[stop-imf] NYT: In Africa, Free Schools Feed a Different Hunger - Impact of User Fee Abolition

[Robert Weissman]

[snip]

That same year, Congress, lobbied by advocacy groups for the poor,
adopted legislation requiring that the United States oppose World Bank
loans conditioned on user fees in education. In 2002, the World Bank,
already supporting several free education initiatives, officially
reversed its policy, deciding to oppose all such fees.

[snip]


   The New York Times
------------------------------------------------------------------------


         October 24, 2004




*By CELIA W. DUGGER*

MALINDI, Kenya - More than 200 first graders, many of them barefoot,
clothed in rags and dizzy with hunger, stream into Rebecca Mwanyonyo's
classroom each day. Squeezed together on the concrete floor, they sit
hip to hip, jostling for space, wildly waving their hands to get her to
call on them. Their laps and the floor are their only desks.

One recent afternoon, the line of wiggly children waiting to have Mrs.
Mwanyonyo check their work snaked around the bare, unfinished classroom
walls. Girls and boys crowded around her, pressing their notebooks on
her. Some cut in line. Fights broke out. Boys wrestled. Girls dashed
from the room. Giggles and shrieks drowned out her soft voice.

Mrs. Mwanyonyo pulled a boy in front of her and eyed his attempt to list
his numbers. "Can you write 1 and 2?" she asked quietly. His head sank
to his chest as he shook it no. While she laboriously graded each
child's work, the noise level rose to deafening. "Quiet, keep quiet!"
she shouted, her voice on the edge of desperation.

Overnight, more than a million additional children showed up for school
last year when Kenya's newly elected government abolished fees that had
been prohibitively high for many parents, about $16 a year. Many
classrooms are now bulging with the country's most disadvantaged children.

Kenya is not alone. Responding to popular demand for education, it is
one of a raft of African nations contending with both a wondrous
opportunity and nettlesome challenge: teaching the millions of children
who have poured into schools as country after country - from Malawi and
Lesotho to Uganda and Tanzania - has suddenly made primary education
free. Mozambique will join them in January when it abolishes fees.

The explosion in enrollments has put enormous pressure on overburdened,
often ill-managed education systems.

What hangs in the balance is the future of a generation of African
children desperately reaching out for learning as a lifeline from
poverty, even as poverty itself presents a fearsome obstacle.

Near the end of a school year that runs from January to November, Mrs.
Mwanyonyo, an earnest wisp of a woman, is still struggling to teach most
of her students the alphabet and basic counting. She knows the names of
only half of them. She estimated that 100 of her 250 students - split
into morning and afternoon shifts - would have to repeat the grade.

Salama Kazungu, a willowy girl of 12, sits among Mrs. Mwanyonyo's
multitudes, her small shapely head rising above those of the 6- and
7-year-olds. She failed last year in the class of another first grade
teacher who had 248 pupils. ("If I could have, I would have run away,"
the teacher confided, relieved he has just 110 pupils this year.)

*Not Enough to Eat*

It is hard for Salama to learn because her belly is often empty. Her
mother sells charcoal but makes too little to buy enough food. Salama
never eats breakfast. For supper, she often has only boiled greens
foraged from the wild.

On her hungriest days, the child said, she looks at Mrs. Mwanyonyo and
sees only darkness. She listens, but hears only a howling in her ears.
Yet she is determined to continue. At 12, she has already had her fill
of the African woman's lot: fetching water, collecting firewood and
carrying it to market on her back like a beast of burden.

"I was always working and working," she said. "I told myself that the
best way to get out of this is to come to school and get an education."

In large measure, the idea of free education has gained powerful
momentum because politicians in democratizing African nations have found
it a great vote-getter. Deepening poverty had meant even small annual
school fees - less than an American family would spend on a single
fast-food meal - had put education beyond reach for millions.

The abolition of school fees is also owed to the changing politics of
international aid. In the 1990's, the World Bank, the largest financier
of antipoverty programs in developing countries, encouraged the
collection of textbook fees. Its experts had reasoned that poor African
countries often paid teacher salaries but allotted little or nothing for
books. If parents did not buy them, there often were none.

But evidence began to mount that fees for books, tuition, building funds
and other purposes posed an insurmountable barrier for the very poor.

In 1996, Uganda's newly elected president, Yoweri Museveni, abolished
fees for four children per family. His message that education was free
sounded through the country like a clanging school bell. In 1997, 2.3
million additional children showed up for class, nearly doubling
enrollment to 5.7 million.

Then in 2000, world leaders met in New York and agreed on an agenda to
reduce global poverty, setting as one of the main goals that every child
should be able to complete an elementary education by 2015.

That same year, Congress, lobbied by advocacy groups for the poor,
adopted legislation requiring that the United States oppose World Bank
loans conditioned on user fees in education. In 2002, the World Bank,
already supporting several free education initiatives, officially
reversed its policy, deciding to oppose all such fees.

The tide had turned.

"In sub-Saharan Africa, almost all countries are under pressure to
abolish school fees for primary education," said Cream Wright, education
chief for the United Nations Children's Fund. "It will spread,
especially if we show it works."

The track record is mixed.

Malawi's decade-old, underfunded and largely unplanned experiment is
generally regarded as a disaster. The number of children in a
first-grade class averages 100. Four out of ten of first graders repeat
the year. Children's achievement scores are among the lowest in Africa.

Uganda, often held up as a model, also found that achievement fell as
classes swelled with highly disadvantaged students.

But in the past eight years, donors have invested more than $350 million
and the government also increased spending. Test results from last year
show that achievement bounced back, though more than half of third
graders still performed poorly in math and English.

*Quantity Versus Quality*

Some experts worry that the drive to expand enrollment rapidly has
overshadowed the push for quality. "Just herding kids into classes and
counting that as education hasn't worked," said William Easterly, an
economics professor at New York University who was a research economist
at the World Bank for more than a decade.

Even those immersed in the basic issues of achieving universal primary
education acknowledge the challenges. "You can get kids into school,"
said Paud Murphy, who recently retired as one of the World Bank's lead
education specialists, "but keeping them there and making them learn
involves a whole lot more than we've understood."

The students at Gahaleni Primary School, more than 900 strong, gathered
for morning assembly under the spreading arms of cashew nut trees, their
voices rising through the branches in sweet song.

But the moment of grace was shattered when the teacher in charge, Andrew
Ngundi, ordered all children not wearing uniforms to come stand before
the rest of the school. As part of its free education initiative, the
government prohibited the expulsion of students who cannot afford
uniforms - required for students in many African countries - but the new
rule has not stopped administrators from pressuring poor children to get
them.

"How come you're sitting there and you still don't have a uniform," Mr.
Ngundi said sharply, pointing at a boy who was frozen in place.

Slowly, barefoot children in torn, filthy T-shirts and hand-me-down
dresses with broken zippers separated themselves from students neatly
dressed in orange shirts and green shorts or skirts.

Salama quietly slipped behind some taller students, hiding her shame - a
skirt covered with big blowsy flowers she had bought used for about a
quarter with her firewood earnings.

But Selina Malungu, a fatherless 8-year-old, stood before all her
classmates in a grimy, red party dress adorned with torn lace and gay
little bears climbing trees. It was her only outfit. The other children
mock her for looking like a street urchin, she said.

The lack of a $4 uniform is one of the many miseries poor children
endure. Still, they persist. Boys and girls interviewed at two schools
here in this district hugging the Indian Ocean voiced a simple faith
that an education will make it possible for them to get decent jobs.
They have only to look at their parents to see the alternative.

Twelve-year-old Asha Charo's mother, Kadzo Menza, a gaunt woman
abandoned by her husband, makes 50 cents a day swinging a hammer to
break rocks into small stones, a common building material.

"I'll break stones until she gets an education," said Mrs. Menza, who
never herself got the chance to study. "When she finishes school and
gets a job, I will rest."

The free education initiative has sent expectations soaring.

It was only in the election of December 2002 that Kenya emerged from
almost a quarter century of autocratic rule under President Daniel arap
Moi, who nurtured corruption and bequeathed rising poverty to his people.

One of the first acts of the new president, Mwai Kibaki - chosen in
Kenya's first elected change of government since independence from
Britain in 1963 - was to abolish fees, fulfilling a promise he had made
to cheering throngs as he campaigned across this country of 31 million
people.

But the government is still struggling to turn around an economy plagued
by high unemployment and low growth so it can begin producing jobs for
the children it is educating.

And it has only begun to change an education system where teachers too
often face classrooms filled with too many children.

Asha, who breaks stones each morning with her mother, is currently
struggling in Mrs. Mwanyonyo's afternoon class for more than 130 of the
slower learners. The school has heard it may get one more teacher - it
now has 9 for 954 students - but none have come yet to relieve Mrs.
Mwanyonyo.

Worried about her inability to give students enough individual
attention, Mrs. Mwanyonyo earlier this year removed her own 7-year-old
daughter from the first-grade class she teaches and used some of her
modest salary to send her to private school.

"Nobody can really teach such a mob of children," said the headmaster of
her school, Andrew Thoya Muraba. "But what can we do when we are told by
the government that the ministry has no money to employ teachers?"

Up to now, Kenya has not hired more teachers, though the country has an
estimated 50,000 unemployed teachers and enrollment has surged to 7.2
million this year from 5.9 million in 2002.

*A Broader Problem*

Kenya actually has a decent average ratio of one teacher for each 39
students, but its schools suffer from a severely unequal distribution of
teachers. Education Minister George Saitoti said in an interview that
there were pockets of extremely large classes, but a 2004 spending
review by the Kenyan government identified a more pervasive problem. It
found "vast differences" in the staffing of schools within districts, as
well as significant regional imbalances.

Here in the Malindi district, the most crowded in the nation, the
teacher to student ratio among the 100 schools ranges from 1 to 17 at
the least crowded school to 1 to 111 at the most crowded.

Even within primary schools, teachers in higher grades have much smaller
classes than those in lower grades, which are swollen with the huge
influx of first-time students since last year.

In part, those chasms reflect the difficulty of getting teachers to work
in remote rural areas and big urban slums. But the problem is also a
legacy of political patronage and mismanagement, experts and officials
said.

Money alone will not fix things. It will require political will.
Transferring large numbers of teachers to understaffed schools will mean
taking on Kenya's powerful teachers' union, as well as communities and
their political patrons who resist losing teachers to other areas.

The World Bank, the largest international donor supporting Kenya's
education initiative, is pushing the country to rely more on teacher
transfers than costly new hiring.

But the education minister, Mr. Saitoti, said in an interview that
transferring female teachers would effectively force them to abandon
their families. He estimated Kenya will gradually need to add 20,000 new
teachers.

The country is also short of classrooms, latrines and water tanks.

Since 2003, Kenya has increased its own spending on education to 7.6
percent of gross domestic product, more than double the average in
sub-Saharan Africa. And the World Bank has provided $40 million for
textbooks and other materials.

In thousands of schools where books had been a rarity, millions of
Kenyan children now share math, English and Kiswahili study guides. They
also have pencils, notepads and other essentials.

As the paperbacks wear out, Kenya will need about $20 million a year to
replace them. And there is still little money for classroom
construction. The ministry estimated more than 40,000 additional
classrooms are needed. The cost will be more than $200 million.

So far, there are scattered efforts. The African Medical and Research
Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Nairobi with an affiliate
in New York, has adopted 10 Kenyan schools and will soon take on 40 more.

At the Mkaomoto primary school in Malindi, where children had to learn
under mango and neem trees last year, the foundation has built six new
classrooms, a library and nine latrines. Parents have contributed their
labor to help keep costs down.

The World Bank expects to spend $100 million on education in Kenya over
5 years. The British are donating $75 million, the Swedes $7 million,
the Canadians $6.7 million, the Americans $3 million and Unicef $2.5
million.

Michael Kremer, a Harvard University economics professor who volunteered
as a high school math teacher in Kenya after college and who has done
years of research in Kenyan schools, said Kenya clearly needed both more
foreign aid and domestic reform of its own education system.

Kenyan officials agree. But as the country scrambles to cope with rising
demand for education, they also plead for help.

"There's a real need for our partners to look at ways and means of
bridging the gap between where we are and where we are going," said
Karega Mutahi, the education ministry's permanent secretary, "to help
relieve suffering before there's time to turn around economic growth, to
take the pressure off democracy."

*Seizing an Opportunity*

Word that education was free spread swiftly from child to child. And the
children themselves have hungrily seized the opportunity.

Joseph Lolo, 16, had worked six days a week since he was 13 grazing and
watering the local headmaster's cows. The headmaster, Peter Mzungu, paid
the boy $4 a month and gave him Sundays off.

Joseph had watched enviously as the headmaster's children returned from
school each day in their crisp uniforms. He longed to attend the public
school the headmaster ran. But his family was too poor to pay the fees.

Then last year, Joseph heard that fees had been abolished. Slowly, his
resolve to go to school strengthened. This year, he went to his father,
a crab trapper, who told him he should keep looking after Mr. Mzungu's
cattle. The family needed the extra income. They live in two tiny,
falling-down shacks. Only six of Joseph's 13 siblings have survived.
Hunger and sickness have plagued the family.

But Joseph said he asked his father, "What will save me if I don't go to
school?"

Next, Joseph went to the headmaster, quit his job and asked for a spot
at the headmaster's school, Kadzuhoni Primary.

A tall strapping boy whose ears stick out from his closely shorn head,
Joseph looks like a giant among the Lilliputians in the class of 83
first graders. The floor of the classroom is loose dirt and the children
sit on ragged chunks of coral rock that tear holes in their shorts and
skirts.

Joseph, who always sits against the wall, looks sheepish when the
teacher insists they all stand to recite a child's refrain, "Head,
shoulders, knees and toes." He towers over the other children, and his
deep voice stands out among their high pitched ones. Still, he pats each
body part along with them.

He feels lucky to be there. His teacher, Chengo Yeri, said he is a
clever student, ranked fifth in the class. Joseph worked again for the
headmaster during the August recess and used most of his earnings to buy
a uniform so he can fit in better.

On a recent morning, Mr. Yeri spelled out colors in English and asked
the students, whose native language is Giriama, to say the word aloud.
"B-l-a-c-k," Mr. Yeri said. Joseph's hand flew up, his fingers snapping.
Mr. Yeri called on him, and Joseph whispered the correct word, a glint
of triumph in his eyes.

"Say black, all of you," the teacher replied, and they all chorused
Joseph's answer in unison.

On the other side of the stone and concrete wall sat Dama Sulubu, 13, in
Randu Nzai's class of 128 second graders.

Dama is excruciatingly shy, but she has a will of iron. None of the four
girls born to her father's three wives had ever gone to school. Dama's
chances for an education shrank further when her mother, the youngest
wife, fought with her father and left home four years ago. Dama became
the responsibility of the elder wife, who felt a girl's place was
working in the fields, not studying in school, Dama and other family
members said.

Several months before school fees were abolished, she left home,
complaining there was not enough to eat, and found a $10 a month job in
a nearby town as a live-in maid. At 11, she worked long hours mopping
the floors, cleaning the toilets, cooking the meals and tending the
children. But when the woman stopped paying her, Dama quit and took a
bus home.

Like Joseph, Dama had made up her mind. She wanted an education and she
would not be denied. She went to her father, a farmer and cow herder.

"Dama fought to get into school," said her illiterate father, Chula
Mbita, as he sat in their dusty courtyard, chickens pecking around his
feet. "She came to me and said, 'Now that school is free, I have to go.
All the children are going.' "

Her father consented. The elder mother said she supports Dama's desire
to go to school, but Dama said, in fact, her father's senior wife is
still opposed to her education. Asked if she would stay in school, Dama
replied, "I have two hearts." One told her to keep going just to prove
her elder mother wrong. The other heart told her to give up.

But Dama's teacher, Mr. Nzai, a natural showman who slides his oversize
eyeglasses down his nose as he grades papers, has given her the little
doses of encouragement lacking at home. He knows that it is the older
girls in class who have defied family tradition to come to school - and
it was the older girls he called on this day to tell a story aloud.

As Joseph was sounding out colors in English on one side of the wall,
Dama rose to her feet on the other side to read from a picture book.
Shyly, she held the book up high, so no one could see her face.

The session drew to an end, and Mr. Nzai called the girls to the front
of the class. With great ceremony, he presented each with a sweet
cracker, a special treat for children who never have enough to eat. And
he shook each one by the hand, thanking them for their effort.

"You have participated very well," he told them with a courtly
formality. "Let us clap for them because they have really tried."

The rhythmic clapping rose into the rafters as the children applauded
their classmates' small victories and a teacher's tender mercies.