Bringing together USAID mission staff and local staff, international nonprofit organisations, international donor agencies, governmental education ministries and many more, the USAID Global Education Summit provided a platform for debates and exchanges about the critical educational challenges people across the globe face.
There were several cross-cutting themes: literacy and numeracy challenges for early grades, the impact of poverty on academic achievement, the need for youth mobilisation and skills development, the measurability of impact, the importance of educating girls, the need for accessibility solutions, the delivery of education in crisis and conflict settings, and the potential multiplier effect of open content.
These themes all hold resonance with us in South Africa and in particular with the work FunDza is doing to bring a love of reading, the skill of writing and the opportunity for reflection and personal growth through stories to teens and young adults via appropriate, local content delivered in innovative and scalable ways.
With multiple sessions happening at any one time, choosing the ‘right’ topic was challenging. I was pleased though to have had the opportunity to listen to a number of insightful thought leaders and practitioners speak about their work and the lessons learned across a wide range of subject areas.
In the plenaries I was privileged to hear Dina Ocampo, Under Secretary of the Department of Education in the Philippines, talk about the challenges their country faces in ensuring that all children develop basic numeracy and literacy skills. Despite the challenge of 171 unique languages, the government is following a multi-lingual educational programme. But, as noted by Ocampo, the curriculum is only as good as the end teaching provided each day in the classroom. Early results on the new approach seem to indicate that this is working. In another plenary, Dr Khadar Bashir Ali, Minister of Education of Somalia, spoke about their challenges to provide quality education after 22 years of conflict in the country. These range from lack of buy-in – and, in fact, active resistance to change on cultural and religious grounds, to a lack of reliable data on the current schools and enrolled population. She made a passionate plea for the importance of reading and of access to books for children: “What can I say about books? Books kept me alive when I was growing up! Books save lives. Books allow you to see and live a life through someone else’s eyes.”
We agree wholeheartedly.
A session on poverty and academic achievement underscored the strong correlations between these two factors. In addition, it highlighted how inequality in terms of wealth further exacerbates inequality in educational performance. This is particularly relevant to South Africa with our high GINI coefficient and the disparities in performance between rich and poor. If education provides the opportunity for economic and social mobility, then as a society we need to really interrogate how poverty inhibits access to education. Delivery of education is not enough. School enrolment is not enough. Quality education that is able to provide even the poorest of learners with the window of achieving at the same level as rich students is vital. And, quality education cannot only focus on academics – it has to look at the whole child and their development through the system, including access to food, access to resources, access to professional motivated teachers, and access to personal care and mentorship. We have a long way to go.
The presentation by Don Sillers, an economist for USAID, questioned whether we need quantity or quality in terms of schooling. He noted that quantity – number of learners enrolled to receive formal education for extended periods of time – does have an impact on economic growth (which has the potential to make society as a whole richer). But, quality – number of learners excelling at education – has an even greater impact on economic growth. Ultimately, he noted, one needs to aim for both. Good quality education for as many young people as possible, and then programmes that can substantially advance the academic performance of the gifted to grow a strong knowledge base.
Other important points on poverty were raised in a presentation on the Young Lives study, which is following the lives of 12,000 school children in Vietnam, India, Ethiopia and Peru over a 15 year period. The early results point to the impact of child poverty and wealth inequality on literacy development. Luis Crouch of RTI International noted that while schooling is now reaching more children than ever before, this hasn’t had a significant impact on literacy, particularly for those in the base of the pyramid. He also pointed to the huge variability in the performance of poor students, compared to their richer counterparts. This is something that we too in South Africa experience.
Michelle Obama’s recently launched Let Girls Learn initiative provided the backdrop for presentations focused on the wider social benefits of ensuring girls have access to quality education. Much research shows that girls who are more educated delay having children, are more likely to provide financially for families and are better able to educate and support their children if/when they do become mothers. But the challenges to keeping girls in school can be high, particularly in very poor or marginalised communities. While the focus of projects working in this area are on the girls, the interventions often need to be far wider – to include the family, the community and the broader society, so that these are allow for girl children to learn, develop and grow. There were a number of inspiring projects that work to provide foundational literacy and numeracy skills, shift attitudes around gender roles, increase self-esteem and provide economic assistance to families in need so that girl children can remain in school.
FunDza believes that stories can provide a powerful, yet subtle, means to shift attitudes, increase empathy and deepen understanding of difficult social issues. Many of our stories focus on the challenges that young girls face – such as gender-based violence, restrictive social norms, health issues, and more. The stories also give boys an opportunity to gain insight into what it is like be a girl or to feel vulnerable or to experience prejudice or social scorn. We plan to use these even more effectively to introduce topics for discussion on our mobile platform, through groups discussions and through classroom lessons.
As an organisation we have tended not to focus on special needs. Given the limits of funding and the interests of the majority of our readers, we haven’t specifically looked at how our work could be supporting access to content for visually-impaired, hearing-impaired or other types of disabled individuals. I realised that this was a failing in our strategy. The discussions on disability and access made me realise there is so much more we can do. I am well aware that the literacy rates of deaf children are far lower than those of hearing children, given the barriers to language acquisition. I’m also aware that there are technology features that could be included in our apps that would make them more usable by visually impaired children. We do seek to remedy this as well as to look at ways we can introduce stories that normalise disability. One of the Rights project stories we plan to run in the next couple of months will look at the rights of disabled children to have access to education. As Charlotte McClain-Nhlapo, Disability Advisor for the World Bank, pointed out in her presentation, while organisations complain about the cost of making content/resources inclusive, the real cost is the lost social benefit of educational investment in a significant portion on one’s population. But, even more imperative than the economic benefits or costs, is the moral and ethical imperative to achieve inclusivity as far as possible.
Other topics that held resonance for our work were discussions around open educational resources and creative commons licensing. Our attitude to copyright has always been that the author holds the copyright to their creative work, so if they’d like to release it under a CC licence we’d be happy to do that, but this hasn’t been proactively marketed to FunDza authors. We’re planning to do a information campaign for all authors and to make the licence choice more of an active choice than a default ‘all rights reserved’ space. Interestingly Pratham Books with their StoryWeaver project is releasing thousands of their titles under a CC licence for use by organisations and individuals worldwide. I am convinced that the future of copyright is one that is far more open than the current standard framework. However this does have implications for our authors, many of whom are reliant on their writing work to sustain their daily needs. So, finding a balance that protects writers and that means that readers are able to access quality text is important.
Another interesting workshop was on the M&E aspect of the use of technology for learning outcomes. In groups we looked at research questions to work out how to refine the question so that it was specific and relevant to both the technology and the application of the technology. As FunDza expands its programmatic work, so it needs to refine how it builds M&E into its programmes. Thinking of the potential research questions – and then the way in which the technology will be measured as a tool to deliver specific learning outcomes – becomes very important.
I was very fortunate to have been exposed to the people and high-level discussions around education through the Summit. Because FunDza’s work is focussed on what’s happening inside South Africa, we don’t often enough raise our heads to see what’s happening outside – both on the continent and beyond. Being exposed to global challenges – and being able to see both the similarities and the differences – was enlightening and thought-provoking. We look forward to seeing how we can modify our programmes so that some of these important issues can become better integrated into our work.