Financial crisis threatens education in Swaziland

The last absolute monarch of Africa, King Mswati III of Swaziland, is refusing to sign the conditions of a loan from neighbour South Africa. (Photo: salymfayad, Creative Commons license BY-SA 2.0)

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Swaziland’s financial crisis could have devastating effects on its education system unless the government avoids cuts in social services.

As we stated in the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report, “divergence between Education for All financing requirements and actual spending is not an abstract concept. It leads to teacher shortages, poor education quality, failure to get children into school and large socio-economic disparities in education”.

After the Swazi government failed to pay outstanding school fees this term, principals have threatened to close their schools as they lack funds for the most basic supplies like pens and notebooks. Some MPs are now questioning whether financing primary education should be a government responsibility at all. In addition, other social services, including the supply of retroviral drugs, are now being compromised in a country that has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world.

The IMF recently refused to bail Swaziland out of its financial trouble unless it cut its public sector wages, among other requirements. South Africa offered the country a $370 million loan, but Swaziland’s absolute monarch, King Mswati III, has so far refused to sign its conditions, which include democratic reforms and adherence to the IMF’s recommendations. Taiwan has offered a $2.5 million grant, a small amount compared with the massive challenges Swaziland faces.

Over the past decade, Swaziland has made progress, although modestly so, towards reaching the Education for All goals. In the 2011 Global Monitoring Report, we found that the country was likely to achieve the goal of adult literacy by 2015. Between 1999 and 2008, education spending increased more rapidly than the country’s economic growth.

But large challenges remain. Just over 50% of Swazi kids get to enrol in secondary education – and the number is much lower for women, the poor and those living in rural areas. Cuts in education and health spending could be devastating to this already frail progress.

BRIEFLY: Promoting skills in Eastern Europe and Eurasia

Despite high unemployment rates, jobs remain vacant for months in many Eastern European countries and countries that once formed part of the Soviet Union. In Macedonia, 28% of the population is jobless – including 62% of youth, but this number could be significantly reduced if young people had the right skills. The US development agency USAID is promoting internships and facilitating job fairs for students in the region to get the young and unemployed into jobs, as the agency explains in the latest issue of its online magazine Frontlines.

The mismatch between skills and demands in the labour market will be a central topic in the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report. The report will focus in particular on ways of developing young people’s skills so that those who left school early, who never attended school, or who left school without the necessary skills have a better chance of getting a job.

How to reduce poverty’s impact on education

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On October 17, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, it’s worth remembering that progress in fighting poverty is inextricably linked with progress in achieving education for all.

Although poverty continues to decline in many countries, it remains a crucial barrier to reaching the goal of universal primary education.

As we found in the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report, the direct costs of sending children to school, as well as the indirect costs of losing a source of labour, can be formidable for poor parents. As a consequence, not only are poor children less likely to enrol in primary school, but those who do so are more likely to drop out. Low quality education reinforces this problem, as parents are less willing to bear those costs if they cannot see the benefits of education.

In sub-Saharan Africa alone, about 10 million children drop out of primary school each year. Although the reasons why children drop out of school vary across and within countries, household income plays a major role.

The 2011 GMR suggested several policies that can help reduce the impact poverty has on dropout levels:

• Cash transfers to poor families, with eligibility linked to school attendance, can help to counter the effects of poverty. Such a programme has been successfully employed in Mexico, where it both improved enrolment and average years of schooling achieved.
• Early childhood nutrition programmes can ensure that children are physically prepared for school. Children damaged by malnutrition are more likely to start school late, learn less, and to drop out. In Kenya, for example, a relatively cheap deworming programme improved school attendance by seven percentage points.
• Ensuring that schools have the necessary teachers, resources and infrastructure is essential. In Colombia, a programme to improve the quality and relevance of education significantly reduced dropout rates. Flexible timing of classes can also reduce the indirect costs of sending children to school.

In countries that have been able to improve education access and quality, education has proved a powerful tool for eradicating poverty, as the Global Monitoring Report team’s Education Counts exhibition showed:

The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty has been observed every year since 1993, when it was instigated by United Nations General Assembly. The theme of the 2011 observance is “From Poverty to Sustainability: People at the Centre of Inclusive Development.”

With global attention focused on the upcoming Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), it is critical to draw attention to the importance of poverty eradication for building sustainable futures for all.

Nobel Peace Prize puts focus on women in conflict

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, president of Liberia, during a state visit to Brazil in 2010. (Photo: A. Cruz/ABr. Creative Commons License Attr. 2.5 Brazil)

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The awarding of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize to Leymah Gbowee and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen, has turned the spotlight on the impact of conflict on women and girls – a theme we underlined in the 2011 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, “The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education.”

The three women share the prize “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work”.

Leymah Gbowee had a key role in the peace movement that ended that war, mobilizing women across the country and ensuring they could participate in elections.

She paid tribute to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – the first woman to be democratically elected as president of an African country – in an interview last year with the UN ECOSOC magazine Africa Renewal, saying that she had broken new ground for African women and provided a springboard for further advances. “When you talk to sisters across the continent, they say Ellen is the president for us all,” Gbowee said.

Armed conflict poses particular threats to the safety of girls and women. Sexual violence is widely used as a weapon of war – and the impact on education is huge. It leaves psychological trauma that inevitably impairs the potential for learning. Fear of sexual violence often keeps girls away from school. The family breakdown that often accompanies sexual violence undermines prospects of children being brought up in a nurturing environment.

More teachers, please! And in Africa, women especially

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World Teachers’ Day on October 5 is an opportunity to celebrate teachers and to promote international standards for the profession. This year’s theme, “Teachers for gender equality,” serves as a reminder that recruiting and training more teachers – especially women – is crucial if we are to achieve the Education for All goals by 2015.

According to updated projections released for World Teachers’ Day by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), the world needs another 2 million teachers by 2015 – and it is essential that a large share of them are women.

Although the proportion of women teachers worldwide has increased from 56% to 62% since 1990, it varies widely from region to region. While in some developed countries the share of women teachers is so high that the challenge is recruiting more male teachers, sub-Saharan Africa needs many more women teachers. The proportion of women teachers has grown only marginally since 1990 – from 40% to 42% – and Benin, Central African Republic, Chad, Liberia and Togo all have less than 20% female teaching staff, according to the UIS projections.

Why are female teachers so important? As the UIS emphasizes in its release, “countries with high proportions of female teachers in primary education are more likely to have high enrolment rates for girls in secondary education”.

Chileans march for equality in education

Students and parents marching in Santiago, Chile.
(Photo: Elibertaria/Flickr. Creative Commons Licence:
Attribution/Noncommercial/No Derivatives)

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For months, Chile has seen almost daily protests by students frustrated at a system that fails to provide the poor with an equal opportunity to get a decent education.

The Chilean case exemplifies the potential pitfalls of competition in the education sector. The 2009 EFA Global Monitoring Report, Overcoming inequality: Why governance matters, warned of the danger “that poorly managed ‘quasi-markets’ in education […] will leave public education systems trapped in a downward spiral of underinvestment, poor quality of provision and widening inequalities.”

Although there have been violent clashes between protesters and police forces, the vast majority of the protests have been peaceful and creative. Tens of thousands have taken to the streets in carnivals, choreographed dances and other stunts.

Chile’s current education system, which allows competition between public and private schools began under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet but has been maintained by subsequent democratic governments. Households now bear 39% of all education spending in Chile – the highest of any OECD country, Bloomberg reports.

The current government, under President Sebastián Piñera, has proposed increasing scholarships and reducing interest rates for student loans, but refuses to meet the students’ demand for more public institutions, according to the Washington Post.

Although Chile has had near universal primary education enrolment since the 1970s, the education system is characterised by strong inequalities. Public schools generally enrol poorer students, while their private counterparts almost entirely educate pupils from richer families. As a consequence, the country retains some of the starkest inequalities of education in Latin America.

What’s in a name? Rebranding the EFA Fast Track Initiative

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By Pauline Rose, director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report

While world leaders were gathering at the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week, an event on the sidelines signalled a change that could benefit millions of children still out of school.

At an unveiling at the UN on September 21, the Education for All Fast Track Initiative (FTI) officially became the Global Partnership for Education. The change of name accompanies a series of reforms, designed to help the partnership leave behind the problems that have prevented it from fulfilling its intended role.

The FTI was established in 2002 as a multilateral framework for strengthening national education plans, improving aid effectiveness, coordinating donor support and galvanizing the financing required to achieve the Education for All goals. In practice, however, as we found in the 2010 Global Monitoring Report, “implementation of FTI planning and financing processes has undermined donor coordination, raised transaction costs and weakened aid effectiveness in some countries.”

The rebranding is an important step forward in recognition of reforms proposed by the FTI mid-term evaluation in 2010, together with recommendations made in the 2010 and 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Reports. Announcing the change, Bob Prouty, head of the partnership’s secretariat, noted that “we have outgrown our original name and are changing it to better reflect who we are, what we do, and how we do it.”

As we found in the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report, reforms of the partnership’s governance architecture have given developing countries a greater voice in decisions, including in how funds are allocated. There is also evidence that disbursements have begun to move more rapidly. The partnership has moved from only supporting countries that show evidence of achieving a “gold standard” in education planning, to trying to identify ways to ensure “fragile states,” including countries affected by conflict, can benefit from support.

How do we gauge global progress on skills?

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One of the challenges when setting targets like the Education for All goals (which the international community aims to reach by 2015) is knowing when you’ve actually reached them. It’s a particularly tough call with EFA goal 3, “ensuring that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life skills programmes.”

Skills development is intrinsically hard to measure. The issue was tackled at the 2010 Group of 20 meeting in Seoul, which adopted an action plan calling on the World Bank, International Labour Organization, OECD and UNESCO to “work together to develop internationally comparable and practical indicators of skills for employment and productivity in developing countries.”

We’ll look at progress in the 2012 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, which will focus in particular on the role of skills in giving vulnerable young people access to good jobs.

As Christian Kingombe of the Overseas Development Institute mentions in a blog post, the measurement conundrum was one of two fundamental Goal 3 challenges brought up by Pauline Rose, director of the GMR, at the 11th conference on education and development hosted in Oxford this month by the UK Forum on International Education and Training (UKFIET).

Harnessing the power of education

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Pauline Rose became director of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report in August 2011, after three years as a senior policy analyst with the GMR team. Here she outlines her vision for the GMR and the 2015 EFA targets.

Since 2000, the Education for All goals and Millennium Development Goals have served as a powerful motor for progress towards ensuring that all children, young people and adults have opportunities for a good-quality education. The EFA Global Monitoring Report has played a crucial role in this process, identifying problems and highlighting solutions. As the 2015 target date for the world’s development goals draws near, I see three strategic priorities for the GMR:

• re-establishing momentum for achieving the EFA goals;
• securing education’s rightful place on the development agenda;
• shaping post-2015 priorities.

In each of these areas, I believe that the GMR has a crucial role to play in demonstrating education’s power to transform lives.

1. Re-establishing momentum for achieving the EFA goals

There is much progress to celebrate since the EFA goals were established in 2000. More children are in school than ever before. The gap between enrolment of girls and boys has narrowed considerably. Many governments are paying greater attention to early childhood care and education. But there is still a long way to go.

Since 2005, progress towards universal primary education has been stagnating. The increased number of children entering school, combined with an insufficient number of trained teachers, is putting pressure on the quality of education. Supply of secondary places is not keeping pace with demand, resulting in widening inequalities between and within countries. And improvement in adult literacy has been extremely limited.

Advances over the first part of the decade have showed that rapid change is possible. If we can regain that momentum, many countries will be able to achieve the goals. The GMR needs urgently to highlight innovative approaches that can overcome the bottlenecks to achieving EFA, and communicate these approaches to policy-makers who have the responsibility for achieving the goals.

When literacy clears a path to peace

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International Literacy Day, celebrated on September 8, focuses this year on ‘Literacy for peace,’ reinforcing the clear role for literacy in peace-building that was identified in the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report, The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education.

The report showed that education can be a powerful force for peace, and that what people are taught, how they are taught and how education systems are organized can make countries more or less prone to violence.

International Literacy Day is a reminder that the global literacy challenge remains. According to the most recent statistics, 793 million adults around the world – 1 in 6 – can neither read nor write.

In keeping with the theme of International Literacy Day, the 2011 UNESCO international literacy prizes, awarded on September 8 in New Delhi, recognize projects that tap into literacy’s power to build peace, in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United States.

One of the two projects awarded a UNESCO Confucius Prize for literacy has helped to bring peace to one of the world’s most conflict-ridden areas, North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Collectif Alpha UJUVI was recognized for its programme Literacy for the Peaceful Coexistence of Communities and Good Governance. While the programme has existed for many years, since 2006 it has brought together literacy, peace education and traditional conflict-resolution techniques to promote dialogue and cooperation among North Kivu’s six territories.

The programme specifically targets women – who suffer particularly in conflict zones – aiming to improve their status and help involve them in their community’s decision-making processes and conflict resolution.

As well as the UNESCO International Literacy prize ceremony, New Delhi will host an international conference on Women’s Literacy for Inclusive and Sustainable Development, organized by UNESCO’s E9 initiative, from September 8 to 10.