] of basic education and training in otheressential skills required by youth and adults, with programmeeffectiveness assessed in terms of behavioural changes and impacts inhealth, employment and productivity (Framework 3).

Perhaps understandably, not a great deal was specific in this thematic area at the time ofJomtien. NORRAG's view at the time was that these areas of primary schooling, adult literacy,and acquisition of skills for work - mentioned in this and the last three targets - must not be seenas three 'compartmentalised targets with no impact on each other. There is a highly interactiverelationship amongst these three domains of basic schooling, adult literacy and skill acquisition'.NORRAG emphasised the fact that 'sustained improvement in all three domains will continue to bevery powerfully affected by perceptions of the availability of work and employment' (NN7, 1990:32).

Six years later it looks even more obvious that the Jomtien Declaration and Framework were veryshort in their consideration of the labour market that might relate to the various scenarios ofbasic education and training for all. The whole notion of exposure of all young people to someskills and some training has surfaced in the 1990s, as has some more radical thinking about theintegration of education and training. This emerging consensus about a convergence ofeducation and training was not foreshadowed in the Jomtien meeting, nor was there in Jomtienthe very widespread interest that has developed since in education for self-employment.

6. Increased acquisition by individuals and families of the knowledge, skillsand values required for better living and sound and sustainabledevelopment, made available though all education channels including themass media..... (Framework 3).

This is the target that was meant to speak to the synergy of new technologies for the delivery ofbasic education. There is evidence, for instance in Chile where a computer network has beenestablished to improve the quality of schools, of some movement on this thematic target. But inthe regional reviews discussed in the next section there may be more evidence of this.

Concluding note


There is clear evidence that the suggested targets were very differently weighted by thesponsors of Jomtien. But what can be said with certainty is that 'Jomtien' has entered thedevelopment vocabulary, along with Rio. So has 'EFA' - 'Education for All', and 'basic education'.For the donor community it was a happy coincidence that Jomtien coincided with the availabilityof the World Bank's policy paper on primary education, because that provided for several donorsmuch of the research-based substantiation for EFA that they needed to argue for greater weightto basic education.

The situation in the developing world is a little less clear cut. Some countries have given a greatdeal of attention to primary education, but readers of NORRAG NEWS will recall 2 key points fromthe special issue on the European Union and on the pattern of demand from nations in Africa,Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) for education support: First, under Lomé III and IV, only 6% and5% respectively of commitments thus far have been in the sub-sector of primary education. Itwould have been expected that if Jomtien had been influential in ACP countries, a greaterdemand for primary education support might have been evident under Lomé IV, and of course itmay be that the figures are somewhat higher by the time this Convention has run its course(Crasner 1995: 26).

Second, however, it must be remembered that of all the 82 ACP countries, no less than 64%(45) gave a low priority to the education and training sector, and only 19% (13) declared thateducation and training was a high priority (Crasner ibid.).

We shall look further at this question of 'Southern' interest in basic education as we turn to someof the regional reactions to the mid term review in the next section.

Reference

Tony Crasner 'Investment in human resources: education and training from the perspective of theLomé Conventions', NORRAG NEWS 17, April 1995

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OBSTACLES TO REACHING THE EFA GOALS:QUESTIONS FROM QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Elsie RockwellCentro de Investigacion y Estudios Avanzados, Mexico

Qualitative research on individual schools, communities and districts has shed light on some ofthe structural problems that may be reflected in the quantitative evaluations of the advance ofbasic (primary) schooling. The following comments concerning progress towards EFA goals arebased on my qualitative and historical research on schooling in rural and indigenous regions ofMexico. Nevertheless, their implications are probably not limited to my country. Most are basedon public facts and preoccupations, and invite shared reflection on the future of formal schooling.

1. Graded schooling (everywhere?) retains and eliminates many children, producing a widespreadpyramidal statistical distribution of primary school enrolment. The achievement of the EFA goal -


- basic education for all -- should lead to a statistical picture that is more rectangular in shape. Isthere a trend in this direction? Can we measure it for countries and regions within countries?

2. Do countries that have raised compulsory school levels in the recent past show any trendtowards a more rectangular statistical distribution, or, rather, has selectivity simply movedupward? Has this measure affected EFA goals, by transferring resources to higher, moreselective, levels, before completing the lower level for all children?

3. There is some historical evidence that the raising of compulsory schooling levels lowers thesocial value, and perhaps even the actual level of learning, in previous compulsory levels (fourthgrade becomes sixth grade, primary school contents are passed to secondary levels). Canquantitative EFA goals be reached without forfeiting the quality and exchange value of theuniversal "basic" education offered? What is the best policy regarding changes in compulsorylevels of schooling?

4. High rates of retention and low rates of repetition are used to judge quality (and cost-effectiveness), under the assumption that the lower the rate (of repetition) the better.Qualitative research has found significant cultural and structural differences, across countries,epochs, schools, and shifts, in the mechanisms and meanings behind these rates. These suggestthat no comparisons are possible, and even that higher rates (of repetition) may correlate withhigher learning. Can we construct better cross-cultural measures of the comparative relationbetween years invested in school and real learning?

5. How should we interpret increases in preschool education? Will this trend reach all children? Orwill it reach a plateau? If resources are so scarce as to allow only one additional year for allchildren, should that year be added below (preschool) or above (third grade) the two grades thatmarginal groups normally receive? How does this choice affect EFA goals?

6. Developing flexible, NGO-managed alternatives no doubt has helped channel resources tomarginal groups. Yet there are dangers that may not be reflected in global statistics. Havegovernments set up parallel procedures for giving (second-rate?) elementary credentials thatallow them to report high short-term quantitative gains, even though the services may notguarantee basic literacy? Does this trend represent a long-term solution for educational equity?

7. Some statistics for the past decade indicate a recent trend towards a regional and classpolarisation in educational attainment. Where gains in the urban/modern sectors outweigh lossesin poor and rural areas, this trend may be hidden in the national figures. Can these tendencies besystematically monitored, on a comparative level, through finer quantitative research?

8. Enrolment in private educational services was once thought to allow governments to channelpublic resources to the lower classes. Yet the sharp increase of private tutoring and schooling inthe neo-liberal economies suggests rather that large low income sectors are forced to pay forservices that the rich get for free. Those sectors may also be subsidising the deficient quality ofpublic systems. How are statistics on privatisation being evaluated with regard to EFA goals?

9. EFA recommends cost-efficiency based on criteria of equity, quality and relevance. Somestudies suggest that governments committed to EFA rely on high-cost, low-accountability,international loans and voluntary labour to meet the basic rights of all children, while subsidisingselective education for the few. Do quantitative studies clearly monitor the long-term cost-


efficiency of such policies? Has military spending been cut in favour of increasing the educationalbudget in any country?

10. The crucial obstacle to (ever) reaching EFA goals is the increase of low-intensity warfare,massive migration of economic and political refugees, racial and religious discrimination, and sheerpoverty all of which keep millions of children from going to school. With the spread of neo-liberalpolicies, these situations are mounting, though often not openly acknowledged. Furthermore,governments may use such situations to avoid meeting EFA commitments. For example,schooling may be denied to the children of so-called "squatters", of migrant workers or ofoppositiongroups involved in struggles for human and political rights, as happens in my country and nodoubt in many others. Can quantitative analyses be tied to specific information on the violation ofchildren's rights to education, and to life?

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FIVE YEARS AFTER JOMTIEN:WHO WILL DEAL WITH BASIC LEARNING NEEDS?

Juan Carlos TedescoInternational Bureau of Education

Geneva

The Jomtien Conference's contribution could be summed up - in a very schematic approach - inthree main themes: i) basic education as a priority, ii) new partnerships in education; and iii) basiclearning needs. Following the same schematic approach, the point I wish to make is that, while,for the first two themes, the results obtained are fairly satisfactory, for the third one the deficitis very significant.

Today, many nations, both from the developed and developing worlds, international agencies ofco-operation and financing, and public opinion in general agree with the idea that basic educationshould be the priority of educational policies. In the same way, education is becoming one of themost important concerns for social actors who were not traditionally involved in the educationaldebate. Private enterprise, the mass media labour unions, cultural leaders, etc. are more andmore involved in the process of reaching agreements about educational strategies, at theinternational, national, regional or local level. From this standpoint, Jomtien has been relativelysuccessful. And I use the world 'relatively' because all of us know that, in many of theseagreements and declarations, rhetoric is more important than action. However, should theydecide to take action, people now know at least what has to be done.

By contrast, when it comes to meeting basic learning needs, the results are much less significant.The analysis of the factors involved in curriculum design show that two main forms of logicunderline this process: the logic of disciplines and the logic of corporations. In both fields, wefind specific social actors supporting each one of these forms of logic. Behind the disciplines arethe scientists, who want the responsibility of deciding on what part of knowledge should betaught. Behind the corporations are the teachers and professors who frequently work with aview to meeting corporate needs. In such a context (presented, I repeat, in a very schematic and


exaggerated manner) none of these actors takes responsibility for representing the learners andexpressing their learning needs.

In some countries, there have been efforts to include new actors in the debate on curriculum.These new actors can present learning needs from the standpoint of either private enterprise,the church or the family. However, the problem still exists. While it is clear that basic learningneeds should only be defined after discussion and exchange among these various actors, do wenot run the risk, in that case, of these definitions being only the result of a compromise? Or arethere other possibilities? The debate is open.

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DOCUMENTATION OF EFA

Kenneth King

It may be useful to give a very brief and highly selective indication of some of the literaturerelated to EFA. This does not pretend to be in any way comprehensive; it is, rather, anillustration of what has come to the attention of one researcher based in the North who was notparticularly working on the area of basic education or EFA during these last 5 years (and who onlyhad an hour to search his shelves!). Apologies in advance to many of the very obvious itemsmissed out. But hopefully even a rough listing will be of use to some scholars who are furtherremoved from research centres.

There was some documentation that was available immediately after Jomtien or directly relatedto it. The IBE in Geneva produced a useful volume capturing all of the materials that had beenavailable in Jomtien itself. Three examples from UNESCO on the World Conference itself wouldinclude:

Education for All: purposes and contextEducation for All: an expanded visionEducation for All: the requirements

Equally valuable was the final version of the original Background Document, Meeting basic learningneeds: a vision for the 1990s (New York, April 1990).

Later in 1990 (29 October to 2 November), a great deal relevant to EFA arose because of theeleventh Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers focusing on a theme very close tothat of Jomtien. Much of the debate is captured in the documentation that focused on quality:

Improving the quality of basic education 1) the issues 2) a survey of Commonwealth experience(Commonwealth Secretariat 1991)

Subsequent to this Barbados Conference, there appeared a whole series of shorter publicationson different dimensions of quality in basic education. For example by Beatrice Avalos,Approaches to teacher education: initial teacher training (1991), Arfah Aziz, Improving thequality of education: a case study of curriculum innovation in Malaysia (1991), and by JasbirSingh and Kenneth King on Quality and Aid (1991). There were many others related to quality in


teacher management and support. A lot of the materials on literacy and primary educationavailable at Jomtien were commented upon in two chapters of King's Aid and education in thedeveloping world (1991).

Also in 1991 there appeared the hardback, academic version of the World Bank's policy paper onprimary education. This was Improving primary education in developing countries by MarlaineLockheed, Adriaan Verspoor et al. This cannot strictly speaking be claimed as an EFA productsince both the policy paper and it were part of an earlier policy development process (seeVerspoor in NORRAG NEWS 16), but the book fitted well into the continuing interest in onedimension of basic education.

Another event in 1991 was the immediate follow-up of the Jomtien conference, in theInternational Consultative Forum on Education for All, held in Paris in December 1991. Again agood range of documentation was available including material on what the donors had done as aresult of Jomtien (e.g. King and Carr-Hill: Changing patterns of development assistance to basiceducation).

The following year, 1992, the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD put on oneof its regular meetings but this too was on the donor dimension of EFA. Its title was 'Basiceducation: donor roles and responsibilities', Paris 10-11, June 1992. There were several papers(including one by King and Carr-Hill International aid to basic education: flows, policies,modalities), but it was evident in several papers that most donors found it difficult to pinpointprecisely what they were doing in the basic education subsector(s). One of the suggestions forfollow-up was that interested bilateral and multilateral organisations should consider thefeasibility of establishing a comprehensive Education for All monitoring and evaluation system. Itwas also suggested that a meeting of DAC could be held in 1995 to review progress made insupport of basic education.

Several individual donors moved ahead with programme and policy statements that emphasisedtheir new or renewed interest in basic (or primary ) education. This included Germany's Conceptpaper: framework for basic education in developing countries (Bonn 1992), and the Netherlands'Development Cooperation and Education in the 1990's Policy Document, March 1993, Ministry ofForeign Affairs, Netherlands, as well as the earlier Swiss Development Co-operation document,Education de base (1990). Other donors have commissioned individual research pieces (forexample ODA published Alan Rogers' Using literacy: a new approach to post-literacy materials(November 1994), as well as David Archer and Sara Cottingham's Action research report onREFLECT (March 1996). Several of SIDA's useful series of Education Division Documents havebeen on aspects of basic education since 1990, including titles on Mozambique (primaryeducation and school books), Tanzania (literacy) and Chile (900 School Programme). UNICEF, asone of the co-sponsors of Jomtien, commissioned a good deal of EFA material, including ManzoorAhmed et al Basic education and national development: lessons from China and India (1991), aswell as two books on BRAC in Bangladesh, The case for investing in basic education (by Carnoy,1992), and Mary Anderson's Education for all: what are we waiting for? (1992). Also linked toUNICEF would be Chris Colclough with Keith Lewin's book Educating all the children (Clarendon,Oxford). Unlike many of the other items mentioned in this article, this was a full length academicmonograph on the challenges to reform, to donors and to finance of educating all the children.

For nine of the most populous countries the Education for All summit of nine high-populationcountries (of December 1993 in New Delhi) produced both a final report and panel proceedingsas well as individual studies e.g. on India.


At a more popular level there have been a series of booklets coming out from UNESCO between1993 and 1995 (sometimes jointly with UNICEF) that have celebrated putting into action, andimplementation of EFA-style ideas. Perhaps appropriately the first in this series called Educationfor all: Making it Work was about Chile, - about the famous 900 Schools Programme which wasannounced very shortly after the return of Chile to democratic rule: Cynthia Guttman All childrencan learn: Chile's 900 schools programme for the underprivileged (UNESCO 1993).

But there were many others (on literacy in China, community schools in Upper Egypt, Thailand'shill areas education project, village schools in Mali, and also on special projects in India, Trinidadand Tobago, Senegal, and Bangladesh).

Connected to this series Education for all: making it work is the INNOV DATABASE 1995:innovative basic education projects (1996). The idea behind this annual database, which startedin 1994 was really to collect and promote successful basic education projects. The data base in1995 has 112 projects broken down by three regions of the developing world. Some are alreadywell known old friends, such as SERVOL in the Caribbean. Others have developed since Jomtien,and may well have drawn inspiration from it. The start dates of the projects are given, so it ispossible to distinguish the Boys Society of Sierra Leone (1966) from the School ImprovementProgramme in Kenya (1990).

Also from UNESCO was the UNESCO's mobilising project to combat illiteracy (1994), which waslooking at some of the success stories in the universalisation of basic education.

From the International Institute for Educational Planning come a set of books most explicitlylinked to Jomtien, and to the notion of tracking change over time:

C. Wright and R. Govinda (eds) Three years after Jomtien: EFA in the Eastern and Southern Africaregion (1994)

I. Lorfing and R. Govinda (eds) Development since Jomtien; EFA in the Middle East and NorthAfrica (1995)

A. De Grauwe and D. Bernard (eds) Developments after Jomtien: EFA in the South East Asia andPacific Region (1995)

Deblé, I. and Carron, G. (eds.) Jomtien, trois ans aprez: Education pour tous dans les pays duSahel, (1993 Paris)

Other relevant books on aspects of EFA from IIEP would include:

E. Schiefelbein Redefining basic education for Latin America: lessons to be learned from theColombian Escuela Nueva (1992)

K. Lewin and Wang Ying Jie et al Implementing basic education in China (1994).

More generally on aid policies, but with material also on extent of support to education, and withsome provisional characterisation of donor profiles and interests in different levels of education,there is Lene Buchert's Recent trends in education aid: towards a classification of policies (IIEP1995).


In many other centres both in the North and South, there have been materials emerging, anddoubtless there will be a good bibliography in Amman in June 1996 that will capture this, butmention should be made, in ending, of organisations such as the Forum for African WomenEducationalists (FAWE) which has been responsible for many booklets on different dimensions ofeducation for girls and women.

[NORRAG members who would like to ensure that the membership know about their own workmight want to send information about it to the editor for the next issue, or alternatively theycould send it directly to those members on the new membership list who indicate an interest inbasic education.]

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REGIONAL MEETINGS EN ROUTE TO AMMAN


Unlike the run-up to Jomtien when there were nine regional meetings (two in the 'North'), therehave been seven in these last few months before the Amman meeting. Each of them has had anIssues Paper as the basis for their discussion, and there has then been a report made of themeeting which in turn has made a contribution to the main working document for Amman Theissue papers themselves make interesting reading, based as they are in part on the regional dataon progress over the past 5 years, and in part on reactions to some common themes that haveemerged.

In this section that follows, we have asked a number of individuals who were closely associatedwith the organisation of one of these regional meetings or in reporting on one of them to giveNORRAG NEWS a very brief summary of the feel of the issues and feel of these meetings. It is apleasure to welcome to this section Sheldon Shaeffer who members will recall was involved inIDRC with the original RRAG work on the research environment. Also we welcome back ErnestoSchiefelbein, another very early member of RRAG, but now back in UNESCO after being Minister ofEducation in Chile. Dorothy Komm and her national chapter of one of our partner networks,ERNWACA, in Cameroon clearly played a key role in organising the West and Central Africanregional meeting; and the same would be true of Anna Obura's role in relation to the Eastern andSouthern Africa meeting. What is interesting in Maria Luisa Jaurequi's piece is how Jomtien fittedinto a pre-existing and very strong set of initiatives within Latin America and the Caribbean. InBirgit Brock-Utne, from Norway, we have someone fortunate enough to have been an observer inboth the African meetings, and who is raising questions about the control of the discourse aboutbasic education.

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EFA MID-DECADE REVIEW: EAST ASIA AND THE PACIFIC REGION

Sheldon Shaeffer, Regional Education Advisor


UNICEF, East Asia and Pacific Regional Office2

The EFA policy review seminar for the region including East and Southeast Asia and the Pacificwas held in Hanoi, Viet Nam, on November 17, 1995. Other related activities concerned witheducation (field trips, presentations, and panel discussions) were held earlier in the week as partof the UNICEF-organised Third East Asia and Pacific Ministerial Consultation on the Goals forChildren and Development to the Year 2000.

The EFA seminar, organised jointly by UNESCO and UNICEF, brought together twenty-threeparticipants from 12 countries of the region, together with seven UNESCO and UNICEF officers.As a basis for the seminar's discussions, the EFA Forum Secretariat at UNESCO headquarters inParis had prepared an issues paper which presented a synthesis of the information reported by10 countries in the region in regard to their experience in implementing policies and strategies toprovide Education For All.

The main conclusions reached in this synthesis and in subsequent discussions included thefollowing:

°The provision of schooling in the region has expanded and enrolment ratios in most countries arerising. Some countries, having achieved almost universal primary education, are extendingcompulsory education to nine years.

°The provision of early childhood/pre-school education has also expanded, mainly in urban areasand through private initiative, but more and more governments are realising that they, too, havean important role to play at this level.

°Gender and urban/rural disparities in enrolments and completion rates are gradually beingreduced, but it is anticipated that disparities may grow not only between public and elite privateschools but also between the best of the public schools and the worst.

°Countries are giving increasing attention to improving teacher education programmes and todeveloping curricula and instructional materials suited to the needs of learners (e.g., ministryprescriptions concerning the percentage of curriculum which should be based on "local content")

°Parent-teacher associations and other school and community organisations are gaining inimportance in the region and are occasionally assuming roles (e.g., in school governance and inlocal curriculum development) other than as financers of primary education.

°Local authorities and school-level administrators and councils are being given more responsibilityand decision-making powers to manage schools, although it is still often unclear which level of thesystem is authorised to do what.

2 This report was written in collaboration with Mr. Prem Kasaju, Coordinator of the Asia-Pacificprogramme of Education for All (APPEAL) at the UNESCO Principal Regional Office for Asia andthe Pacific in Bangkok; Mr. Kiichi Oyasu, programme specialist in literacy at APPEAL; and MichaelLakin, Executive Secretary of the International Consultative Forum on Education for All in Paris.


°In many countries, funding for basic education is still inadequate to meet growing demand andmore complex needs.

°There are still large numbers of school-age children, particularly in rural areas, that are not beingreached by the formal school system, although multi-grade classrooms are becoming morewidespread in the region in order to reach the "harder to reach".

°New employment opportunities for children, illicit or otherwise, are often seen as more attractivethan education and keep or draw children away from school.

°Many countries report shortages of teachers, especially in remote areas, and poor workingconditions and salary scales make it difficult to attract and retain well-qualified teachers.

°A growing problem is the education, both initial and continuing, of youth, often on the street andemployed, if at all, in exploitative labour.

The main recommendations from the Hanoi EFA seminar included the following:

°Countries that have not done so should develop a more coherent legal framework for compulsoryprimary school attendance, especially in relation to the growing incidence of child labour.

°Governments and donors should ensure continuity in the funding of reforms and innovativeprojects that usually require a relatively long period to go to scale --to become internalised inindividuals, institutionalised in schools and bureaucracies, and, ultimately, sustainable.

°Teachers should be explicitly trained in how both to identify children who have special needs andare at risk of dropping out of school and to design individual programmes (special tutoring,stipends) to keep them in school.

°Ministries of education should pay greater attention to developing curricula (e.g., with more localcontent) that are relevant to the specific conditions and needs of learners.

°Well-qualified teachers, especially competent in teaching early literacy skills and in dealing withyoung children, should be assigned (and be more explicitly trained) to teach in the early grades ofprimary school.

°Governments, NGOs, and communities must provide more material and non-material incentivesand recognition to teachers (e.g., awards, accelerated promotion, hardship allowances), especiallythose working in remote areas.

°Teacher associations, networks, fora, and newsletters should be encouraged in order to improveteacher motivation, morale, and performance.

°In the face of many economic and social changes, more focus must be placed on the school'srole in fostering sound moral values.


°All concerned sectors (government departments, NGOs, religious organisations, the community,the media, etc.) must join together to promote basic education; "education for all" implies "all foreducation".

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COMMENTS ON KEY THEMES FROM THE EFA MID TERM REVIEW FOR WEST ANDCENTRAL AFRICA

Dorothy KommERNWACA, Yaounde, Cameroon

Three of the main concerns of this regional mid term seminar were: girls' education; costs andfinancing of education; and education in emergencies and for reconstruction. These seemed tobe three of the weaknesses hampering EFA in this part of Africa.

Girls' Education. The importance of this topic was clear from the number of sessions and speakersconcerned with it. Yet though representatives of most of those countries present had attendedseminars, conferences and workshops on education for all and on girls' education in the last 5years, action had been slow to follow.

The most outstanding project and action in favour of girls' education was identified as aCIDA/UNICEF transnational experimental ongoing project being executed in seven West Africancountries and one Central African state. Everything considered, greater efforts, means and morepolitical will were necessary to implement recommendations of these regional seminars andinternational commitments in this part of Africa. Though an increase in girls' enrolment atprimary school level and women's literacy rates had been registered, caution was recommended.Indeed, there was a pernicious drop to be reckoned with in the near future. It indicated thatinstead of a reduction of the literacy gap between men and women there could be an increase ofthe rate of illiteracy if the continuous withdrawal of youngsters (mostly girls) from schools wasnot quickly stopped. In short, a lot remained to be done to integrate education in its socio-cultural context in order to enhance female demand for education and strengthen the littleground gained so far.

On costs and financing. The lead paper on this sub-theme acknowledged the financial difficultiesof the governments in responding to an increasing demand for education, but the paper finallypointed out that the impact of education on a society is so important that its financing cannotdepend only on whatever provision parents and communities can provide, for this supply isessentially unpredictable and certainly insufficient. Though it was clear that countries of theregion should rely on their own resources first to further the development of education, thestrategies to get those indigenous resources put at the service of education were still to bedetermined.

On education in emergencies and for reconstructionParticipants described experience of organising education in refugee camps (Mozambique) as wellas of the huge challenges to basic education presented by the disastrous situation in war tornLiberia.


General appraisal of the SeminarThe seminar revealed that the situation of EFA in West and Central Africa was still quitechallenging in spite of some glimpses of hope. It was very urgent to devise special strategies foreducation as a whole and for girls' education in particular for the next five years in the region.Discussing costs and financing with globalisation as the backdrop showed that no miraculousfinancial help was to be expected from any external source. The participants were given as foodfor thought some reflections on what Africa intended to do for herself, before reaching out for ahelping hand. In fact this seminar was meant to sensitise participants into thinking out theconceptual lines for education in Africa for Africa, without closing in on itself but not giving upitself to be thought out by others. Some effort had been made here and there, lots ofconstraints remained to be faced, but the challenge was mostly with Africans first to stop Afro-pessimism, to draw lessons from the missed opportunities of the last five years to consult andbuild together, so as to come up with more positive thinking for the 5 years to come when thefinal review of the Jomtien resolutions is made.

The African Year of Education subsequent to the Ségou Perspectives of April 1995 was anencouraging local initiative which would be reinforced by the declaration of the African Decadefor Education.

Some more room could have been made for discussions on the non formal education models as aresponse to the educational needs of marginalised and/or out of school population age groupsand illiterate adults in the prevailing African context of serious financial crisis.

UNICEF was theoretically in charge of the seminar. But the responsibility for the logistics and thescientific organisation of this major event was transferred to ERNWACA Cameroon. It was indeeda very enriching experience for our national network which worked ceaselessly for the realisationof the objectives set for the seminar.

There were no great resolutions and no solemn declarations; the official organisers had deemed itmore important to engage in planning for action.

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THE MID-DECADE REVIEW OF PROGRESS TOWARDS EDUCATION FOR ALLA PERSPECTIVE FROM EASTERN AND SOUTHERN AFRICA

Anna OburaUNICEF, Nairobi

INTRODUCTION

The venue of the meeting, in Johannesburg, South Africa, was felt to be highly significant. Theopening speeches of the seminar noted the historic importance of holding such a meeting for thefirst time in South Africa and warmly commended the enthusiasm and commitment of the SouthAfrican Government to education for all. In all, the opening speeches pointed quickly andsubstantively to systemic problems in the education sector in the region and appealed forsacrifices and 'difficult decisions' with regard to the utilization of finite and limited resources.


REVIEW

The Ministers present at the meeting took the initiative in pledging the region to send in moredata before the Amman meeting in June. The seminar programme was organized in such as wayas to focus on the future. There was a stimulating tension between the view that the meetingwas all about looking back to Jomtien and the view that it was the business of the meeting tomake up for lost time and to move forward.

The overview: The overview paper (presented at the Seminar) constituted therefore the principaltool of review, gathering a wealth of examples of incremental achievement and progress from anumber of countries, the cumulative telling of the tale giving an impression of effort and of actionacross the region. This is also the tone of the Report of the meeting, in consonance with theoverview paper. Many of the examples in the paper were familiar from the literature. It is still notcertain by 1996 how many of the efforts have been sustained since their inception in the early1990s or sustained to the level of expectation of the early years. The paper makes it clear thatnot all of the examples reported would necessarily have been inspired solely by Jomtien. Jomtienis looked upon as 'a turning point', a time of focusing on and highlighting the importance of basiceducation, a renewed and targeted commitment to reaching out to each and every child, ofgetting all children, in time, to school. The reader gets a picture of quickening pace, nevertheless,across the region, towards more innovative and community-relevant education systems.

What may be absent from the overview is an appreciation of the more recent events. The case ofMalawi is significant. It is historically an unusual phenomenon to witness a government in the1990s returning to the 'free primary education' model tried by so many countries in the region inthe 1960s and 1970s. It caused ripples when discussed in Johannesburg and it is a significantoccurrence as a new governmental decision of the 1990s. Zimbabwe continues with its freeprimary system and South Africa is also committed to this policy but these points were notexamined in plenary. Not enough is known in East and Southern Africa about the free primaryeducation models that exist in West and Central Africa. Perhaps Johannesburg did not bring thistopic up front to the required degree. Now that even the World Bank is considering this option,free primary education, in terms of an effective investment in development, the time is surelyripe for reopening the discussion in a major way. This could be the opportunity of Amman, forAfrican countries.

The discussions during the meeting produced some new understanding of trends in the region.Some are noted here.

Reaching the unreached: In countries where government has taken upon itself the responsibilityof the education of all children, there appears to be increased innovation (Mali, Burkina Faso,Uganda, Zimbabwe, Malawi). Malawi declared free education in late 1994, abolished fees, whichwas a psychological boost to education as a principle, and abolished uniforms, thereby reducingthe cost of schooling in a significant manner. School fees had been approximately seven kwachawhile uniform had been at least ten times that figure. The two factors combined led to anovernight increase in 1.3 million children in the schools, up from a previous total of 1.9 million. Itseems that the demand factor was alive and well and was merely waiting for the right conditionsto allow it to be manifest. Mali, Burkina Faso and Uganda have introduced alternative schoolingsystems under the same Ministry of Education as the primary schools. The interesting factor isthat the same ministry is managing to design, manage and oversee at least two models ofschooling, in the interests of producing diverse education delivery services, relevant tocommunities which remained beyond the reach of the classical form of primary schooling. In all


cases these alternatives are viewed as short-term measures, as decisive action to meet theneeds of communities still unserved by school. They seem to be succeeding. The only problemmay be a lack of pace. The yardsticks of success are surely those of South Asia with itstremendous NGO initiatives and East Asia's governmental records of school enrolment increase.

Moving: To return to Africa, the new and embryonic model devised by Uganda, the COPE schools,is now being talked about across the region. Tanzania is developing their own system, the COBETprogramme. Burundi is likely to follow another track. The government authorities are consideringthe possibility of seriously assisting the Yaka Mukama schools - paying teachers' salaries,introducing the national curriculum, etc - by gathering them into the orbit of Ministryresponsibility. This would increase the national gross enrolment rate by 10 per cent at least.

Spreading: However, the report did not pick up on the above examples since they are relativelynew.3 They do however need significant support from the region. This could, again, be a targetfor the Amman meeting, to seek to give recognition and support to those governments andorganisations that are trying to make a breakthrough. What is important to note in the region isthat three or four years after Jomtien there was little that was new in terms of innovating schoolsystems or creating new ones to reach out-of-school children in significant numbers. Unreportedbut real are the efforts of the last two years in the region where there is, at last, discernibleeffort to try: Burundi revisiting the Yaka Mukama schools; Uganda's COPE schools, Zambia'splanned community schools, Tanzania's COBET-in-the-making; Lesotho's interesting recentrecognition of their thirty-year-old satellite school system; Eritrea and Botswana's new initiativesfor planning education provision for nomadic and marginalized populations in arid areas. The pointbeing made is that these initiatives are so new, so tentative, so nation-bound, so significant,that they need recognition, morale-boosting, regional support and encouragement.

The lesson of Mali: Even the most stimulating example of all, 'les écoles des villages' in Mali,beyond the ESA region - where one NGO has been the principal catalytic agent in setting up thefirst schools - the Government of Mali appears to have played a decisive role. The lesson to belearned, as will be noted for girls' education below, is that the position and the action ofgovernment seems to be the major factor in the Africa region in bolstering, cajoling, convincing,supporting, moving or shaking NGOs, communities, districts or religious bodies, or their ownministry(ies) of education, into taking on the education of the total national community. Since itseems to take government effort and initiative to get something moving in the region,governments should become the targets of advocacy, not the 'community', as so much of theliterature urges.

The role of government: In those countries where the work of reaching out to the stillunschooled children is left entirely to 'the community' and to NGOs, there is less progress, thereare patches of effort, gems of ingenuity, generally unreplicable, with organizations working underdifficult conditions with little recognition or support of any kind. Overall, there are no sustained oreven replicable instances of alternative models of education in the region - yet. But processes ofreview can go a long way towards promoting them by giving recognition of their mere existence -and moral support.

ADULT EDUCATION: THE TRENDS

3 Many of these examples, for instance, do not appear in the INNOV DATABASE 1995


The overview report highlights the issues involved in reaching the still unschooled children. Theoverview states unequivocally that adult education, women's literacy in particular, has beenneglected over the last decade. The overview highlights the increasing proportions and absolutenumbers of illiterate people in the region.

GIRLS' EDUCATION

It was interesting that the UNICEF/FAWE paper on girls' education noted (a) the generalstagnation of enrolment rates in the region, several declining rates in specific countries (contraryto the generalized picture given in the overview that the downward of the 1980s had beenreversed) - but this is probably due to the fact that the FAWE figures were more recent than theoverview figures; (b) the trend in widening gender gaps. In the countries for which data isavailable 1990-1993, the gaps are widening more than they are narrowing. It is not that it wasexpected that Jomtien would have immediate impact on girls' education or on any othercomponent of education but it was sobering to note that the trend was negative rather thanpositive in the eastern and southern African region.

The statistics pointed to country-specific cases. A general understanding of the context of girls'education was necessary to appreciate the significance of the statements made on girls'education. First, (a) the 1990 level of general enrolment rates must be taken into considerationand (b) the 1990-1993 trends in overall enrolments, declining or increasing. The case of Eritreawith rapid gross and net enrollment ratio increase is, for example, very different from some othereastern African countries which have declining enrolments.

(c) The next indicator of interest is the baseline gender enrolment position in 1990 or theexisting gender gap at any point in time (in 1990 or in 1993), the proportion of girls in school,relative to boys. Some countries have a longer road to travel in terms of reaching gender paritythan other countries.

The fourth relevant indicator is (d) the trend in gender gap reduction or increase. It is the casethat in at least one country of rapid GER increase, the gender gap is increasing noticeably. Inanother country with general declining enrolments, the gender gap is narrowing. There are nohard and fast rules. What seems to be the case is that unless gender disparity is monitoredclosely and continually, and reported publically, nationally and locally, girls' participation is notincreased in any significant manner; it can actually decline. It is noticeable that in two countries ina period of national reconstruction, after emerging from conflict, the gender gap is beginning towiden in an alarming manner. The UNICEF/FAWE paper stated that there were more signs ofdisparity increase than decrease across the region. The overview did not detect signs of disparityincrease. The lesson to be learned seems to be the following: gender parity is not achieved bychance. It needs working on. Few countries have managed to develop plans for systematicallyworking on it. The challenge remains as strong as it did in 1990 but we now know, sinceJohannesburg, a little more about how difficult it is to get action.

CONCLUSION

The Communiqué of the Ministers at Johannesburg brings a message of hope, of determinationon the part of the Ministers and delegates present in Johannesburg, to face the issues, to collectdata more meaningfully and in time, to share the data, to use it and work with it, developingstrong innovative approaches to meet the ever-growing needs of Africa for education.


It was also significant that there was a great deal of interchange at the meeting. It wasparticularly appreciated by the delegates that the Ministers were always available, ever-present atthe plenary and group sessions, open to discussion with all the participants and taking anadmirable lead when action and calls-for-action were required. They initiated a number of topicsand they urged for more government involvement, for example, in terms of protecting girls atschool and in creating a more enabling school environment for girls. These factors wereappreciated and they were responsible for making the Johannesburg meeting a true forum ofexchange and of renewed commitment.

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WHO HAS THE POWER TO DEFINE "BASIC EDUCATION" ?

Birgit Brock-UtneUniversity of Oslo.

As reported in earlier issues of Norrag News, there was quite a struggle at the Education for Allconference in Jomtien in 1990 over the definition of the concept "basic education." Countriesfrom the South wanted the concept also to include non-formal education and adult education aswell as mentioning the necessity for a renewed emphasis on higher education. Several donors,led by the World Bank, wanted to limit the concept to primary schooling. Countries from theSouth managed to have "basic education" defined in broader terms than "primary education" inthe World Declaration on Education for All.

I had the privilege to be present as an observer at the two recent conferences preparing Africa'sparticipation in the mid-term conference in Amman, Jordan. The two conferences were first theEFA conference for West-Africa which took place in Yaounde, Cameroun from 12 through 14 ofFebruary 1996 and then the EFA conference for Southern and Eastern Africa which took place inJohannesburg from 21 - 23 of February.

It was quite clear in both of the conferences that there was a struggle over the power to definethe concept "basic education" going on. The struggle appeared, crudely, to be between theWorld Bank along with UNICEF on the one side and the African states along with UNESCO on theother side. While the first two agencies equated basic education with primary education, AfricanMinisters of Education as well as other officials from African states along with UNESCO (especiallyits office in Dakar - BREDA) refused this equation and insisted that "basic education" had toinclude also nonformal education and adult education.

Why is there this apparent difference between the World Bank and UNICEF on the one hand andUNESCO and the African states on the other, we may wonder? Does it have something to do withthe location of the World Bank and and UNICEF in North America?

A question raised by African states at several points in both of the conferences had to do withthe right of an African child to use his/her mother tongue as the language of instruction. Donorsnever raised this question. Pai Obanya - the Head of BREDA - said that not only had OAU declared1996 to be the "Year of Education" but a large conference on the situation of the Africanlanguages as languages of instruction would be held in Mali from the 6th to the 10th of May


1996. He stated clearly that he saw the linguistic problem as the main educational problem forschool-children in Africa.

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EDUCATION FOR ALL IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN (LAC)

Ernesto SchiefelbeinUNESCO, Santiago

LAC countries launched in 1979 a regional program aimed to provide good quality education forall, but at that time there was no special discussion on basic education needs and on how tomeet those needs. In the Quito Meeting (1991) LAC countries reviewed biennial workplans totake into account the Jomtien analysis and recommendations (based on a careful analysis of poorlearning results in LAC) and decided that a new model should be implemented to developeducation to the expected quality levels.

The elements for building up a revised model were discussed in Santiago. The traditional frontalmodel - called 'banking education' by Paulo Freire because it 'transmits knowledge' by teachingthe whole class, with poorly prepared lectures, following the curriculum rather than adapting it tobasic pupils' needs, centred on instruction of the 'average' pupil, in spite of high heterogeneity ofpupils, evaluating mainly the ability to recall facts and concepts, with a long tradition of cheatingin tests, demanding silence to allow the teacher's voice to reach all pupils, and punishing anyquestioning of teacher's statements or alternative divergent answers to their one-right answerquestions - was identified as the main source of poor learning for the heterogeneous group ofstudents attending schoolrooms in deprived neighborhoods.

Countries are now aware of the need to value diversity in all forms (gender, ethnic origin, IQ andother personal characteristics). Several experiences in providing personalized active learningmainly based on learning materials have been carried out in different countries. Still there is along road to supply opportunities for reaching similar levels of learning.

It is necessary to reduce the huge gap in inputs available in schools catering to the upper and thelower parts of the society, but at the same time the educational process must change withteachers playing a role as facilitators of students working (alone or in groups) at their own paceusing elements available in the school or home environment; taking into account the interest ofthe student through well defined options and self evaluations; and with the teacher spending afair amount of the classroom time in formative evaluation.

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SUMMARY REPORT OF THE EFA MID-TERM REVIEWSEMINAR OF THE LATIN AMERICAN REGION

Maria-Luisa JaurequiUNESCO - OREALC


1. Ten countries were represented at the meeting by high officials of the Ministries of Education(Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama andVenezuela, including the vice-ministers of education of Argentina, Venezuela and Ecuador.Representatives of UNFPA-Santiago, ECLAC and UNICEF-Chile, also attended.

2. Even though participants agreed that Jomtien had made a deep impact in the region, theycommented that Jomtien's goals had already discussed in PROMEDLAC III (Guatemala 1989), inthe context of the Major Project for Education in the LAC Region (MPLAC). However, Jomtiengave the MPLAC universal validity and a major thrust as was made evident in the results ofPROMEDLAC IV (Quito 1991) and in PROMEDLAC V (Santiago 1993).

3. Discussions and findings from the meeting confirmed that the documents being prepared forthe MINDELAC VII meeting (Kingston, Jamaica May 1996) were on the right track and provideanswers to or hints about the needs expressed by participants.

4. Participants discussed key legislation on education enacted between 1990-1995 (in Argentinaand Mexico in 1993; in Colombia in 1994; in Chile and Panama in 1995 and in Brazil in 1996).National consensus was reached in several countries and national plans in Argentina, Brazil, Chile,Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Panama. There is ample evidence of educational reforms,including curriculum reform, in half of the countries represented. Educational reforms include animportant thrust towards decentralization (core national curriculum) and the modernisation ofthe Ministries of Education; increases in national budgets for education (with the exception ofEcuador and Mexico); as well as a move towards major autonomy by the schools.

5. Countries are improving management and local administration of the schools which includenew responsibilities to the directors and teachers (in terms of curriculum) as well as the provisionof textbooks and classroom libraries. Countries are including the community in the managementof schools through school councils or PTAs, (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica,Nicaragua). There is agreement on a student centred learning process and the school as thenucleus to form future citizens with democratic values of tolerance and solidarity.

With respect to Basic Education for All, important measures have been taken in several countriesin terms of 'Compensatory Programmes' which include support to rural areas, support to theschools which are most in need, (in the very poor areas) etc. (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica,Mexico and Venezuela). Programmes for pre-school education, bilingual education and adultliteracy have still to be strengthened in the region. Nonetheless, there is an effort to improvespecial education.

7. The subjects of equity and quality remain an important preoccupation for all countries, andmeasures are being taken to improve them through legislation, educational reforms,decentralisation and the increased autonomy given to schools. The status of the teacher,salaries and training have yet to be improved in the region.

8. The participants requested international co-operation to support the educational reformsbeing undertaken with technical and financial co-operation. There is also the need to strengtheneducational technologies and programmes using the mass media (TV and radio), as well as theuse of informatics. Finally, there was a request to continue to support exchange of informationamong countries and educational statistics and measuring instruments of a more qualitative typethrough the identification of new educational indicators.


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A MEASURE OF THE EDUCATION FOR ALL (EFA) INITIATIVE:MORE THAN HALF FULL!

H.S. BholaIndiana University

The reference to the criterion of satisfaction with the progress of the Education for All (EFA)initiative is included in the World Declaration on Education for All: Meeting Basic Learning Needsof March 9, 1990 which said: "Every person -- child, youth and adult -- shall be able to benefitfrom educational opportunities designed to meet their basic learning needs. These needscomprise both essential learning tools (such as literacy, oral expression, numeracy, and problemsolving) and the basic learning content (such as knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes) requiredby human beings to be able to survive, to develop their full capacities, to live and work in dignity,to participate fully in development, to improve the quality of their lives, to make informeddecisions, and to continue learning."

Of course, there was basic education before EFA was proclaimed. Therefore, the relationshipbetween the EFA initiative of 1990 and the ongoing worldwide movement of basic educationshould be seen as that between a stream and the mainstream. It follows that the present Mid-Decade Review of Education for All (EFA) is also a report on the state of basic education in theworld at the mid-point of this decade. The two cannot and need not be separated.

Giving Praise Where Praise is Due

To engage in a discourse on the EFA initiative, one must begin with praise for the socialimagination of those who made Jomtien possible; agitated to put EFA, written in bold letters, onthe national agendas of nations of the world; who helped raise resources, nationally andinternationally, for expanding access to basic education, particularly for girls; worked tirelessly inbuilding capacity among policy makers, managers, and providers in the world's ministries anddepartments of education; raised awareness about the necessity of assessment of results, anddisseminated information about innovations; and who worked for transfer of responsibility for thedefinition of ends and the organisation of means to national leaders in education anddevelopment. It is only then that one should offer critiques with the benefit of hindsight.

With the Benefit of Hindsight

One over-arching impression that emerges from an examination of the documentation and debaterelating to EFA during 1990-95 in relation to the Jomtien Declaration is that of exclusion of theconstituencies of adults and youth from its concerns; and less than due attention paid to thecurriculum and content of education for all. There is no dearth of good intentions and greatpromises but in practical action the established and institutionalised have been preferred. The so-called new modalities are close variations of the old and tested patterns: the new is sometimesweaker than the old.


This has meant an almost exclusive focus on primary education for children. Basic learning needshave often come to be equated with a package of minimum learning needs of literacy, numeracy,and a small component of life skills. The "cutting edge" of primary education has seldom cut allthe way through to prepare youth or to rescue adults from the stranglehold of disadvantage.Non-Formal Education, more often than not, has meant formal primary education delivered tochildren through nonformal means and modes. The synergies of integrations that could haveappeared from educating children and their parents do not seem to have appeared.

Socialisation for Democratisation and Peace

In so exclusively focusing on primary education of children, EFA may have missed the opportunityfor the re- socialisation of adult men and women for democracy, ecology, tolerance and peace.The grand themes of the summits in the 1990s: sustainable development (Rio 1992), humanrights (Vienna 1993), population and women's empowerment (Cairo 1994), social aspects ofdevelopment (Copenhagen 1995) and gender equality and peace (Beijing 1995) seem not toecho in discussions of the content of learning.

Reasons for Hope

All is not lost and there are reasons for hope. Shifts in emphases should be possible toaccommodate in the new programs and projects: adult literacy, adult basic education and trainingof youth for employment and self-employment in the informal economy. There is ample time tolaunch important curriculum projects that could help integrate the new grand themes of thesummits of the 1990s in the curriculum of adult education as a priority, as also in the curriculumof schools.

Lastly, the historical forces are on the side of EFA. In a larger historical-futuristic frame, literacyand basic education are inevitable. The challenge is simply to take the inevitable more immediatein the lives of people -- children, youth and adults. It can be done, and should be.

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EDUCATION FOR ALL: ACHIEVING THE GOALA COMMENT ON THE WORKING DOCUMENT FOR AMMAN

Kenneth King, Education Department and African StudiesEdinburgh

The flavour of the Working DocumentNot perhaps surprisingly, the judgement in the document overall is that there has been progresssince 1990. Indeed it is said that the majority of developing nations have responded positivelyto the challenge of Jomtien. On the donor side of the equation, it is stated that donorcommitments and disbursements to basic education have risen both in absolute and in relativeterms.

But understandably the picture is mixed. On the positive side, it is judged that the downwardtrend in primary education enrolment (which had been one of the reasons for proposing Jomtien


in the first place) has been halted. School enrolments in all developing countries have apparentlygrown in the five years by an astonishing 50 million. But this is an honest report, and it isadmitted that on many of the other 6 suggested targets in the Jomtien Declaration andFramework there has in fact been little or no progress over the period.

Thus, there are allegedly now 110 million school age children out of school in contrast to pageone of the 1990 World Declaration which had said there were 100 million out of school. [There isnot surprisingly a lack of unanimity over the figures for out of school children in 1990; theAmman Working Document has the figure of 129 million for 1990, while the World Declarationhad 100. But as Kuper, Rockwell and others argue in different sections of NN19, attendancefigures are highly problematic.]

Nor is there anything very positive to say about learning achievement. Significant numbers stilldrop out of primary schools in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America before grade 4.

Working conditions for teachers have continued to decline in many settings.

Gender disparities in net enrolments between boys and girls have actually grown worse in mostregions.

As for adult literacy, the Amman Document says the situation is now slightly worse than in 1990,since there are allegedly 4 million more illiterates in 1995 than there were in 1990. [The adultilliteracy figure on the first page of the Jomtien World Declaration was actually 960 million,whereas the Amman Document states that in 1990 there were 868 million in 1990 (p. 7) andalso 885 million (p.23). These disparities underline how gross are the estimates that plannersare obliged constantly to use and work with.]

Not much is said in the Working Document about the suggested target 5 of the JomtienFramework which was about the provision of basic education and training in other essential skillsfor young people. Again not surprisingly, for the link between basic education and access towork or employment had not been a feature of Jomtien itself. But the backcloth to thisparticular target in Amman must be the announcement during the week before the Conference ofthe figures for child labour (83 million) worldwide.

On the issue of creative use of the media for mass communication of basic education messages,the Amman Document admits of only modest success.

Finally in this set of executive messages at the beginning of the Working Document, it isadmitted that the data make it problematic to gain a full picture, but there has been a rise ofeducational expenditure (as a proportion of GNP) in all regions except South Asia. Very worryinghowever is the further fact that the weakest and least developed nations appear to have fallenfurther behind.

A deeper level of analysisIn a working document that is both reviewing progress after a full five years and looking ahead tothe next five, there is an undeniable tension between an audit of the past and advocacy for thefuture. In terms of balance within the document, the bulk is, perhaps appropriately, dedicated toa review of past achievements and challenges (30 pages), while the immediate priorities for thefuture are just 5 pages. What can we extract from the detail of the analysis and audit ofachievement?


1. External Aid to basic education - what do we now know?Since NORRAG has maintained an interest in donor policies over many years, this is one area ofthe Working Document we would examine with considerable interest.

The answer to our question above is at best equivocal, and the available evidence for the answerrather thin. As several of our contributors in Section Four (donor dimensions) point out, the dataare really not adequate - even in the North, and even when there have been so many suggestionsabout compiling and monitoring these. The Working Document does draw on one majorgeneralisation: 'that aggregate donor commitments and disbursements for basic education haverisen in absolute and relative terms' (p.16). The source for this is a UNESCO Survey of 1995, butdisappointingly there is no reference - at least not in this advance copy of the working document- to this survey, nor any indication of what order of magnitude is being talked about.

One or two donors are mentioned by name (Sweden and Germany, and the European Union) asare some of the co-sponsors of Jomtien. It is admitted also that several other donors, unnamed,have not joined the international consensus in support of basic education. Amongst all thebilaterals, therefore, there is very little data offered to the reader which could give any sense ofthe kind of direction now being pursued. Nor is there any but very general indications of wherethe funds have been distributed amongst the various forms of basic education. All that isadmitted is that 'most donor support has gone to primary schooling' amongst the differentcategories of basic education. It might well be important at Amman to see what scope there isfor getting a better leverage on these questions. If it has not already happened, there might bevalue in the Development Assistance Committee convening, as planned, a follow up meeting toits earlier (1992) analysis of donor policies.

In a situation where there is an overall decline in total resources for development aid, an audit ofwhat has been allocated from external resources, and to what effect, could be timely. Whatanalysis has been done, in the early 1990s by King and Carr-Hill, and in the last 2 years byBuchert, continues to point to the problems with comparative cross-national data. And yet somecontinuation of the evaluation of donor practice in relation to basic education will surely beimportant to sustain over the next five years.

2. Looking ahead: new challenges? new suggested targets?Elsewhere in this issue of NORRAG NEWS we have commented on whether it would be appropriateto confirm the older Jomtien targets, or to reschedule the deadlines or timelines. What steerdoes the Working Document give in this direction?

It encourages the Amman Forum to debate and decide on four areas: improved learningachievement; resources and partnerships for EFA; building capacities to providebasic education; and meeting the basic learning needs of all. (pp.44-47)

In respect of each of these four key issues, however, the Working Document only has a series ofvery major questions about how to proceed, about what has been learnt, about what can bedone, about what has proved effective in the past. The Document, perhaps sensibly, bows out ofdeclaring what the answers to these questions might be, and how they might be applied in thevery different regions of the world. Rather than pre-digesting the answers for discussion inAmman, it challenges the Forum to debate these issues.

3. New deadlines to bring the inevitable a bit nearer??


The text of the Working Document ends (p.47) on an intriguing note. First, it notes that there isan endemic and natural desire in the human species to translate experience into symbols forcommunication and for learning. Optimistically, in this human sense, it judges that 'Educationfor all is probably inevitable'. Indeed the current global forces of competition and co-operation will further encourage this innate inclination.

On the other hand, the Document does not think that EFA will come about without continuouseffort; indeed the evidence is that the revolution in basic learning needs makes the attainmentof EFA 'an ever more ambitious goal'.

Even if the Document is right about the (eventual) inevitability of EFA, it judges that thisparticular Forum will need to refocus 'on specific goals within reach during the next five to tenyears and then marshal the resources and forces needed to achieve them.' In an interesting turnof phrase, the Document ends with the following aphorism:

The inevitable can and must be made more immediate.

But readers will have noted that the suggested time line has become a little less definite. It willbe interesting to see what Amman makes of this challenge to refocus, and to re-set the sights ofthe donors and nations on bringing the inevitable a little closer.

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SOME DONORS AND BASIC EDUCATION: FROM 1990 TO 1995


At the Jomtien meeting itself, in Thailand, it was predictable that there were available manydifferent materials from different agencies and from different countries illustrating theirapproaches to basic education. Influential amongst these were draft copies of the World Bank'sImproving primary education in developing countries: a review of policy options (which would laterthat year appear as the World Bank's Primary Education: a World Bank policy paper). Alsoavailable was Chris Colclough and Keith Lewin's Educating all the children: the economic challengeof the 1990s (the result of a UNICEF-supported project to examine the feasibility and costs ofdoing just that - educating all the world's children. All kinds of other valuable material was readilyavailable from the agencies who went to Jomtien: from ODA (UK) which produced for Jomtien itsglossiest ever education policy paper: Into the Nineties: an education policy for British Aid(1990), from UNESCO, from DSE, the Commonwealth Secretariat. from Japan, from the OECD, aswell as from the World Bank, UNICEF, UNESCO and UNDP, its principal sponsors. And fromnational governments there was also a rich array: from Thailand (the host country), the Gambia,Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Kenya, India, Tanzania, and many others.

What are some of the positions now on Basic Education for All? We carry in this sectioncommentary about several of the donors who are conscious of the importance of this shift.Notably, ODA, NORAD and DGIS (Netherlands), and we refer to others such as Italian Co-operation where have been significant projects in basic education and to Canadian CIDA wherethere would appear to have been little change of direction.

For a few of the donors that were already convinced of the importance of Basic Education before1990, such as SIDA and the World Bank, it may be useful to examine briefly their most recentpolicy pronouncements. It will also be useful to note how others less committed traditionally tobasic education have been shifting - both on paper and in practice.

In the case of Sida (which since July 1st 1995 has incorporated five Swedish developmentassistance authorities into one) there is a sense in which it is no longer quite the sameorganisation as was represented at Jomtien. For one thing Sida now includes the organisationSAREC (the Swedish Agency for Research Co-operation) which presumably means that there aremore connections with universities and with research institutions at the level of higher educationthan was evident in the old SIDA. The latest policy paper on education from new Sida, however,Policy for Sida Co-operation in basic education and education reform (January 1996) is stillrecognisably from the organisation that traditionally put a strong emphasis on basic education(both in schools and through support to adult literacy).

Sida's new policy paper makes explicit a commitment to the principles of Jomtien ('The WorldDeclaration on Education for all and its Framework for Action have been important considerationsin the revision of Sida's policy for development co-operation in basic education and educationreform work [Sida, 1996: 8]). Be that as it may, Sida, in addition to its continuing emphasis onprimary education, would seem to have continued to pay more attention to adult basic educationthan many other donors have since Jomtien. The actual figures for expenditures on educationsub-sectors are not available in this Sida document, but the contrast implied in this quotationsays a good deal about Sida's concern that adult basic education, including literacy, has beenneglected, in part because of Jomtien:


Adult basic education, including literacy programmes, has on the whole been event moreadversely affected than the formal school system by economic decline and budget cuts.In addition, its share of the shrinking education budgets has in most countries decreasedduring the last ten years, partly as a result of the growing priority given to primaryeducation for children by the main sponsors of the 1990s World Conference on Educationfor All (Sida 1996: 6).

Although this particular Sida paper is the first major one since the re-organisation, and its focus isquite explicitly on basic education and education reform, there is some weight given to theessential complementarity of basic with higher education.. The teachers and planners working inbasic education, and the researchers in the basic education field are normally created by highereducation institutions. But Sida does not justify its support to higher education only for itslimited if important connections to basic education. It recognises that higher education is crucialfor institutional development and that institutional development in turn is crucial for most otherprogrammes of development co-operation. But it also acknowledges that 'support to further andhigher education is necessary for technological development and research of relevance to thecountry in question as well as internationally' (Sida 1996: 10).

The World Bank was indirectly referred to above as one of the sponsoring organisations of theWorld Conference which had been partly responsible for reducing emphasis on adult literacy by itsstrong focus on school education. That priority was evident at Jomtien where the then Presidentof the Bank underlined the fact that 'support for basic primary education will be the dominantpriority' (NN8:1990: 29).

The World Bank has continued its strong emphasis on primary education over the decade, andeven though it does have a small number of projects supporting literacy and non-formaleducation (see Biervliet in this issue for a Ghanaian example), it is perhaps not completely out ofcharacter that in the latest Bank policy paper on education, the focus is almost entirely on formaleducation with the exception of one paragraph from which the following is taken:

Programmes of adult education are necessary but such programmes have a poor trackrecord. One study showed an effectiveness rate of just 13 per cent for adult literacycampaigns conducted over the past thirty years (Abadzi 1994), and there has been littleresearch into the benefits and costs of literacy programmes. Several new approaches toadult literacy appear promising, however, in large part because they address motivation -the key factor in all successful programmes...............These new approaches will be reviewed in detail in a future World Bank paper, promptedby challenges to the view that large-scale literacy programmes are generally unsuccessful(World Bank 1995: 90).

In what is effectively the first overall review of education by the World Bank since the 1980sector policy paper, this is all that can be said of adult literacy and adult education.

By contrast, the World Bank has significantly increased lending in the primary education sub-sector, to a point where during fiscal 1990-1994, more than a third of all lending for educationwas for primary level (more than twice that of the previous decade). It has also begun lending inthe area of another of the Jomtien priorities - early childhood education - but here too, like adultliteracy, there has been little or no evaluation of impact.


What is intriguing about the latest Bank paper is its assertion on the one hand that educationcontributes to economic growth but cannot by itself produce it. On the other hand the papergoes on to argue very forcefully indeed that education, and particularly primary education, is oneof the key variables for explaining the economic success of specific countries. Thus despite whathas been said about education not being a sufficient precondition for growth, it is then said that'Primary education is the largest single contributor to the economic growth rates of the high-performing Asian economies' (World Bank 1995: 23). When it comes also to explainingdifferences between East Asia and Latin America, or East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, again it iseducation that allegedly accounts for a greater proportion of the predicted differences in growthrates than physical capital. This is presented very powerfully indeed for sub-Saharan Africa:

Similarly, the major difference between East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa is due tovariations in primary school enrolment rates. Investment in physical capital accounts foronly 20 percent of the difference (World Bank 1995:23)

We have argued elsewhere, including in NN18, that there are probably dangers in overstating therole of primary education as a component in the East Asian miracle, and not least when it islooked at as a factor in isolation from the wider culture and value system in which it is embedded.

One of the other donors which has tried to move forcefully towards greater support for basiceducation has been ODA. There have certainly been some major recent projects in South Asiaand Africa in support of basic education, but as Allsop argues elsewhere in this issue the formalstatistics of expenditure on education still tend to give the impression that, for ODA, educationspending is heavily biased towards secondary, technical and higher education at the expenses ofprimary education and literacy/nonformal education (ODA 1995: 5). There is almost certainly astatistical timelag, caused in part by a bias towards accounting expenditures rather thancommitments. Hence it may take years for the really large projects committed to basiceducation to be reflected in the official DAC figures.

A further donor that has tried to change both policy and practice towards basic education andadult literacy is NORAD, as can be seen from Sissel Volan' s piece in this section. Her articlemakes clear in passing one of the important but less discussed issues in making this kind of shiftand that is the absence of in-house personnel in the agency itself or in the wider consultancy anduniversity constituency who could really play high quality technical assistance roles in respect ofbasic education. This is certainly also an issue that several other donors have noted, includingODA, as they have increased their projects in this arena.

A last donor that might be mentioned here is the world's largest bilateral aid donor, JICA, whichhas been re-considering the extent to which it should adjust its traditional policies in the light ofJomtien, and had a study group report in 1994 on possible policy shifts towards basic education.The results of their investigation do not constitute JICA policy but they provide a valuable insightinto the tensions between the World Bank approach and the very issue of culture and primaryeducation we have just alluded to.

For instance, despite the strong support to World Bank style thinking on education as humancapital investment, it is abundantly clear that the Study Group pays a great deal more attentionto the cultural, moral and religious dimensions of education than do Bank reports. In discussingthe problems of education in developing countries, for instance, the Study Group underlines thepoint that education is inseparable from other factors than the economic:


Education is premised on participation by pupils from all walks of life; therefore it stronglyreflects ethnic, cultural, regional and national characteristics (JICA 1994:12).

From the side of the Japanese themselves, it is argued that one of the most important aspectsof education is its very intimate relationship with a particular nation's history, traditions anddevelopment. This theme has sometimes been used in Japanese discussions about aid toeducation to argue that Japan should especially not become involved in aid to primary education,on the grounds that this is a sphere that should be a nation's own particular concern. In theStudy Group's thinking, however, this point is extended to apply to all education sub-sectors in away that is very distinct from World Bank commentaries:

Because education is an area where values, morality, aspirations to national unification,culture and sovereignty are involved, it is difficult for Japan actively to enlarge the scopeand enrich the content of its aid for education (JICA 1994: 37).

In a similar vein, the Study Group argues that the very value-laden character of education makesit a priori problematic for many Japanese to be identified for educational assistance missions(JICA 1994: 37).

This then produces a rather paradoxical situation. On the one hand, the Study Group hasapparently felt a responsibility, given the logic of human capital from the research associatedwith the Bank, to make the case for increasing Japanese aid to the education sector, but on theother hand, it is keenly aware of the cultural and moral dimensions of education. This makes theStudy Group diffident about Japan's capacity to provide support in such a sensitive area.

There is then something of a possible contradiction running through the three majorrecommendations that the Study Group has assembled. These are as follows:

1. Increase Japan's educational aid, including that for vocational training, to about 15 percent of total ODA by the year 2000.

2. Assign the highest aid priority to basic education.

3. Without focusing narrowly on basic education alone, identify the stage of developmentof each country's education, then implement the kind of education aid that is required(JICA 1994: v).

The first and second recommendations seem to derive from a sense of the importance ofeducation, as proved by a great deal of research, including from the World Bank and other donorsand from Japan's own history of education as well as from Japan's leadership role as the world'slargest bilateral donor with responsibilities for extending educational aid further afield. But at thesame time as assigning the highest priority to basic education, Japan is only too aware of why ithad found it difficult to aid basic education in the past:

It was thought that basic education is not well suited to aid programmes because basiceducation involves a people's morals, values, and customs, and accordingly aid in this areatouches on a nation's culture and sovereignty, and because basic education targets hugepopulations, spread out over vast geographical expanses (JICA 1994: 39-40).


The third recommendation reinforces the hesitations about making basic education too dominanta priority, and underlines the importance of responding to what the particular country'sdevelopment requires (King 1995: 7-8).

References

Japan International Co-operation Agency (JICA) 1994 Study on development assistance fordevelopment and education, the Study Group on development assistance for educational anddevelopment JICA, Tokyo

King, K. 1995 'Aid for development or for change: a discussion of education and training policiesof development assistance agencies with particular reference to Japan', CAS, Edinburgh,December 1995 (forthcoming in Watson K. (Ed.).Educational Dilemmas: debate and diversityCassell, London).

NORAD 1995 NORAD's support to the education sector: with a focus on primary, secondary andbasic adult education (Basic Principles: 27.2.95), Oslo

ODA 1995 Aid to education in the 90's: Education policy pape,r London

Sawamura, Nobuhide 1995 Changing policy and practice of Japanese education aid to Sub-Saharan Africa, unpublished M.Phil. University of Edinburgh

Sida 1995 New Sida to co-ordinate all Swedish development co-operation, Sida, Stockholm

Sida 1996 Policy for Sida Co-operation in Basic Education and Education Reform, Department forDemocracy and Social Development, Education Division, Sida, Stockholm

World Bank 1995 Priorities and strategies for education: a World Bank review, World Bank,Washington

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DONOR POLICY AND PRACTICE RELATED TO EDUCATION FOR ALL SINCE JOMTIEN

Lene BuchertCOWIconsult,Denmark

The expressed commitment to Education for All was high amongst the representatives of themany national governments and of national and multinational organisations who participated inthe Jomtien summit in 1990. Since then, a number of steps have been taken by the participants,including: the adoption of Education for All strategies by national governments in the developingworld and by international and national aid organisations; policy dialogue amongst the donors andbetween donors and recipient governments; budget increases for Education for All in a number ofrecipient countries and among some of the donors; joint donor meetings to monitor progress and


cooperation in Education for All; information campaigns to further draw attention to the goalsand prospects of Education for All.

The translation of expressed policy commitment into formulated statements and, then, intoactual practice is a lengthy process. After all, national governments may change, national andinternational organisations reorganise and have bureaucratised decision-making processes and,under all circumstances, the realisation of altered educational policies is a medium to long-termphenomenon. Therefore, setting the goal of achieving Education for All within a decade was,perhaps, more a symbolic act, realising the need for immediate attention to the goal, than arealistic assessment of the time period needed to reach it.

The goal of Education for All has to be met in a context of an estimated increase in the numberof out-of-school children by approximately 34 million and a slight drop in the world adult illiteracyrate by approximately 6% during 1990-2000 (UNESCO 1993, 1994). Furthermore, it has to bemet at a time of reduced traditional aid budgets due to recession and other competing demandsinternationally, redirection of resources from traditional aid recipients to the so-called transitionaleconomies, and general aid fatigue. In light of these constraints, both procedural and contextual,the continued overall responsibility of the recipient governments in realising the goal must bestressed.

Assessing Donor Involvement in Education for All: Some Difficulties

i. The concept of Education for All

There are several difficulties involved in assessing whether the expressed commitment amongnational and international donor organisations has been translated into policy formulation andimplementation. Firstly, the concept of Education for All is complex and diverse. It included anumber of different dimensions in the Jomtien Declaration which have since been expanded in theUNESCO Education for All Programme (Inter-Agency Commission 1990). National andinternational donors have adopted the original dimensions differentially, often depending on theirparticular priorities and what they consider to be their comparative advantages. The translationof the concept into practice among the agencies is, therefore, related to different focal areas andactivities, aiming at different target groups and using different instruments (Buchert 1995a).

Critically then, this means that the scope for donor cooperation becomes constrained and that aparticular donor emphasis on Education for All may or may not fit well into specified recipientcountry priorities. There is a risk, therefore, that donor agencies may continue to circumvent theessence of the policy dialogue process which has often been described as an effort "to put therecipient governments in the driver's seat".

ii. The deficiency in data

The lack of coherent understanding of the underlying concept of Education for All is alsoreflected in the lack of standardised recording of education aid amongst multinational andnational organisations. It is virtually impossible to establish reliable trends in education aidbecause the figures are not available, are too dispersed, or are classified in different ways atdifferent times by different agencies. Therefore, the most that can be achieved at the presentmoment from an analysis of policy formulations and the available scarce statistics is to identifycertain emerging patterns in the aid to Education for All among national and multinationalagencies.


These patterns seem to be threefold: some agencies which have always put their highestemphasis at the basic levels of the educational system continue to do so (e.g. SIDA, Danida);some agencies which have traditionally supported higher education and/or vocational educationand training have shifted resources to the basic level (e.g. Finnida, ODA); some agencies whichhave traditionally supported secondary and higher education have a declared intent of shiftingresources to the basic levels and, in some cases, reorganisations within the agencies have takenplace to support such measures (e.g. DGIS, JICA) (Buchert 1995b).

iii. Addressing Wider Constraints

Despite these emerging, and possibly positive, trends, the task of reaching the goal of Educationfor All seems to demand much more comprehensive efforts which go beyond immediate financialsupport for Education for All to address the wider constraints which impede the realisation of thegoal. Strengthening the international solidarity, which was one of the strategies of the JomtienDeclaration, must include attention to the overall political and economic conditions within theglobal economic system which sets constraints to the implementation of the policies nationally,such as trade and debt arrangements, project and other aid conditionalities, and determination ofthe issues on the international agenda.

References

Buchert, Lene. 1995a. The concept of Education for All - what has happened after Jomtien.International Review of Education 41 (6), pp. 537-49.

Buchert, Lene. 1995b. Recent trends in education aid: towards a classification of policies. Paris:UNESCO:International Institute for Educational Planning.

Inter-Agency Commission. 1990. World Declaration of Education for All and Framework of Actionto Meet Basic Learning Needs. New York: Unicef.

UNESCO. 1994. Statistical Issues STE-6. UNESCO: Division of Statistics. October.

UNESCO. 1993. Education for All. Status and Trends. Paris.

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EDUCATION FOR ALL: AN ODA RESPONSE

Terry AllsopSenior Education Adviser, ODA

Since the publication of its Education policy Paper - Aid to Education in the 90s - in 1993, ODAhas identified itself with the overall prioritisation of investment in basic education evident in thepost-Jomtien world. Definition of basic education has been flexible enough to include "formaleducation up to the normal limit of compulsory/universal education" along with "non-formaleducation and adult literacy training". This change of emphasis has not precluded ODA fromworking in its more traditional levels of secondary and tertiary education, but the profile of workin progress is undoubtedly shifting rapidly.


The change of profile is not yet easily monitored through aid statistics; the best available figuressuggest that spending on basic education in 1994/5 comprises only 15% of total ODAinvestment in education. This is partly attributable to the long lead-time involved in generatingnew projects in primary education, partly to the lack of disaggregation of the statistics of, forexample, investment in training programmes focussed on primary education. A more reliableindicator of the shift is probably the number of large agreements, by ODA's standards, signedduring 1994/6: with India £46.0 million, Malawi £7.3 million, Pakistan £7.9 million, Zambia £7.0million. Many other major projects have since been agreed or are in the pipeline.

In this changing environment, there have been many new approaches to be pursued, and theexperience over ten years of the Indian primary education work in Andhra Pradesh has been animportant influence. It has been extensively and rigorously evaluated throughout. ODA hasrecognised the importance of sectoral approaches to basic education development, puttingparticular emphasis on the need for reform of educational management and planning, allied todecentralisation of decision-making to district, community and school level. Support is offeredwhere appropriate. There is also recognition of the need to acknowledge that the locus forchange of quality of learning must rest in individual classrooms and schools, as reflected in therecent World Bank publication, Schools Count: World Bank Project Design and the Quality ofPrimary Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (Heneveld, W. and Craig, H.: 1996). ODA's own capacityfor educational research in basic education is increasing; a recent study of reading in primaryschools in Malawi and Zambia has impacted directly on project activity, emphasising again theneed to target support for in-classroom changes. Lastly, in this section, ODA is gaining importantexperience in the field of adult literacy; we contribute, for example, to adult literacy projects infour of the five West and North African countries in which I work (Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria andSierra Leone). We have recently published an evaluation of the work of ActionAid's REFLECTliteracy programme. All of this presents a learning agenda for ODA which cannot be enactedovernight.

There is a matching agenda for our British partners in the delivery of aid to education. Theresource needs in the mid-1990s, for consultancy, project management and training, are verydifferent from those of ten years ago. There is no primary education resource equivalent to thatwealth of direct overseas experience built up in, for example, science and mathematics educationor secondary teacher training, over many years. Identifying and mobilising a new resource is nowa daily preoccupation for ODA advisers; the response from the UK constituency is generally veryencouraging, and of good quality.

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WHERE ARE THE DUTCH SINCE JOMTIEN?:the implementation of basic education policy of The Netherlands .

Kees van den BoschCESO, The Netherlands.

At the time when the WCEFA was held in Jomtien in 1990, the Netherlands' Ministry of ForeignAffairs was finalising its overall policy paper for the 90s, entitled 'A world of difference'. In thispolicy paper much attention is being paid to structural poverty alleviation and humandevelopment had been put back in the centre of development: development by, for and of the


people. Of course this policy paper could not fully take into account the results of the WCEFA, itwas just mentioned briefly by saying that more attention would be paid in future to BasicEducation. A year later, the consequences for education of the overall policy paper, wereelaborated in the first dutch comprehensive policy paper on education, entitled 'Developmentcooperation and education in the 1990s' (published april 1992). This document took intoaccount the lessons learnt from the past as well as recent developments such as the WCEFA. Inthis way Holland was one of the first bilateral donors to formulate a new education policyfollowing Jomtien.

The policy paper gave five policy guidelines which should direct future dutch education aid andexplains what this means for support to Basic Education. These guidelines are:

a. a higher priority for education: increased education aid, particularly for basic education.

In 1990 expenditure for Higher Education contributed for 45% to total dutch education aid whileBasic Education received only 10%. Most probably this distribution pattern has been very similarthroughout the 1980s. In order to remedy this situation a quantitative target was set by statingthat annual expenditure on Basic Education should increase with 100 million dutch guilders in the1990s. Two thirds of this was targeted for Sub-Saharan Africa and one third for Southern Asia.The idea behind this was that any growth in education aid would go into Basic Education, thusfreezing the volume of aid to other education sub-sectors, notably higher education. This avoidedthe problem of reallocation from higher to basic education. It was assumed that the growth oneducation expenditure would come from the growth of the overall development budget.

b. promoting access to education and equal opportunities for all.It was mentioned that cost-effective alternatives in the provision of basic education would beencouraged and supported in order to promote access in a sustainable way. Special attentionshould be given to schooling of girls and women.

c. maintaining and raising standards.It was argued that increased access was of little value if quality and relevance of Basic Educationcould not be maintained and enhanced. Mention was made of e.g. in-service teacher training andof research into learning processes and basic learning needs.

d. strengthening capacity and education systems in developing countriesBasic education, both formal and non-formal, has to be seen as an integral part of the nationaleducation system. If innovative and comprehensive approaches in basic education are to besuccessful, the institutional capacity in many countries needs to be strengthened. The sameapplies if other actors like NGO's and the local community are to be involved and if new and moreeffective instruments between donors and Governments are to be successfully implemented.

e. effective local, national and international cooperation.Not only improved interministerial and intersectoral coordination within developing countries aswell effective mobilisation of all actors including NGO's, has been mentioned but also improveddonor coordination was stressed. The latter is of particular importance to The Netherlandsbecause it did have little experience in supporting Basic Education and working together withother donors was therefore considered an essential element for successful implementation.

It is interesting to note that these policy guidelines were extensively discussed within the variousdepartments of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs as to what its consequences are for


countries, regions and other sectors. This has considerably contributed to a rapid internalizationof the new education policy while it was still being formulated. This process contributed to theimplementation phase.

The new policy is now four years in operation and briefly the following points could be mentionedregarding its implementation.

1. One of the first things which was done was the appointment of three regional educationaladvisers in Africa. There was already a regional adviser in Central America since 1989, whichproved successful. Because in South Asia a number of activities were already in preparation, mostof the new programmes had to be identified in Africa. These education specialists were attachedto a dutch Embassy and it was their task to stimulate policy consultations with a number ofcountries and to identify activities in Basic Education, not only with Governments but also withappropriate NGO's and with other donors. It is the intention of the dutch Ministry to furtherincrease the number of education advisers.

2. It was decided that support to Basic Education would be mainly restricted to some twenty(20) countries. This prevented dilution of efforts and allowed for a more indepth and sustainedconsultation process with the countries concerned. This concentration did indeed already result insome substantive and long-term involvement in Basic Education programmes.

3. Support for BE is not restricted to a narrowly defined education sector. On the contrary, it isstimulated to include basic education components in programmes in other sectors, for example inrural development programmes. Basic education components can be found mainly in the followingsectors (using the OECD/DAC sectoral codes): health, water and sanitation, agriculture, othersocial infrastructure, multi-sector.

4. Wherever possible a programmatic approach to basic education support is favoured overprojects. The prerequisite for doing this, is that the country has a sound BE policy and action planin place and that the necessary local capacity exists. In some countries this programme supporthas taken the form of budget-support (for specific purposes) which has been realized in CapeVerde. It is the intention to further stimulate this approach.

In quantitative terms there has been a steady increase in basic education aid during the past fewyears, as is shown in the following table:

Expenditure to Basic Education (in millions of Dutch guilders)

1992 1993 1994Africa 6.6 9.1 29.0Asia 6.2 12.9 33.9Latin America 6.3 9.4 6.8Other -- 0.1 0.1Total 19.1 31.5 69.8

The year 1992 has been taking as the starting point for increased support to BE, so the targetset in the policy document will have been reached when annual expenditure amounts to Dfl.119million. The year 1998 has been set for achieving this target. The above figures show that in1994 aid to BE has increased with Dfl. 50 million. The table also shows that the increase goesfaster in Asia than in Africa. But the development of new programmes which result from bilateral


policy consultation have a long incubation period before it leads to expenditure and given thatrestriction, the results in quantitative terms are not bad. Particularly not, because the overalldevelopment budget has been stagnating rather than increasing. This meant that increasedsupport for BE had to come from reallocation between sectors. There is no evidence that thisreallocation has taken place within the education sector. There is another important point. Theabove figures refer only to 100% BE activities, while - as mentioned above - the deliberate policyis to include BE-components in other sectors, but this can not be accounted for in terms ofexpenditure. For example, in 1993 there were in total 232 BE-activities of which only 60 were100% BE and only those 60 are included in the above figures. Therefore, real expenditure on BEis most likely to be considerably higher, but this cannot be measured in a reliable way.

In concluding one can say that following Jomtien, The Netherlands has formulated acomprehensive policy on education aid and it has taken its implementation seriously. Despite astagnating overall development budget, support to BE has grown during the past four years.Halfway through the decade, Holland is halfway to its quantitative target.

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ITALO-PALESTINIAN DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION& EDUCATION FOR ALL

Lavinia GasperiniDGCS, Italy

The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) has been a new partner for Italian educationaldevelopment Cooperation since 1994 when the Palestinian Ministry of Education and HigherEducation (MOEHE) was established.

The Italian Cooperation in the Palestinian Territories, although addressing different levels of theeducation system, focuses mostly, on Basic Education (grade I to X), a priority for the MOEHE.

The Palestinian population of West Bank and Gaza, in fact, estimated at 2.4 million, has a veryyoung age structure, with 46% of the population under 15 years. Although there are apparentlyno major problems of access in the first grades of schooling (enrolment rate is estimated at102% for the primary cycle and 80% for secondary education), the major problem is the generaldecline in the quality of basic education, and as a consequence of secondary and highereducation.

The first project funded by Italian Development through UNESCO is supporting the PalestinianCurriculum Development Centre. Before the Agreement on Preparatory Transfer of Powers andResponsibilities - signed on the 28th of August 1994, which followed the Agreement on the GazaStrip and the Jericho Area (Cairo 4th May 1994) and the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration ofPrinciples (13th September 1993) - education was under Israeli rule. In West Bank and Gaza, theJordanian and the Egyptian education system were adopted by all institutions. Somemodifications were introduced by the Israelis on textbooks, to suppress information that wasconsidered to be directed against Israeli occupation. The MOEHE therefore attaches high priorityto the development of a unified curriculum which will be sensitive to the cultural, social andeconomic needs of the Palestinian people.


A second project funded by the Italian Development Cooperation through UNESCO/IIEP, alsoaddressing basic education, aims to contribute to building the capacity for policy formulation andmanagement required to plan, implement and monitor the various actions required to improveeducation quality.

Finally, DGCS recently approved the funding of a $ 2 million 'pilot' project - which will beimplemented by UNESCO - concerning the provision and use of teaching materials for 100disadvantaged primary schools (grade I to IV) on the West Bank. The project aimed at enhancingeducation quality, will train teachers to produce teaching materials and to use them in theirclasses. They are using as an additional incentive, revamped classrooms and the provision ofmini-budgets to help in the preparation of teaching materials. Headmasters and districtsupervisors will be trained to guide the teachers. Communities will be mobilised by theestablishment of parent-teacher associations and ad hoc planned activities to increase thecontribution and add to the sustainibility of the project.

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CANADA'S RESPONSE TO THE "EDUCATION FOR ALL" INITIATIVE

Karen MundyStanford University School of Education

In the 1990s, as other donors and donor organizations began to move into programs whichtargeted both basic education and the broader implementation of educational reforms, theseissues remained conspicuously absent from the policy agendas of the two most importantorganisations delivering Canadian educational ODA -- the Canadian International DevelopmentAgency (the central administrator of Canadian ODA), and the International Development ResearchCentre. Yet because the government's 1995 foreign policy review concluded with a commitmentto increase aid flows to basic needs sectors (including education), there is some possibility thatbasic education may again rise to importance within the Canadian aid program in the second halfof the 1990s.

This brief review will look at the demise of educational aid in the Canadian aid program during the1980s and early 1990s, noting the scattered activities which formed Canada's response toJomtien in the five year period since 1990. It will consider the impact of Canada's domestic"structural adjustment" on educational aid -- highlighting the rise of trade and internationalcompetitiveness to the top of its foreign policy agenda and the systematic cuts administeredsince 1989 to the aid program. It will also suggest those areas in which there have recently beenrenewed, though still modest, attempts to channel Canadian aid towards "education for all".

Education: A Low Priority in the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)

Canada is a relatively small donor, whose development aid is highly diffused both geographicallyand sectorally. It has traditionally been seen as among the "like-minded" OECD nations, becauseof its strong emphasis on humanitarian aid, the concentration of its aid on least developedcountries, the higher than average levels of its ODA as a percentage of GNP per capita (whichhovered between 0.4-0.5% of GNP for most of the 1980s), and the fact that most of its aid is


formally untied. Critics point out, however, that the Canadian ODA program has remainedprimarily organised around Canadian goods and technical assistance, and that it became evenmore closely linked to domestic economic interests during the 1980s (Pratt 1994).

Historically, a substantial part of Canadian ODA (between 7-14%) has been channelled intoeducation (the current figure, 12.5% includes expenditures on training and scholarshipprograms). In the 1980s, the education sector activities funded through the CanadianInternational Development Agency became subsumed under the rubric of "human resourcesdevelopment". The HRD programming theme swept through the Agency's two major branches ofoperation, Bilateral and Partnership (which supports the initiatives of non-governmentalorganisations and institutions), rising from 14.52% to 29.84 % of overall expenditures between1986 and 1993. Although the 1980s saw support for a scattering of educational projects whichprovided Canadian paper, teachers or educational administrators, HRD sector work concentratedprimarily on tertiary level training and on building institutional linkages between Canadian anddeveloping country colleges and universities. The expansion of programming at these levels wasdriven by several factors, including the lobbying of Canadian organisations, and the explicit linkmade between training of high level professionals and the potential for future economic relationsbetween Canada and newly industrialising economies. By the second half of the 1980s, the readyavailability of a group of consulting firms and contracting organisations specialising in high levelHRD had also begun to feed back into the rapid expansion of CIDA's HRD programs (Mundy 1992,1995).

The impact of Jomtien on CIDA has been at best, uneven. While CIDA participated in the"Education for All" activities and prepared several research pieces on basic education in the early1990s, its education sector specialists failed to have any Agency-wide strategy for HRD andeducation approved by senior managers between 1990 and 1994. They were also far fromsuccessful in convincing operational level staff to develop projects in basic education. Indeed, arecent attempt to document all spending on basic education across Bilateral and Partnershipprograms suggests that disbursements steadily dropped between 1992 and 1995. Bilateraldisbursements, for example, fell from $30.02 million Canadian dollars in 1992/93, to $13.46million in 1994/95 (Doncor 1995). In Partnership Branch, which supports NGO and NGI initiatives(generally assumed to be more closely focused on basic needs and poverty issues), only $17.66million, or 7.4% of all spending in 1992/93 went to basic education (Vander Zaag 1994). Thelion's share of bilateral spending has gone into textbook production, where the promotion ofCanadian publishers has been central. Teacher training and upgrading has remained the focus ofmost Partnership Branch work. CIDA supported only a few projects in curriculum, and even fewerwhich targeted broad-based education sector reform.

CIDA's low levels of spending in basic education must be understood as the outcome of threeinter-related factors. The first, as already described above, is the historical concentration ofCanadian education sector work on high level HRD. Since the late 1970s, when the decision wasfirst made to pull out of school construction and volunteer teacher sending, education per se hasbeen seen as a sector of very low importance. One result has been the steady attrition ofeducation sector staff: today CIDA has fewer than 6 education specialists, and among these onlyone or two has specific training in basic education.

The second is the highly decentralised nature of Canada's own educational system: education isa provincial jurisdiction, so that unlike other sectors such as agriculture and transportation, nofederal ministry exists with an interest in promoting education sector activities. Finally, andcrucially in recent years, has been the paralysis of CIDA's Policy Branch in the face of serious


budgetary cuts and new challenges from Canadian policy makers about the relevance of aid in amore competitive global economy. CIDA's corporate management has been consumed byorganisational downsizing; pressures to link projects to domestic interests have increased; yetuntil recently there has been little vision or leadership within either CIDA or Canada's broaderforeign policy machinery about the future of Canada's foreign aid program.

In this context, the issue of basic education, which implies large and costly inputs, has been givenmuch shorter shrift by CIDA's Policy Branch than such new themes as human rights and theenvironment. Widespread scepticism about involvement in education at operational levels hasremained the norm, particularly within Bilateral Branches. Perhaps even more worrying, however,has been the absence of significant leadership or lobbying from Canadian NGOs and NGIs aroundthe issue of basic education. Most NGOs and NGIs involved in education and training havecontinued to specialise in high level HRD, or have begun to move out of education into othersocial sectors where it is felt that Canadian volunteers are still needed.

The past two years, however, have seen a growing formal commitment within CIDA and by theCanadian to social development and poverty reduction. There have been some key innovations ineducation sector work within the Agency's Bilateral Country Programs. Late in 1993 a few newprojects targeting basic education began to appear. These now include an $ 11 million grant tothe Bangladeshi Rural Action Committee, and a $ 15 million grant to support UNICEF's girl-childeducation initiative in Africa. The first broader educational reform projects appeared in 1994,with a $ 12.9 million Eastern Caribbean regional project, and $ 5 million of support for the reformof primary education in Senegal. CIDA has also indicated its ongoing support for the Associationfor the Development of African Education (DAE), through a grant of $ 1 million pledged forresearch on educational finance.

In 1995 the Canadian government published a new foreign policy framework. In it Basic HumanNeeds (including basic education) is listed as the first of six ODA priorities, to which 25% ofoverall spending is committed. This new policy framework may well herald in the beginning of amore coherent and expansive effort in basic education. To date, however, CIDA has movedrather slowly at corporate levels: it has only just established a definition for basic education (inwhich it includes early childhood development, primary schooling, basic education for youth andadults, and support of institutional capacities in basic education), and it has made no attempt toset out a specific share of its 25% basic needs commitment for basic education. Spending oneducation will depend primarily upon the filtering down of a broad acceptance of the importanceof basic education, and a clear sense that Canadian implementation capacities exist. In thiscontext, the absence of leadership around the issue of basic education, both within the Agency,and among external members of Canada's development assistance community, remains the singlegreatest block to expanded Canadian programs of support for basic education.

The Demise of Canadian Support for Educational Research: the IDRC

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) was established in 1970 to supportcollaborative research in the South, based both on Canadian and South-South partnerships. Toenhance its unique mission, the IDRC was granted considerably greater institutional autonomyfrom Canada's foreign policy machinery than CIDA: its funding comes from a direct parliamentarygrant, and its work is guided by an international Board of Governors. This autonomy has beenboth a blessing and a curse: it has meant that the IDRC has been able to take an independentstand within development circles, often acting as the advocate of its Southern partners. It hasalso limited the impact of the IDRC's work on CIDA, Canada's broader foreign policy machinery,


and Canadian non-governmental organisations and institutions. Initially the IDRC concentrated itssupport on agriculture, food and nutrition research. But by the late 1970s it had also begun asubstantial program of support for education within its social sciences program. Though annualbudgets for education sector work rarely exceeded $ 5 million (out of total budgets of $ 85 -110 million), by the early 1980s the IDRC had become a central player in internationaleducational aid, prominent for its support for Southern-based solutions to educational problems.The IDRC's education sector projects were typically small research projects, initiated by Southernresearchers, with budgets of less than $ 100,000. Yet because of the support of education staffin 6 regional offices and the Centre's commitment to disseminating the findings of theeducational research it supported, the IDRC's work in education gained large regional andinternational audiences. The unique nature of its mission also allowed the IDRC to support smallscale educational innovations, an unusual undertaking among Northern donor agencies. Includedamong these was support for the development of regional educational research networks, theResearch Review and Advisory Groups (RRAGs) to which NORRAG belongs.

The IDRC's work in education began a steady decline in the second half of the 1980s, and theIDRC lost its prominence within the educational assistance community. In 1988, when theCentre's Education and Population programs were merged under the rubric of "SocialDemography", education had already begun to be seen within the IDRC as a sector of decliningrelevance, inimical to the organisation's new focus on interdisciplinary research, and out of stepwith its central focus on innovation. Funding for educational work dropped to $3/4 millionbetween 1988 and 1990. Two sharper blows to education sector work occurred in 1991 and1992, when budgetary cuts and political exigencies prompted an organisation-downsizing, andthe reframing of the IDRC's work around the Canadian government's announcement in RIO thatIDRC would focus on Agenda 21 environmental issues. Education was henceforth downgraded,and appeared only within the new cross-cutting themes of the Centre's Social Sciences Division,most notably in the Social Policy Program. The budgetary and staffing cuts of 1991 also sharplycurtailed the Centre's involvement in the follow-up to Jomtien

Since 1994 the IDRC's energies have been on absorbing new and even more dramatic budgetarycuts and a governmental attempt to have its activities merged with CIDA. In response the Centrehas tried to develop a range of new policies, including a greater focus on cost-recovery and out-contracting its research capacities, and building support from its Canadian constituency. Staffhave recently been re-organised flattened interdisciplinary program teams, whose small budgetsand search for contractual opportunities have heralded in an even sharper drop in educationsector research. Today the IDRC has lost virtually all of its former ability to play a dissenting rolein academic and donor-related educational circles. Ironically its retreat from educational researchand innovation has come just at the moment when the expansion of Canadian educational aid hasbecome a real possibility.

References

CIDA (1995) Presidential Memo, "ODA Priorities: CIDA Operational Definitions." Hull: CIDA(September 1995). "Meeting Basic Human Needs." Draft policy consultation statement. Hull:CIDA, 1995.

Doncor Information Systems. (March 1995). "CIDA's Support to Basic Human Needs: PreliminaryFindings, 1992/93 - 1994/95." Study Prepared for CIDA Policy Branch, Hull: CIDA.


Government of Canada (1995). Canada In the World: Government Statement. Ottawa: CanadaCommunications Group.

Government of Canada. (1995). Government Response to the Recommendationsof the Special Joint Parliamentary Committee Reviewing Canadian ForeignPolicy, Ottawa: Canada Communications Group.

IDRC. (1995). Annual Report. Ottawa: IDRC.

Mundy, K. (1995). Education and Human Resources Development in the Canadian InternationalDevelopment Agency. Ph.D. Dissertation, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University ofToronto.

Mundy, K. (1992). "Human Resources Development Assistance in Canada's InternationalDevelopment Assistance Program." Canadian Journal of Development Studies 13(3).

Pratt, C. ed. (1994). Canadian International Development Assistance Policies: An Appraisal.Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Van Rooy, A. (1995). A Partial Promise? Canadian Support to SocialDevelopment. Ottawa: The North South Institute.

Vander Zaag, R. ( July 1994). "NGO Partnership Contributions to Social Development." Hull:Policy Branch, CIDA.

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INDIA: DISTRICT PRIMARY EDUCATION PROGRAMME (DPEP)

Jandhyala B G TilakNational Institute of Educational Planning & Administration

New Delhi

The 1990s is a decade that marks a new phase of developments in education in general, andprimary education in particular, in India. International assistance for primary education has beenthe most significant development, as external assistance was not sought even for other levels ofeducation for a long time by the government of India. Rather for the first time, primaryeducation sector was opened to external assistance. Starting with World Bank assistance forprimary education in ten districts in Uttar Pradesh and that of UNICEF in Bihar, a plethora ofinternational aid organisations are seen today in India working on primary education system. Inorder to ensure better co-ordination from the point of view of the government of India andgovernments of various states in India on the one hand, and various international aidorganisations on the other, the government of India has launched a programme of DistrictPrimary Education Programme (DPEP), as a broad overall umbrella of international aidprogrammes in primary education in the country. It is too early to comment upon the strengthsand weakness of the programme. However, a few important trends emerge significantly, some ofwhich may be long term in nature and effect. A couple of such very important trends are verybriefly commented upon here.


Of all, the most important consequence of DPEP is relaxation of resource constraints in planningeducation. Educational planning under austerity (or under conditions of severe resourceconstraints) has been the characteristic feature of planning education in India for a long time, asin many developing countries. Perhaps for the first time, the districts in India were told that eachdistrict participating in the DPEP would be given about Rs.350-400 million for a 7 year projectperiod under DPEP. While Rs.350-400 million is a substantial additional amount for a district,Rs.50-60 million per annum is not really that high compared to the present level of publicspending of about Rs.600 million per district in India (1994-95). Secondly, the programme isnow confined to about 50 districts, out of 500 and odd districts in the country. It is proposed toextend to 110 districts by the end of the eighth five year plan (March 1997). Hence it stillcannot be regarded as a massive large scale programme of improvement of primary education allover India. But its influence -- positive and undesirable -- is indeed very significant.

District planning in primary education has been restored to a respectable place under the DPEP.While there has been much talk about the need for district planning in education in India for along time ever since independence, including constitution of a few important national levelcommittees on district or block level planning, few significant efforts could be noted untilrecently in this direction, except for a couple of random district plans in education preparedearlier by researchers and planners. DPEP has been envisaged to be based on district planning,and accordingly, district planning in primary education became very important. This is the singlemost important positive contribution of DPEP.

Correspondingly, capacity building at local levels has been an important outcome, as it indeedbecomes an important prerequisite for preparation of any meaningful district plan in adecentralised framework. As planning has been from above for a long time, expertise also gotconcentrated at national and state levels. Under DPEP it has become imperative to train anddevelop local level manpower for planning, project preparation and for execution of the plans andprojects. This is the second most important contribution of DPEP.

However, either district planning or capacity building does not really require external assistance.It is a sad point that they could be made possible only under externally assisted programme ofprimary education. While the contribution of DPEP has to be acknowledged, it should beemphasised that these two aspects speak more about the inability and failure of the governmenton these two fronts during the last forty years. Moreover, most, if not all, of the components ofthe DPEP -- whether they relate to quantitative expansion, improvement in quality, orimprovement in equity -- do not actually require foreign exchange. Many of these componentshave had been funded with the help of domestic resources. Thus a clear and sound rationale forexternal assistance for primary education does not exit. This is perhaps the most importantweakness of the programme. The eagerness of the international aid organisations to financeprimary education in India on the one hand, and the severely deteriorated general budgetaryconditions of the government at the beginning of the 1990s on the other, have been responsiblefor launching of the programme of external assistance for primary education.

An immediate fallout of DPEP can be reduced domestic efforts to finance primary education. Thecentral government can suggest to the states to join DPEP and to go for external financing, sothat it can reduce its transfers (or additional transfers) out of central revenues to states tofinance primary education. Similarly states have been willing to go for external financing, as itcan relieve pressures on themselves for (a) mobilising additional resources on their own, and (b)reallocation of budgetary resources in favour of primary education more efficiently. In addition,external assistance has been attractive to states, as the central government transfers the


external assistance to states as grants, not as loans. A fall in domestic efforts to finance primaryeducation is possible despite the condition of 'additionality' in external assistance, as thecondition of additionality might refer to absolute level of expenditure incurred in the base year,and not to the rate of growth in expenditure experienced. On the whole, the states seem to viewthe programme essentially as a centrally sponsored programme with generous resources flowinginto the states through central government. What seems to be overlooked both by the centraland state governments is the long term debt burden on the people.

A very important and damaging consequence of DPEP (and the economic reform policiesintroduced since the beginning of the 1990s) has been of a different kind. A view, which peopleused to question, has been now widely accepted and has been least questioned, and it is:government does not have money even for primary education and for the development of anyqualitative or quantitative or any dimension of primary education, the only source available isexternal assistance. As a result, resource poor (as well as resource rich) states compete witheach other to enter into the DPEP arena for external assistance for primary education. This,which can be described in familiar terms as dependency culture, has widely spread in no timeboth horizontally across all parts of the country in all states, irrespective of political ideologies ofthe ruling parties in the states, and vertically at all layers of government and administration, andpeople in general in the whole country, creating a certitude that primary education in the countrycannot be developed without external assistance. What a sad and sudden turn in the history ofprimary education in independent India!

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CHANGES IN NORAD'S SUPPORT TO THE EDUCATION SECTORWITH A FOCUS ON BASIC EDUCATION

Sissel VolanNORAD, Oslo

CURRENT SITUATION

NORAD also recently been reorganised (like everybody else!). All the five sector offices, includingthe Education division, have been closed down. For education there are presently only threepeople all working as senior Education Advisers.

NORAD's Basic Principles for basic and secondary education were approved by the DirectorGeneral early in 1995. NORAD's official policy since Jomtien has been to increase its assistanceto basic education, but this has for several reasons not been evident yet in much concreteaction. Recently, however, things have been changing. With encouragement from the NorwegianMinister for Development Co-operation, NORAD's Board of Directors has now decided to supportprimary education in Zambia, Malawi, Madagascar and Eritrea, and we have just started initialpreparations for this co-operation. Up till now, there has been no support to basic education inAfrica, apart from what has been channelled through Norwegian NGOs. In Asia the picture hasbeen somewhat better; here we have supported several projects in Pakistan and Bangladesh; inthe latter, education will emerge as one of two major sectors for Norwegian support to thatcountry.

Our main problem for the time being is the limited internal capacity (in NORAD) to plan andadminister. The answer could be to expand external consultancy agreements. But the


consultancy market in Norway for services linked to education and development is, however,limited, and we realise that we will need some time to develop it. We have in fact been caught insome kind of a vicious circle - because there have traditionally been few assignments to offer,not much experience has been built up, and the fact that there is not much experience in thefield, has been used as an argument for not focusing on basic education.

[The following are excerpts from the Document: NORAD's support to the education sector: with afocus on primary, secondary and basic adult education (Basic Principles: 27.2.95) Editor]

1. SECTOR DEFINITIONThis document will discuss education within a more narrow framework, focusing on primary andsecondary education (including vocational and technical education and training) deliveredprimarily by the formal school system in the individual country, but very often supplemented byprivate schools run by non-governmental organisations or local communities. In our discussion wefurthermore include basic adult education, with the main emphasis on formal and non-formalliteracy programmes. We touch on higher education when discussing teacher training and whendealing with prioritising between the different levels of education. But for a more comprehensivediscussion of NORAD`s assistance to tertiary education we refer to a second documentpresently under preparation linking higher education to competence building, training, institutionaldevelopment and research.

2. EXPERIENCES GAINED FROM ASSISTANCE TO THE SECTORNorwegian bilateral support to the sector through the Country Programme Agreements hascovered a wide range of activities. A lion's share has been allocated to the strengthening ofinstitutions of higher education. Activities at primary and secondary level range fromrehabilitation of classrooms to financing paper for textbook production, training of primary schoolteachers and stipend funds for female education. The focus on tertiary education is consistentwith the international trend - World Bank statistics show that in the recent past only about 8% offoreign aid to the education sector in Africa went to the primary level. NORAD has furthermoresupported the establishment and reorganisation of a number of vocational and technical traininginstitutions both in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

In addition to projects financed under the Country Programme Agreements, a substantialproportion of the assistance channelled through NGOs has benefitted primary education,vocational training and special education. Literacy programmes have mainly been supportedthrough local and international NGOs working with adult and continuing education. In Norway`sAfrican partner countries a number of volunteers have furthermore served as teachers insecondary schools.

It is fair to say that there has been an emphasis on reaching women and girls as a target groupthrough Norwegian bilateral assistance to the education sector.

Because there has been no satisfactory co-ordination between the different projects in theeducation sector within NORAD not much work has been done to assess the experiences in asystematic way or to analyse the results obtained.

3 NORAD SECTOR SPECIFIC CONCERNSThe Parliamentary White Paper No. 51 (1991-92) draws up the broad guidelines for NorwegianDevelopment Assistance. According to this document the Norwegian Government intends toincrease its development assistance to the education sector in the years to come. Basic and


primary education is singled out as a growth area. Support to this level has also been confirmedby Norway's endorsement of the World Declaration on Education for All . The White paperfurthermore defines secondary education and vocational training as areas of concern.

However, given the economic and institutional crisis in many developing countries the question ofrecurrent costs and of support to teachers' salaries (which in most cases absorb more than 90%of the total budget for education) has become a burning issue. NORAD`s aid policy in thisrespect ought to be flexible enough to consider financing local and recurrent costs on a decliningbasis, providing this is part of a well laid out national plan.

Though it is in principle the government's responsibility to provide free basic education for all itscitizens, the authorities in many developing countries are not in a position to bear the financialburden unaided, and consequently they are investigating the possibility of various forms ofprivatisation and cost-sharing. Parents may be required to contribute labour in the constructionor maintenance of school buildings and to cover the cost of textbooks and school uniforms.

Where public funding is supplemented by private contributions in the form of school fees, it is aprerequisite for NORAD support that the government being assisted in this manner provides freebasic education for those groups which are incapable of paying school fees.

Non-governmental organisations may represent a source of supplementary funding in order tosecure adequate educational services for all population groups. NORAD undertakes to assist theauthorities by assuming responsibility for the necessary overall co-ordination of assistance aimingat the provision of free primary education for poor and underprivileged groups. This may takethe form of strengthening the interplay between the public and the private sectors.

3.1 Qualitative improvements of primary and secondary educationThe general concept of quality of education is composed of three interrelated dimensions whichhave to be considered: the quality of human and material resources available for teaching(inputs), the quality of teaching practices (process) and the quality of the results (outputs andoutcomes).

Research shows that it is the teacher who is the crucial factor in the teaching process. NORADwill support strengthening the quality of initial and in-service training. Distance education incombination with follow up seminars at the local level focusing on methodology might be a cost-effective way of expanding in-service training.

Research also shows that teachers claim they learn best from their colleagues and that they arehungry for all sorts of pedagogical guides and documentation.

NORAD will support initiatives to revise the overall supervision system, and the respective rolesof different levels of management.

NORAD is furthermore prepared to support initiatives aiming at bringing the school closer to thecommunity; ranging from making the content of education more relevant and suited tocommunity needs, to activities strengthening co-operation between parents and teachers at thelocal level.

3.2 Basic adult education


NORAD will support initiatives by governments and non-governmental organisation to createopportunity for basic education and further learning either through community-based non-formal-education or through links with the formal education system. Good results have been obtainedwhen literacy is part of a consciousness raising process.

A key issue is to design the literacy programmes to meet the needs and aspirations of the adultlearners. The majority of literacy learners are women. This fact has not been adequately takeninto account in the design of literacy programmes.

A difficult challenge is how to create and to maintain motivation and demand. The knowledge andskills acquired in the literacy classes may rapidly fade away if they are not properly sustained andstrengthened afterward.

3.3 Enhancing equityIt is NORAD`s policy to promote equal access to education for all groups in society. Specialattention is given to marginal groups and especially to women within these groups in both urbanand rural areas, cultural minorities, as well as to mentally and physically handicapped people. Themere expansion of schools is no guarantee for equity - equal opportunity to education is linked toaccess, retention and quality.

3.4 Promoting female educationAssistance to promote the education of girls and women is a priority area for NORAD. Inparticular, measures that stimulate girls' retention in school and their completion of primaryeducation, along with literacy programmes, adult and vocational training of women will besupported.

Recent experience shows that with the introduction of school fees in some developing countriesdisadvantaged groups, and especially the girls within these groups, drop out of the schoolsystem.

3.5 Long-term commitmentEducational reforms and the restructuring of educational systems take a long time to becomeeffective. An even longer time span is required for reforms to become sustainable.

In recognition of the fact that it takes many years for the fruits of investment in the educationalsector to ripen, NORAD is prepared to cooperate in the educational sector where the time-span isextensive, preferably in excess of 10 years. This applies to teaching reforms, teacher training,and improvements in the quality of both the form and the content of the education beingprovided.

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TOWARDS A MASTER PLAN FOR PRIMARY EDUCATION IN SRI LANKA

Angela LittleInstitute of Education, University of London


During 1996 the Ministry of Education and Higher Education in Sri Lanka to develop a Master Planfor Primary Education with assistance from ODA. The plan, which will be developed at thenational, provincial and subprovincial level is designed to contribute to the improved efficiency,increased equity, increased participation and improved quality of education in the primary cycle.The development of the master plan will be undertaken within the policy framework of thegeneral objectives of education advanced in 1995 by the Sri Lankan National Commission ofEducation. The planning is envisaged to embrace the national, provincial and subprovincial levelsin a process which, realistically, will cover 2-3 years.

Sri Lanka has achieved exceptional levels of participation in a primary education system over along period of time. Fees, textbooks and, in recent years, uniforms and midday meal vouchers arefree. Achievements notwithstanding, a number of issues have been highlighted by a range ofstakeholders. These include


∑ substantial variation between schools, divisions and provinces in the availability anddeployment of primary teachers

∑ lack of incentives for all teachers, including primary level teachers, to serve in disadvantagedareas

∑ restricted opportunities for primary teachers to develop their careers within the field ofprimary education

∑ the treatment by the educational administration and planning system of ‘primary’ as a‘subject’, on a par with art, music and dance, rather than as a cycle of education; resulting inan ‘advisory’ system which favours disproportionately the post-primary grades

∑ the lack of primary education experience of the teacher educators who train primary teachers

∑ the distorting influence of the year 5 scholarship examination on the curriculum and pedagogyof primary education

∑ the relative neglect of assessment as a formative tool to support learning

∑ low levels of ‘mastery’ in literacy and numeracy among year 5 primary pupils, combined withwide variations between schools, divisions, zones and provinces

∑ substantial amounts of time spent by primary cycle students in private tuition

∑ poor physical conditions and often crowded space in which primary students learn in someschools

∑ a shortage of furniture and other basic equipment for primary students in some schools

∑ the concentration of resources in many schools on the post-primary classes and examinationclasses, and pressures on schools to upgrade to the next higher type

∑ the lack of control of resources by schools and divisions to implement plans generated at theschool and divisional level

The Master Plan will attempt to address these and other issues. It will develop specific strategiesfor the planning, management and finance of primary education; for teacher education,deployment and career structures; and for curriculum and assessment. It will translate strategiesinto specific proposals for funding, most of which is anticipated to be Sri Lankan in origin.

The development of the Master Plan will capitalise on a number of initiatives in primary educationin which donors have been involved over a number of years, some of which are described below.

Donor Assistance to Education in Sri Lanka (US$ = Rs 50; £ = Rs 75)

The volume of donor assistance to education in Sri Lanka has increased dramatically since theearly 1980s. In 1982 the total volume was US$2.4million. By 1995 it was US$33.36million


(National Planning Department, MPF/EA/NI 1995), representing approximately 8% of net receiptsof foreign assistance to all sectors.

Donor assistance for education focusses on primary and secondary education. Large scalesupport for technical education and university upgrading projects which had characterised thepattern of educational aid in the mid 1980s has declined. The major donors are SIDA, GTZ, ADBand the World Bank. Much of the donor assistance to basic education in Sri Lanka pre-dated theJomtien declaration. Between 1986 and 1994 SIDA has signed agreements for grants totalling Rs1,655 million for primary and secondary education. Since 1986 GTZ has signed agreements for Rs644 million for a college of education of development of primary schools. Smaller grants havebeen made by ODA for English language (Rs 50.2million over the period 1988-96); and by UNICEF(Rs 1.05 million over the period 1992-1996). ADB committed 5-year loans to the value of Rs1,540 million for secondary education between 1990 and 1995. IDA committed a 5-year loanfor Rs 2,041 million for primary and secondary education (External Resources and MOEHE figures1995). Most recently ODA has committed itself to grant aid for 3 primary education projects(English Language, the development of a Master Plan for Primary Education, and PrimaryMathematics). The World Bank and the Ministry of Education and Higher Education have justsigned a new 5 year loan agreement for teacher education.

The largest commitment to school-based primary education development has been made by SIDAthrough two programmes - the Plantation Sector Education Development Programme (PSEDP)and the Primary Schools Development Programme (PSDP). A total of Rs 1,337 million(£20million) has been allocated to these programmes between 1986 and 1996.. In theagreement periods July 1986-June 1992 and July 1992 and June 1994 the utilisation ofallocated funds was extremely high, 99.7% and 99% respectively. Both programmes are school-based and focus on disadvantaged primary schools in limited geographical areas. Both focussimultaneously on the universalisation of access to and improvement in the quality of schools.The infrastructure and quality development needs of schools are assessed before individualschool-level investments are made. The main components are in-service training, materialsdevelopment and provision, school supervision and management, and infrastructure development.The use of a systematic and phased plan developed by the MEHE has led to the development of627 schools since the inception of the projects in 1986 at an average cost of Rs 825,000(approx. £11,000) per school. Reductions in Swedish aid in 1994 led to the curtailment of plansfor the development of some schools between 1994 and 1999.

SIDA’s work in primary education had started in a modest way as early as 1983 when it beganfunding school-based primary education within the Badulla Integrated Rural Development Project(IRDP) administered by the Ministry of Plan Implementation rather than by the Ministry ofEducation, and subsequently within the Matara IRDP and Anuradhapura IRDP.

The Master Plan for Primary Education seeks to consolidate the many gains made in primaryeducation over the past decade by national and provincial agencies as well as by foreign agenciesworking in collaboration with the Sri Lankan Ministry of Education and Higher Education.

Further Reading:

Education in Sri Lanka: the past, the present, the future World Conference onEducation for All, Jomtien (available from the Ministry of Education and Higher Education orUNICEF, Colombo)


The First Report of the National Education Commission, National EducationCommission, (sessional paper no V), 1992 (available from Government Publications Bureau,Colombo 7, Sri Lanka)

Beyond Jomtien: implementing primary education projects (eds A Little, W. Hoppers,R.Gardner) Macmillan 1994 (see chapter on the Plantation Sector Education DevelopmentProgramme by R. Sivasithambaram and K. Peiris) (available from bookshops)

The Monitoring and Evaluation of Primary Education Projects in Sri Lanka, byAngela Little, SIDA Education Division Documents no 65 (available from SIDA)

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ADULT LITERACY & DEVELOPMENT AFTER JOMTIEN:A Brief Review and Introduction to the ILI

Daniel A. WagnerInternational Literacy Institute

University of Pennsylvania

At the Jomtien Conference, originally entitled “Basic Education for All,” a concertedeffort was made (led by UNESCO) to include adult literacy and non-formal education for adults.Hence, the final title of the conference -- “Education for All” -- was a victory, at the politicallevel, for adult literacy in the mix of education efforts that would become the EFA Decade. Aswe pass the mid-point of this decade, and begin to glimpse the year 2000, it is a veryappropriate moment to take stock of efforts past, present and future.

As with any brief overview, the reader will have to excuse the writer for a certainamount of subjective bias. It is simply impossible to sketch a comprehensive and worldwideportrait in the limited space available. Rather, I will attempt to base my comments primarily onthe results, commentaries, and recommendations emanating from of the 1996 WorldConference on Literacy (WCL), held in Philadelphia in March 1996. Co-sponsored by theInternational Literacy Institute, UNESCO, World Bank, Unicef, USAID, and others, the WCL, thefirst of its kind in more than 20 years, drew more than 500 participants from 45 countries forfour days of deliberation.

As some 1990 Jomtien participants will recall, the World Declaration on EFA stated, inArticle 4, that it is “necessary to define acceptable levels of learning acquisition for educationalprogrammes ... rather than (relying) exclusively upon enrolment, continued participation inorganized programmes and completion of certification requirements.” This emphasis on learningachievement has become an important focus of discussion in adult literacy work, especially atthe policy and program levels. The most salient issues, cutting across both industrialized anddeveloping countries are two-fold: quality improvement and professional development. Therecently published OECD report on the International Adult Literacy Survey (which was discussedat the WCL) convincingly demonstrated that adult low-literacy is endemic in diverse OECDindustrialized countries, with 20-30% of the adult population so categorized, in contrast to UNlistings of universal literacy in those same countries. Thus, there is now a much widerrecognition that the literacy-illiteracy dichotomy which once predominated in adult literacy work


worldwide is no longer operable. More sophisticated and reliable approaches are needed,including improved assessment and evaluation of learning achievement. Clearly, advocates ofadult literacy programs will have to take quality into account much more than quantity in thecoming years -- a reversal of the pre-Jomtien era.

A second major conclusion of the WCL was that while literacy problems are seen asincreasingly important and chronic in most countries of the world, there is a growingrecognition that these programs are underfunded, poorly integrated with other educational andsocial services, and (for these same reasons) largely inefficient if not ineffective. Literacyprograms have rarely benefited from the types of innovation oriented investments that havebeen made in formal schooling or early child education programs; nor have they had any seriousinvestment in professional development. Further, even though the EFA declaration stated that“all partners (should) strengthen and use relevant existing mechanisms for consultation and co-operation and establish procedures for monitoring progress at regional and international levels,”in the literacy field, such co-operation has as yet only been minimal, in the view of manyliteracy specialists.

As we enter the Mid-Decade Review of EFA, it is clear that many government, bilateraland multilateral agencies understand the importance of literacy work, whether couched in adultNFE programs, women’s development, AIDS education, agricultural extension, worker trainingand retraining, and so forth. Yet there is relatively little to no coordination, systematic datagathering, collaborative planning and the like in this domain -- unlike that in other areas ofeducation or basic human needs. The result of this latter approach is that little knowledge ismaintained or gathered in support of improving literacy work at the local, regional orinternational level.

The creation of the ILI is, we believe, one real opportunity to improve the currentsituation. Co-sponsored by UNESCO and the University of Pennsylvania, and located under thesame roof as the National Center on Adult Literacy (funded primarily by the U.S. government),the ILI has as its mission to provide leadership in research, development and training. Besidesthe WCL last March, the ILI helped to organize a major R&D forum on literacy in Southern Africa,and is planning regional forums in Asia, the Middle East, and in Latin America. The first issue ofLITERACY INNOVATIONS, an international newsletter to appear in English, French, Spanish,Arabic and Chinese, will be published in mid-1996, and available 2-3 times each year. Otherinitiatives include the use of the Internet for worldwide dissemination. Information on the ILImay be obtained via FAX (1-215) 898-9804 or on the World Wide Web at: Http://ncal.literacy.upenn.edu//.

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LITERACY IN THE INDUSTRIALIZED WORLDA new perspective on education for all

[From Index Presskit]

Few industrialized countries saw any direct implication for their own full-enrolment educationsystems when the Education for All movement was launched in 1990. But this outlook may bechanging.

A recent survey published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD), in co-operation with UNESCO and other partners, revealed that over 20 per cent of


adults in some of the world's richest countries have low literacy and numeracy skills. Many havedifficulties understanding simple instructions for medical treatment, reading a bus timetable orcarrying out day-to-day mathematical calculations. As a result of the survey's findings, a wholeseries of meetings and conferences is being organized in industrialized countries.

"The survey provided evidence of the scope of the problem and a sense of urgency foreducation ministers to consider lifelong learning as a way to address it," says Albert Tuijnmanof OECD's Education and Training Division.

The 1990 International Literacy Year helped draw attention to the issue in industrializedcountries. The crux of the problem for the richer part of the world is that rapidly changingeconomies require higher levels of functional literacy for people to adapt and participate fully insociety. In Central and Eastern Europe, change towards a market economy put new demands onpeople: "Adults in the former Eastern bloc have increasing difficulties solving daily problems asthe demands for the use of literacy become more complex," according to Paul Bélanger,director of the UNESCO Institute for Education in Hamburg.

Holding up a Mirror

The survey, which set out to measure five degrees of literacy from the lowest to the highest,measured the extent to which people could make use of written materials demanding variouslevels of reading, analytical and mathematical skills. Entitled Literacy, Economy and Society:Results of the first International Adult Literacy Survey (1995), it was carried out in Canada,Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States. It paints themost detailed picture ever available of the conditions of adult literacy in Europe and NorthAmerica. Poland ranks at the bottom, with 42 per cent of adults having reading and numeracydifficulties. The corresponding figures are 20.7 per cent for the United States, 16.6 per centfor Canada, 14.4 per cent for Germany, 10.5 per cent for the Netherlands, and 7.5 per cent forSweden.

"In Europe, there was a sense of disbelief. It was the first time a mirror had been held up likethis. Eventually, the realization will come that it is true," said Tuijnman.

Canada and the United States, which have relatively high numbers of people at the lowestliteracy level, had made such measurements before and are already more oriented towardsintervention. Now, twelve other OECD countries have signed up for a second round of the samesurvey to complete the picture.

Defining the problem

The scale of the problem means that it is no longer possible to look on illiteracy as a diseaseafflicting an unfortunate few. Levels of literacy are linked to a number of factors, the foremostbeing basic schooling. However, a sizeable proportion of adults in industrialized countries havepoor literacy skills that do not correspond to the number of years of schooling. The survey alsoshowed that literacy skills can be lost if they are not called upon in the workplace and moregenerally in a literate cultural environment. Conversely, these skills continue to develop afterformal education ends.

"We are all convinced of the crucial importance of learning throughout life for enriching people'slives, fostering economic growth and maintaining social cohesion...now we need to find more


effective ways of offering every one of our citizens such an opportunity," declared SimonCrean, Australian minister for employment, education and training at an OECD ministerialmeeting last January. The ministers present decided to focus more on quality "since a sizeableminority of young people still leave school without adequate qualifications, knowledge or skills."

The search for answers

Introducing higher standards of literacy in the first years of school is one way of raising thegeneral literacy level of a population. The German school system seems to producecomparatively higher levels of literacy in fewer years of schooling. Europe's young adults nowhave better literacy skills than previous generations, probably due to wider-spread secondaryand post-secondary education.

Early childhood education plays a crucial role in reducing educational disadvantage. Specialprojects like "Galaxy Classroom" in the United States, whose television programmes reachschools in poor neighbourhoods of twenty states, encourage a new enthusiasm for learningamong disadvantaged pupils.

Many adults with low literacy levels develop coping mechanisms, which mean they are unawarethat they even have a problem. Yet low levels of literacy are clearly linked to employmentprospects. According to the report, those who have poor reading and writing skills are four totwelve times more exposed to unemployment than the others. Literacy is demand-driven andnew strategies have to be developed to stimulate literacy skills in the workplace and give adulteducation to those who most need it. "The workplace has a prime responsibility for maintainingand developing skills and literacy ties in directly with the social inclusion and social exclusion ofpeople in jobs, in community life, in active citizenship," noted Tuijnman. The message aboutliteracy and lifelong learning seems to have been heard. "The target of education for all may beambitious, but we cannot afford not to work towards it," said Crean.

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'EDUCATION FOR ALL': A SLOGAN FOR THE MILLENNIUM; 'NON-FORMAL PRIMARYEDUCATION': A FOUNDATION FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Alan Rogers and Carol Morris, Education for Development, University of Reading

Many developing countries have come to acknowledge that their existing formal primaryschooling system is dysfunctional and that they can no longer afford to provide universal,compulsory and free primary education for all those who need it. Bray (1987 p7) in discussingresources for schooling concludes "The combination of high population growth and the globalcrisis of the 1980s has placed many governments under severe strain".

The tensions between economic crisis, disillusion with dysfunctional formal primary schoolsystems, the expressed demands of rural and urban poor communities for education, especiallyfor girls, and the exaggerated claims of the Education for All campaign "to promote (on a globalscale)general access to education, to eradicate illiteracy and to provide a satisfactory level ofinitial education to all" (Ranswara 1989 p3) has given birth to a varied, adventurous andgrowing non-formal primary education (NFPE) movement in a number of countries. The originand development of NFPE schools can frequently be characterised as arising from smaller NGOs


responding to demands from poor communities and gaining donor funding to establish provisionoutside of the formal system.

Two examples can be seen to typify this model. First, the early work of the Bangladesh RuralAdvancement Committee (BRAC) in contradistinction from its later and current work arose in1985 from demands from village parents. 22 experimental schools were established, aimed atproviding basic literacy, numeracy and social awareness in the children of landless families witha target of 70% enrolment of girls. Such was the success and credibility of the initialexperiment that some 2500 village schools had been developed by late 1989 with girls makingup approximately 63% of 75000 enrolments. In 1990, the cost to BRAC of establishing andrunning NFPE schools was in the region of US$15 per pupil annually. BRAC now has over30,000 such schools, becoming in fact if not in theory a vast complementary system to thestate's primary school system.

The second example is the work of the BUNYAD Literacy Community Council (BLCC) in theProvince of Punjab, Pakistan. BLCC began its involvement in education with village adultliteracy programmes in the early 1990s. When funding for these ceased, BLCC responded todemands from parents in those villages where literacy centres had been established for primaryeducation for girls. Drawing on their adult literacy and community development experience andupon the work of BRAC, BLCC raised donor funds (primarily from UNICEF) and in 1993/4established some 100 NFPE centres for girls only. By May a total of 496 NFPE centres were inoperation in Punjab Province with 14880 girls enrolled. In 1995, the cost of establishing andrunning these centres was in the region of US$40 per pupil annually.

Factors common to these two examples and to the majority of recent NFPE developments are:-the schools open in response to local demand arising from the dysfunction or lack of a village-based formal school- parents and/or village leaders are actively involved in establishing andrunning the schools, identifying local persons to come forward as teachers, providing andmaintaining the building and assisting with the recruitment of the pupils and monitoring theirattendance- the teacher receives a brief (8-12 days in some cases) initial training coursefollowed up with regular supervision and refresher training- the teacher is paid a small monthlystipend- the target pupil-teacher ratio is 30:1 (some exceed this; a few have lower ratios) -the pupils attend part-time: usually for about 3 hours per day for six days a week over theyear, taking only national and religious holidays and with other closures according to localsocial and economic needs (e.g. harvesting) agreed between the providing agency and theparents- the curriculum is highly structured, frequently following the formal system but usinga combination of the national formal school textbooks and more locally organisation-developedmaterials. - the curriculum often includes opportunities for options relating to the locality -e.g. health, sanitation, art and craft activities etc.- parents frequently want their daughters tograduate to the formal school system and there is increasing evidence of successful transferwhen there is an available post-primary school- initial funding is usually from donor agencieswith the aim of establishing provision and seeking government funding in the longer term.

However, NFPE developments within the wider growth of Non-Formal Education (NFE) over thelast ten to fifteen years pose a number of practical, philosophical and political questions.Fordham (1993) and Rogers (Morris and Rogers 1995 Appendix II) encapsulate the wider NFEpicture. Rogers (op cit) draws a distinction between Non-formal Education (NFE) and 'non-formal schooling'. Some of the issues relating to this distinction (with special reference to girls'schooling) can be broadly summarised as follows:


Possible negative factors- NFPE is sometimes seen as a second-class alternative to formalschooling- NFPE is unlikely to be sustainable once donor funding ceases- NFPE relies on teachersworking for little financial reward and no career advancement compared with Governmentteachers (for example, in the BLCC NFPE programme, teachers receive some Rs200 per monthcompared with Government teachers on Rs2000 per month)- NFPE teachers receive a veryshort initial training so that they are not adequately equipped to teach the full curriculum-NFPE may undermine any intention of the Government to improve the dysfunctional formaleducation system- by having part-time schooling, NFPE can help to perpetuate child labour

Proven positive factors:- the alternative to not having NFPE is no provision for schooling- NFPE structures andmethodologies are increasingly being adopted and funded by governments- the female NFPEteacher receiving a small stipend most frequently has no other source of income- the NFPEfemale teacher gains considerable standing in her own community- NFPE teachers know theircommunity; formally trained female primary teachers often will not teach in rural areas forreasons of travel and status- through supervision and refresher course training, NFPE teacherscan become competent and relevant teachers- the presence of NFPE provision in a localityhighlights even more starkly the dysfunction of the formal system and brings into strongerfocus the need for improvement- the short school day for six days a week enables pupils toparticipate in the essential economic activities of the family. Thus daughters are fullyparticipating members of the family as an economic unit and, as learners. enhance their lifechances and those of their family.

REFERENCESBray M 1987 'New Resources for Education: community management and financing of schoolsin less developed countries', London, Commonwealth Secretariat

Fordham P E 1993 'Informal, Non-formal and Formal Education Programmes' Coventry,University of Warwick

Ranaweera A M 1989 'Non-Conventional Approaches to Education at the Primary Level',Hamburg, UNESCO Institute of Education

Rogers A 1995 'Non-formal Education and Non-formal Schooling' in Morris C and Rogers A1995 '.. we were like geese, wandering in the street...; evaluation of the Bunyad LiteracyCommunity Council's Hafizabad Non-Formal Primary Education Project', Reading, Education forDevelopment

UNICEF 1990 'The State of the World's Children 1990', Oxford OUP

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TOWARDS FREE BASIC EDUCATION & LITERACY FOR ALL IN GHANA

Wim Biervliet with Leo Dubbeldam (CESO, The Hague) and Juliana G. Adu, Director Field

Operations, Non-Formal Education Division, Ministry of Education, Ghana.4

4 The authors gratefully acknowledge support and stimulus obtained from the Director-General PMU, Mr.R.J. Mettle-Nunno and the National Coordinator of the Ghana National Literacy and Functional Skills Project,Mr. S. Salifu Mogre in preparing this article bridging formal and non-formal EFA in Ghana.


Introduction

Ghana has created an interesting policy environment to respond to challenges of basiceducation and literacy for all as one of the pillars of the country's endeavour to makesubstantial progress towards achieving middle-income country status.

The approaches followed are innovative because of their link with policy analysis of theeducation sector as a whole , the nation-wide approach towards both formal basic educationand non-formal education including basic and functional literacy and because of a combinationof increased government financial support to basic education combined with partnerships withthe World Bank, bilateral and multilateral agencies and NGOs for implementing the basiceducation and literacy agenda.

The policy framework and context for basic education in Ghana are described as well aspartnerships including one between the Non-Formal Education Division of Ghana and CESO. Thispartnership aims in an innovative way a capacity building for action research and policy analysisto assist NFED to cope with the monitoring and supervision requirements of a complex nation-wide basic and functional literacy program in fifteen Ghanian languages.

A supportive policy environment

The Government of Ghana recognises basic education as the fundamental building block of thecountry. A participatory, literate citizenry is the foundation of democratic processes, economicgrowth and social well-being of a nation's population.

The 1992 constitution specifically directed that:

(1) The state shall provide educational facilities at all levels in all the regions of Ghana, andshall, to the greatest extent feasible, make those facilities available to all citizens.

(2) The Government shall draw up a programme for implementation within the following tenyears, for the provision of free, compulsory and universal basic education.

In a process of intensive consultations involving national stakeholders and external technicalassistance such a programme was drawn up and finalized in 1996 "the Basic Education SectorImprovement Programme; Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education by the Year 2005(fCUBE)."

Ghana's ten-year National Programme of Action (NPA), 1993-2003, sets among its principalobjectives:

"to increase the gross enrolment rate in primary schools from 67 to 98 percent"; to eliminategender disparities in primary education and reduce the rate of wastage from 40 to 20 percent

Ghana - Vision 2020 the recent Presidential Report to Parliament on Coordinated Programme ofEconomic and Social Development Policies, reiterates the basic goals of human development, asto reduce poverty, increase average incomes and reduce disparities in incomes andopportunities and emphasize the achievement of universal basic education and adult literacyespecially for females.


Context and Constraints

The Government is committed to making schooling from Basic Stage 1 through 9 free andcompulsory for all school-age children by the year 2005. Through fCUBE the Government ofGhana is trying to combine an emphasis on increased access with improving the quality ofeducation services. In approaching this combined quantitative and quality problem fCUBEconcentrated on the following key areas for action:

Curriculum and Learning, Strengthening management to improve efficiency; access andparticipation and cost and financing with the view to sustainability.

Meeting the challenge of basic education and literacy for all is complex. UNESCO WorldEducation Report data refer to a estimation of 3.387,000 adult illiterates in 1995 in Ghana ofwhich 67% are females. The adult illiteracy rate still stands high at 35.5% with strong genderdiscrepancies in terms of access (24.1 males-46.5 females). School-age population in 1992amounted to 2.635,000 with gross enrolment at 76% (83% for males-70% for females). In1994, according to fCUBE data, gross enrolments at primary level stand at 78%. Regional andgender discrepancies in certain cases combined further complicate the picture. Enrolments inthe Northern region stand 30% lower; in some areas of the Northern region, girls comprise only21% of primary enrolments and as little as 10% of the junior secondary population.

Primary enrolments have grown by 31% from 87/88 to 93/94 but without achieving minimumacceptable quality levels. The results of the 92/94 national criterion referenced tests in BasicStage (BS) 6 indicated that fewer than 5% of the students tested demonstrated command ofEnglish language and mathematics at acceptable levels of achievement.

It can be understood that tuition free and compulsory basic education of six years primary leveleducation and three years of junior secondary education combined with recurrent anddevelopment costs for a nation-wide literacy programme has huge budgetary implications.

The Government of Ghana now spends 40% of its recurrent national budget on education;about 65% of that amount is allocated to primary and junior secondary education. Thesefigures are among the highest reported by African nations. Government projections forresource allocation to the education budget, assuming a 5 percent annual growth rate innational recurrent expenditures, are projected to increase proportionally through 2010.

The share of the total education budget (recurrent + capital) out of national budget rose from21.95% in 1990 to 36.41 in 1992.

The fCUBE policy document refers to an analysis of actual expenditure collected from 27districts in 10 regions showing about 98% for salaries and only a meagre 2% remaining forteaching/learning materials. This resulted in the inadequacy and in some cases the completelack of basic materials for teaching and learning.

Full implementation of Ghana's strategy for education and literacy for all is dependent onexisting partnerships being maintained and new ones being created with loans, grants andtechnical assistance combined with a gradually increasing Ministry of Education budget.

Partnerships and donor coordination


Since 1987, however, approximately $400 million has been loaned or granted to the sector, ofwhich the greater part has been directed to basic education, including the national literacyprogram. On an annual basis donor contribution constitutes some 9% of the overall educationbudget and 15% of the allocations for basic education.

The World Bank for example has approved six education sector including a primary educationcredit negotiated in 1993 and one for non-formal education (basic and functional literacy).Other donor agencies supporting the Ghana EFA agenda include USAID ( primary education),ODA ( strengthening staff development for literacy and teacher training); Norway provided co-financing to the IDA credit for literacy (monitoring, evaluation and research) and providessupport for construction school pavilions for basic education; OPEC also supports schoolconstruction and rehabilitation and construction of school sanitation facilities; UNICEF hassupported primary, pre-primary and literacy; World Food Programme has supported foodallocation to school children;EEC has granted education sector general budget support.

Presently further support to program components of fCUBE is being negotiated and preparedincluding an EU program in support of the decentralization process in strengthening thecapacity of District Assemblies to manage education projects and second phase to the IDAPrimary Education Project and for the National Literacy and Functional Skills Program.

An innovative approach has been applied to arrive at coordination of the education sectorsupport programme including non-formal education and literacy. All independent programmeUnits funded by World Bank, USAID and other donor agencies have been integrated into a singleProject Management Unit headed by a Director-General. This facilitates mapping of andconcerted efforts in the education sector including EFA. However, NGO driven support includingthose by Action Aid and World Vision (literacy) are still outside this scope.

EFA: An expanded vision

Ghana is exceptional in combining both EFA schooling and adult literacy in nation-wideprogrammes with IDA loans and bilateral and multilateral assistance.

In 1991 a nation-wide campaign was launched against illiteracy aiming at literacy for all in2000.

In 1993 with the support of the World Bank, NORAD and ODA, the Government of Ghanainitiated the National Literacy and Functional Skills programme with the aim of eradicatingilliteracy among some 5.6 million Ghanaians by the year 2000.

Among the unique characteristics are the combination of a nation-wide program with literacycourses to 15 language communities implemented by the Non-Formal Education Division(NFED) with staffing inputs at Headquarters, in 10 regions, 110 districts and more than 1,000zones. In each zone some 15 literacy classes are situated run by volunteer facilitators,supervised by zonal supervisors. While the component of voluntarism of facilitators is positivein view of lower recurrent cost requirements, it leads to high turnover of facilitators andconcern about the degree to which the programme is providing a substantial amount of learnerswith minimum literacy levels. In June 1996, the first nation-wide learner assessment of around205000 learners in 8089 classes will give feedback on the degree to which the learners masterwriting skills, reading comprehension , attitudinal, numeracy, cognitive and functional skills.


From 1992 to November 1995 some 36000 literacy classes have been launched with a totalenrolment of 850.000 learners(60.4% females) The program runs a two-year cycle with oneyear of basic literacy centring around a primer and a second year with two readers.

The new literacy cycle started in December 1995 with 7763 classes with an enrolment of200.119 learners. According to the new revised targets between 1995 and 2005 some 4million learners will have to become literate through the NFED program. Apart from basicliteracy, the program should also concentrate on post-literacy which has to be one of the keycomponents for priority attention in the second phase of the program.

The program is dealing with complex heterogeneous realities. Socio-economic conditions differ;15 languages;both rural and urban areas are covered; different functional groups. All thesefactors have implications for effective programme implementation and learning. The programmeenables groups of learners to follow literacy courses in their own language irrespective ofregion. As a consequence, there is language diversity in literacy provision even at district level.This creates problems especially with regard to recruiting and retaining facilitators for minoritylanguages.

It can be understood that given this heterogeneous character and the reliance on volunteers tomanage the learning process in literacy classes, requirements for supervision, initial andupgrading training of facilitators and NFED staff at all levels are among the key issues.

The emphasis on a primer as the main anchorage for structuring learning is complex if it is to berelevant nation-wide as well as for the different target groups. This requires a strong emphasison processes of formative evaluation of the primer and the need to combine core standardcomponents with proper localization of content.

NUFFIC/CESO and NFED cooperate in an output oriented capacity building project aiming atarriving at an integrated approach to monitoring, evaluation and research to strengthen thecapacity of NFED to cope with requirements of policy making, management and quality deliveryof this complex program at Headquarters, Regional, District, Zonal and Literacy Class level. Thecooperation is concentrating on on-the-job training in Ghana combined with relatedworking/training periods in the Netherlands. The approach consists of joint development andimplementation of a pilot survey in two regions, followed by NFED implementation of a similarsurvey in 3 other regions. Survey data are processed and reported upon jointly in theNetherlands This constitutes a basis for system redesign. System redesign will involvevalidation, user training and the joint development of a manual for monitoring, evaluation andresearch within NFED.

In preparing for and implementing the survey, practical insight was obtained in severalcomponents of the research cycle, basic data-collection techniques and components related toplanning and management of studies. Moreover daily issues relating to approaches tomonitoring the process, availability and need for data as well as their utility and utilization weredealt with. A scenario for the survey was prepared as a guideline for data-collection.

A strategy for a baseline study has been developed aiming at providing a joint approach toimpact , tracer and community studies to assess the influence of the project on individuals andtheir communities. Subsequently the strategy will be further elaborated in a research proposalto be implemented as part of the second phase.


An assessment of on-going and planned research has been made as a basis for a ResearchStrategy. This strategy is the base for a process of planning for monitoring and researchleading into activity budgeting.

The most important output relates to a process of joint team work, strongly participatorybased on dialogues and assignments which constitute building bricks for the anticipated teamoutputs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.The Educational Reform Programme, Ministry of Information, Accra, September 1994.

2.Ghana-Vision 2020, Presidential Report to Parliament on Co-ordinated Programme ofEconomic and Social Development Policies, Accra, 6 January 1995.

3. Basic Education Sector Improvement Programme, Policy Document, Free Compulsory BasicEducation by the Year 2005 (fcube), Ministry of Education, Government of Ghana, April 1996.

4. Joint NFED-NUFFIC/CESO Progress Report I, Ghana ational Literacy and Functional SkillsProject, Ministry of Education, NFED, Accra, February 5, 1996.

5.Draft Report on Monitoring Visit to all Regions and districts of Ghana, February 18- March 3,1996, Monitoring and Evaluation Unit, NFED, April 1996.

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PRIMARY EDUCATION VERSUS ADULT LITERACY: BASIC EDUCATION IN GUJARAT

Caroline DyerUniversity of Manchester

Gujarat declared itself a 'totally literate' State early this year. On closer inspection, thisencouraging statement is worrying, but unfortunately, the declaration means that, now the'target' has been reached, little more effort is likely to be expended on adult literacy. Gujarat'sTotal Literacy Campaign (TLC) has not been a learning experience for State agencies, and norhas it dislodged the bureaucratic perception that 'the business' is done in primary schools, andthe TLC was just something that had to be got over as fast as possible. In fact, the experiencesthat Gujarat has had, about the nature of literacy learning, the appropriateness of the settargets, and what makes sense in literacy teaching, could have fed back into the EFA mid-termevaluation to make some important points about the sense, and difficulties, of teaching literacyin non- or low literate surroundings.

The literacy 'problem' in GujaratWith a literacy rate of 61.3% in 1991, Gujarat stood almost 10% above the national average of52.2%. Gujarat's rate is 76.5% in urban areas and 53% in rural areas. The gender discrepancyof 24.5% is serious, and has improved by only 2% since the 1981 census. These figures implythat Gujarat needed to tailor its literacy mission to place special emphasis on rural areas, andmake particular efforts to draw in rural women.


The KSSP modelOn 4th February 1990, Ernakulam in Kerala was declared India's first totally literate District.This was the result of an experiment headed by the Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) thatdrew together administrators, volunteers and others. It followed a strategy of time-bound,phasewise coverage of the macro unit - the District - by a collaboration of community andgovernment efforts, using relevant teaching materials taught in a dynamic fashion, with asystematic, comprehensive evaluation, monitoring and feedback process. The Ernakulamexperiment 'established the feasibility of a mass-based, community-based, campaign approachwith the objective of generating environment building and demand for literacy followed byliteracy instruction' [Ghosh 1994: 9].

The KSSP model was subsequently applied State-wide in Kerala, and was then adopted foralmost all sanctioned projects under the TLC. However, conditions which prevail in Kerala areunusual in the Indian context: it has long had a high literacy rate, a culture of education and, asthe Ernakulam experiment illustrated, the capacity to mobilise vast numbers of volunteers[personal communication and written pamphlets, Kumar 1994]. Would the KSSP model work inStates with a different culture, history and set of attitudes?

Gujarat's State Literacy Mission was created in September 1990; it adopted the KSSP's

District-wise approach, and took as its target the end of May 1995 for total1 literacy of theentire State.

Management structure

Gujarat's voluntary organisations have usually focused on assisting in the provision of basicneeds such as water; self-employment; women; or social mobilisation. The absence of NGOexpertise in education did not allow a solid voluntary pillar in the TLC management structure, asthe KSSP model envisages. The key NGO was not been truly voluntary: it is the GujaratVidyapith, the university founded by Mahatma Gandhi, which has strong political affiliations withthe State government. This organisation was designated the State Resource Centre, to whichwere entrusted training of volunteers and preparation of materials. The TLC in Gujarat wastherefore very much government-led.

Adult Education is the least popular of the three educational postings at the District level,largely because until recently there was very little to do, and it is commonly seen as a'punishment posting' for officers who fail to please. All government development activities of aDistrict (including primary education) are under the District Development Officer, to whom allDistrict functionaries answer. There is no obvious reason to expect bureaucratic interest inleading a mass movement towards social awareness, as the KSSP literacy model implies, if amore assertive public might then increase its demands on structures that have robustlyresisted the 'efficiency' paradigm for many years [Davies 1994]. At the State government levelthe Director of Adult Education was a joint charge with the Director of the Textbook Board, butoccupied only the latter office. My enquiries about the TLC and its progress were treated withlaughter that anyone could take it seriously. This was in sharp contrast with the sincerity thatabounded in New Delhi offices, where it was recognised that much depends on 'finding the goodindividuals in the monolith' [personal communication, Kumar 1994].

1 Total literacy was been defined by the specially appointed Dave Committee as 80% ofthose who enrol in a programme gaining a 70% level of skills.


Voluntary organisations also found it difficult to interface with the government. For instance,during the awareness programme, one NGO in Kutch, the State's largest District, made theeffort to identify and categorise learners' needs in every village, in order to ensure thatappropriate inputs were provided, as the KSSP model suggests. Their survey was rejected onthe grounds that it would be too difficult to implement.

The volunteers

The KSSP model required one instructor per 10 students. Gujarat's target of 6.80 millionilliterates required a total of 68000 volunteers, so, in the absence of a large number of NGOs, ithad to draw on those who could be forced to participate. All Grade 12 students were maderesponsible for getting three adults literate before they were passed at that grade. Howeversince students were given no support in finding illiterates or instruction in how to teach them,this was acknowledged to be impossible and teachers tacitly accepted the 'certificates'students produced.

The other obvious channel was primary teachers, since there is at least one in every village.They were asked to identify all the illiterates by door-to-door survey, and made responsible forvillage-level awareness-raising exercises. For many teachers the TLC was yet another burden, sothey often reacted by exercising the only autonomy available to them - closing the primaryschool early early in order to attend to literacy work. The outcomes of this situation in respectof 100% enrolment and retention of all children, the means by which adult illiteracy is to beavoided in future, are obvious. But to the government authorities charged with implementingthe TLC, primary schooling took a back seat while this more urgent work was carried out:'I nthe 100% literacy campaign we were supposed to make a census of those between 15-35 andthey told us it's OK if the primary children learn less but you have to do this work' [Personalcommunication, Primary teacher, Panchmahal District, 1994].Since volunteers were not remunerated for contributions to TLC, it depended on good will.Much was made of the short duration of the vounteer's commitment: only 180 hours. This ishow the TLC was 'sold' to volunteer teachers in public rallies, but is a poor strategy for takingseriously the difficult task of literacy teaching and learning. However, Bhavnagar District's TLCshowed that the KSSP model could work, if the imagination of a vast number of volunteers wascaptured. Bhavnagar mobilised adherents of the Swami Narayan sect, and: 'Results werespectacular, not only by persuading illiterate people, but also by providing an army ofvolunteers. With this sort of conviction, it is really wholehearted, rather than people justobeying government' [Personal communication, Deputy Director of Adult Education,GoG,1995].

TrainingEvaluators, senior trainers, government officials and teachers are unanimous in their view thattraining, organised by the State Resource Centre, was inadequate. At worst, it was an 'on-paper' exercise to fulfil targets: 'We had a 5 day meeting but not a single volunteer waspresent. On paper all this bogus work is going on and everyone knows about it. The figuresshow 200 people present for the training, but actually there were about 5 and only one ofthem was really committed. If we talk to our officers about this kind of thing they find faultwith us: why did you do this bogus work? But if we don't show these things on paper we arepunished [Personal communication, Primary teacher, Panchmahal District 1994].

The materialsUnder the guise of ensuring equal quality and pace of inputs, the State Resource Centre made itmandatory for all agencies officially involved in the TLC to use only its primers. There was


widespread agreement with the sentiment of the Directorate of Adult Education that theprimers were 'much too difficult and the lessons are not interesting' [Personal communication,Deputy Director of Adult Education, GoG,1995].

The evaluationEvaluation of the State's entire TLC, from the three primers to the post-literacy course, wascarried out by a single person. It is alarming to find this official evaluator taking the stance thatadult learners are at fault for their failure to perform: 'Particularly Parts II and III was [sic] verytough for adult illiterates...teachers and volunteers expressed the view that the latter parts ofthe [course] were more or less equivalent to the syllabus for formal schools standards 4 and 5and consequently were beyond the reach of the 15-35 age group men and women who hadhardly any inclination towards learning and possessed poor grasping and limited receptivity...' oreven 'these textbooks are relatively tough and tedious vis-a-vis the prevalent limitations oflearners in terms of grasping ability and learning skills...One still wonders if SRC would considerit necessary to [simplify] the primer so as to suit the low IQ level of the adult beneficiaries'[Parikh 1993: 39 and 42].

DemandThe fragility of demand for literacy in environments where so little is written is an importantconsideration in balancing funding to Basic Education. Volunteers, and State officials, werecaught between the realities of low demand and State targets: 'The 100% literacy campaignhas come and we know it is not going to be successful. We just show all these programmes arehappening, on paper. People don't have food to eat: how are they going to come and study?Who are we going to teach? People who are illiterate have gone out to work, and people whoare literate are in service. We have written 300 names but they don't exist' [personalcommunication, Primary teacher, Panchmahal District, 1994].

Primary education versus adult literacyAs this account has shown, the TLC in Gujarat has provided many important insights into thepracticalities of one particular campaign. Clearly, at State level, an Education for All approachhas not been followed, as the notion of Basic Education has not absorbed and operationalised.This is not very surprising, given the low demand among non-literate people for literacy - forthe TLC was not driven by demand, but by policy decisions far removed from the reality of'beneficiaries'' working lives. This can also account for the realism of officials about thecampaign, depressing though their attitude may appear. It ought really to prompt, at Amman, areview of the potentialities of literacy in circumstances where oral culture dominates; andwhether or not the written word is given undue importance by those who cannot imaginesurviving without it.ReferencesDavies, L 1994 in CompareGhosh, A 1994 Expert Group Report on National Literacy Mission MHRD New DelhiKumar, K 1994 is Director of the Bharat Gyan Vigyan Samiti, NGO spearheading the National

Literacy Mission, New DelhiParikh, G Evaluation of TLC in Kheda District Sardar Patel Institute of Economic and Social

Research, Ahmedabad

WOMEN'S LITERACY IN UGANDA(Based on a presentation at the Africa Centre Conference on

"Increasing Educational Opportunities for African Women and Girls)


David Archer & Sara CottinghamACTIONAID

In 1990 governments around the world made a commitment to Education for All at the Jomtienconference in Thailand. In the five years since then, most governments have interpreted this asmeaning a need to invest in universal primary education and there has been relatively littleattention paid to adults. This is reflected by donors. The World Bank, in their latest EducationSector Policy Paper (in draft form), scarcely mention adults - and the European Union educationpolicy paper equally overlooks them. In ACTIONAID's experience this is a fatal mistake as thereis a close relationship between adult literacy and children's education - and a particularly strongrelationship in Africa between women's literacy and the education of girls.

The basis for not investing in adult literacy is partly related to the overall shortage of resourcesgiven structural adjustment and recession. However, it is also partly to do with the belief thatadult literacy programmes do not work. A recent World Bank discussion paper estimates that,over the past 30 years, literacy programmes have only a 12.5% effectiveness rate. The vastmajority of adults who enrol for classes do not learn. However, this is an analysis ofgovernment programmes and does not analyse sufficiently the reasons for failure - or explorethe better results achieved in non-governmental literacy programmes, specifically thosetargeted at women.

It is in an attempt to revitalise adult literacy that ACTIONAIDlaunched an action researchproject to explore the uses of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) techniques within adultliteracy programmes. This has led to the development of the REFLECT approach (RegeneratedFreirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques) which was first developed in aremote part of Uganda and has since spread rapidly to over twenty five other countries.

It is useful to look at this innovative project in just one country (Uganda) though the approachwas also piloted in El Salvador (with a grassroots highly politicised organisation) and inBangladesh (with women's savings and credit groups in a strictly Islamic area). Through thiscase study we hope to make some observations on the importance of considering women if wewant to improve the education of girls (and boys).

The literacy programme in Uganda started in Bundibugyo, a remote region in the extreme Westof the country on the border with Zaire, behind the Rwenzori mountains. In Bundibugyo 86% ofwomen are illiterate (compared to 65% nationally).

In Bundibugyo women have almost no access to power. Local government through resistencecouncils is dominated by men. Women marry young and are in a very powerless situation as awife after the full bride price has been paid. In the lowlands women do almost all the agriculturalwork. An ACTIONAID research document in March 1993 concluded:

"A woman's worth is viewed in terms of her ability and energy as a cultivator and, especially, asa producer of children. Women do not own land, goats or other assets. Children belong to thefather" ... and ... "women have no say in child spacing."

The literacy programme arose as a response to this situation. But as illiteracy was only onefactor within women's condition, a conventional literacy programme would not have beensufficient. We had to do more than just provide reading and writing skills. Despite the rhetoricmost literacy does not achieve much more than this. A new approach was needed - so we


returned to the theoretical framework developed by the Brazilian Paulo Freire, but sought tostrengthen it by giving a more effective methodology, drawing on PRA techniques.

In the REFLECT programme there is no textbook - no literacy "primer" - no pre-printed materialsother than a guide for the literacy facilitators. Each literacy circle develops its own learningmaterials through the construction of maps, matrices, calendars and diagrams that representlocal reality, systematise the existing knowledge of learners and promote the detailed analysisof local issues. As 85% of learners in Bundibugyo were women this method gave women thespace to reflect on their lives and the opportunity to change their condition.

These "graphics" included maps of households and land; calendars of gender workloads,illnesses and income; matrices to analyse local crops, household decision-making, schoolattendance and participation in local organisations. Each graphic is initially constructed on theground, using whatever materials are locally available (sticks, stones, beans etc). As the womenare drawing on their own local knowledge and representing it in a large-scale visual way (usingtheir own codes of representation), everyone has something to say and everyone is able toparticipate.

Once such a graphic has been constructed, the literacy facilitator introduces visual cards (whichare simple drawings, locally designed and pre-tested) so that the sticks and stones caneffectively be labelled. Using these simple pictures a copy can then be made of the graphiconto a large sheet of paper (which the learners usually do themselves). This stage of transitionfrom the three dimensions of the initial map to two dimensions using pen and paper is the firststep to literacy.Once this is complete, words can be introduced in places where the spatiallocation helps to reinforce recognition. All the words used are ones generated from thevocabulary universe of the women themselves. As the literacy course progresses so the rangeof graphics produce a wider range of vocabulary and learner-generated writing is promoted(women write descriptions of the graphics or phrases from the discussions stimulated by theprocess). Supplementary "real" reading materials are introduced on the themes covered by thegraphics so that the women can practice at home.

By the end of the literacy course, each circle will have produced a range of 30 maps, matrices,calendars or diagrams and each learner will have a copy of these in their books, together withphrases they have written - so that they are left with a real document and not an exercise bookfull of copied scribbles!The graphics become a permanant record for communities, giving thema basis on which to plan their own development with the minimum of manipulation by externalagencies. Meanwhile, ACTIONAID ends up with a detailed survey of the conditions, needs andattitudes of people, particularly women, in every village (which might take years to produceusing other methods).

The results of this literacy programme were evaluated intensively during March and early Aprilof this year - and this is our first opportunity to share the tentative results. We have found thatafter an average of about 100 contact hours participants learnt to read and write, some tosuch an extent that they were writing fluent oral histories and letters. Compared to theestimated average of 25% (Abadzi, World Bank Discussion Document 245), 69% of those whoinitally enrolled in the REFLECT circles graduated, passing a standard literacy test. The averagescore in literacy tests was 58%, compared to just 34% in another literacy programme whichhad functioned over the same period, and which was used as a control group. A breakdown ofthe results showed that men and women performed equally in writing, men performed better onreading, but women performed better in numeracy.


These results are clearly positive. However, it was not just the teaching of reading and writingwhich interested us - rather we wanted to explore the wider impact of the literacy programmeon local development and specifically on women's empowerment.

For example, the REFLECT programme has led to many community actions which havesucceeded in making the links between literacy and wider development. On constructing ahousehold by household map of their village and examining changes in the local population overrecent years, women were moved to discuss family spacing and organised community meetingsto address the topic - inviting trainers from the Ministry of Health (but on the women's ownterms) and getting their husbands to agree to take part as well. Similarly, a map of naturalresources now, compared to resources twenty years ago promoted dicussion of deforestationand the women mobilised to organise tree nurseries. If someone had come to their class andlectured them about family planning or deforestation they would probably not have listened -but because they came to the awareness through their own analysis of the issues they nowhave a real sense of ownership and a strong conviction.

Other actions which have emerged from the literacy circles have included terracing, theintroduction of new crops, using new planting techniques, protecting water sources, buildingpiped water systems, establishing grain stores, and constructing basic latrines.

There is also widespread reporting of changed attitudes and behaviour - with men consultingwomen for the first time on certain types of household decision such as the building of kitchensand latrines or the paying of school fees. Women for the first time are gaining access to malecompounds where decisions are traditionally made . There are even cases where men are nowhelping women carry water, which was unimaginable before.

The literacy circles in Bundibugyo formed savings and credit groups which have been linked to alocal bank to receive credit. Through these women are now more in control of their income.Parish Councils have also been set up with two women from each village elected onto them.ACTIONAID development funds for the area are devolved to these Councils so that women getexperience of participating in community decisions and having power over resources.Leadership skills developed through these councils then help the women to become active inthe male dominated Resistance Councils. The increased attendance and participation of womenin community assemblies has already been noted in almost every village.

Another fascinating feature of this literacy programme concerns language. Neither of the twomain local languages were written down before the literacy programme - and local schoolstaught in a language imposed on the region from a neighbouring kingdom (which is disliked byparents). When given the choice of language, learners chose their mother tongues, and thesehave now been written down and are being increasingly valued locally. This is reported ashaving had an important impact on the local sense of dignity and self-worth. In the context ofthe political decentralisation now taking place in Uganda the importance of regional languages isgrowing and so this has come at a vital time. Negotiations are now underway with the Ministryof Education to get the languages used in local schools.

The promotion of local languages may be one reason why there has been an exponential rise inschool enrolment since the start of the literacy programme. The more fundamental reasonhowever appears to be that parents, in learning themselves, place more importance on theeducation of their children than they would otherwise. In one parish, in the space of a year,


school enrolment tripled - and all the new children are reported to be sons and daughters ofparents who are attending the REFLECT literacy classes. There has not been a similar rise inparishes where there is no REFLECT programme.

Where there are no schools - which is in fact the case in many communities - women havemobilised to set up new schools. particularly "nursery" schools for children under ten years oldwho have difficulty getting to school (in Bundibutoro for example, children previously have tocross a river eight times to reach the nearest school). The teachers in these nursery schoolsare in some cases the self same literacy facilitators - and some of the methods they are nowusing in the teaching of children are drawing on the REFLECT methodology.

Learners have also played a key role in establishing parent-run primary schools, wheregovernment schools are too far. In the space of one year, more than 20 new schools havebeen established by parents - amounting to more than one third of the communities whereliteracy classes took place.

All in all the impact of the literacy programme in Bundibugyo has been startling. Over less thantwo years, there has been a clear increase in women's empowerment and this has had asubstantial impact on children's education.

As the REFLECT approach spreads through many other organisations to many other countrieswe hope that we can get the World Bank and others to reappraise their policies. The WorldBank have already acknowledged, in their 1995 paper "Priorities and Strategies for Education"that the reforms they outline "will not contribute significantly to solving the problem of adultliteracy in a world with more than 900 million illiterates. The Bank now accept that they need todo a similar paper on adult literacy and they give the REFLECT approach as a specific exampleof the type of programme which they want to review. They have subsequently approved agrant of $500,000 to facilitate the scale up of REFLECT in 7 countries over the next threeyears. This grant will form 15% of an overall $3.7 million project to scale up REFLECTinternationally.

A REFLECT Mother Manual was published by ACTIONAID in March 1996 alongside an ActionResearch Report on the REFLECT pilots, published by the ODA as No.17 in their series ofEducation Papers. Both are available on request.

This case study gives a flavour of what a relatively small NGO initiative can do to promotechange at the micro level and then influence macro level policies. If we are to move forward onthe education of girls and women in Africa then this sort of initiative can play an important role.Most of all however, we must stress that that we cannot progress by focusing on childrenalone. The education of adults is vital as it is parents who decide whether to send their childrento school and it is (increasingly) adults who have to pay for their children's education.Moreover, much research shows the importance of a literate home environment for reinforcingwhat is learnt at school - and the organisation of parents into PTAs is widely seen as one of themost effective strategies for improving the quality and accountability of schools (particularly inrural areas). It would be both morally wrong, and practically unwise, to abandon a generation ofadults.

WHEN ALL IS ONLY SOME: ADULT BASIC EDUCATION AFTER JOMTIEN

Simon McGrath


University of Edinburgh

As we look back at half a decade of efforts to universalise basic education there are manyreasons to celebrate. However, there are areas in which the Jomtien vision is in need of furtherdevelopment. One of these is Adult Basic Education (ABE). In highlighting ABE, however, thereis no intention of denying the importance of the predominantly child-centred focus of theWCEFA movement. There is, for instance, a large body of opinion which claims that given thechoice adults would rather see resources used for the education of their children thanthemselves. Although it is likely, and probably proper, that Child Basic Education (CBE) shouldremain the overwhelming focus of WCEFA efforts, let us take a brief moment to remember thechallenges of ABE.

Whilst there is an increasingly powerful orthodoxy regarding the proper core of CBE, thereappears to be more uncertainty regarding the ideal nature of ABE. For some, illiteracy is adisease to be eradicated and ABE, equalling literacy (perhaps with a bit of numeracy thrown in),is the cure. However, there is a growing body of opinion which either questions the universalneed for literacy or which talks of different context-specific literacies. ABE thus becomes moreabout skills for a particular context, which may or may not include literacy. Calling the provisionABE also highlights a further approach, which stresses the need and the offering as morebroadly educational and less instrumental. This, however, leads to further questions. Shouldthe ABE curriculum be the same as the CBE curriculum? Should some childish elements bereplaced by some adult elements? Should the ABE curriculum be made leaner, as adults arelikely to have less time for study?

All these different views and questions point to a balance which must be struck in ABEprovision. On the one hand, provision should be concerned with the maximisation of access andrelevance. On the other, the curriculum should be as broad as possible and should facilitateprogression to further learning.

Progression to further learning may often seem utopian but is central to another multi-lateralslogan: lifelong learning. There are three considerations regarding progression which should bekept in mind. First, the problem with much ABE as literacy is that it has not been the basis foranything further and retention of skill has often been poor as a result. Second, just asquestions arise regarding whether ABE should be the same as CBE, so we must also considerwhether adults need a tailored secondary curriculum, as is being developed, for example, inSouth Africa, or should utilise the school curriculum, as is the case here in Scotland. Third,given that further and higher education and training systems have been built upon mechanismsfor progression from the child-centred system, how can adults access these systems if theyhave gained their education to date through other modes?

The range of unresolved issues in the ABE field is large and the challenges still present in thecore WCEFA field of CBE remain pressing. Nonetheless, it is to be hoped that a strong attemptwill be made in the coming period to spread the drive for education for all ever more widely tolearners of all ages. In doing so, the imperative to consider the debates sketched above will bevital.

MOZAMBIQUE: DOES EFA STILL HAVE A CHANCE?(TOWARDS A RENEWED PATTERN OF GOVERNMENT-DONOR COOPERATION)


Luis TiburcioUNESCO, Maputo

It is known that war affected very profoundly the delivery of education in Mozambique,as well as the access to it. The signing of the peace agreements in 1992 have contributed togenerating an environment favouring recovery, although the magnitude of the educational crisismakes it very difficult and slow, in particular in what regards progress in the education for all(EFA) goal.

The major EFA problem is exclusion. Formal and non formal educational opportunities,both state and private, are still scarce. Absolute and functional illiteracy is persistent. Lack ofqualified teachers, shortage of financial resources, poor quality and equity in basic educationadd to the definition of the EFA crisis.

Exclusion, drop-out, illiteracy

In primary education, the education system takes care of 34.5% of the school-agechildren (6-12 age group), corresponding to 1,178,490 out of 3,414,935 children (1995 dataprovided by the Ministry of Education). Excluded are 2,236,440 girls and boys. Survival is verylow in the 5-grade primary education cycle. Only 11.5% of enrolment in grade 1 reaches grade5 and a small 7% finishes the cycle. The modal age of the enrolled pupils is 10 years old.

The drop-out phenomenon occurs primarily during the first year of schooling. Legislationallowing for the existence of private schools dates from 1990. However, the importance ofprivate schools in primary education enrolment is marginal. These figures tend to become moreimportant in the future, knowing that the average annual growth rate of the 6-12 populationgroup is 3.7% (the average annual growth rate for the Mozambican population is 2.8%).

The illiterate population is estimated between 11 and 12 million persons (70 to 74%illiteracy rate), and 9 to 9,5 million are women (80% of the illiterate population).

Unqualified teachers

Teachers in the primary education cycle are 24,575, mostly men (77.2%). Of these,25% are considered as unqualified teachers and 51.4% as poorly qualified. Salaries andmotivation are low. Teacher training and teaching practices were characterised by theseparation between the "thinking" and the "doing", as well by the standardisation of theteachers' tasks, leading to an important deprofessionalization of the teaching staff and to agrowing "proletarianization".

Finance

As a consequence of the war (military spending) the education budget represented 9%of the government budget since 1987. In 1995, the Government that emerged from the firstdemocratic and free elections, increased that share to 15%, which is likely to be maintained,within the current structural adjustment programme. Investment in education is dependent onexternal finance in almost its totality.

Does EFA still have a chance?

The evidence shown here supports the view that educational development has sufferedfrom the war and the deteriorating economic environment. In spite of the Government's


determination to assign a very high priority to education in the development effort, thedeterioration of Mozambique's education and human resource base poses growing challenges tothe task of restoring long-term economic growth, and social and political development.

Combating exclusion and expanding EFA opportunities is central in that context. EFA canstill have a chance in Mozambique and certain options can be considered (an extensivediscussion of these options is developed in Reimers and Tiburcio's Education, adjustmentand reconstruction: options for change, published by UNESCO, 1993). However, in thecase of Mozambique, the EFA challenge seems to requires an improved pattern of relationshipbetween the Government and the donor community. The Government, through the Ministry ofEducation is finalizing the preparation of a strategic master plan for the education sector(excluding higher education), with the purpose of reversing the current decline and introducingsubstantial improvements in critical areas, such as primary education, girls education andliteracy. This strategic education policy framework is essential to provide guidance for thesector's interventions and to coordinate foreign assistance.

It is anticipated that the master plan's implementation will call for an important amountof financial resources, mostly to be provided by the donor community. There is some sectordialogue between government and donor community, and (less) within the donor communityitself. Yet, technical and financial cooperation is essentially done on a donor by donor basis.This practice often leads to disperse and unbalanced efforts. An alternative option could be theestablishment of a Education/EFA Development Contract, according to whichaggregated and coordinated donor funding would guarantee the education sector strategy'simplementation. A sector strategy that would select a mix of options that are mutuallyreinforcing and consistent. In this sense, any policy intervention should be understood as partof a "system"; its impact will be influenced by the support of other policies in effect. Forinstance, policies or projects to promote access by opening more schools or expanding bilingualeducation should be supported by financing policies that increase resources in real terms forbasic education, or by management policies that promote the development of administrativecapacity at the central, provincial and local level. On the Government side, this modality wouldrequire clear commitment to assigning high priority to education and EFA in particular, not onlyto be expressed in increased budget allocations. But also, and perhaps, mainly, in showingclearly that the "contracted" programme is the result of concrete consensus and partnershipsbuilt with non governmental organizations, religious groups, opposition parties and otherrelevant civil actors. In this sense, the "education/EFA development contract" could beconsidered as an effective expression of national social responsibility for education, and ofglobal donor commitment to promote development.

[L. Tiburcio is UNESCO Representative and Head of UNESCO Office in Maputo, and is a NORRAGmember. The views expressed in this text are his own, and not UNESCO's or the Ministry ofEducation of Mozambique's.]

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EDUCATION FOR WOMEN & GIRLS:An ongoing Struggle for Equality

[Index Presskit]


The World Declaration on Education for All adopted in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990 affirmed that"The most urgent priority is to ensure access to, and improve the quality of, education for girlsand women..." But have words been followed by action? In the past six years, governments anddonors have increasingly recognized that basic education for girls and women is central todevelopment, and many have taken action to reduce gender disparities in education.

Recent data indicate that girls' primary school enrolment jumped from 226 million in 1990 toan estimated 254 million in 1995 -- an increase by 28 million. Despite this marked increase infemale enrolment, nearly three girls (6-11 years) out of ten are still not in school, compared toone out of ten boys. Literacy rates among women have increased only slightly: 71 per cent ofwomen in the world were literate in 1995, compared to 69 per cent in 1990.

"The increase in girls' enrolment is largely due to more awareness building at international andnational levels and in local communities," says Winsome Gordon, chief of UNESCO's primaryeducation section. "But the leaders of the world still have to prove that they are serious whenthey say they want to invest in education for women and girls. Generally, there has been muchtalk and too little action."

Complex web of obstacles

One would be hard pressed to find a government disavowing the benefits of educating girls andwomen. Beyond the concept of education as a human right, a solid body of researchdemonstrates numerous correlations between female education levels and increased economicproductivity, improvements in health, delayed age at marriage, lower fertility and increasedsocial and political participation.

Many countries have made major strides forward to provide education to girls in recent years.

In China, for example, advocacy and social mobilization programmes help boost girls' enrolmentin poor areas.(UNICEF/Roger Lemoyne)

The complex web of cultural, social and economic obstacles confronting women are also welldocumented. All too often, developing countries remain caught in a vicious circle: althougheducation helps delay girls' marriage age and reduce fertility rates, current population growth,economic constraints and increase in poverty make it ever harder to provide them withschooling. When school costs become high for parents, daughters are taken out of school first.

Many other factors make girls' education problematic: the lack of women teachers, of sanitaryfacilities, and of schools within safe walking distance can all affect girls' participation. The linkseems clear: Kerala State in India has the country's highest female literacy and enrolment ratesand the highest proportion of female teachers, at 60 per cent, while the two Indian states withthe lowest enrolment rates have less than 20 per cent women teachers.

Breaking down barriers

Despite the obstacles, many countries have taken seriously the task of giving priority toeducation for girls and women. Guinea is one example. By involving religious leaders in the callfor girls to be educated, by ensuring that all teachers on the pay roll actually teach and bymobilizing local communities, Guinea increased girls' enrolment from 24 to 45 per cent in just


three years. "It worked marvellously with minimal resources!" said Fay Chung, head of UNICEF'seducation cluster, "More countries must make this sort of breakthrough."

Pakistan, in order to boost women's education, has encouraged 10,000 young women fromrural areas to enrol free in a distance learning programme for teacher certification and thecountry is also relaxing the age limits for the recruitment of women teachers. Malawi has madebasic education free. "So many more girls enrolled, the system began bursting at the seams!"says Gordon.

Gambia accepts female candidates who do not meet the criteria for teacher training and givesthem a special preliminary programme. "Otherwise, these women will never be admitted. Wewant to remove the conception that girls are inferior to boys. They just need to be given theright possibilities," explains Gambia's minister of education Ms. Satang Jow. And Egypt iscurrently setting up innovative community schools for children in deprived areas, 80 per cent ofthose who attend are girls.

There are also regional initiatives to promote education for girls and women. For example, theForum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE), founded by five women education ministersin 1993, has managed to foster dialogue within governments on how to improve femaleeducation.

In supporting government plans to reform education, some donors underline the priority theyplace on strategies that will improve access and quality of girls' education. The CanadianInternational Development Agency, for example, is contributing US$75 million over five years toa programme run in collaboration with UNICEF to boost girls' education in Africa.

The struggle for real equality of educational opportunity is well under way, but it is clear thatthe road will not be straight and easy.

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GENDER & PRIMARY SCHOOLING IN AFRICA

Christopher ColcloughIDS, Sussex

This project, directed by Christopher Colclough has two sets of objectives.

* to examine the main causes of low female enrolments, relative to those of males in SSA;

* to identify the most promising policy choices facing States which wish seriously touniversalise the enrolment of girls at primary level, and, in the context of three country cases,to investigate the resource implications of such alternative policies.

Six research officers and supporting research staff conducted case studies in Guinea, Tanzaniaand Ethiopia during 1995/6. The results of this work are presently being written up in the formof three national reports. A second phase of the work has been funded which will involveorganising six seminars in Africa for the purpose of disseminating the results, and thepreparation of a book on gender and education in Africa. The project is being funded by the


Forum of African Women Educationalists together with a broad grouping of northern aidagencies, including the Rockefeller Foundation, NORAD, HEDCO and the World Bank's EconomicDevelopment Institute.

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POLICIES & PRACTICES GEARED TOWARDS EDUCATION FOR ALL IN CHILE

Beatrice Avalos, MECE, Ministry of Education, Chile

In 1990 when the Conference of Education for All was convened in Jomtien, Chile wasemerging from a long period of dictatorship and the new democratic government that tookoffice on 11 March 1990 was not represented at the Conference. This meant that therecommendations of Jomtien such as they were formulated, did not become part of the public’sknowledge nor was there full awareness of their form on the part of Ministry of Educationofficials. Having said this, however, the policies that have framed actions of both democraticgovernments (1990-1994 and 1995 on) are fully consonant with the spirit of the Jomtienrecommendations. We shall briefly review these in terms of what is referred to as the“expanded vision and renewed commitment to education” (Articles 3-7 of the WorldDeclaration on Education for All).

Universalising access and promoting equity. Right at the start of the democratic governmentin 1990 it was judged that to a large extent expanding access to education was not thegreatest problem to be faced. In a system of 8 years of primary level education and 4 ofsecondary the coverage of the population aged 7-13 and 14 to 17 by 1994 was as follows:

Years GER Mn. Years of Schooling*

Primary Secondary Male Female

1990 95.3 65.0 8.3 9.1

1992 98.2 79.9 8.9 10.1

1993 94.5 75.1 9.0 10.1

1994 93.3 79.7 9.1 10.2* Economically active population, 15 years or more.Source: MINEDUC Chile, Compendio Información Estadística, 1994.

Other indicators such as illiteracy levels pointed to low and decreasing levels of the populationaged 15 plus from 8.9 % in 1982 to 4.8% in 1994, but literacy training continues in order toeradicate the problem completely.

Concern to cover the pre-primary level (0 to 5 years) for all children is a clear policy though farfrom being achieved. Figures in 1994 showed a GER of 13.6% but the target is to raise pre-school attendance from 63,000 in 1994 to around 100,000 by 1998, focusing on those fromthe poorer sectors of society.


Special education for the disabled is offered to just over 31 thousand children and there hasbeen a 57.5% of increase between 1981 and 1994 in the numbers of children provided withspecial attention.

Retention, which is the other component of access, remains a problem despite improvementsince 1990. For Basic Education (primary level) retention levels have changed as follows:

Cohorts Completion Rates Years taken tocomplete*

1980-1990

68.2 10.4

1981-1991

73.6 10.2

1982-1992

80.3 10.0

1983-1993

78.4 10.1

1984-1994

79.1 10.0

* Minimum: 8 years; maximum: 11 years. Source: MINEDUC Chile, Compendio de Información Estadística, 1994.

Focusing on learning acquisition. The main target of the education policies that started withthe democratic government in 1990 was to focus on quality, especially for those mostdisadavantaged groups in society. This led to a major programme for primary education knownas the Programme for the Improvement of the Quality and Equity of Education(MECE). This programme has three target areas: the most disadvantaged schools (900Schools Programme, the Projects for School Improvement open to all primary schools and aProgramme for Rural Schools). The main target of the 900 School Programme is to providestimulus to satisfy basic learning needs and improve learning achievement particularly inlanguage and mathematical skills, and does so by focusing on the provision of learningmaterials, teacher workshops to improve their teaching skills and an innovative experience usingmonitors to help children with learning difficulties. The programme focused in 1994 on 1052schools (approximately 10% of the total number of schools) judged to be most disadvantaged.Over time, some of the initial schools have overcome their problems and left the programme.Measured by a standardised language and mathematics test (SIMCE), schools in the 900Schools Programme have improved in the following way their results:

Years Language % Scores Mathematics % Scores

'88 43.7 42.6

'90 52.6 51.6

'92 60.5 61.3

'94 60.6 62.6


Various means are used to improve teaching and learning in all primary schools; among themare the Projects for School Improvement. These are generally curricular innovations thatschools develop often involving teachers and parents, and are presented to a national boardthat decides on merits those that will be allocated funds for implementation. There arecurrently some 3,000 of these projects being carried out in primary schools. The Programmefor Isolated Rural Schools rests among other things on the establishment of micro-centres thatgroup neighbouring schools, many of which are one-teacher schools, and brings their teacherstogether for staff-development activities.

Enhancing the learning environment. This target of the Jomtien Conference is being met invarious ways, of which an important one is the provision of classroom libraries (between 35 to60 books for every classroom). All 1st to 6th grade classrooms have been covered in 1996and by 1997 the other grades will receive their books. Equally there is a free textbookdistribution programme that now covers all publicly funded schools. Most innovative is theintroduction of computers and computer networking in the primary schools by means of anespecially designed programme known as Enlaces. It will not be possible to supply all schoolswith computers, but the intention is to cover 50% of the 8000 schools by the year 2000.Currently there are 150 schools in the programme of which 110 were funded by the Ministry ofEducation and the rest by other, private forms of support. Most of the schools in thisprogramme are located in one of the disadvantaged regions of the country where many of thechildren are of indigenous background.

Mobilising resources. In an effort to reverse the established trend of diminished funding forpublic education, the Chilean government is committed to an increase from 2.86 of GNP in1994 to 7 % by the year 2000 of which 6% is to be provided from public sources and the restfrom private contributions. Compared to 1994-95 the budget for education has increased 16%in 1996, which is higher than the target proposed for the year.

Given the extensive coverage of secondary education but knowing that its quality is poor, thegovernment has engaged also in a programme to improve its quality, targeting all publiclyfunded schools (80% of the school population) with special emphasis also on those that aremore disadvantaged. The programme (MECE Media) began in 1995 and will gradually include allschools by the year 2000 with special actions for teachers, youth, curriculum change,textbooks, books and other teaching resources provisions as well as computer networking forall schools.

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THE NUMBERS' GAMEWhat we can do in order to get better information about education

Wolfgang KuperGTZ, Eschborn

"Although governments throughout the world invest heavily in education, they spendremarkably little to monitor and evaluate their investment. Management of most of theworld's education system is done without adequate information and analysis. Theinternational education database is often unreliable, and leaves out crucial measures ofquality, process and output. Education research does not receive the same priority asresearch on agriculture, health or the economy". This is what the abstract of an article on"International education statistics and research: status and problems" from Jeffrey M.

Puryear says1). In spite of this situation the national and international organisations areaccustomed to approach education mainly by numbers. Educational data in educationalstatistics are important tools for all kinds of planning processes. Implementation andevaluation of educational projects in international cooperation primarily are based onstatistical explanations or exposures of quantitative developments.

However, very often one can find that the basis for this is weak, or as Puryear puts it:"government statistics on education are uniformly narrow, seldom timely and oftenunreliable". Not being a statistician, I will try to elaborate this on the basis of someexamples I have come across in my capacity as an educational planner (in very generalterms), and in my practical fieldwork as an adviser to the Ministry of Education in a Latin-American countries.

On the macro level, irrespective of the fact of how the different enrolment data arecollected, the particular weak point is the relation of population data (mainly on the basisof projections from existing census data) and existing enrolment rates in order toindicate arrive at the participation rate in education. In two cases during the last years, Ifound the population data for the children in school age much too low which resulted in ahigher participation rate as should have been assumed on the basis of more realistic(higher) figures for the children in school age. With regard to international literacystatistics, Daniel A. Wagner observed that member countries which provide UNESCO witheducational data "typically rely on national census information, which most oftendetermines literacy ability by the proxy variable of self- stated years of primary schoolingor through self- assessment questionnaires. Many specialists would agree that suchmeasures are likely to be unreliable indicators of literacy ability.." And he adds: "The dataon world literacy rates is misleading and underestimates the nature and scope of literacyproblems; neither increases in primary schooling nor adult literacy programs have been

very effective at reducing illiteracy, mainly due to population growth". 2) Puryearmentions, that only some 60 of UNESCO's 175 member states consistently report suchdata on the ages of pupils/students, which are necessary for calculating net enrolmentratios and school life expectancies.

When it comes to the real base of collecting enrolment data, we can find that manydifferent interests are involved; they normally attend to make enrolment data higher thanit really exists. Teachers and school directors would like to account as many children aspossible in order to get more teachers and/or funds to raise the importance of their


school. According to Puryear, some 20 - 30 countries suffer disastrous problems ingenerating reliable education statistics. Another 50 or so although report data that havesignificant gaps and weaknesses. That means, that slightly less than half of UNESCO'smember states suffer serious reliability problems with respect to their statistics. As aconsequence neither can the present situation be made transparent nor realisticprognostic calculation for educational planning is feasible.

In many countries, there is a sharp decline (drop out) from the first to the second gradein primary schools. One of the explanations is that parents mainly out of reasons ofpoverty, take out their children from school after one year. But why should they startsending their kids to school, and after one year they take them back? They must knowmore or less what their children will expect in school. Therefore, many other reasons arebehind this phenomenon. One of them is that in some countries pupils take their youngerbrothers and sisters (often called "babies") to the school, where they are more or lesssitting around idly in the "baby-classes" for some years, but for reasons of enrolmentrates they are accounted as grade 1.

In our project in the Andean region of Latin -America, we had many problems withattendance and dropout. Even the repetition rate was subject to many mistakes. Childrenwhere not counted correctly or not at all. Subsequently, the attendance register was notcorrect. Children who where absent for only some periods (e.g. the harvest time at thecoast) where counted as dropouts and were not really followed up when present at inschool, i.e. when they returned. Other real dropouts simply where not accounted for orfollowed up. Result: almost every time when one counted the children present in class,their number was not congruent with the number fixed in the attendance register.Teachers did not mind very much and inspectors, if they ever came, where not able orwilling to control this situation.

Another particularly weak point is the attendance of teachers in the classes. Worldwide,the official academic year for primary grades 1 through 6 averages 880118 instructional

hours3). In rural areas, again taken the example of the Andean Sierra, teachers normallydo not attend their school on Fridays and very often not on Mondays too, the reasonbeing that their homes were in the next city, often considerably away from the school.According to the attendance register, on Fridays the teachers normally have had officialmeetings in their city. In the mornings, most of the teachers come late and at noon theyleave early. A lot of time is consumed by preparing or distributing meals in school feedingprogrammes. Normal absenteeism of teachers and the many festivals add up to this. Theresult of this is that the real instructional hours went down below 20 % of the normwhich in that country was fixed at a minimum of 180 schooldays to have been taken inorder to be recognised as a school year. With regard to the international figures thiswould mean, that in contrast to the average of 880 instructional hours, we do not havemore than 200 to 300 hours in a school year and sometimes even less.

Many other examples could be given to underline the fact avoidance of the unreliability ofmany school statistics in developing countries, but not only there. One particularlystriking example is that of an African country where it was impossible to get a reliablefigure of the teachers employed. The respective indications of officials of the Ministry ofEducation varied between 17,000 and 28,000. Puryear reports the same from Uganda,where the Ministries of Education and Finance cannot agree on how many primary


teachers their country has (85,000 counted by Finance and some 140,000 counted byEducation). He further gives the example of Somalia which reported twice as manyteachers as were later determined to be present in schools.

Quantitative data imply qualitative aspects and allow some conclusions on educationalquality. But as Puryear makes it very clear: this statistical regime is too narrow. Thewhole emphasis is on quantity and not on quality. Inputs are counted, but there is"virtually no attention to documenting how schools function or what students learn".There is almost no information, no data, on private education expenditures, on thetraining possesed by teachers at the various levels of education, nor information on theavailability of textbooks and other educational materials in the classroom or informationon non-formal and adult education or for any kind of private educational facilities. Wehave always no "global information on educational processes such as curriculum,language of instruction, teaching materials, numbers of hours spent in classrooms orteaching methods" measures. Particularly conspicuous, again, according to Puryear, is theabsence of educational achievement data. Summing up: particularly in the educationalfield it is not so that much the quantity that counts but the quality - and here we havevery little numbers to prove the achievements of the system.

To improve the situation, Puryear simply suggests the necessity of global leadership,basically under UNESCO, or in the words of the abstract of his article: "Improvements willdepend heavily on greater commitment at the political level to measuring educationoutputs, and on the emergence of global leadership in promoting comprehensive, reliableassessments of education systems". As necessary as these global improvements are, Idoubt whether it is very realistic to build on them. I think much more can be done andhas to be done.

First of all, we have to revise our modalities of preparing projects. In a review of

externally commissioned studies of education in Africa during 1990 - 19944), theUNESCO/Association for the Development of African Education Working Group onEducation Sector Analysis has analysed the many deficiencies of those sector studieswhich are mainly done for the preparation of projects. It is mentioned, that availableeducation data are incomplete, inconsistent, inaccurate, or all three. Since sector studiesmay deal with with flawed data in very different ways, it is very difficult to compare theresults and recommendations of even two studies within the same country excludingthose frequent cases where unreliable data are simply copied from one study to theother. There are time pressures which commonly require that education sector studiesare being completed far more quickly than those involved really desire. Therefore, I thinkmuch more has to be invested into the preparation of projects. This can only be done in amuch longer time than normally has been provided for project preparation and on thebasis of thorough empirical studies and based ion intensive fieldwork. We have juststarted with this procedure in a secondary science education project in Tanzania, whereall discussions of the implementation of a project really started from such basic researchwork. By the way, there is abundant evidence that educational research is almost notavailable and many countries carry out no educational research at all. This leads up tothe statement of Puryear: "Countries tend to analyse their investments in education lessand less carefully than they do many of their other investments".


As things cannot be done or moved without any data, either in the preparation or in theimplementation of cooperation projects, and in order to get a better feeling for thereliability of the existing data, I think it is necessary that constant work is done in thefield on following up what really happens in the school. As this cannot be done in all theschools, very well designed and closely followed up pilot studies or examples should beselected. This, by the way, could be particularly relevant to the enrolment rates of girls inthe schools who so far are still marginalised in many regions in the world. Fromcomparison of these examples with official data, conclusions could be drawn of howunreliable they are or what has to be done in order to improve the situation. In all theseexercises the collection of quantitative data has to be complemented by qualitative dataor multidimensional explanations/expansions of the stated phenomena. For example,drop-out rates have to be explained within the existing situation. Teachers have to followup the drop out of the children with their parents and the community, investigate thereasons and/or explain them to the school authorities.

In spite of all the difficulties, there is a definite need of more evaluation of the learningachievements, that means to measure what pupils really have learned in school. The1990 Jomtien World Declaration on Education for All urges countries "to improve and

apply systems of assessing learning achievement".5) With the exception of the studiesof the Iinternational Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA),very little has been done so far and even less in developing countries. But one promisingexample has been developed and described recently: a serviceable methodology formeasuring basic education (competencies in reading, writing and arithmetic, as well asselected life skills), which has proven to be simple, inexpensive and rapid, and which hasbeen tested in Bangladesh on more than 2,000 children between the ages of 11 and

12.6) Furthermore UNESCO has taken up this aspect in chapter 4 "Searching for

Standards" in the World Education Report 1993.7)

As Puryear makes it very clear, even in industrialised countries evaluation is politicallyunpopular. There is much resistance to compare their own results with those of others,and nobody would like to make failures or deficiencies of one's system made public. Buthow can we develop education for all, if we do not know even in quantitative terms whatis really happening and what finally comes out? It is most embarrassing for theeducational sector, that at least 5 of the world's 9 largest countries are judged by mostexperts to have serious deficiencies in education statistics. And that the situation ineducation there is much less concern for data on achievement much than in othersectors like economics, agriculture or health. Therefore, everybody in the game,teachers, parents, local and regional authorities, ministries and governments, national andinternational donor and executing agencies seriously should do something more on thismatter.

References:

1. Jeffrey M. Puryear, International Education Statistics and Research: Status and Problems, in: International Journal of Educational Development, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 79-91, 1995


2. Daniel A. Wagner, Literacy and Development: Rationales, Myths, I nnovations,and future Directions, in: International Journal of Educational Development,Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 341-362, 1995

3. Lockheed - Verspoor et al., Improving Primary Education in Developing Countries. The World Bank 1991, p. 58

4. UNESCO, DAE Working Group Lead Agency: Analyses, Agendas and Priorities inAfrican Education, 31 May 1995 (Revised Draft)

5. World Declaration on Education for All, WCEFA / UNICEF, New York 1990

6. M.R. Chowdhury et al. Assessing Basic Competencies: A Practical Methodology,in: International Review of Education, 40(6): 437-454, 1994

7. World Education Report 1993, UNESCO, Paris

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AID TO BASIC EDUCATION: RHETORIC AND REALITY

Roy Carr-HillInstitute of Education, London

Since 1960, universal primary education (or UPE) has been the objective for nationalministries of education, despite the challenge posed by Mark Bray (see reference below1989). Indeed, many would claim that since Jomtien, there has been a renewedemphasis on basic education - but what form does it take? is there a renewed effort toreach UPE?

Until recently, this would have been an unanswerable question: exactly what donors didwith their aid monies was shrouded in mystery - not least to officials of those sameagencies! The pressures for international collaboration - in order to save costs? - andnational accountability have meant that, over the last ten years, there is considerablymore information available to assess what is happening.

Policies and Rhetorics around UPE

In a report on the International Working Group on Education, Buchert (1995) documentsa fascinating terminological debate around 'capacity building' in the field of education.Whilst some use that term, others add the adjective 'human', others speak of 'humanresource development', and a small minority of 'human development'. Although theseterminological quibbles may seem irrelevant to a debate over UPE, Buchert shows howthey relate to real differences in approach of the donors. Essentially, those - disappearingfew - who emphasise human development are concerned about democratisation andequity; whilst those emphasising resource development are more concerned witheconomic effectiveness and efficiency and the mantra of economic 'growth'.

This is illustrated in the second report prepared by Buchert (1995) for the IWGE, wherethe issues that were mentioned by all donors were: quality; efficiency; and partnership


(pp.37ff). The problem of attaining universal or even near-universal coverage is notmentioned; indeed, for some, the quality of what is provided appears to beingemphasised at the expense of quantity. Are we returning to the enclave 'model'schools?The problems of sustainability (ensuring that the government could take up the recurrentcost implications of any educational policy reform) were highlighted for providing aid topoorer countries and SIDA, for example, emphasised three issues as being important interms of sustainability: quality, financing and institutions (ibid., p.38). Once again, theissue of coverage is curiously absent from the discussions.

The World Bank paper suggested six key reforms as a focus for attention: a higherpriority for education; greater attention to outcome; maximising returns to publicinvestment; greater attention to equity; more household involvement; and more flexiblesystems. At last, someone talking about 'equity'? -and even possible coverage? No,what they really mean is equality of misery.

Practice

The International Working Group on Education (1995) also extended earlier work by Kingand Carr-Hill (1993) to show the trend in aid to the social and administrativeinfrastructure from 1988 to 1992. It concludes, in a report by Buchert, that

there is no evidence of uniform upward or downward movement although somecountries show a consistent emphasis on human priorities (p.6).

Buchert comments that, when examined in detail, 'The period [1985/86 - 1991/92] istoo short to distinguish any major changes' (p.12); but the data in the table she providesmakes it clear that there has been a small drop overall in the percentage of official aidgiven to education (from 10% to 9%); and that, among those donors who gave morethan US$100 million to education in 1985/86 (Australia, France, Germany, Japan,Netherlands, UK and USA), the only slight increase was registered by France with theothers decreasing the percentage spent on education.

Moreover, among those donors, Australia reports no spending on basic educationi, Franceabout a sixth, Japan about a third and the UK about 10%; only Germany claims to bespending the bulk on basic education. So basic education is receiving a relatively smallshare of a declining aid programme!

But it has been calculated - for example by Colclough with Lewin (1993) - that verysubstantial increases are required to provide sustainable quality basic education. There isa gulf between the rhetoric about basic education and the reality of disbursements.

When this is combined with the subtle shift in emphasis in donor-speak, the inferencemust be that there has been a progressive withdrawal from UPE.

References

Bray M. (1989) If UPE is the Answer, what is the Question?, International Journal forEducational development


Buchert L (1995) A Classification of aid policies and Education aid policies and practices,International Institute for Educational Planning, A Report from the IWGE

Colclough C. with Lewin K. 1993 Educating all the children Clarendon, Oxford

IWGE 1995 Education aid policies and practices IIEP

King K. and Carr-Hill R (1992) 'Aid to Basic Education: Flows, Policies, Modalities' forDevelopment Assistance Committee of the OECD

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POVERTY AND DEMAND FOR PRIMARY EDUCATION:EVIDENCE FROM MOROCCO

Sobhi Tawil, IUED, Geneva

Universal primary education has been one of the four general principles guiding educational policy inMorocco since independence in 1956. Resources allocated to education have traditionally been highand have steadily inreased since 1975. Morocco now devotes 25% of state budget to education;This is the largest proportion as compared to other countries in North Africa and the Middle East.Despite impressive progress made in expanding primary education in Morocco, UPE is still far frombeing reached. Primary GER in 1991 was 62.6% and substantial urban/rural disparities and gendergaps persist. Moreover, there has been a disturbing pattern of decline in primary enrolments sincethe early eighties with GER dropping from 86% in 1983 to 65% in 1990. A combination offactors may explain this apparent contradition:

Inefficient Resource Allocation

An examination of successive MOE budgets since 1966 reveals that there has indeed been anincrease in public investment in education. Once adjusted both to the Consumer Price Index (CPI)and to average rates of demographic growth, per capita public expenditure on education appearsto have more than doubled in real terms (average growth rate of 2.12). This is largely aconsequence of positive economic trends as reflected by the 93% increase in real GDP per capitasince 1966.

However, the same period has also witnessed a regular decrease in the share of the MOE budgetallocated to the primary level going down from 58% of the total budget of the MOE in 1966 to32.9% in 1995. Such patterns of resource allocation among the different educational subsectorscontradict recent evidence relative to educational investment choices. Psacharopoulos (1994)suggests that social rates of return to investment in education appear to be highest at theprimary level, particularly in low and middle-income countries with low levels of achievement inbasic education.

In addition, although the rural population accounts for 52% of the total population, only 10% oftotal educational investments where channeled to rural areas during the eighties (Khandker, Lavy &Filmer 1994). Bearing in mind that 45% of the rural population lives below the poverty line, it maybe argued that the combined effects of reduced allocation to primary education and the generalneglect of rural areas, discriminates against the poor and amplifies existing inequities in incomedistribution.


Household Poverty

Beyond questions pertaining to strategic choices in resource allocation, underenrolment may alsobe explained through demand-side factors. The global results of the recent Moroccan LivingStandards Survey (MLSS) suggest that although the inadequate provision of schooling continues tobe an important factor (particularly in rural areas) in explaining the non-take up of primaryeducation, economic/subsistence constraints on housholds in both urban and rural areas are by farthe most important determinants. Forty percent of the causes of non-enrolment at the primarylevel reported by parents relate to their inability to bear the direct and indirect costs of schooling.For families that cannot meet their subsistence requirements, the opportunity costs of schooling,in terms of forgone income from child labour or household production, will be so important as toovershadow the future returns to schooling.

Although tuition is free in Morocco, a closer examination of access to schooling among the poorindicates that the inability to pay for school-related expenses and the need for 7 to 13 year-oldchildren to help parents in household chores and productive activities account for 48.4% and52.2% of the reasons reported for not attending schools in rural and urban areas respectively. A1993 survey conducted jointly by IREDU and the Moroccan MOE demonstrated that the opportunitycost resulting from school attendance in rural areas increases with age and is on average higher forgirls at all ages. The participation rate of rural girls in both domestic and economic activities risesfrom 37.8% in the 7-12 age group to 60.5% in the 13-16 age group. It appears then that thenarrower the household subsistence margin, the greater the demand for child participation in theproduction process and consequently, the more difficult it becomes for poorer families to bear thedirect and indirect costs of schooling.

It is this prevalent poverty that largely conditions family demand for primary schooling for theirchildren and explains both low take up of primary education, as well as low mean years ofschooling. It is not surprising then that rural illiteracy (10+) was as high as 71.8% (MLSS 1991)whereas GER among 7 to 13 year-old children was only 44.1% with a drop-out rate (before sixthgrade) of 58%. Such low levels of educational attainment severely limit the possibilities ofeconomic growth and restrict the social opportunities that disadvantaged groups may gain fromthe development process.

As the constraints of economic survival largely condition access to schooling in Morocco, anyattempt to expand the take up of existing facilities must necessarily address the issue of povertyreduction. Policies to reduce or remove the direct costs of schooling to households may proveinadequate where opportunity costs are high. There now appears to be a growing internationalawareness of the "the genuine dilemmas posed by conflicting demands on family/householdresources, short-term survival needs, and the contribution of children to household productivity, asagainst the need to maintain children in school through the full primary cycle."(*) It is suchconcerns that lie behind policy packages for basic education advocated by the World Bank thatinclude targeted stipends for poorer households and more specifically for rural girls, as is beingexperimented in Morocco .

__________

* Three Years After Jomtien: EFA in the Eastern & Southern Africa Region IIEP/UNICEF, 1994: 68.

Data Sources & Research on Basic Education in Morocco Since 1990:

1. Analyse des Déterminants de la Scolarisation en Zones Rurales au Maroc (1993) Division des Etudes et des Objectifs / IREDU Rabat: Ministry of Education


2. Enquête Nationale Auprès des Jeunes: Analyse des résultats (1993) Education & formation des jeunes (vol. 2) Rabat: Conseil National de la Jeunesse & de l'Avenir

3. Enquête Nationale sur le Niveau de Vie des Ménages (1991) (Moroccan Living Standards Survey / MLSS) Rabat: Division de la Statistique

4. Enquête par Sondage sur la Scolarisation des Filles dans Cinq Provinces (1994) Division des Etudes et Objectifs Direction de la Planification Rabat: Ministry of Education

5. Etude Evaluative des Actions du MEN pour le Développement du Préscolaire Coranique (1993) Rabat: Ministry of Education / UNICEF

6. Jarousse & Mingat (1992) Evaluation Globale de la Politique Educative Marocaine Report for the World Bank

7. Khandker, Lavy & Filmer (1994) Can the Government Improve Schooling Outcomes in Morocco World Bank Discussion Paper, No. 264 Washington DC: The World Bank

8. Lavy, Spratt & Leboucher (1995) Changing Patterns of Illiteracy in Morocco: Assessment methods compared Living Standards Measurement Study, Working paper No. 115, Washington DC: The World Bank

9. Wagner, D. A., (1993) Literacy, Culture and Development: Becoming Literate in Morocco New York: Cambridge University Press

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THE PROSPECTS OF EDUCATION FOR ALL IN ETHIOPIA

Tekeste Negash, Department of History, Uppsala University

In 1991 the military and socialist government which ruled the country since 1974 was defeated byan insurgent army. A remarkable achievement of the earlier regime (1974-1991) was in the field ofeducation. In the formal education sector about 38 percent of the school age population had by1990 access to primary education. More notable was the achievement in the spread of literacy.Between 1979 and 1988 the rate of illiteracy was reduced from an estimated figure of 93 per centto about 37 percent. This feat was achieved by a series of centrally organised literacy campaigns.Literacy classes were given in about a dozen different languages. The government's efforts tospread literacy were internationally recognised, even though the reliability of the figures werequestioned. The government was efficient in conducting campaigns but was not so well organisedin post-literacy activities. The risk, therefore, of those reached by the first literacy campaignrelapsing back to illiteracy remained overhanging.


Yet the earlier government had a more positive attitude towards non-formal education. Between1985 and 1990 the government, with active support of SIDA, established about 400 CommunitySkills Training Centres (CSTC) all over the country. According to official figures about a quarter of amillion people received some kind of training. The department of non-formal education which runthe community Centres had in 1990 a staff of about 140 and a functioning library.

Since 1991 the landscape of Ethiopian education has considerably changed. The transition from ahighly centralised system to that of federalism, and the decentralization of power appear to havetheir impact on the education sector. According to the political framework of the presentgovernment primary education is the responsibility of the regions. Accordingly, the Ministry ofEducation's main responsibility has become more advisory. Moreover, it appears that the strategyof the present government is inclined more towards formal education.

Education statistics and the several surveys carried out by donors (Sida and USAID) clearly reflectthe impact of the change of regime. These figures and surveys also provide prospects and trendsof the education for all for the foreseeable future. Gross enrolment in primary schools declinedfrom 38 percent in 1989 to nearly 20 percent in 1993. Literacy campaigns, which were interruptedin the late 1980's due to the war between government and insurgent forces, are no longer aconcern of the central government. Like primary education, campaigns against illiteracy are aconcern of the newly established federal states. At present, we have no way of knowing either therate of literacy or the condition for literacy in the country. Official statistics have no entries on theprogress of literacy.

One of the effects of decentralization and devolution of power from the central ministries to theirregional counterparts is the reduction of personnel and the closure of redundant departments. Thestaff of the Ministry of Education has been reduced from a high figure of 900 to nearly 300. Theworst hit of all departments has however been that of non-formal education. The department hasbeen virtually abolished and its staff spread throughout the regions. Within the Ministry ofEducation, matters dealing with non-formal education are taken care by a non-formal educationpanel staffed by four experts.The strategy of the present government is to increase primary gross enrolment from ca. 22 percent to50 percent by 2025. As a show of commitment there was a sharp increase of the education budget in1993. Meeting the target would however be extremely difficult in view of the rate of population growthand the hitherto limited financial resource base. The funds would be very hard to come by to build andstaff schools. On the other hand, Ethiopia finds itself in the midst of a political experiment wheredecentralization and devolution of power are the key concepts. It is possible that in the near future, thefederal states would be strong enough to identify the educational needs of their populations. It is alsoto be hoped that Ethiopia and its federal states would come to appreciate the viability of non-formaland literacy campaigns, in addition to formal education, as strategies in the efforts to make literacyaccessible to all.

Reference

Tekeste Negash, 1996 Rethinking education in Ethiopia Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, Uppsala

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EDUCATION FOR ALL? A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE CHALLENGES FACINGNIGER

Shona Wynd, Department of Education/Centre of African StudiesUniversity of Edinburgh

Introduction


The upcoming conference in Amman marks the halfway point between the signing of theEducation for All declaration in Jomtien and the target year of 2000. While for manycountries the mid-term evaluation provides an opportunity to demonstrate animprovement in their educational indicators, for countries like Niger, the evaluation willbe more likely to be giving an early indication of their inability to meet the highexpectations placed upon them. Situated at or near the bottom of most listings ofcomparative educational achievements, the case of Niger provides an interesting studyof a country hard-pressed to maintain its current levels of basic education provision, letalone improve them.

Niger’s Plan of Action: 1992In its National Plan of Action, the Nigerien National Committee for Monitoring andEvaluation of Education for All Recommendations noted that Niger was in a particularlygrave situation with a primary schooling enrolment rate of 20.4% and a literacy rate of

14%ii. Additionally, a fertility rate of 7.4 and an annual population growth rate of

3.25%iii meant that the challenges of providing basic education for all were going toincrease exponentially with the growth of the population. The report listed among theconstraints against primary schooling: an absence of a clearly defined national educationpolicy, a growing national debt, many disaffected parents who felt education was wastedas the economic crisis resulted in a shrinking formal job market, lack of school buildings,lack of qualified teachers, shortages of school textbooks, and a curriculum which waspoorly adapted to the Nigerien context.

In addition to the global problems, the Committee also noted that the situations facedby females were particularly challenging. A 1992 study indicated that, of those childrenattending school, only 36% were girls; in rural areas female enrolment rates were as low

as 10%iv. Girls, in addition to facing problems of quality and relevance of education,were also constrained by cultural norms which limited their activities outside of thehome from an early age.

Echoing the overall trends of the Jomtien conference, the global goal of the Nation Planof Action emphasised the need to increase overall levels of literacy, with particularemphasis placed on women, and to improve education rates, once again with a particularemphasis on girls. The specific goals aimed to increase schooling rates of 7 -14 yearolds from 20.24% in 1990 to 25.34% in 1996 and 31.11% in 2000. Girls weretargeted to increase from 35% of the school population in 1990 to 40% in 1996 and50% in 2000. Additionally, the Plan aimed to improve the condition of illiterate womenand their families, and to increase the number of literacy centres from 1443 in 1990 to3143 in 1996.

The extent to which the committee felt that the targets were realistic is unclear,although interviews with members of the committee indicate they were sceptical. Whatis clear from the Plan of Action is that, despite the list of targets and areas of generalfocus, it failed to provide a means of achieving those targets. Devoid of references tohow increased levels of basic education would influence local issues such as agricultureand health, the Plan of Action remained at the abstract level of figures.

Niger’s Current Indicators


It is difficult to speculate about the extent to which Niger’s educational indicators wouldhave improved, had they had an more effective Plan of Action; the situation was clearlyone of the most challenging in the world. However, despite efforts on the part of theWorld Bank, and the Dutch, French and Canadian governments to assist the Nigeriengovernment in realising their goal of basic education for all, the obstacles continue to bedaunting. Niger is one of six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa whose literacy rates haveactually decreased between 1990 and 1995, and women’s illiteracy rates are now one

of the highest at 93.4 %v. Due to the number of school years cancelled because ofstudent and teacher strikes, schooling has been, at best, sporadic over the past fiveyears: a boy-child can now expect to attend school for an average of 2.8 years, and for

the girl-child the expectation is reduced to 1.4 yearsvi. A military coup took place inNiger in January of this year which, in addition to seriously undermining the efforts madetowards establishing a democratic nation, has resulted in the withdrawal of most of theirsources of international funding.

ConclusionIt would seem that Niger, along with its Sahelian neighbours of Mali and Burkina Faso, willprove to be an example of a country which cannot expect to achieve vastly improvedlevels of educational provision by the year 2000. Rather than hoping to achieve theelusive universal basic education for all, the task for Niger remains one of a struggleagainst regression.

[Footnotes are on page 96]

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EDUCATION FOR ALL:FOLLOW-UP ACTIONS AND ACHIEVEMENTS IN CHINA (1990-96)

Zhou Nanzhao, China National Institute of Educational Research, Beijing

Over the past six years China has made great efforts in implementing the WorldDeclaration on Education for All to meet the basic learning needs in the most populousdeveloping country. The following gives a glimpse of follow-up actions andachievements made in education for all programmes.

Policy Goals for 1990'sThe goal set by the Chinese government for basic education in the 1990's is:1. to basically universalise 9-year compulsory education by the year of 2000. Specificallyit aims:

-- to universalise 9-year compulsory education in geographical areas accounting for 85%of the total population;--- to universalise 5-6-year compulsory primary education in areas accounting for 10% ofthe total population;--- to universalise 3-4-year junior primary education;--- to increase gross enrolment rate for lower secondary education to 85%; and--- to achieve an enrolment rate for school-aged children higher than 99%.


2. to develop special education programmes for children with special learning needs inreceiving compulsory education and to basically meet early childhood educational needsin large and medium-sized cities and develop one-year pre-school education in rural areas;3. to basically eradicate illiteracy among young and middle-aged adults, with literacy rateraised to 95% and 4-5 million illiterates on average made literate annually, of whom 3million will be women;4. to develop diversified vocational education/training programmes and implement asystem of "compulsory training prior to employment" and "compulsory training prior topost-taking" to ensure necessary pre-occupational training of new labour forces;5. to develop a national system of job-related training and job-shift training for allemployees, with farmers educational- technical schools established in the majority ofrural townships and villages; and6. to develop a national network of distance education and open learning systems whichwill provide teaching, instructional management and life-long learning opportunities forlarger number of adults deploying modern information technologies. By the year of 2000about 70% of the rural counties are to set up educational television stations and 70% ofrural schools beyond township-central primary-school level able to directly receiveeducational programmes.

Major Strategies and Actions Taken

A series of governmental and non-governmental actions have been taken to implementeducation for all programme in this most populous developing country.Among major strategies are the following.

1. Developing legislative infrastructure for legal protection of the right of all toeducation. Serious actions have been taken to implement the first major educationallegislation, China's Compulsory Education Act, which was put into effect in 1986;following that there have been the Act on Protection of the Disabled, in 1991; the Acton Protection of Rights of Pre-adulthood in 1991; the Act on Protection of Women'sRights in 1992; the Chinese Programme on Educational Reform and Development, aleading governmental policy document, in 1993; the China's Teacher Act in 1994; theRegulations on Education for the Disabled in 1994; and in 1995 China's Education Law,the first ever parent law in education in the history of New China.2. Mandating governments at all levels to place education as a highest priority on theirdevelopment agenda. At least in policy rhetoric, education is regarded as the foundationof national modernisation and basic education has been emphasised as the "highest ofhigh priorities" in educational development programme. A guiding strategic policy is setof "prospering the nation by science and education" by the central authority. In socio-economic development plans at all levels, education is included as an integral part andgiven high priority.3. Developing strong leadership for effecting over-all co-ordination of different sectors inefforts to develop education. Education becomes a responsibility not only of theeducation sector but all social and economic sector. For example, for universal literacyprogrammes, an Inter-ministerial Co-ordinating Group was set up, composed ofrepresentatives from ministries of education, agriculture, forestry, culture, propaganda,mass media, film and television, civil administration, and the army, the Youth League, theSciences Association, and Women's Federation. From the premier, the governor, themayor, down to village and factory directors, authorities at all levels are made


responsible for education and training. Responsible government officers who have notachieved the compulsory education targets set for his or her province, county ortownship will not get promoted.4. Decentralisation to local and institutional levels and participation by communities.Primary and secondary education administration was decentralised to provincial andcounty authority since 1985 and the process has been further improved, withresponsibilities further clarified between different levels. Local participation and initiativesare increasingly encouraged.5. Flexible approaches of "planning by geographical regions, supervisory guidance byeducational categories and sub-sectors, and implementation by steps". Different policytargets are set for different areas in light of their different economic and educationalconditions. For the universalisation of 9-year compulsory education and illiteracyeradication, a three-phase strategy and target dates of universalisation were set forurban and rural areas at different development levels.6. Clear-cut focus and priority placed on poverty-stricken areas, ethnic minority-populated areas, Special measures have been taken in this regard. For examples:

--- A special Governmental Fund for Compulsory Education was set up at central,provincial, prefectural, and county levels;--- A special "Poverty-Eradication Support Fund" was set up, mobilising mainlygovernmental resources at national level;--- Developed areas are mandated to provide human, financial and material resources toless developed areas.

7. High priority given to basic education of disadvantaged population, especially girlsand women. Drop-out rate for girls in primary education will be controlled below 2%;about 3 million women will turn literate every year; representation of women at everylevel of education will be raised proportionally.8. Combination of formal, non-formal, and informal education in the delivery of educationfor all, especially in mountainous areas, island areas, and poverty-stricken areas.9. Partnerships between governmental and NGOs, public and private, education andbusiness, and central and local communities, in the joint efforts for education for all.A national "16-characters" policy of "active encouragement, energetic support,appropriate guidance, and strengthened management" has been effected for developingnon-governmental and private education. At present there have been ore than 60,000non-governmental, "social-forces-sponsored" educational institutions in China, includingover 4,000 private primary and middle schools, nearly 900 private and NGO-sponsoredcolleges, and larger number of private kindergartens and vocational training institutionsand programmes.10. Diversification of financial sources of funding. Apart from governmental budgetaryallocations, which will remain the dominant source of funding for basic as well as higheducation, there have been many others, including: educational supplement collected inboth urban and rural areas; educational expenditures contributed by public industrial-business enterprises and government-affiliated institutions; funds collected or donatedby NGO institutions and individuals; tuition and fees for non-compulsory education; andincome from work-study programmes and school-run enterprises. Funds from these non-governmental sources have accounted for nearly 40% of all educational expenditures,most of which are used for primary and secondary general education.11. International assistance and collaboration. To promote education for all, China hasimplemented a series of collaborative education projects with assistance from the World


Bank, UNICEF, UNDP, and UNESCO, and matching funds from governments. The results ofthese international projects have been most positive in both quantitative and qualitativeterms.

Major Achievements: Some StatisticsOver the past six years, remarkable progress has been achieved in education for all inChina. The following statistics stand for 1994.

Pre-school education. Among children aged 3 to 6, a national average of 31.5% wereenrolled in kindergartens; 70% for urban areas, and up to over 90% for some largemunicipalities. For rural areas, 60% of children aged 6 have been enrolled in one-year pre-school programmes; enrolments increased 45.1% between 1990-94; percentage ofenrolments of rural kindergartens increased from 39.1% to 59.8%.

Primary Education.There were more than 680,000 primary school, with a total enrolment of over 117million, at an enrolment rate of 98.4% (that for girls was 97.7%), an increase of 0.6%over 1990. Completion rate was 86.6%, a 12% increase over 1990; drop-out rate wasreduced to 1.85%, a drop of 0.35% over 1990.

Lower Secondary Education.There were over 68,000 junior high schools and 10946 complete high schools with bothlower and upper divisions, with a total enrolment of 43.79 million. Gross enrolment rateat this level was 73.8%, and drop-out rate was reduced to 5.1%. Promotion rate forgraduates was 46.4%, a 5.8% increase over 1990. By 1994 554, or 19.3%, of allcounties had universalised 9-year compulsory education.

Learning Achievements.According to "monitoring education for all goals" project, China conducted a nationalsurvey study on learning achievements in Chinese language, math, and life skills, of pupilsin the 6-year primary schools in 1992-93 academic year, in 8 provinces, with a samplingof 24,582 4th-graders and 24,443 6th -graders from 1305 primary schools. The resultsshowed that 90% of primary schoolers met the requirements set for compulsoryeducation standards: passing rate for 4th grade Chinese language was 83.15%; 85.08%for 6th graders; 94% for 4th grade math; 87.54 for 6th graders; 79.17% for 4thgraders in life skills; 79.8% for 6th graders.

Adult Literacy.--- Between 1990-1994 China had made literate a total of 24.87 million illiterate adultsaged 15-45.--- By 1994, 850 of the 2200-odd counties had eradicated illiteracy among young andmiddle-aged adults.

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SOME QUESTIONS ON THAI EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AFTER THE WorldConference on Education for All, Jomtien 1990.

Pisitphol KraipipadhEducation Department, University of Edinburgh


Introduction

The World Conference on Education for All, held in March 1990 in Jomtien, Thailand,sponsored by UNESCO, UNICEF, UNDP and the World Bank, concentrated on quality andquantity of basic education for all (WCEFA, 1990). When the World Conference onEducation for All was adopted by developing countries, it encouraged changes to agreater or lesser degree in many developing countries.

The conference influenced the direction of Thai educational development since Thailand’sNational Education Commission, which has responsibility for national education planning,took the World Conference for Education for All and The Frame work of Action Plan toMeet the Basic Learning Needs in accordance with the Seventh National Economic andSocial Development Plan; and the Seventh National Educational Development Plan (1992-1996) as a basis to formulate a draft action plan on education for all.

NEC finalised a draft action plan on education for all, and then submitted it to the Cabinetfor consideration. This plan was implemented in 1992, entitled The National EducationalScheme.

Education for All is proclaimed in this National Education Scheme 1992, by the ThaiGovernment in the following terms:

Education is a fundamental right for every Thai citizen-regardless of gender, age,social-economic status, place of residence, religious belief or any reservations.Every citizen and sector concerned must give priority, support and take jointcontribution in providing education for all (National Education Scheme 1992 P2).

This notion reflects the commitment and conformity to the Universal Declaration onHuman Rights of 1948 which stated ‘Everyone has a right to education’, as well as theWorld Conference on Education for All, 1990.

The Provision of Basic Education

The provision of basic education, which was set forth in the National Education Scheme1992, served as a long-term human resources development policy. Three main levels offormal education for improving educational opportunities of Thai citizens are set out inthis scheme (National Education Scheme 1992).

1) Pre-primary schooling : All children are encouraged to take at least 1 yearof pre-primary education.2) Primary schooling : All children are provided free primary education in publicschools. Six years’ duration of primary education is compulsory by law.3) Secondary schooling : Government will provide secondary education asbasic education for all children, but it is not compulsory and it is not free.

It is believed that the expansion of education will improve the quality of the Thaipopulation and help them to adapt themselves to the changing economic and socialconditions. Currently, the main issue of Thai education aims at the expansion of basiceducation from 6 year to 9 years (NESDB, 1992: 9).

Difficulties to face


It is believed that poorer populations will improve their living status, if they obtainopportunities for appropriate education (NESDB, 1992: 104). But at the momentaccording to the National Statistics presented in The Seventh National Social andEconomic Development Plan (1992-1996), it is clear that agriculture workers, generalmanual workers, and low-ranking civil servants all earn low incomes. At least 64 % of thepopulation, for example, are still agricultural workers. This group does send its children toprimary schools, but there is a tendency actually to withdraw them because of the needfor agricultural labour at the secondary school stage. They also need equality ofopportunity to get access to basic education (NESDB, 1992: 33).

If basic education is counted as a right of all Thai citizens, as stated in the scheme 1992,then the Thai government has to support or find an appropriate measure for theprovision of basic education for all. This is to ensure quantity and quality will be gained byall the population, especially those 64 % of population involved in agriculture.

To make the expansion of basic education apply to all, it should be compulsoryeducation. This is to ensure that practical value is added. Obviously, it is foreseen thatthe Thai Government has greatly to increase resources allocation for basic educationeven for the present six years. It is not only a question of increasing educational budget,however, for there is a shortage of specialist teachers (especially in Mathematics, Englishlanguage, and Sciences), because of the lack of competitiveness in teachers’ salaries.There is currently a debate in the government body about whether basic education isgoing to be nine or twelve years of compulsory education. But if it is going to be madecompulsory, it has to be free.

Questions to ask

It would be very surprising if the Government really made 9 or 12 years compulsory inthe very near future. It may be possible that the expansion of Thai education from 6 to 9years is going to be implemented within 2001 as stated in the National EducationalScheme 1992; however, a lot more educational resources are needed to support this.

Although there is a policy to encourage educational institutions to earn extra income(ONEC, 1992: 25) such as the income from providing academic services, and fromdonations, it may provide too small an amount of income to support the institutions.Currently, according to the formal education statistics of academic year 1991,1,527,851 pupils were in pre-primary level, 6,926,109 pupils in primary level, and1,567,259 were in lower secondary level (ONEC 1993:5)

According to the figures above, is it possible for the government to allocate educationalbudget to respond to the high demand of education? How about the 1 year of pre-primary education discussed above? Is it going to be counted as compulsory education?

There is an educational development policy to accelerate the production of teachersupply in areas of shortage (ONEC, 1992: 23), but it takes at least 4 years to produceteachers. It may not be possible so rapidly to respond to the shortage of personnelresources. Furthermore, it will be hard to keep those specialist teachers in schoolswithout competitive salaries. Is there any measure at the moment to solve theseproblems?


References

NEC (1992). National Education Scheme 1992. National Education Commission, Office ofNational Education Commission, Bangkok: Thailand. (Original in Thai)

NESDB (1992). The Seventh National Economic and Social Development Plan (1992-1996). National Economic and Social Development Board, Office of The Prime Minister,Bangkok: Thailand. (Original in Thai).

ONEC (1992). Objectives, Policies and Measures in Educational Development Under theSeventh National Education Development Plan (1992-1996). Office of the NationalEducation Commission, Office of the Prime Minister. Bangkok: Thailand. (Original in Thai).

ONEC (1993). Formal-Education Statistics and Indicators Academic Year 1986-1991.Office of the National Education Commission, Office of the Prime Minister. Bangkok:Thailand. (Original in Thai).

Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (1948). United Nations General AssemblyResolution 217A (III), United Nations.

World Conference on Education for All (1990)World declaration on education for all andFramework for action to meet basic learning needs adopted by the World Conference onEducation for All, Jomtien, Thailand, March 5-9 1990. New York.

0-0-0-0-0EDUCATION FOR ALL IN KENYA SINCE JOMTIEN

Daniel N. Sifuna & Francis X. GichuruKenyatta University, Nairobi

IntroductionBefore the Jomtien conference of 1990, Kenya had made considerable efforts in thefield of education. The educational policies followed after independence in 1963 weremarked by the quantitative expansion of schooling opportunities at all levels of theeducation system. This expansion was dictated by the educational, economic, socialand political imperatives of the transition from a colony to an independent state.

In primary education for example, a Presidential directive in 1971 abolished tuitionfees for the districts having unfavourable geographical conditions that were said tomake populations in these areas poor. The December 12, 1973 Presidential decreewas said to have taken the country and government much closer to achieving thelong awaited universal primary school education. The decree provided free educationfor children in standards I-IV in all the districts of Kenya. Subsequent decrees wentfurther and abolished school fees in primary education.

Following the 1973 Presidential decree, in all districts there was a sharp increase inenrollment during the period 1973-74, but thereafter the situation reverted to what it


had been before. Enrolments even in districts which had major infusions of new pupilswere not registering their full cohorts of school age children by mid 1970s. Thenumber of children who joined in 1974 dropped out soon after; thus the situationregarding access and continuation in school reverted to what it had been before thePresidential decree. The reason for this enrolment situation was that at the time ofthe abolition of school fees, no counter measures were announced about how toreplace the lost revenue. With the enlarged enrolment, a country-wide buildingprogramme had to be launched to cope with the extra classes. School committeesimposed a building fee for each child. This frustrated many parents who hadwelcomed the pronouncement of free primary education (Nkinyangi, 1980).

In the area of adult literacy, efforts that had started after independence to promoteadult education in the country, received a major boost in December, 1979, on theoccasion of the 15th anniversary of Kenya's independence. The President in anaddress to the nation, officially ordered a massive literacy programme to be launchedin order to eliminate illiteracy within a period of five years. Illiteracy was described asa major obstacle to economic development and social participation. In consequence,the literacy programme was presented as an important component of an overallstrategy in the Fourth Development Plan (Republic of Kenya, 1979)

Following the launching of the literacy campaign in 1979, 321,208 women wereenrolled in Kenya's adult literacy classes compared to 93,968 men. By 1990,however, respective enrolments for women and men were 105,458 and 32,696.These figures suggest that overall enrolment figures have been gradually decliningsince the early years of the initial enthusiasm (Mwiria, 1993).

The education of the marginalized groups was mainly the responsibility of Non-governmental organizations and voluntary agencies, although the Ministry ofEducation provided education and training of teachers of the handicapped as wellmaintaining some institutions initially established by NGOs and voluntary agencies.Efforts were also made to expand opportunities for nomadic communities.

The World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) rekindled worldwide interest inexpanding basic education. Kenya was an active participant in the Eastern andSouthern Africa preparatory meetings for the conference. The country wasrepresented at WCEFA by a very powerful delegation led by President Moi who isquoted to have made the following statement in his speech.

The warming of relations between East and West, the withdrawal of occupyingforces in various parts of the world, and the reduction of the manufacture ofarms are all developments that should release huge amounts of resources fordevelopment. We shall surely not be asking for too much when we say someof the resources thus saved should be put to better use of providing educationfor all (IAC, 1990).

The findings of a research study on the WCEFA follow-up

From a documentary review, it was established that as an important follow-up toWCEFA, the Kenya Government formed a 26 member National EFA Task Force chairedby the Director of Education; with a sub-committee, the National Planning Committee.


At the regional seminar held in September, 1993 in Kampala, Uganda, Kenya reportedher achievements since Jomtien to include;

Formation of the National EFA committeeVarious seminars and workshops as follows

(i)A National workshop in Nyeri form 16-20 September 1991 to developKenya's Plan of Action for EFA, detailing Kenya's EFA goals andproposed strategies.

(ii)A National conference on EFA held in Kisumu 27-30 July, 1992 toconcretise the National Plan of Action.

The Kisumu conference which was the last major follow-up event of WCEFA madeimportant recommendations on what it preferred to call Basic Education for All, ratherthan EFA. The recommendations covered extensively the areas of Early ChildhoodEducation, Primary Education, Education for Special Groups, Out of School Educationand Skills Training, Adult Education and Literacy, Education for Girls and Women, andEducation through the 3rd channel. The conference was sponsored by the Ministry ofEducation in conjunction with a good number of local donor agencies and Non-governmental organizations.

With regard to the assessment of perceptions of the impact of WCEFA throughinterviews, 19 out of 40 respondents were interviewed. In contrast to the positiveresponses from officials of ministries and representatives of donor agencies, there waslack of cooperation and at times indifference on the part of NGOs and professionalorganizations. Some claimed that they did not participate in the WCEFA, andtherefore were not aware of its recommendation. Even for those who participated, itwas apparent that many did not possess or were familiar with the major documentoutcomes of the conference. Consequently, answers to specific WCEFArecommendations tended to be general and at times they failed to explain if theconference had had any impact on EFA.

Government officials and some representatives of donor agencies, that wereseemingly more knowledgeable with WCEFA recommendations, could not concretisethe actual impact of the conference on policy strategies or innovations. Programmessuch as early childhood education, street children and projects targeting somemarginalized groups that were attributed to WCEFA had been going on long before theconference.

Problems in the implementation of EFA were cited to be financial and humanresources. In a literal sense, therefore, the prospects of implementing EFA in Kenyawere said to be zero. Lack of political will and commitment, however, were suggestedto be a major stumbling block to achieving EFA. There was also little or nocooperation between the various agencies and government ministries that areinvolved in promoting EFA. The study concluded that political statements and policyassertions that resulted from Jomtien have not been translated into practical actionsand achievements on the ground in Kenya.


The study also discussed some disturbing trends in Kenya which are not only workingagainst the Jomtien spirit but are undermining educational achievements that hadbeen made especially in the area of increased primary school participation. Oneconomic grounds it has become quite doubtful if programmes of structuraladjustments are compatible with reforms needed in order to provide education for all.Structural adjustment programmes have severely crippled the country's capacity toraise resources for basic education for all. In education in particular, through theEducation Sector Adjustment Credit 1990/91-1995/96 , the governmenthas embarked on a policy which is aimed at reducing the growth rate of the educationrecurrent budget to sustainable levels. This policy coupled with rapid expansion ofuniversity education which has meant increasing expenditure on tertiary education,has drastically affected the expansion of primary education and increased communitymaintenance of education at the primary school level. This policy is already workingto the detriment of vulnerable and disadvantaged groups who are supposed tobenefit from the Jomtien Declaration (Government of Kenya, Unicef, 1992). TheMinistry of Education has acknowledged that the national participation rate in primaryeducation which stood at 94% in 1987, has declined to below 90% in 1992 (Republicof Kenya, 1992).

In terms of quality, the study established that recent education policies, especially theimplementation of the 8-4-4 school curriculum has seriously undermined the quality ofprimary education. The curriculum is broad and overcrowded, teachers have not beenadequately in-serviced to handle the curriculum subjects and teaching facilities and materialsfor effective learning are lacking in many of the public primary schools. The worseningquality of public primary education coupled with the competitive nature of the educationsystem in the country have contributed to a proliferation of many private and expensiveprimary schools especially in the major urban centres.

A recent phenomenon which has drastically contributed to low enrolment rate in someof the districts in the country is the poor state of security and the politicallymotivated ethnic clashes. The clashes in parts of the Rift Valley Province andWestern Kenya have inflicted suffering to school children and their teachers whoseeducation has been disrupted due to the closure of schools in the affected areas.Many schools were deserted as communities whose houses were burnt were forced tomove into some kind of refugee camps for their safety and that of their children.Although accurate figures of the affected people have as yet to be compiled, reportsindicated that over 1500 people were killed in the clashes, a number which includedschool children and about 300,000 families were uprooted from their settlements inthe affected districts. Teachers also died in the clashes and many qualified teachersfled those areas. Consequently a shortage of teachers exists in some of the districts.(Standard March 1992; Nation May 1994).

Conclusion

From the study it was apparent that WCEFA conference was quite instrumental inrenewing commitment and positive policy orientation towards EFA among politicalleaders and policy makers in Kenya as in many other countries. In terms of concretepractical initiatives, however, apart from establishing a task force, national committeemeetings and the national conference, little was achieved by way of realizing some ofthe recommendations of the World Declaration. None of the educational initiatives


going on in basic education can directly be attributed to WCEFA. The study alsoestablished that current economic, political and education policies followed by thegovernment are undermining the level of primary school participation which had beenachieved prior to the Jomtien Conference.

References

Government of Kenya and Unicef, 1992 Children and Women in Kenya: ASituation Analysis, 1992, Nairobi: Unicef, Kenya Country Office.

Mwiria, K. 1993, Kenyan Women Adult Literacy Learners: Why their Motivation isDifficult to Sustain International Review of Education , Vol. 39, No. 3.

Nkinyangi, J.A. 1982, Access to Primary Education in Kenya: The Contradictions ofPublic Policy Comparative Education Review June, 1982.

Republic of Kenya 1979 Development Plan 1980-84 Nairobi Government Printer.

__________1992 Economic Survey Nairobi 0 Government Printer

The Daily Nation Newspaper: 28 May 1994,The Standard Newspaper 12 March, 1992.

WCEFA 1990 Inter Agency Commission

EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH ENVIRONMENTS IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD: A BRIEF RE-VISIT 1980-1996

Sheldon Shaeffer, UNICEF, Bangkok

[When NN18 was under preparation, leading to the special issue on research and consultancy,Sheldon Shaeffer was asked to reflect on what were the differences between the educational

research environment of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the mid 1990s. ed.]

When the studies done for the book Educational Research Environments in the Developing World*were carried out in the early 1980s, at least this co-author was in a rather optimistic mood, notyet influenced by the reality of illogicality as a major force in the development process (andperhaps not yet infected by the cynicism of the frequent failure of donor/ministry reforms). Thegeneral conclusion, therefore, was that, with a little bit of analysis and effort, the environmentfor educational research could be improved. Before assessing the validity of this conclusions,some context.

Educational problems in the developing world, at least as represented by the not necessarilytypical region of Southeast Asia, have, in fact, changed quite a bit in the last 15 years. In manycountries of the region -- the two Koreas, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, China, Thailand, and thePhilippines -- the problem of access to basic education (meaning, in this region -- for good or bad-- primary schooling) has largely been solved. Except for particularly remote and impoverishedareas and for children with special needs, almost universal enrolment in grade one is a reality(though doubts about the accuracy of data abound). Problems of completion of primary


schooling remain, however, even in the more advanced countries, and questions of the qualityand relevance of the education provided persist.

Another set of countries which was little examined 15 years ago, at least by the "North" -- VietNam, Laos, Myanmar, Mongolia, Cambodia -- as well as out-of-the-way places such as Papua NewGuinea and other, smaller countries of the Pacific, have been shown to have considerably morecomplex and intractable problems. In these countries, initial enrolment often is a major issue withcompletion and continuation even more problematic -- especially in those countries where a newmarket economy is pulling children out of school.

With such universality of primary schooling, nations are examining what to do next. A popularalternative is the expansion of the definition of basic education to include the junior secondarylevel, with major moves in this direction being made in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.Another, often more debated, move is towards a greater government role in early childhooddevelopment, at least in formal kindergartens and perhaps in programmes for even youngerchildren (play groups, daycare, etc.) as well.

Other new trends include the following: teacher development -- the recognition that teachersneed more support, especially at the school and community level, than formal training coursesand ministry supervisory systems can provide; this is leading to greater emphasis on school-based teacher support and training and more concern for teacher career paths within theeducation system; inter-sectorality -- the belief that education must be seen more broadly inrelation to other sectors such as health, nutrition, social welfare, and issues of child rights andchild labour; decentralisation, community participation, and school-based quality improvementprogrammes -- the realisation that much innovation already occurs at the local level, and thatgenuine education reform must begin at that level rather than wait for a "project" from thecentral ministry or the foreign donor; and the new content of education -- the acceptance ofissues such as the environment, gender equity, HIV/AIDS education, and human rights into thecurricula, preferably not as separate subjects but linked in a broader set of "life skills".

Against this background, a rather impressionistic analysis of educational research environments inthe region -- 15 years later -- shows the following: many of the new trends mentioned above arenot yet the subject of official research despite the fact that they are being supported byministries and donors alike. Research, therefore, continues to lag behind the new directions andpotential of the system; major decisions about the nature of the education system -- such as thedecision in regard to the expansion of basic education to nine years -- continue to be madewithout benefit of systematic research; greater concern for the quality of educational processesis being reflected both in donor agency projects and in government programmes. This has led toa stronger interest in more qualitative and even participatory research methods; ministryresearch centres in general seem little stronger now than 15 years ago. The range of skillsrepresented among their staff is broader, but, if anything, they are even more stretched nowthan earlier, with more clients wanting their services (but often for less significant research), butalso with more competition from stronger university-based centres; and technologies for datacollection and analysis and for report writing are more advanced, but the quality and depth of theanalysis and interpretation have not greatly improved as a result.

A few examples: In Thailand, the national network of qualitative research, begun in the early1980's, has prospered, with hundreds of members, annual meetings, standard texts, and specialtraining courses provided for researchers of diverse sectors. But the central research bodies


have only limited influence on policies which remain the site for considerable contention amongcompeting line agencies.

In Indonesia, anthropologically-oriented dissertations, scorned a decade ago by Ph.D.-grantinginstitutions, are now considered more legitimate, if not completely "equal" to more quantitativeones. But the research and development centre of the Ministry has a smaller role to play in thepiloting of innovations and in influencing the development of major donor activities.

In the Philippines, the training of central planners and researchers is still seen as something thatneeds to take place out of the country; little high-level capacity for such training yet exists, or, ifit does, is given little legitimacy by ministry officials.

In countries such as Cambodia, Myanmar, and Lao PDR, ministry or university research ispractically non-existent, with researchers and research institutions reduced to being "helpers" todonor-driven sectoral studies and the preparatory phases of donor-supported grants and loans.

In sum, there is more research being done, by more institutions, and with a broader range ofapproaches and methodologies -- but the fundamental problems of how to get researchers todeal quickly with issues of urgent concern, and how to get policy-makers to listen to therecommendations resulting from the research, remain. Perhaps another, more detailed review ofthe environment for research as we approach the new century would be useful.

*Editors, Sheldon Shaeffer and John A. Nkinyangi, International Development Research Centre,Ottawa, Canada, 1983

0-0-0-0-0LEARNING TO COPE - BY THE MARKET?

Bernd Baumgartl European Training Foundation, Turin

[Following on Claudio da Moura Castro's comment in the last NORRAG NEWS 18 on the WorldBank's negative attitude to institution-based VET, the debate continues. Ed.]

Adding fuel to this discussion, the "Economist" (with the title story "Learning to Cope", 6-12April 1996) took a even more radical position: money spent by the state on VET in order toalleviate unemployment is futile! Studies from various countries are cited, and they all seem tounderline that indeed the most VET can do is to shift unemployment from one group to theother. According to the cover-story, government supported training programmes have succeededonly when they have been small and focused.

Moreover, "the supposed market-failure is greatly exaggerated: firms will train workers ...provided that workers are willing to meet some of the costs through lower wages and/or that theskills concerned are firm-specific..."

This is all the more surprising stuff in the aftermath of the Turin summit of the European Union,where each of the Heads of Government assured his population before going to Turin, that s/hewill be the one that brings the issue "unemployment" to the core of the European Union. Training,of course, was mentioned as one of the recipes to alleviate the depressing situation. The sametune echoed from Lille, where the labour ministers gathered for a "job summit".


So, who is right, the "Economist" or the European Heads of Government? Do vocational educationexperts have to worry for their jobs? Are big donors indeed removing staff from VETdepartments to other areas of assistance? The educational scientists have been thrown a touchyissue on their table; now they should take up the gauntlet and respond convincingly - if there isgood ground to do so.

The answer should, however, adopt a broader view, i.e. should include considerations of the costsof labour to employers, and the benefit of labour to workers - and their impact on the market.

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NORRAG and the Working Group on International Cooperation in Technical& Vocational Skills Development.

Following a feasibility study sponsored in 1994 by the Swiss Development Cooperation(SDC) concerning the opportunity to launch a Working group on the internationalcooperation in technical and vocational skills development, a meeting was held in Geneva(25-26 april) under the auspices of the ILO, the SDC and NORRAG to finalize a decision inthat field. Different agencies - SIDA, DANIDA, ODA, GTZ, IIEP, Netherlands, EuropeanTraining Foundation, ILO, SDC (many of them being NORRAG members) - attended themeeting, the first part of which was devoted to the TVET national policy in Vietnam andon the relations of Vietnam with the bilateral and multilateral in the field. Prof. Duong,former director of TVET at the Ministry of Education and Training had been invited,thanks to the support of the SDC, to lead this presentation. The second part of themeeting was devoted to the strategical and technical dimensions of the decision formallyendorsed by the participants to launch the Working group. The discussions were focusedon the necessity to keep a rather informal and light dimension to the activity of thegroup, eventhough the efficient running of such an activity needs an active management.Some concerns were expressed about the ways in which the partners of the agencies inthe South should and could be involved in the different activities of the group in order toguarantee from the beginning that their concerns be the starting point of the reflexion.Finally, the necessity to keep in mind the fact that any cooperation can't be envisagedwithout, at the same time, considering that competition between agencies at the nationaland international level is a normal dimension of any development programme or project,was reaffirmed.

In order to keep the reflexion process going, the proposal was made by the participants,that ILO, SDC and NORRAG keep collaborating for the organization of the next meetingwhich will be hosted by the GTZ in Frankfurt in Germany (October 96). Depending on thesupport the SDC might provide in the near future, NORRAG has expressed its readiness toplay a facilitating role for the preparation of this meeting during which the same agenciesand hopefully some new ones, will detail the contribution and objectives they place in theworking group.

Michel CartonCoordinator


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NOTE ON NORRAG EXPERTISE

A short note was sent out in 1995 in order to compile information on the main fields ofexpertise of all Norrag members, as well as on countries in which members do research,advisory work, consulting or teaching.

A total of 48 responses have been received so far and the categorization that we haveadopted is based on the information provided by those who were kind enough to respondby April 1, 1996. Those of you who have not yet replied are warmly encouraged to do soat your earliest convenience so that a more complete list may be drawn up and circulatedalong with the next issue of Norrag News.

Self-reported areas of expertise totalled over 120 separate entries. These havetentatively been reduced to some 50 keywords or subfields to reflect areas ofspecialization in a standardized yet accurate manner. A maximum of four key words orsubfields are used to depict each members' field of expertise. We apologize for anyerrors that may arise from this process of reformulation. However, Norrag takes noresponsability for the indicated areas of expertise as reported by individual members.

Sobhi TAWIL

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Inter-Network Workshop on the Lessons Learned from Brokering betweenEducational Research and Policy-making.

Santiago Chile January 9-12, 1996

NORRAG: A SELF-ASSESSMENT

by

KENNETH KING &DOUGLAS MARCHBANKS

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY, NOVEMBER 1995

NORRAG members may be interested to know that a very detailed assessment of NORRAGas a network was delivered in the inter-network meeting in Santiago. It drew not only oninterview data with individual members and with the executive, but also on the returned


questionnaires of over 50 of the membership. In due course this document will appearalong with the assessments of all the other research networks in the same family, and theyshould provide a valuable insight into many dimensions of networking.

I must thank Douglas Marchbanks of Edinburgh for assisting me in producing this document,and all of the members who found time to reply.

I should like advice on possible distribution. For those on email I daresay it could be sentout as an attachment at very little cost. However, it is some 7,000 words in length, andtherefore if individuals would like a copy by post, it might be as well to know in advance thelevel of demand. Copies should be available in Copenhagen, and it may be that by that timethe full Report on the Santiago meeting may have appeared.

Could you let me or the Co-ordination know if you would like to get a copy.

i Including both the categories basic education and primary education from her table.iiRepublique du Niger, Ministère de l’Education Nationale et de la Recherche (1992) “Education deBase pour Tous: Plan d’Action National (1992-2000). Niamey, Niger.iiiKourguéni, Idrissa., Bassirou Garba and Bernard Barrère. (1992) Niger: Enquête Démographiqueet de Santé .Maryland, USA: Macro International.ivibid.vForum Consultatif International sur l’Education pour Tous. (1996) “Afrique Occidentale etCentrale: Séminaire Régional d’Examen des Politiques d’Education pour Tous”. Yaoundé,Cameroon, 11-14 février, 1996.viibid.