CERCular: No.2 of 1998

Consultancies



Financing Education in East and Southern Africa

In May 1998, Mark Bray travelled to Eritrea to run a workshop on behalf of UNICEF on the financing of basic education. The workshop had 54 participants from 18 countries in the region. Half of the participants were UNICEF personnel from the various country offices, and most of the other half were government counterparts.

Although much of Mark Bray's recent work has been in Asia, UNICEF was aware of his background in Africa and that he had kept in touch with the region through work for the World Bank and other agencies. UNICEF was especially anxious for the workshop to highlight issues conerning household and community financing of basic education. These are a focus of Mark Bray's book Counting the Full Cost, which was published in 1996 by the World Bank in collaboration with UNICEF.

The 18 countries represented at the workshop were diverse. They included the small island nations of Comoros and Sao Tomé & Principe, as well as much larger countries such as South Africa and Zimbabwe. The per capita GNP expressed in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) dollars ranges from PPP$540 in Rwanda to PPP$13,210 in Mauritius. However, all countries are confronting similar questions concerning the roles of the state and of non-government actors in the financing of education. Also, all countries face tensions between quantity and quality, especially since the majority are yet to achieve universal primary education.

Workshop participants were particularly pleased to learn from their host country. Eritrea has a population of three million, and gained independence from Ethiopia only in 1991 after a 30-year struggle for liberation. The fight for sovereignty had been costly in human as well as financial terms. In 1991 only 15% of all schools were in serviceable condition, and over 50% of primary school teachers were untrained. Major strides were made in the following years, but in 1996 the gross primary enrolment rate was only 52% and the net enrolment rate was 29%. Participants were impressed by the dedication with which problems were being tackled, and by the examples of community cooperation to bridge gaps which arose from the scarcity of government resources.

As commonly happens in international workshops, participants learned as much from the contrasts between countries as from the similarities. They also drew insights from experiences in Asia and other parts of the world. The week-long event was lively and stimulating, and was a form of comparative study which will have direct implications for both UNICEF and government projects in the countries concerned.

UNDP Study Tour

In May 1998, CERC implemented a UNDP-sponsored study programme for the delegation of 14 educators, researchers and administrators. They were involved in a project for improving basic education in five poor provinces of mainland China. The event was managed by Tomoko Ako.

The participants studied the overall situation of Hong Kong's education system. Seminars were delivered on the theory and practice of the Target Oriented Curriculum (TOC), and the challenges and strategies of Hong Kong's teacher education. Participants learned about innovative teaching practices in the visits to a TOC school, a pre-vocational school, a girls' school and the Hong Kong Institute of Education.

The one-week programme was too short for the participants to understand in detail the educational situation of Hong Kong, the structure of which is very different from that in mainland China. Some participants were travelling outside the mainland for the first time in their lives. Nevertheless, the programme was much appreciated, and the participants made very positive comments in the evaluation. The fact that CERC could conduct the programme in Putonghua made it much more effective than it would otherwise have been.

School Clusters in Cambodia

School clusters have become an important mechanism in Cambodia for distributing resources and for raising the quality of primary education. Almost all schools in the country are grouped into clusters. Most clusters have about eight schools, one of which is designated the core school. Resources are allocated to clusters for sharing among schools, and the clusters also provide foci for staff development.

Much of the impetus for development of clusters in Cambodia has come from UNICEF. The scheme was launched in 1993, and drew some of its ideas from a booklet written by Mark Bray and translated into Khmer. It is entitled School Clusters in the Third World: Making them Work (Paris: UNESCO-UNICEF Cooperative Programme).

In April-May 1998, CERC's Zhang Minxuan assisted UNICEF in Cambodia with an assessment of the costs of clusters and of the effectiveness of UNICEF inputs. He was requested:

  • to investigate and analyse the investment costs for firmly-establishing the cluster school model;
  • to describe the investment added to the schools and communities by the cluster system; and
  • to make recommendations for rationalising investments and running costs, in order to guarantee the expansion and sustainability of the cluster model.
In addition to surveying national data, Zhang Minxuan undertook detailed fieldwork in Takeo province. He produced a report which is both comprehensive and far-reaching. Zhang Minxuan felt that a new phase in UNICEF work was needed, shifting attention from hardware to human capacity. He drafted an action plan, and proposed ways to spread UNICEF resources to parts of the country which had not been reached.

From a comparative perspective, Cambodia's experimentation with clusters is of considerable interest. Among the countries which operate school clusters, very few have information of the type contained in Zhang's report. The lessons from Cambodia's achievements and problems with the cluster scheme have considerable relevance to other countries both in the Asian region and more widely.

Partnerships in Education: Lessons from Asia and Africa

The Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) is a non-government organisation based in Switzerland. It is part of the Aga Khan Development Network, which promotes education, health and rural development in less developed countries. The AKF gains much of its income from the Islamic Ismaili community, but provides assistance on a non-sectarian basis.

Much of the AKF's work is in South Asia and East Africa. CERC's Mark Bray is assisting with a project which seeks to document this work, focusing particularly on community partnerships in the financing of education. In June 1998, he helped run a workshop in Karachi, Pakistan, on this theme. The workshop was attended by 19 AKF education personnel and selected government counterparts. While in southern Pakistan, Mark visited community-based schools in rural parts of Sindh Province. He then went north to the mountains for another workshop with 28 personnel from Pakistan's Northern Areas and North West Frontier Province.

The following month, Mark continued this work in Tanzania and Kenya. In Dar es Salaam, capital of Tanzania, he visited the School Improvement Project which focuses on the primary level, and in Zanzibar (Tanzania) and Mombasa (Kenya) he visited primary schools, secondary schools and madrasa pre-schools.

Mark is now working with colleagues in the AKF on a project which will document the nature of partnerships and challenges encountered in the countries in which the AKF supports projects. In Asia this includes Tajikistan, India and Bangladesh as well as Pakistan; and in Africa this includes Uganda as well as Kenya and Tanzania. The research will lead to a comparative book which will identify both conceptual and practical lessons.

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