The Beautiful Tree

by James Tooley

  Private Schools Serving the Poor in Kibera

  So what did we find in the slums of Nairobi? It is estimated that about 60 percent of the population live in “unplanned informal settlements,” slums like Kibera. A household survey conducted in 2004 suggests that nearly three-quarters of Nairobi’s population lives “below the poverty line.”5 In the slums, there are no public services— no publicly provided water, sewage, health, and, of course, no public education. But clearly, there were private schools. How many? James Shikwati assembled a team of researchers, graduate students from Nairobi universities. We trained the team in methods of finding and gaining access to schools, and in the use of an interview schedule for school managers. We found a great map of Kibera, created by a German aid agency, which showed how the Uganda railway snaked through the slum, and sent researchers out with copies to systematically sweep the whole area. As usual, we were only looking for primary and secondary schools, excluding “nonformal education” places, and schools serving only nursery students. The researchers were also asked to visit any government schools that the local residents said served Kibera.

  The researchers found 76 private primary and secondary schools in the slum of Kibera (plus 59 nursery-only schools, which we didn’t examine further). This was quite remarkable—so many private schools where even sympathetic observers, like James Shikwati and his informers, had reported there were none. These schools served 12,132 children (excluding those in the nursery streams, which many of the primary and secondary schools also had). About a third of the schools were managed by women. And—a clear potential answer to the conundrum that private schools, for whatever reason, seemed to have emerged only after free public education was introduced—we found 1996 to be the average year the private schools were established. These schools clearly had not simply “mushroomed” only recently.

  The researchers also visited five government schools that reportedly served the Kibera community, located on the outskirts of the slum area. In these schools, reported enrollment was 9,126—although many of these children came from the middle-class suburbs, not the slums. These visits enabled us to make several interesting comparisons between the public and private schools serving Kibera. First, Jane was right about the relative wages in public and private schools. Our researchers found that average salaries were three to five times higher in the government schools than in the private schools. And her suggestion about relative class size was also borne out by our evidence. The public schools had much higher pupil-teacher ratios than the private schools: in the private schools, the average pupil-teacher ratio was 21 to 1—and this was also the average class size, since there were no extra “floating” teachers for specialist subjects. In the public schools, the average pupil-teacher ratio was nearly three times higher, at 60 to 1. But that included several teachers who were specialists in different areas, and so the average class size was even larger.

  Again, there wasn’t a big difference in the proportion of boys and girls in public and private schools—contrary to what might have been expected from the pronouncements of the development experts: In the private schools, there were roughly equal numbers of boys and girls (51 percent and 49 percent, respectively)—nothing like the gross gender inequality that we’d been led to expect. The figure was more or less identical in the public schools (49 percent boys and 51 percent girls).

  All but 2 of the 76 private schools charged fees—the exceptions were both run by religious organizations. The average monthly fees in the rest ranged from 149 Kenyan shillings ($1.94) for nursery classes to 256 Kenyan shillings ($3.33) per month for eighth grade. We compared these figures with the “absolute poverty” line for Kenya as a whole, which was set at a monthly income of 3,174 Kenyan shillings ($41.33), excluding rent. The average fees per child would thus range from 4.7 percent to 8.1 percent of this minimum income level—which seemed to be pretty affordable, even for the poorest of the poor.

  Free Primary Education Did Not Lead to an Increase in Enrollment

  The excitement about free primary education, as we saw from former president Bill Clinton’s comments, was that it reportedly led to a massive increase in enrollment—an additional 1.3 million primary school children across Kenya, with a reported increase of over 48 percent in Nairobi alone. This was the crucial point that I wanted our research to explore. However, these headline figures don’t take into account what is happening in the private schools in the slums—because no one seems to have either been aware of their existence or thought they were worth bothering about. What difference would it make to these headline figures if changes in enrollment in these private schools were also taken into account?

  My researchers asked managers, in both private and public schools, how free primary education had affected their primary school enrollment. They also asked if managers knew of any private schools that had closed altogether because of free primary education. What I found completely contradicted the accepted wisdom of the development experts, and provided a ready solution to their conundrum.

  True, free primary education had dramatically increased the number of students enrolled in all five government primary schools reportedly serving Kibera. The total increase was 3,296 students, or 57 percent, an even higher growth rate than that reported for Nairobi. This might have been anticipated given that government schools on the periphery of slum areas would be expected to have enjoyed larger enrollment gains than schools farther away. It was, in any case, a dramatic increase, part of the reported increase in enrollment of 1.3 million nationwide.

  However, taking into account what was happening in the private schools in the slums, a totally different picture emerged. Just as Jane had pointed out from her own school, in the vast majority of the private schools, free primary enrollment had led to a net decline in enrollment. This was not the case in all schools—around 30 percent of the schools reported that enrollment either had stayed roughly the same or had declined initially but since recovered, or even, like Huruma Kibera School, had actually increased. Adding the decline in the majority of schools, then subtracting the increase in the others, gave a net decrease in private-sector enrollment of 6,571—far greater than the growth in public school enrollment. That is, far from leading to a massive increase in the number of children in school, as the official figures acclaimed, there seemed to have been a large decrease.

  However, this was not the end of the story. We were given the names of 33 private schools that school managers told us had closed since the introduction of free primary education. We went searching for the owners of these former private schools. After much detective work, we located and interviewed 32 of them. We also uncovered an additional three private schools that had closed since free primary education was introduced, the names of which existing school managers had not given us. Not all these 35 private schools had closed because of free primary education, however. In fact, two of the schools had relocated and were still open, whereas six had closed because of demolition work from the building of a bypass through Kibera. And two had closed, the managers candidly told us, because of mismanagement or lack of funds, unconnected with free primary education. However, in the 25 schools that had closed specifically because of free primary education, a total of 4,600 children were reported to have been enrolled in the primary grades.

  Pulling all this information together, I arrived at an estimate of the net decrease in the number of students enrolled from Kibera as a result of the introduction of free primary education. In private schools as a whole, I estimated that enrollment had declined by 11,171 since the introduction of free primary education. Set against the increase in government schools of 3,296, this meant an overall net decrease in enrollment of 7,875 primary school children since the introduction of free primary education. That is, my estimate indicated that about 8,000 fewer students from Kibera were enrolled in primary schools than before the introduction of free primary education. This was quite astonishing.

  Of course, the figure could be inaccurate. After all
, it was based on the increases and declines in school enrollment reported by school managers. These may be incorrect simply because the managers may have remembered incorrectly. Or they may have felt some incentive to exaggerate their decline in student enrollment if they felt it would lead to financial or other assistance. It also assumed that all children who had left Kibera private primary schools could only have gone to the five primary government schools bordering Kibera, but they may have enrolled at other government schools once those bordering Kibera reached capacity. And children may also have relocated to other towns or rural areas, perhaps through natural movement of families in and out of the slum areas—but we had no way of quantifying this “natural” movement unconnected with free primary education.

  Another question was why private schools were closing if relatively few children were transferring to government schools. One reason suggested by private school managers was that, as private schools ran on very tight budgets, the loss of even a few children might make them unviable financially and hence force them to close. And when we interviewed parents, they gave the impression that it was the more prosperous slum dwellers who could afford to send their children to government schools, given their “hidden costs”—reported to include requirements for school uniforms, parent-teacher association fees, and so forth. These more prosperous parents may have been the ones who could afford to pay fees on time in the private schools, and the private school managers may have felt their loss particularly acutely.

  My team asked managers of private schools that were now closed for their views on what had happened to the children who had left their schools. They were not very optimistic. William Onyando, who had run Upendo Primary until he was forced to close because of free primary education, told us, “Some children joined other private schools and city council schools but others are still at home because of limited chances in the present schools.” Stephen Juma Kulisher, the former proprietor of Jesus Gospel Church School, said, “The needy children remained at home; others went to the local private school and some to the local government school.” Oscar Osir of the now-closed Sinai Academy told us, “Some joined the city council schools but others did not since they were orphaned and needed special treatment which the city council schools do not provide.”

  The suggestion that some of the displaced children enrolled at other private schools in Kibera may help explain why a few of the remaining private schools experienced an increase in enrollment, but this cannot account for all the missing children. Some of the comments above suggest that some adversely affected by the introduction of free primary education were orphans who previously enjoyed free education at a local private school. Following the closure of these schools, such children may have been unable to find a free place at another local private school or couldn’t afford the “hidden costs” of enrolling at a government school, or couldn’t afford transportation costs to schools farther away, if local government schools were already oversubscribed.

  Whatever reasonable objections there are to the data I found, they clearly pointed to the need for a more sober assessment of the net effect of free primary education on enrollment. They dramatically showed that one ignores enrollment in private schools for the poor at one’s peril. And they demonstrated that the strategy of free primary education succeeded above all in “crowding out” private schools that were already serving the poor.

  At best, even if the reported figures were exaggerated by a factor of four, it would still mean that the net effect of free primary education was the same number of children enrolled in primary streams—the increase in government enrollment merely reflecting a transfer from private to government schools. Far from being a huge success story for aid in Africa, at best, the free primary education that has been so held up as something to be emulated by others may have led only to a straight transfer of children from private schools in the slums to the public schools on the periphery. Worse than that, it has destroyed a not insignificant number of private businesses that gainfully employed workers without the need for international aid funding—just the sort of self-sustaining economic activity that is responsible for the rise of nations out of poverty.

  Indeed, the failure of free primary education to actually increase enrollment was not lost on the public school administrators themselves, as I learned from Mr. Gitau, the charming and handsome deputy principal of Toi Primary, one of the public schools on the periphery of Kibera. I called on him while doing the research—although as usual when visiting government schools, I didn’t immediately mention my interest in the private schools in the slums. He told me that his school enrollment had increased by over 700 since free primary education—although he had no new teachers to cope with the influx, so things were now becoming impossible. “My class sizes are 75 to 100,” he said, “How can a teacher mark all those books?” But then, almost conspiratorially, he leaned forward and asked: “Did you know? These are not children who hadn’t been at school before. They all were in private schools in the slums before!” Really? “Yes, it’s just like moving from one store to another. But if they could pay before, then why can’t they pay now? What is the sense in the government doing that? If only they had spoken to people like us, neutral observers, perhaps they wouldn’t have done anything so silly.”

  But by this time in my journey, I already knew what the response of the development experts would be to my findings. Even if the “best-case” scenario was true, and there had simply been a shift from private to public school enrollment, then it was obviously all to the good because the quality of the private schools in the slums was purportedly so low. It was an argument that I’d begun to hear from many of the development experts I spoke to. And it was something I’d heard on television. Shortly after returning from one of my research visits to Kenya, I saw a report on the BBC lunchtime news. A young female reporter had visited Kibera to explore some of the problems with free primary education to reinforce the need for more British aid. It was around the time that the then British prime minister Tony Blair was embarking on his mission to save Africa, hence the BBC’s interest. The young woman visited a private school in the slum, one I had got to know well from the research. The camera played tenderly on gaps in the crumbling mud-and-timber walls and delighted in the dust storm blowing through, choking the children (the dry seasons also have their problems, much as the rainy ones). The reporter spoke of how the “unqualified, poorly paid” teachers were doing their best. “But,” she concluded, “no one believes that these schools can offer quality education.”

  If You Go to a Market . . .

  But is it really so grim? After all, my research had shown that significant numbers of parents had tried free primary education in the public schools but had decided to move their children back to the private schools. Surely, they weren’t doing something so counterintuitive if they thought that the private schools really were hopeless? My research assistant from Newcastle, James Stanfield, and I decided to interview groups of parents in four schools that had reported parents’ returning their children, having moved them first to the government schools. These parents at least were clear that they had behaved rationally moving back to private school.

  In each discussion, parents eagerly told us how the education being offered in the slum private schools was higher quality than in the neighboring government schools—however much the buildings’ appearances might suggest the contrary. Not one parent expressed the opposite view.

  One mother told us: “I have two children who joined this school since their nursery level and they are still in this school today. I see them doing good in subjects. Their time and subjects are well planned; they spend time well and are taught all subjects. . . . For those reasons this private school has impressed me a lot. I have saved money and cut many costs of my maintenance in order to bring children in this private school. Even though people might question why I send children in private school while there are free [government] schools, I am concerned with high-quality subject teaching
offered in this private school.”

  We asked parents to elaborate on what particular features made the private schools preferable. One mother told us: “People thought education is free; it may be free but children do not learn. This makes the quality of education poor and that is why many parents have brought their children back here. People got their children out of the private schools to the public schools because of free education. . . . However, the children do not learn; all they do is play.” Other parents agreed. A father told us: “While most of the teachers in government school are just resting and doing their own things, in private school our teachers are very much busy doing their best, because they know we pay them by ourselves. If they don’t do well they can get the message from the headmistress, of which we cannot allow because we produce ourselves the money, we get it through our own sweat, we cannot allow to throw it away, because you can’t even take the money from the trees, you have to work harder to find it so the teacher must also work harder on our children so that he earns his own living.”

  A mother agreed: “You will never see [in a private school] a teacher working on something else like sewing a sweater while she is supposed to be in class.”

  But how did parents know the quality in the private schools was better than in government schools? We asked them for details. Parents, it turned out, actively compared children in the government schools with children in the private schools in their neighborhoods. One mother commented: “If you make a comparison between a child attending private school and one who is in government school by asking them some questions from their subjects you will find the one in private school is doing very good, while the one from government school is poor. Even when you compare their examinations scores you will be able to see private school pupil is performing well while that from government is poor.” Another gave a similar story: “I am living next to parents who send their children to a government school, and I always compare their children with mine who are attending private school. I always find private schools teach better than government schools from these comparisons. Government school children are always smart dressed in good uniforms but when you ask them some questions, you will realize that they know nothing. Those attending a private school are usually not smartly dressed, but they are good in school subjects.”