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Reaching the poorest

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Enrolling the world’s poorest children in school needs new thinking, not just more money from taxpayers.

Jan 21st 2010. From The Economist print edition

DAWN has just broken but classes have already started at the village school in Aqualaar, in the Garissa district of Kenya’s arid north-east. Around 30 children, mostly from families of Somali herders, sit listening as an enthusiastic 18-year-old teacher, Ibrahim Hussein, gives an arithmetic lesson. The school is really little more than a sandy patch of ground under an acacia tree. Mr Hussein’s blackboard hangs from its branches. There are no desks or chairs. Pupils follow the lesson by using sticks to scratch numbers in the sand.

The lack of basic kit is only too typical of schools in poor countries. What is unusual, sadly, is that Mr Hussein was actually present and teaching when his school was visited by Kevin Watkins, the lead author of “Reaching the Marginalised”, a new report on education in the developing world by UNESCO.

In India, for example, research by the World Bank reveals that 25% of teachers in government-run schools are away on any given day; of those present, only half were actually teaching when the bank’s researchers made spot checks. That is dreadful but not unusual: teacher absenteeism rates are around 20% in rural Kenya, 27% in Uganda and 14% in Ecuador.

Despite the inspiring rhetoric that accompanied the adoption of the UN’s “Education For All” goals in 1999, progress has been patchy. The numbers of unenrolled school-age children dropped by 33m in 2007 compared with 1999. About 15m of that fall came in India alone (though UNESCO says statistics may understate the problem by up to 30%). In countries like Liberia and Nigeria the numbers have hardly budged since 1999. Of the 72m still outside school, 45% are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Dig, and it grows still gloomier. Two-thirds of the fall in out-of-school numbers was in 2002-04. Since then, improvement has been scanty, though getting the final chunk of children into school is necessarily the trickiest task as the easy cases are already solved. The hardest job is enrolling children from remote areas, who speak minority languages; or come from cultures that place little value on schooling or (in India) from castes that have been long excluded from it. In more than a third of the 63 countries for which such data were available, more than 30% of young adults have fewer than four years of schooling. Nineteen of these countries are in Africa; the remaining three are Guatemala, Pakistan and Nicaragua.

The UNESCO report shows stark differences within the 80-plus countries it covers. In Nigeria about 10% of young Yoruba-speaking adults have under four years of schooling; for Hausa-speakers the figure is over 60%. Focusing on ethnicity or regional disparities can be controversial. The governments of Turkey and India are unhappy about the report’s mentions of, respectively, Kurdish girls and low-caste children.

Attending school is only the first step towards education. Even spending time in school does not guarantee good outcomes. In Ghana, for example, sixth-graders sitting a simple multiple-choice reading test scored on average the same mark that would be gained by random guessing.

So what to do? More government spending—as suggested by the report—is unlikely to be a complete answer. Others, such as James Tooley, a British academic who advises a chain of low-cost for-profit schools in India, say private-sector education in poor countries routinely outperforms the free, taxpayer-subsidised version. Teachers turn up; parents complain if standards slip or pupils flounder.

Another answer may be performance-related pay for teachers. Two researchers, Karthik Muralidharan of the University of California at San Diego and Venkatesh Sundararaman of the World Bank, tested that idea in 300 state-run schools in Andhra Pradesh in India. The extra pay was three times more effective in boosting student test scores than spending the same money on teaching materials. When schools are poorly run, studying what is wrong is the most vital subject of all.

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