Equipping children for the future

Dr Satish Chand




You are reading this, a credit to some school and teachers. You may have worked (and walked) for your studies, but so did your parents. I bet that your children have better access to primary education than you did.
Mine do! But this is not true for many in Papua New Guinea. They are definitely not reading this article!
I would also bet that you did not know that nearly one in every two kids of school age in Papua New Guinea is not in school right now.
Imagine the future these children will have in the 21st century world of Google, Facebook, Twitter, mobile phones, iPods, and more. Primary schoolling is hardly enough to operate the new gadgetry that rolls off the manufacturers’ bench on a daily basis.
Finding your way around without education is akin to walking in darkness; permanent and pitch black darkness. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for the illiterate. How will our children judge us if we fail to equip them for the future? It is this question that I want to pose to each of us.
Would you like to see any child miss out on primary education? Or even secondary education, for that matter? I don’t. And it is the poverty of access to primary education in Papua New Guinea, the largest and most populous of the Pacific Islands States, that I want to turn to now.
Poverty of access to education
Published statistics on Papua New Guinea have to be taken with a large grain of salt. For now, all we can do is make the best of what we have. Primary school enrolment statistics compiled by my colleagues at the National Research Institute shows that only 53 percent of children in the 6-14-year age group are in school.
This implies that some 680,000 children of school age are not enrolled in school. They will be the ones walking blind-folded in a decade!
Gender disparities in education are equally alarming. Girls comprise 45 percent of children in elementary and primary schools. They start off on par with boys, but then a fifth fall by the wayside before the end of primary school. Yes, gender disparities widen as students move up the education ladder.
If not alarmed enough by the above statistics, here is the third fact that will send you reeling. The quality of education delivered is poor, very poor!
A recent survey reported that some 37 percent of primary school graduates were unable to read or write. And, for some districts, the number of primary schools has fallen since independence. I could go on with more alarming figures, but you probably get the picture by now.
Some may debate, with good reason, the accuracy of the figures I have quoted. But no adjustment to these numbers gets primary school enrolment rates in Papua New Guinea in the 90 percent—the norm in all but one Pacific Islands nation.
More money not the solution!
The poverty of access to primary education in Papua New Guinea is widely acknowledged. Donors have been pouring squillions of dollars in an effort to raise school enrolment rates. More funds are on the way as donors heave their energies to achieving universal primary education, the second of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.
Donor efforts to-date have helped. Australia, the largest donor to Papua New Guinea, has historically prioritised education as a sector for assistance.
Many in Papua New Guinea tell me that school enrolment rates would be lower if not for this assistance.
But, if the responsibility for access to quality primary education is largely that of the international community, then the data on Papua New Guinea is evidence of our collective failure. Yes, your collective failure at equipping the future generation with the basic tools to survive.
The Papua New Guinea government has committed to achieving universal access to basic education by 2015. A National Education Plan has also been completed.
What will count in the end, however, are not commitments and plans, but rather the actual achievements. And, the task of equipping the workers of tomorrow requires addressing more issues than just primary education.
Try different strategies!
More money will help. Additional funds could be used to construct more and better school buildings, train more teachers, design better curricula, and buy more textbooks.
Improved technical assistance could be provided to district administrators and national administrations.
The Education Plan and its suite of policies could also be expanded. This would be doing more of what has been done to-date. One survey of reasons why children did not attend school revealed the following. Half the respondents stated that the school fee was too high. Close to 40 percent reported that they did not have a school in their village, thus the non-attendance. More money will help with each of the above.
According to the same survey, nearly half of the girls stated that they did not attend school because their parents needed help at home. A third stated that they did not feel safe in school. And a similar fraction said that they were simply not interested in schoolling. I wouldn’t be either if I knew that eight years of trudging back and fro from school daily would leave me without the ability to read or write.
Do more of the same…
Certainly, more of the same old programmes and projects will help. Bumping up outlays on teachers, textbooks and the rest will relieve some of the constraints to real progress in education. But, it would not be enough. The strategy of increasing inputs with the assumption that this will lead to increased outputs and improved developmental outcomes is flawed. Hindsight suggests that raising inputs may not necessarily lead to more and/or better quality output.
We can be more ambitious in getting more value from money targeted at improving educational outcomes. Why not use these funds directly to buy more and better education? Why not Cash on Delivery (COD) for quality education?
Allow me to use a familiar analogy to underscore COD and its value. Papua New Guinea is short of everything except abundant and quality food. You cannot go hungry so long as you have cash in the country. From Kimbe to Kompiam and from the Highlands to the Islands, good quality food is available in abundance for cash anytime and nearly everywhere. It shows that COD works well and fine for quality food. Why would it not work for education?
Cash on delivery of education
COD, as a mechanism to purchase more and better quality education, is being worked upon by several of my colleagues at the Centre for Global Development in Washington DC. Under the proposed COD contract, a funder would provide a specific amount of funding, for example 200 kina, for every additional student to reach the final year of primary school and take an assessment exam.
The use of COD for delivering primary schooling in Papua New Guinea has several attractions over existing practice of subsidising inputs. Three of the most obvious for PNG include: (i) COD uses existing delivery mechanisms—no need to create parallel systems; (ii) COD takes resources to the frontline of service delivery—it can no longer remain stuck in Waigani; and, (iii) COD is administratively low maintenance—no need for constant monitoring and receipt-tracking.
Cash on delivery shifts the focus from number of schools, hours of teacher training and other inputs to outcomes, specifically the ultimate goal—learning. COD is “hands-off” allowing stakeholders to do what they think is necessary to increase learning—important since they are best positioned to judge what is best done to expand access to education. And the results of COD are transparent to citizens, educators, funders and government officials alike.
If food and fuel, the basic necessities of life, can be delivered via COD all over the planet, then why not try the same for delivering basic services in PNG?
Who knows, the tucker shop on the corner might just decide to switch from providing quality food to quality education. I would like to see that!