One major area of interest for me in my work is tackling the problem of reaching children who currently do not go to school at all. This is Millennium Development Goal Number 2 ("Achieve universal primary education"), which sadly we are still a long way off from achieving by the target date of 2015.
UNESCO have recently published their Education For All Global Monitoring Report (June 2012), see here. It is worth reading. I pull out some arresting charts and key quotations, by way of summary:
I had no idea that Nigeria had by over 10m children not in school - double the second most struggling country's out-of-school population, which is Pakistan at 5m children. I have strong reasons to suspect (since I've been working there, on this area) that Ghana's out-of-school population is understated at 567,000, which makes me wonder what the likely error range might also be on the Nigeria and Pakistan numbers. It's probable that globally the 61m figure is a conservative estimate (partly for political reasons; governments and donors tend to want to show how much progress has been made since 2000) and in fact the problem is worse than we think it is.
Most alarming is the following insight:
One of the things the chart above shows is that of the 30.6m out-of-school children in sub-Saharan Africa, a full 55% of them are unlikely ever to enter a school. The drivers of that are complex and vary from country to country, but poverty, gender and lack of access (i.e. a nearby local school, with available teachers who actually turn up) are recurring themes.
The policy implications for this are in one sense quite clear - African governments and relevant donors should be focussing on solutions which target that 55% who never get to a school in the first place. We know that building bricks n' mortar schools and extending the often dysfunctional state system is both time consuming, hugely costly, and often partially hostage to political election cycles. We also know that mobile and web-based education delivery is now a reality and vast amounts of decent quality open-source educational content now exists on the web. Can there be a way to bypass the former problem by deploying the latter solution?
I for one am hoping that governments, donors, and citizens themselves start to apply real thought to new models of open-source, distance learning, precisely to reach this majority sub-population who never even get to see a school in the first place. (Investing in nation-wide broadband and mobile coverage in many of these African countries would, I opine, be a good start...but that's the subject of another posting).
Prof Sugata Mitra's work on Self-Organised Learning Environments (or SOLEs, see his TED talk on this here) is one response to this, as is Prof James Tooley's desire to unlock low-cost private school chains across Africa by liberalising the education supply-side. Both of these are going to be trends to watch over the next few years, and again, I shall try to touch upon them in separate, dedicated postings.
UNESCO have recently published their Education For All Global Monitoring Report (June 2012), see here. It is worth reading. I pull out some arresting charts and key quotations, by way of summary:
"Worryingly, the number of out-of-school children has remained at 61 million over the last three years. Much of this global stagnation is due to trends in sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of children out of school has actually risen over the past three years, from 29 million in 2008 to 31 million in 2010. Although enrolment has continued to rise, it has not kept pace with the increase in population." (page 1).
I had no idea that Nigeria had by over 10m children not in school - double the second most struggling country's out-of-school population, which is Pakistan at 5m children. I have strong reasons to suspect (since I've been working there, on this area) that Ghana's out-of-school population is understated at 567,000, which makes me wonder what the likely error range might also be on the Nigeria and Pakistan numbers. It's probable that globally the 61m figure is a conservative estimate (partly for political reasons; governments and donors tend to want to show how much progress has been made since 2000) and in fact the problem is worse than we think it is.
Most alarming is the following insight:
"Of the 61 million children who were out of school in 2010, 47% are expected to never enter school. A further 26% have attended but left school, and the remaining 27% are expected to enter school in the future (Figure 3)." (page 2).
One of the things the chart above shows is that of the 30.6m out-of-school children in sub-Saharan Africa, a full 55% of them are unlikely ever to enter a school. The drivers of that are complex and vary from country to country, but poverty, gender and lack of access (i.e. a nearby local school, with available teachers who actually turn up) are recurring themes.
The policy implications for this are in one sense quite clear - African governments and relevant donors should be focussing on solutions which target that 55% who never get to a school in the first place. We know that building bricks n' mortar schools and extending the often dysfunctional state system is both time consuming, hugely costly, and often partially hostage to political election cycles. We also know that mobile and web-based education delivery is now a reality and vast amounts of decent quality open-source educational content now exists on the web. Can there be a way to bypass the former problem by deploying the latter solution?
I for one am hoping that governments, donors, and citizens themselves start to apply real thought to new models of open-source, distance learning, precisely to reach this majority sub-population who never even get to see a school in the first place. (Investing in nation-wide broadband and mobile coverage in many of these African countries would, I opine, be a good start...but that's the subject of another posting).
Prof Sugata Mitra's work on Self-Organised Learning Environments (or SOLEs, see his TED talk on this here) is one response to this, as is Prof James Tooley's desire to unlock low-cost private school chains across Africa by liberalising the education supply-side. Both of these are going to be trends to watch over the next few years, and again, I shall try to touch upon them in separate, dedicated postings.
No comments:
Post a Comment