by James Tooley
Suspicious of the aims and motivations of the state, in 1929, the Kikuyu in Central Province began to boycott mission schools and demanded an end to the missions’ monopoly on education. After failing to persuade the government to open its own secular schools free from missionary control, the Kikuyu began to open their own. During the early 1930s, extensive fund-raising activities took place, private schools were erected, and self-help groups formed. Each private school was governed by a local committee, responsible for recruiting and paying teachers, setting school fees, and conducting other fund-raising events. As private schools became established, joint meetings were organized, culminating in the founding of the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association in August 1934. While KISA emphasized the need to negotiate with the colonial authorities, some school proprietors wanted to remain entirely free from European influence. A rival association, the Kikuyu Karing’a Education Association, was therefore established soon after. By 1939, there were 63 independent Kikuyu schools educating a total of 12,964 pupils.
To help meet the increasing demand for trained teachers, in 1939 both KISA and KKEA agreed to support the opening of a private teacher-training college, Kenya’s first ever, public or private, at Githunguri. When Jomo Kenyatta returned to Kenya in September 1946, he was appointed principal of Githunguri, before being elected president of the Kenyan African Union. Over the next five years, Kenyatta would divide his time between these two organizations. Under his leadership, Githunguri would become the private school movement’s unofficial headquarters, and KAU would of course develop into the political party that would eventually lead Kenya to independence.
It is interesting to contrast the successful rise of Kenya’s independent school movement with comments such as those expressed by the British provisional commissioner for Kikuyu Province in 1929: “It is indisputable that the Kikuyu people, in their present stage of development, are incapable of organising, financing, and running efficient schools without European supervision.”45 On the contrary, the Africans were capable of financing and operating their own schools without government support, and did so well into the first half of the 20th century.
The rest is history. A police investigation of the Mau Mau Uprising early in 1952 sealed the fate of the private schools. When the government declared a state of emergency later that year, both KISA and KKEA schools were closed. In Kenya’s struggle against colonial oppression, private schools became the battleground. On becoming president of Kenya in 1964, Jomo Kenyatta championed the Harambee, or “self-help” spirit, on which he believed the future development of Kenya would depend. It is clear that at least part of his inspiration for this movement came from his experiences in private education. Private schools were an integral part of the African liberation movement against the British. Perhaps today we can see the emerging private schools as a new liberation movement against the legacy that the British (and other colonial powers) brought to their countries?
Forgotten Lessons
History’s lessons can guide us today. The World Bank argues that a country’s history has “a bearing on which service delivery arrangements are likely to succeed.”46 My historical journey made me realize that private education has been a norm in many countries, before the Western powers imposed their own systems, and even a part of the liberation struggle against these imposed systems. What was it that Bob Geldof said? That development can succeed when people ignore “the advice of ‘the experts,’ to find ‘their own culturally appropriate model.”’ Perhaps the vital lesson of history is that a centralized public education system is not the culturally appropriate model for peoples in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa today. In championing private education for the poor, we may well be championing a return to the cultural roots of the people.
12. Educating Amaretch
Easterly’s Dilemma
William Easterly begins and ends his latest book, The White Man’s Burden, with the heart-rending story of 10-year-old Amaretch, an Ethiopian girl whose name means “beautiful one”: “Driving out of Addis Ababa,” he passes an “endless line of women and girls . . . marching . . . into the city.”1 Amaretch’s day is spent collecting eucalyptus branches to sell for a pittance in the city market. But she would prefer to go to school if only her parents could afford to send her. Easterly dedicates the book to her, “and to the millions of children like her.” He returns to Amaretch in his concluding sentence: “Could one of you Searchers”—the word he uses to define entrepreneurs of all kinds—“discover a way to put a firewood-laden Ethiopian preteen girl named Amaretch in school?”
The Searchers I’ve encountered on my journey—the educational entrepreneurs who’ve set up private schools in places not unlike where Amaretch finds herself—are already finding the way. The accepted wisdom—what everyone knows—is that children like Amaretch need billions more dollars in donor aid to public education before they can gain an education. And the poor must be patient. Although public education is “appalling,” “abysmal,” “a moral outrage,” “a gross violation of human rights”—all epithets commonly used to describe the “government failure” of public education—there is no alternative. The poor must wait until the Modern Macaulays sort it all out for them. It’ll take time, but it’s the only way. There is no silver bullet.
Behind the scenes, unassisted by donor involvement or government intervention, the poor have found a silver bullet, or at least the makings of one. The route to the holy grail of the development experts—quality education for all—is there for all to see, if only they’ll look. By themselves, the poor have found their own viable alternative. The solution is easy: send your children to a private school that is accountable to you because you’re paying fees. Perhaps it’s all too easy a solution for the development experts (even taking into account some remaining complexities—such as how literally everyone can access private education, of a desired quality—which I’ll come to in a moment). The poor just did it.
Sometimes it seems to me, as I reflect on all I’ve seen on my travels, that what the poor just did is invisible to those with power and influence—the development experts, as I’ve called them throughout this book. Is it invisible because it arose out of the myriad decisions of individuals, rather than through any grand development plan? Individual entrepreneurs, like Reshma and Anwar in the poor areas of Hyderabad, India, or BSE in Makoko, Nigeria, or Theophilus in Bortianor, Ghana, or Xing, in the remote Gansu mountains of China, or Jane in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, all recognized the desire of poor parents like them to have a decent education, saw the problems of public education, and decided that the best way forward might be to start a school. They took a risk, started small, scoured around for teachers and buildings, experimented with what worked, found that parents liked what they were doing—or changed things around until parents did—and their schools grew and grew. Others saw what they were doing and thought it seemed a neat way to help their community and make a little money as well—sometimes conversely. And individual parents—like Victoria’s fisherman father and fishmonger mother—anxiously aware that not all was well for their children in government schools, calculated that they could just about afford the private school, gave it a try, found it worked, and told others about their success.
Is that all too simple for the development experts? It’s not my place to explore why many with power and influence seem to have difficulty accepting the ease with which the poor have said enough is enough and proceeded with their own, highly workable solution. I’ll get on with presenting my findings, in conferences like the one in Oxford, in this book, and wherever else people will listen to me, and try to do the best I can to convey some of what I’ve found around the world. For what I’ve found seems to be a cause for celebration. There’s no “TV tragedy” here, yet another depressing story out of Africa, nor another dismal tale of how the poor in India and China are sidelined as their countries juggernaut toward development. Instead, the poor are empowering themselves. En masse, they are abandoning public educa
tion. It’s not good enough for their children. And they’ve found a superior alternative. That’s a good news story, isn’t it?
But there’s still plenty to be done, for those of us who want to help. The poor have found the makings of their silver bullet, but Amaretch is still out of school. So what is to be done?
There seem to be three problem areas we can usefully address. Reaching Amaretch and children like her—those out of school altogether and also those stuck in dysfunctional public schools—is the first. The second concerns educational quality. Although private schools for the poor, my research has shown, are better than public schools, there is still plenty of room for improvement. Third, there is the genuine information problem currently experienced by parents, an information asymmetry as the economists would put it. How do parents really know whether their school is any good? How can they even more reliably avoid private schools that are not up to scratch?
I’m not about to say, here are Three Big Plans to counter these Three Real Problems. That would be precisely the wrong approach. To borrow from William Easterly: “Has this book found, after all these years, the right Big Plan to achieve quality education for all? What a breakthrough if I have found such a plan when so many other, much smarter, people than I have tried many different plans over fifty years, and have failed. . . . You can relax; your author has no such delusions of grandeur. All the hoopla about having the right plan is itself a symptom of the misdirected approach. . . . The right plan is to have no plan.”2 Agreed. Rather than new Big Plans, I want to point to the general ways in which we can start small and work our way up—and by “we,” I mean thousands of small-scale philanthropic and aid agency projects, working hand-in-hand with thousands of small-scale educational entrepreneurs—trying different approaches, building on what works, and rejecting or modifying what doesn’t. So many little bits of information are out there in the market, known only to parents, children, and entrepreneurs, that can move the solutions forward. So many different levels of incentives for parents, children, and entrepreneurs can be harnessed to make the solutions work. We don’t need an overarching plan at all. But here are some pointers to what might work.
Bringing the Beautiful One to School
Private schools already serve huge numbers of the poor. But not every child is in private school. For some, their parents can’t afford the fees, or can’t afford the opportunity costs of not having their children working for the family purse. So they either don’t send them to school at all (like Amaretch) or must send them to a public school, where they’ll likely feel abandoned. Others have parents who aren’t particularly bothered about their child’s education, with the same effect. We don’t really know how many such children there are—the figures from the aid agencies exaggerate the problem because they don’t take into account children already attending unrecognized private schools, off the state’s radar. But of course, it’s nonetheless a significant problem that must be addressed.
But an obvious solution presents itself: many children like Amaretch, from families far too poor to afford it, are already benefiting from private education, through the scholarships, free seats, and concessionary places, that private schools are offering. In my research, I found that nearly one in five of all students in the slums of Hyderabad receive free or subsidized tuition based on need. The Searchers who’ve created private schools are already reaching children like Amaretch, but not yet Amaretch herself. It’s not rocket science to see how she, too, could be helped, building on what is already being done.
The solution could be to extend what is occurring within the private schools to create targeted vouchers for the poorest, for those children whose parents don’t care about their education, and, in countries where boys are likely to be favored as I found in India, for girls to use at private schools. I gave a few examples in Chapter 10 of apparently successful schemes that work like this. Easterly also notes the success of the World Bank Food for Education program in Bangladesh—a rare example, he says, of successful aid—that gave cash payments to parents in return for their allowing their girls to go to school (indeed, he notes precisely, “This is the kind of program that could help Amaretch in Ethiopia”3). That’s great—but it still doesn’t capitalize on the full range of incentives that are there for the picking: through these targeted vouchers, true, parents have the incentive to send their girls to school, but the schools—presumably public schools—have no incentive to educate the girls once they’re in school. There’s no way the school is accountable to the parents, so teachers still don’t have to show up and can still sleep in the classroom. As Easterly pointed out in his earlier work, The Elusive Quest for Growth, if people “have the right incentives, development will happen. If they don’t, it won’t.”4 Harnessing incentives from everyone is the key to successful approaches.
If targeted vouchers are made available for private schools in the right way, they have the potential not only to incentivize parents to send their children to school (and if opportunity costs are a problem, these vouchers could include supplements for the parents themselves, as well as to cover school fees), but also to incentivize school management to do its best for the children once in school. The key here is to ensure that parents receive physical vouchers to take to the school of their choice and to use in lieu of school fees, just as if they were cash. The school can then cash in these vouchers from the agency providing them, after suitable checks to prevent fraud. Crucially, as far as the school is concerned, these parents are paying fees, just like all the others, and so the school will suffer if they are not satisfied—they can move their children to another school, just as they could if they were paying cash—so the short route to accountability is still maintained. Furthermore, targeted vouchers can also include supplements for textbooks and even midday meals, to allow the poorest to have the education that the wealthier-of-the-poor parents can afford.
If done “in the right way” is the important caveat—which is one reason why I’m not suggesting, even if anyone would listen, a wholesale Big Plan to transfer aid funding straightaway to targeted vouchers for private schools for the poor. I’ve been experimenting with a small-scale targeted voucher scheme through the Educare Trust in Hyderabad, India, using the physical voucher idea to fund 500 children in private schools. On a small scale, it seems successful. But even on this scale, in schools that I knew fairly well, a case of fraud arose. This problem would grow exponentially with the scale of the intervention, and so we would need to learn countermeasures early on. And even on this small scale, we were aware of small misgivings on the part of one family that was paying fees—why was this other girl being subsidized when they were struggling to pay for their children? In this case, we were able to demonstrate that the girl in question had a bedridden father, and that the fee-paying family should not be deterred from finding funds. But this problem—of moral hazard that bedevils any social welfare scheme, that apparently seems to punish those who virtuously struggle to provide for their children and can seem to reward those who do not—is a real one that any scheme would have to find ways of addressing.
It’s easy to see how it could all go wrong. Targeted vouchers handled by the wrong agencies could lead to widespread fraud. I recently did some research for the World Bank in Karnataka, India, one of the most forward-looking, least corrupt Indian states. In Gulbarga, one of the poorest districts, I investigated scholarships, administered through the Ministry of Social Welfare, that were supposedly aimed at some of the most disadvantaged, India’s “scheduled castes” and “scheduled tribes,” and especially girls from these groups. Parents and school managers told me that most of the scholarships didn’t reach the children for whom they were intended. Most were siphoned off as they went through the various levels of the district bureaucracy. And that was in one of India’s least corrupt states. Giving funds for targeted vouchers to state agencies like that would seem to be precisely the wrong way forward. But if reputable nongovernmental organizations or microfinance banks wi
th good track records for genuinely reaching the poor could manage the funds, then there might be some hope of reaching a multitude of children.
And there’s nothing ideological here: if an experiment showed that having vouchers available for public schools also worked, that would be fine too. The public schools would probably need to be properly incentivized. Thus, if the school’s—and teachers’—income depended on getting the vouchers, and so they really had to compete for them, then they would not abandon the children using them in the classrooms.
But surely finding the funds for a large number of targeted vouchers would be a problem? I don’t think it would. Even as things stand now, with current levels of aid funding and without touching any government funds currently being spent on public education, so with no need to reform public education and public finance, I reckon we could afford to send every out-of-school child to private school. (In what follows, please, I’m not suggesting that all these funds be immediately diverted to do this. I’m just showing, in case anyone was worried about this point, that the required funding is already available.)
Take Ghana for instance. The British aid agency, Department for International Development, alone gives about $27 million per year to Ghanaian state education. In the poor areas of Ga, where my research was conducted, a typical private school for the poor might charge about $30 per year. In remoter rural areas, the cost will be even lower. If all those funds spent by DfID alone in Ghana were spent on scholarships to fund 100 percent of these private school fees, it would provide places for at least 900,000 children annually. Suppose, more realistically, that there are some costs associated with voucher administration, say 6 percent of the funding. It would still provide funding for nearly 850,000 out-of-school children. No one really knows how many children are currently out of school in Ghana. The government estimates about 1 million, but some of them are not out of school at all, but in private unregistered schools. If around 15 percent of the out-of-school children are currently in such private schools, then the education aid budget for Ghana from DfID alone would provide all the funds for targeted vouchers for those currently out of school to attend private schools. Add in the education aid budgets for Ghana, from the U.S. Agency for International Development, Oxfam, the Nordic countries, Germany, the Netherlands, and so forth, and it soon becomes clear that children currently in government schools could also attend private school.