Islands Business - WE SAY: Education powerful engine for prosperity

‘There is no doubt that education alone is the most powerful engine
that can drive a nation and its people toward prosperity’

It is one of the many ironies of the modern world that at a time when information and communication technologies, the information processing power of microchips and the types of devices and means with which to access information and knowledge stored in computer networks are growing exponentially, the number of children and young adults denied basic and higher education is also growing alarmingly.
In a world where bandwidth is doubling every couple of years and new wireless devices are launched by the month and selling by the million—the latest of these being the Apple iPad launched late last month—the number of children dropping out of the school system and young men and women unable to enrol into higher education courses in many developing countries including the Pacific Islands, are growing.
There is an ever growing chasm between those enjoying the fruits of the information and communication technologies revolution and those being denied the very building blocks to participate in that revolution: both basic and tertiary education. Indeed, the chasm is so deep and wide that UNESCO has warned of a generation of lost children who are drifting away from the mainstream world devoid of the basic wherewithal to be able to earn a decent wage.
The chasm is at a much more fundamental level than what is often termed in coffee table musings on development as the digital divide: far from the availability of infrastructure to access technology, what is at play here is the very basic skills of what is traditionally been described as the three Rs. It is akin to having the latest television set connected to 200 of the world’s best news and infotainment channels but with no electricity to power it to life.
The UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report on Education For All for 2010 makes grim reading and examines this issue of growing numbers of children and young people unable to access educational facilities throughout the developing world. While the reasons for this are subtly different in the world’s different regions, the one common factor that runs through all of them is poverty: these children are in the lowest socio-economic rung of society.
Like the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, the Education for All programme aims to provide basic education to most of the world’s children by the year 2015. But the latest report puts this target seriously in doubt and also points to the global financial crisis that has rocked the world over the past two years as another major factor that will affect this goal.

“More households are experiencing poverty, malnutrition levels are rising and, at the same time, levels of education and aid budgets are coming under increased pressure. Countries like Sweden and Ireland have already made cuts to their aid budgets.
“Without a concerted effort by national governments and the international community, the financial crisis is likely to have a big negative impact on the prospect of achieving the goals and without specifically addressing the needs of the most marginalised and deprived, Education for All will not be achieved. And it is not a question of just extending the same opportunities to these groups, they require special attention and special policies,” the report says.
In the Pacific Islands region, statistics show the Polynesian countries have fared better than their Melanesian counterparts in providing basic education but the region as a whole has been lagging behind in higher education. In primary education, countries like Papua New Guinea, Fiji and the Solomon Islands continue to fare badly.
Fiji’s education minister Filipe Bole said in April last year about 15 percent of children did not complete the full eight years of their primary education, while about 74.9 percent did not finish secondary education. School dropouts often ended up in the labour force, he had said.
According to the Fiji Wages Council chairman, Kevin Barr, the dropout rate from Fiji schools even before the global financial meltdown was as high as 66 percent, mainly because of poverty. This is feared to have increased following the unfolding of the crisis and the country’s negative GDP growth in 2007, and the almost zero growth the following year.
This concurs with the observation in the UNESCO report that the global financial crisis and the consequent reduction of developed nations’ aid budgets will hit developing countries’ education programmes hard. The report’s Deprivation and Marginalisation in Education (DME) database draws on a range of household surveys covering 80 countries, providing a clearer picture of education poverty (those with less than four years of education), extreme education poverty (those with less than two years of education) and those in the bottom 20 percent (with the fewest years of education in a given society).
While there is little data on this stratification in the Pacific Islands, anecdotal evidence suggests that numbers could be growing in each of these segments, at least in certain countries in the region—and certainly so since the global financial crisis.
The report suggests remedial measures like improved early intervention and maternal health, removal of school fees (something that will undoubtedly boost early education numbers in a country like Vanuatu where even primary education is not free), the provision of teaching and learning materials, building schools closer to isolated communities, and improving teacher training.
Countries like Papua New Guinea have tried to address some of these issues in their own way. For instance, to circumvent the unavailability of teachers to instruct children in some of the country’s hundreds of vernacular languages, the Madang provincial government has taken the decision to teach in a common language like English as in the province.
While this might eventually contribute to a decline in the use of local vernacular languages, it would ensure there are teachers to instruct students in English and therefore address the problem of the lack of teachers confronting the system. Such pragmatic choices will increasingly have to be made by governments faced with dwindling education budgets.
While the developed countries have long realised the importance of education and its direct relationship to prosperity, for developing countries, the case that education is a way of moving out of crisis into sustained growth has to be put more strongly—and donors need to live up to their commitments on financing basic education in the poorer world.
There is no doubt that education alone is the most powerful engine that can drive a nation and its people towards prosperity.