Who Will Educate the Educators?

After leaving Maker Faire Africa on Friday, inspired by much of what I saw there, I returned to Nakuru, where many of the town's residents stand or sit in the same places every day, staring at passers by, shouting the odd bit of abuse and joining in any commotion that happens to relieve the monotony.

I admit, I was a bit annoyed when I compared how some people do amazing things with their time and others do not. I always have to go through the same thought process; first I get exasperated and then I remember that there can be reasons why some people energetically pursue things that benefit them and others while some people seem condemned to get up every day and stare into the middle distance until it gets dark.

The vast majority of exhibitors that I talked to at Maker Faire were well educated and some were clearly from well off backgrounds. This means nothing on its own. Those with lots of education from well off backgrounds can also end up doing little with their lives. And some from poor families with only a basic education achieve great things.

But some of the exhibitors were also wondering why some of their fellow Africans didn't do what they were doing. And one reason I would suggest is lack of basic education and training in skills that allow people to prosper, or at least to get by better than they do now. When I attempted to demonstrate to people around Nakuru how they could make and use simple technologies, they went through a few phases: they were curious, even surprised; they raised objections; they became silent and sat on their hands.

I admit, they may not have had the best teacher. But I think there is something about education beyond what is imparted by a teacher and embraced by a learner. People didn't sit on their hands because they were unable to cut out shapes using patterns and stick things together with glue. They are well able to do such things and many others. I would guess that most of them could have done much of what the exhibitors at Maker Faire did.

What people gain from education, I hope, is the ability to make what they learn part of their day to day lives, whether this involves various bodies of knowledge or sets of skills. What people with a poor education receive is lists of things to learn off so that they can get the requisite number of ticks in order to graduate to the next class. These ticks are rarely, if ever, of any use to people thereafter. But once people have mastered the pretence of being educated, they have no way of taking their education further.

I'll say it again, people with education and training may not necessarily do much with it. And those with little education and training may spend their lives enhancing what they have got and benefiting themselves and those associated with them. But that seems like leaving things to chance for the majority, while allowing a minority quite an advantage, whether they use it well or not.

Development projects can be very narrowly focused. For example, many education projects focus on a few indicators, often the ones that show the project in a favorable light but give little benefit to the recipients. They might concentrate on enrolment but not attendance, exam results without any evidence of learning or the ability to continue learning after school has finished, gender parity without any change in genuine inequalities, etc. 'Success' in development projects can resemble the 'success' of students who have received a poor education.

HIV projects can involve huge amounts of money and produce amazing statistics about the number of HIV transmissions prevented, the number of deaths averted and the number of condoms distributed. Yet people are suffering from and dying from very ordinary diseases that are easy to prevent and cure. Health is not just a matter of disease or being free of disease and it's even less a matter of one virus (which is still endemic in many countries in the world, despite hundreds of millions having been spent on 'prevention' programs).

There seems to be an emphasis on size and magnitude and the measurement of these development projects, as if there is some great prize to be won on the basis of a few hackneyed quantities. Is the aim of development not to ensure that there are fewer millions of people receiving little or no education, suffering from and dying from preventable and treatable illnesses, unable to afford basic nutrition or water and sanitation? Of course you have to count people, but people are not indicators, nor are health or education.

Many of the projects at Maker Faire were about things that matter to people in their day to day lives, food, water and sanitation, agriculture, communication, income, energy, lighting, raw materials and the like. There was less emphasis on education that I would have expected, unless you count some electronic device that 'helps children learn to read'. But these are all concerns that are raised when you go to villages, slums and isolated areas.

Levels of education, especially among girls and women, can be shockingly bad. Many primary school teachers are said to have a low understanding of the subjects they teach and even those who know more don't manage to impart much. But education is not just a process of 'attaining' a set of facts or skills. It is the preparation that everyone needs in order to ensure the education and health of themselves and their families and to ensure that they grow up to be able to provide for themselves and their families, in turn.

A lot of development is dominated by quantities and measurement, a set of boxes to be ticked, regardless of the irrelevance of such processes to people's lives and livelihoods. The Millennium Development Goals, mentioned several times at Maker Faire, are the epitome of such a lifeless and administrative view of development. People need basic things, education, health, nutrition, income, water and sanitation and infrastructure, but they also need to be able to provide themselves with these and other rights. These are not things you can pack in sacks and send them off in an aid convoy.

Significant feats will not be achieved by hordes of administrators with clipboards (or technological variants of clipboards) recording a handful of indicators as people die prematurely and needlessly, though this is a great way of spending billions of dollars. I suppose development will only achieve anything when it has put people in developing countries in the position where they can do the development. So far, we have not been very good at this (and I include myself, of course).

That development needs to be sustainable, that it needs to give rise to further development, seems clear. But it also seems to matter a great deal who is doing the development, who is able to do it, whether it is outsiders from developed countries or insiders from developing countries. Which is very similar to the conclusion I came up with yesterday! I could go on, but tomorrow is another day.

Plans Are Not Achievements, Not Yet

Recently, Ribbon of Hope started assessing families for an orphan and vulnerable children program (OVC). The idea is that the families will bring up the children and Ribbon will support them. The kinds of support Ribbon will give will include advice on health and welfare, budgeting and household cost management and anything else we can advise on. We will also provide some financial support so the families can supplement household income by running a small business. The finance comes from private donors.

The assessments are difficult because there's no question of finding the most needy 22 children. It's unlikely that three or four Ribbon members could identify the most needy in any of the villages we work in, no matter how long we spent there. All we can do is identify as many as we can support and assess them to ensure that we really can succeed in helping each family to give the children what they need until they become independent.

The initial assessments were mostly encouraging, although some guardians are more in need of assistance than the children they are caring for. Some are probably even incapable of looking after another child, perhaps even incapable of looking after their own children. But other families are very capable and they should, with some help, also be able to set up and run some kind of income generation activity.

In retrospect, we were naive in thinking that asking each guardian or family to write a business plan would result in anything tangible that we could work on. We discussed with each person what they would like to do and how they would approach setting up their activity, if they had the finance. The discussions went well but the written business plans, at best, consisted of a list of goods and prices, at worst, one word and a cost. Most people can read and write a bit but many have rarely done so since they left school.

Feeling a bit stupid, I started to look up advice on writing business plans online. Some of what I found, I would be hard pressed to write myself. They are complex and use a lot of technical vocabulary which, having studied project management and related areas, I suspect is mainly bullshit. But thankfully, one site gave a simple list of the sorts of information you need to know before attempting to set up a business.

I am aware that starting up a business is not easy and that many businesses fail. Many of the income generation activities we have set up or helped to set up have failed or lapsed or bumped along, producing little benefit. But we are attempting small things, growing food crops, fruit and vegetables, keeping a cow or a goat or a few chickens. There's no reason why people should be made to jump through hoops that will have little or no bearing on whether they succeed or not.

Having said that, we need to know a handful of basic details from everyone, such as why they are starting the business, what they will sell and to whom, why people will buy from them and how much, how this will make them better off, how they will prepare for risks and cope with problems and how to run their finances, which is not always straightforward if you try to do it all in your head. We don't want to burden our clients with information that we need to collect. But we need them to answer these questions, so we have a solid foundation on which to build a small income generation activity.

No matter how dangerous it is to make assumptions, it's hard to get through a day without making some. I've made assumptions about people's working knowledge of English and even their level of education. English is an 'official' language but many have little opportunity to use it and even when they do, technical terms can be just sounds. Even those who have spent long enough at school and have done well enough there have few opportunities to use what they learned, and 'Standard 8', 'Form 4' or 'fluent' are also just sounds; grades are just numbers, often completely meaningless.

We are two thirds of the way towards the Millennium Development Goals, which developing countries are expected to have reached by 2015. But what will it mean if countries like Kenya achieve some or all of those goals? If lots of children enrol for school but hardly ever attend, perhaps never; if they get good grades but have learned nothing because the tests are just pages of multiple choice questions with tick boxes; if the teacher is absent most of the time, either because there is a shortage of teachers or because the teacher doesn't bother turning up most of the time? And similar remarks apply to other education indicators. Will these achievements be nothing but sounds or boxes ticked?

In countries where education has been failing for decades, it takes several generations for things to improve. The children we are hoping will grow up to be independent have siblings and parents who had little education. Even some of the teachers had a relatively poor education and some of the young people going to teacher training colleges now have managed to get through the system without learning much. I hope the aim of the Millennium goals is to make genuine improvements in people's economic circumstances, education, health, environment and infrastructure. But what I have seen is not encouraging.

Repeating 'good news' over and over again doesn't make it so. Saying people's lives have been transformed doesn't transform them. And writing things down doesn't make them any truer. Ribbon's work seems to involve creating some kind of bridge but sometimes I feel that we are attempting to translate the concrete into the amorphous, hoping that things like education and healthcare will become part of people's everyday lives. Somehow, these promises that have been made for so long seem to remain amorphous, things attained by the fortunate few who live far away, out of sight.

I guess the most important question for a simple business plan is how you intend to go from having very little to having a bit more and hopefully, enough. How does selling fish, keeping a cow or owning a motorbike ensure that each member of your family grows up to be able to have their own independent family? Perhaps writing it down oversimplifies things because running a business is about doing things, not just saying, writing or thinking them. We need written business plans but if we mistake them for the achievement of the goals of the business itself, we'll have nothing but bits of paper in a year's time! The business plan is so vital and yet completely useless if it remains just a plan. Bit like the Millennium Development Goals.