This was originally published on Pearson's Affordable Learning blog.
In many developing countries, the government remains the main financier and the dominant provider of education. The demand for quality education continues to increase while resources remain scarce, making education inaccessible to a significant part of society.
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Монгол хувилбар байгаа
Financed by the mining boom, government spending on new infrastructure in Mongolia has increased 35-fold in the past 10 years. But you would not know this from driving the pot holed streets of Ulaanbaatar or inhaling the smog filled air of the city, particularly in the ger areas.
A new World Bank report I co-authored examines why this increased spending is not resulting in equivalent benefits for the citizens of Mongolia in terms of better roads, efficient and clean heating, and improved water and sanitation services.
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| Axel talks about his trip to Myanmar in a video below. |
You can feel the energy in Myanmar today—from the streets of Yangon, in the offices of government ministries and in rural villages. Dramatic political and economic changes are sweeping the country.
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| Children participate in an earthquake drill. |
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Do longer classroom hours equal good grades? Spending more time in school is a subject currently being discussed as one solution to improving students' academic performance with the ultimate goal of making countries more competitive in the global economy.
This is true for emerging and advanced economies alike.
The state of India’s school education does not paint a very pretty picture. No doubt a whopping 97% of all children between the ages of 6-14 years in rural India are enrolled in school. However, national school attendance averaged just about 70%, dipping below 60% for populous states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh. Performance was much worse. Amongst the standard 5 kids surveyed, over half could not read a standard 2 level text fluently and more than one-third could not do basic standard 2 level subtraction.
India’s problem is not so much about getting children into school anymore. We now face the far more complex issue of keeping them there and ensuring effective learning. Crumbling public infrastructure, poverty, corruption, lack of attractive compensation and training for primary school teachers and a lack of awareness among uneducated rural parents about their child’s progress at school are huge obstacles in the path to educational attainment.
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Spending a day at a kindergarten can be eye-opening for an adult. I’ll tell you why.
The school in question is what we, in the Russian Federation, call an inclusive school – where children with special needs are part of a regular kindergarten and participate in the same activities and programs as others. It works! This school was started in 2011 and does not distinguish between children with special needs and others. Both groups are part of the same class, sit at the same table, and participate in the same activities. Not many places in the world do this.
The inclusive model, while not unique, is still rare. But other than that distinctive nature, what’s so special about it?
Saleha Begum was determined. Over the last couple of years, a number of children in her village had tragically died, their families left behind shocked and shattered. Memories were all that remained of these young lives cut short, and Begum was now determined to do her bit to stop the untimely deaths and accidents caused by the proximity of a highway to a community school.
We had arrived at Baishakanda Union Parishad in Dhamrai just before the local community meeting started. (Union Parishads are the lowest tier of local government in Bangladesh.) Begum had already taken her place among men and women from her village. A number of women threw anxious looks toward her. That day, Begum was going to play a vital role in advancing their agenda.
My last two blogs, Lessons on School-Based Management from a Randomized Experiment and Empowering Parents to Improve Schooling: Powerful Evidence from Rural Mexico, have focused on empowering parents to help increase accountability in schools. However, too often, decentralization programs are designed without adequately conveying the messages about their purpose to the intended audiences; or, it is done in such a way that the program is rendered useless.
Earlier this month in Doha at the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, well known simply as BRAC, was chosen as the first winner of the WISE Prize for Education.
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| With new learning materials, children are more interested to come to school as learning becomes more enjoyable. |
I’ve always been passionate about the need to focus on education in order to achieve lasting development and this is especially true in Timor-Leste, a country with one of the youngest and fastest growing populations in the world. I visited a number of schools around the country to see the benefits of two of the World Bank’s projects in the education sector: the Fast Track Initiative Bridging Project 2009 and the Education Sector Support Project, co-funded by AusAID.
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| Parents and community members are more willing to support a school from having full knowledge about the school's resources. |
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Years and years ago, when I was still in school, the interaction my parents had with the school was only during report card day, and perhaps the odd times I got into trouble. That was it. Although my son is only a year and a half old, I’ve been on the lookout for a school and I would rather not have him study at the type of school I went to.
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| Map courtesy of Wikipedia through a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. |
Taking development to the outlying provinces of Solomon Islands is not an easy ride. I found this out when going on a site visit to the Rural Development Program (RDP) at the country’s far western province of Choiseul.
At the Northwest region of Choiseul province where the island faces open waters that span to the Micronesian archipelago of the Pacific lies a village called Polo. The Polo community has a primary school that was established in 1957 when Solomon Islands was still a British Protectorate, prior to independence in 1978. Since its inception, the Polo school never had a permanent classroom building until two years ago when through the RDP participatory process, the community identified the school as their main need.
Roads are not sexy. You don’t see glossy ads pleading for people to sponsor a road. You don’t see the construction of a road moving global audiences to tears. There are no celebrities, concerts, wrist-bands for the road. I guess that is because for most people in the developed world, we take roads for granted.
Recently I spent some time around Kerema, which although only 350 km from the country’s capital, feels as one of the most remote and cut-off places in Papua New Guinea. Kerema is the Gulf’s provincial capital and, with its surrounding villages, it has been cut-off from the rest of the country due to a mere 67 km of mostly un-passable road. Under the Roads Maintenance and Rehabilitation Project, the World Bank has been supporting the Government of Papua New Guinea to restore the road. Today, the Bank’s Board of Executive Directors approved the second phase of this project, which will see the rest of the road restored and paved to a proper national standard.
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| A school girl in Haiti. Photo © World Bank |
