Education for All and The "Quality Crisis" in Southern Africa
In the 30 years since the 1990 Jomtien Education for All (EFA) conference, the world has seen notable progress towards achieving Universal Primary Education (UPE). EFA Global monitoring reports boast child mortality rates are down 39%, 48 million more students are enrolled in primary schools, secondary school enrollment has nearly doubled in some parts of the world, and the number of countries with extreme gender exclusion rates has been reduced by almost half (EFA 2000-2015 Report Card, 2016). With more students in attendance than ever before, the donor community is increasingly concerned with the "learning crisis" in a disproportionate number of classrooms in low and middle-income countries where students can spend years in school and never learn to read or write.
On average, nations in the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) community spend the most significant percentage of domestic budgets on education. Still, their relatively low GDP's and overwhelmingly young populations make domestic spending insufficient and international aid a near necessity. I explore the quality crisis in terms of defining, providing, and funding quality from the perspective of the donor community and the SACMEQ community. While SACMEQ nations are diverse in many ways, their education systems face similar challenges, and donor strategies within and across their borders are similar.
Decisions on how to improve quality rest mainly with the donor community, which is itself at odds about "what works" in improving academic outcomes. The range of tactics used by donors to improved education is broad, and many are openly criticized. Early development work believed that in SACMEQ nations the school was more influential in predicting student achievement than family background. In essence, this notion led to substantial investment in hardware for schools, particularly primary schools. The World Bank and African Development Bank portfolios show that assistance to SACMEQ countries before the mid-1990's overwhelming went to physical goods for primary schools (books, infrastructure, material support), dropping below 50% only in 2004. The school building is an effective means for donor nations to advertise their goodwill and account for expenses, but in recipient nations, it fails to address systemic problems.
The multi-donor GPE was established on the premise that "no country with a credible plan would be thwarted from implementing it for lack of resources." While the commitment is morally noble, the loose definition of "quality" discussed above means that the donor community and recipient nations can pour resources into "proven plans" more for political trade-offs than demonstrated educational effectiveness. Even when SACMEQ nations are opposed to a donor's philosophy, they are hindered from effectively altering donor plans due to ever-changing norms in donor agencies, pseudo "partnership" rhetoric, and the preclusion of national ownership and local control innate in donor organizations. With so many donors acting in SACMEQ nations, funding is spread wide and not always coordinated through recipient government mechanisms. The donor community has yet to pledge substantial resources to scale up the most successful finance projects such as conditional cash transfers or cash on delivery schemes, which are not without their criticisms.
In SACMEQ countries where rural posts go unappointed, urban teachers are frequently absent, and large numbers of unemployed youth go without basic numeracy and literacy skills, the quality crisis is genuine. Quality concerns will likely dominate international education headlines, particularly those in South and East Africa, for the foreseeable future, but the topic is not new. Donors and recipient countries are both responsible for the contradictions, faulty policy, and weak implementation that feed into the quality crisis and the power balance is currently heavily tilted in the donors' favor. For decades, aid-recipients and donor communities have danced around the definition of quality, strategies for improving educational outcomes, and the best funding mechanisms—both parties recycling strategies and rhetoric in place of actual compromise or conversation—any end to the quality crisis will require more coordination, communication, and compromise from both ends.