Education for All and The "Quality Crisis" in Southern Africa

In the 30 years since the 1990 Jomtien Education for All (EFA) conference, the world has seen notable progress towards achieving Universal Primary Education (UPE). EFA Global monitoring reports boast child mortality rates are down 39%, 48 million more students are enrolled in primary schools, secondary school enrollment has nearly doubled in some parts of the world, and the number of countries with extreme gender exclusion rates has been reduced by almost half (EFA 2000-2015 Report Card, 2016). With more students in attendance than ever before, the donor community is increasingly concerned with the "learning crisis" in a disproportionate number of classrooms in low and middle-income countries where students can spend years in school and never learn to read or write.

On average, nations in the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) community spend the most significant percentage of domestic budgets on education. Still, their relatively low GDP's and overwhelmingly young populations make domestic spending insufficient and international aid a near necessity. I explore the quality crisis in terms of defining, providing, and funding quality from the perspective of the donor community and the SACMEQ community. While SACMEQ nations are diverse in many ways, their education systems face similar challenges, and donor strategies within and across their borders are similar.

Decisions on how to improve quality rest mainly with the donor community, which is itself at odds about "what works" in improving academic outcomes. The range of tactics used by donors to improved education is broad, and many are openly criticized. Early development work believed that in SACMEQ nations the school was more influential in predicting student achievement than family background. In essence, this notion led to substantial investment in hardware for schools, particularly primary schools. The World Bank and African Development Bank portfolios show that assistance to SACMEQ countries before the mid-1990's overwhelming went to physical goods for primary schools (books, infrastructure, material support), dropping below 50% only in 2004. The school building is an effective means for donor nations to advertise their goodwill and account for expenses, but in recipient nations, it fails to address systemic problems.

The multi-donor GPE was established on the premise that "no country with a credible plan would be thwarted from implementing it for lack of resources." While the commitment is morally noble, the loose definition of "quality" discussed above means that the donor community and recipient nations can pour resources into "proven plans" more for political trade-offs than demonstrated educational effectiveness. Even when SACMEQ nations are opposed to a donor's philosophy, they are hindered from effectively altering donor plans due to ever-changing norms in donor agencies, pseudo "partnership" rhetoric,  and the preclusion of national ownership and local control innate in donor organizations. With so many donors acting in SACMEQ nations, funding is spread wide and not always coordinated through recipient government mechanisms. The donor community has yet to pledge substantial resources to scale up the most successful finance projects such as conditional cash transfers or cash on delivery schemes, which are not without their criticisms. 

In SACMEQ countries where rural posts go unappointed, urban teachers are frequently absent, and large numbers of unemployed youth go without basic numeracy and literacy skills, the quality crisis is genuine. Quality concerns will likely dominate international education headlines, particularly those in South and East Africa, for the foreseeable future, but the topic is not new. Donors and recipient countries are both responsible for the contradictions, faulty policy, and weak implementation that feed into the quality crisis and the power balance is currently heavily tilted in the donors' favor. For decades, aid-recipients and donor communities have danced around the definition of quality, strategies for improving educational outcomes, and the best funding mechanisms—both parties recycling strategies and rhetoric in place of actual compromise or conversation—any end to the quality crisis will require more coordination, communication, and compromise from both ends. 

Historical Parallels in America's HBCUs and Malawian Universities

State Building in Africa: Prospects & Challenges

Mwalimu Nyerere Memorial Academy

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Acknowledging Malawi's strategic Cold-War era position, the United States of America offered technical and financial assistance to the nation promising to build hospitals, schools, and government offices to raise the overall quality of life in the country. American policies on education development in Malawi during this period shaped the country in crucial ways. I pay particular attention to the types of schools constructed, and the level of education offered. I examine how America's global hegemony, past legislation at historically black colleges and universities in America, international development policies, and technical assistance shaped Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Malawi's first president, and in-turn, present-day Malawi. 

Ownership and Education in Malawi

In 2017, Malawi President Peter Mutharika published an op-ed, “The Moral Imperative of Quality Education,” that reads as a thank you letter to the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) and its potential funders. In the letter, Mutharika discusses his time organizing and convening conferences, belabors a crisis quality “that has reached [his] doorstep,” praises his nation for increased education spending as an example to the “developing world,” and thanks Rihanna for the “spotlight” her trip to Malawi offered. Mutharika does not mention ownership once. He does not comment that despite the “transforming” nature of the GPE partnership, education expansion and attainment in Malawi has stagnated by most international, regional, and national indicators; that educational quality in Malawi has always suffered, at the earliest dating back to colonial legacies about education’s provision and purpose; that the extremely high 23% national budgetary expense on education—with 60% towards primary schooling—is the result of a donor-enforced conditionality; or that Rihanna is hardly a household name in Malawi. 

Ownership is the cornerstone and foundation of aid effectiveness; it is not a strategy for improvement or aid’s newest buzzword. Ownership should be recognized as a prerequisite for any successful and sustainable development—an understanding that is particularly crucial in the education sector. Using examples from Malawi, this paper explores the importance of ownership in education and the spectrum of ownership definitions employed in donor-recipient relations, to advocate for a reinvigorated conversation around ownership and aid.

Education and Geography in Malawi

In “The Role of Place, Geography, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in Educational Research,” Mann and Saultz (2019) call on educators to respond to the urgent need for educational research that is elevated through the inclusion of the oft-ignored geographic component of education. This call is echoed in powerful ways by other scholars in the 2020 AERA Open publication, which provides theoretical orientations for using GIS in education, methodological examples, and a diverse array of real-world implications.

The applications of GIS and new GIS methodologies such as qualitative and mixed-methods GIS in education are seemingly limitless. Recent research combining education research and new GIS methodologies has been used to explore residential segregation in metro St. Louis school districts (Hogrebe & Tate, 2019). Green, Sanchez, & Castro (2019) use hot spot spatial analysis to trace patterns in Detroit public school closures and new charter school openings. GIS has also been used to understand enrollment patterns in universal pre-kindergarten and patterns of new racial segregation practices in a spatial analysis of southern school district successions (Shapiro, Martin, Weiland, Unterman, 2019; Taylor, Frankenberg, & Siegel-Hawley, 2019). The collective voices of these GIS educational researchers indicate that the once daunting technological and financial barriers to entry for education researchers are no longer the impediments they once were and that the time for incorporating spatial analysis in educational decision-making is now.

GIS is a tool—it can be used to control, disempower, and disenfranchise a people. Still, it can also accurately display and triage the locations of high-risk populations when those who wield it avoid the trappings of power and quick “technofixes for development” (Dunn, Atkins, & Townsend, 1997). Whether in Charlotte, NC, or Lilongwe, Malawi, for those who are willing, GIS can prove to be a useful resource to direct future policy, highlight structural inequalities, and bring to light social-spatial phenomena for the sake of justice.

Beyond Safaris: Exploring Africa's Diversity in K-8 Classrooms

An overview of resources for K-8 teachers in exploring Africa beyond the safaris and stereotypical images students can bring to the classroom, or that we ourselves might hold. I explore how to practically and adequately describe the geographic, linguistic, and ethnic diversity on the continent to students at varying development stages and across multiple subject areas. I also offer practical language and tools for addressing popular stereotypes surrounding wildlife, urbanization, and traditions using children's books, crafts, and classroom group activities.

Parallels in Urban Education in the United States and Malawi

Disrupting the Myth of a Rural-Urban Dichotomy in Malawi

As international researchers, policymakers, and development staff, we rely on data indicators to simplify the populations we work with to target initiatives for the greatest possible impact. Ethnic, gender, and income-based goals can help development workers target the communities where the most significant needs are. "Rural" and "urban" when used as mutually exclusive, however, do not offer the clarity and specificity we seek. Instead, these terms paint gross misrepresentations that allow for misallocated funds and inappropriate policy. 

In the United States, "urban" is often a euphemism for black and poor, particularly when discussing schools. The development world utilizes "rural" in a similar way to conjure images of inaccessible villages where residents have little to no access to markets or trade and march for hours every day to transport water. To be clear, there are places where this is true, but they are only a small portion of what we currently label "rural." Utilizing this loaded language hides the varying levels of economy and access present in the "rural" world. It is as much a disservice in development work as it is in educational research ("urban" in American education here, here, and here). 

Consider the above image of Malawi. The pinned cities of Mzuzu, Lilongwe, Zomba, and Blantyre are the only official urban centers the Government of Malawi acknowledges. Roughly, 2 million people in a nation of over 16 million. With the numbers stacked as such, country-level analysis using urban/rural disaggregation can easily find vast inequalities that are more a function of the categories than accurate reflections of reality. 

Above, the 28 administrative districts of Malawi are mapped. In Malawi, "urban" does not carry the racial, economic, or social burdens the term does in the United States. For Malawians, official urban centers are the only locations where government offices for drivers licenses, passports, permits, and registrations can be obtained. It is where the government and politics are present and at play. 

While only 17% of the population is "urbanized," those four cities benefit from 53% of overall public education expenditure—a statement that can mean next to nothing without the context that "urban" in Malawi is just four cities. Analysis of educational outcomes as urban or rural is next to instinctive in development work but it does not reveal the full picture. The unbalanced nature of a rural/urban dichotomy is explicit in Kendall's analysis on the effects of Free Primary Education in Malawi from the regional perspective instead of the urban/rural binary. In essence, FPE varies far more region to region, than it does on the binary. A more publicly known example of government manipulation of the urban/rural divide is visible in the 2010 Hardship Allowances meant to attract qualified teachers to "rural" areas. At face, this is a sound and noble policy; in reality, over 90% of Malawian schools are classified as rural and the small allowances were more a ploy to gain votes and political favor from the nation's large teaching staff than to effect change in the nation's most remote villages. 

Most readers will have heard somewhere that by 2030, over half of the world's population will be urbanized, with most of the growth in Africa and Asia. To be clear, there is no universal definition of what exactly "urban" means. The UN Population Division published a list of how 232 countries define the term for use in censuses, noting variations in use of population minimums, weights of population density, economic indicators, and levels of infrastructure. The World Bank and United Nations are working on standardizing the definition as the current differences pose a challenge for monitoring Sustainable Development Goal 11: To make cities safe, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable. But it is still unclear how this standardization will be implemented and monitored on a global scale.

At 17.7% Malawi has the lowest urbanization rate in Sub-Saharan Africa and amongst other members of the South African Development Community which are urbanized at 37.9% and 35.9% respectively. These numbers exclude the numerous peri-urban centers in Malawi that contribute to the nation's standing as one of the most densely populated countries in Africa. While peri-urban centers still suffer from limited government interaction, their exclusion from urban/rural analysis limits researchers' ability to fully quantify how education is effected or obtained in peri-urban centers and how policy might adopt to areas that disrupt the rural/urban dichotomy. 

Can international development achieve full impact where the imagined "urban" and "rural" dichotomy still holds extreme implications for funding allocations and research considerations? Until more stable measures for urban and rural are adopted and recognized, decisions that fail to incorporate the peri-urban reality should no longer be the aim of development work. A peri-urban category should be institutionalized to accommodate populations that are not currently represented.