Literacy/Education Development Interview-UNESCO Literacy for All Campaign
The Schools Project
Ms. Jensen-Director, UNESCO Tanzania
I had the pleasure of meeting and talking about educational development both in Tanzania and the broader African region with the head of UNESCO in Tanzania, Ms. Vibeke Jensen. Ms. Jensen is the Representative and Director of UNESCO for the Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, and the United Republic of Tanzania. UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, and they have launched the Education for All initiative worldwide, along with other educational support programs.
What is the main objective for UNESCO's educational and literacy work in the country? How does the Education for All platform address these needs?
In the current situation, UNESCO has very limited amounts of funding and is focused mainly on the normative and policy advisory aspects of education. UNESCO has just signed off on a four year plan for the country with UNICEF and WFP, key UN partners, but we are not really on the ground, such as UNICEF. We work primarily with the Ministry of Education to develop three main areas. The first is developing and guiding education management systems with the Ministry, to create and collaborate good quality data for policy and planning decisions, as well as overall and information gathering. The second focus is with quality of education. The country has a very high school enrollment rate, at about 95%, but the quality is not really there. (As seen in so many areas of the developing world. The figures are often doctored to appease foreign donors, but the critical element of quality in the educational process, a challenge in developed nations, is simply missing in most circumstances here in Tanzania, as I have just witnessed in Mozambique, and in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, as the harsh reality). There is a very low pass rate and a high drop out rate going into secondary school from the primary level. This is a huge problem. In particular, for females, who we are targeting in our efforts, science and math education are particular areas where they have struggled. (Why is this?) There is a lot of stereotyping in these two areas, socially, as “strong” and “male” oriented fields. This is a social thing here in Tanzania. Thus, girls simply perform much worse than boys in these areas. This has a lot to do with their futures as well, their development of higher level problem solving, innovation, thinking outside the box, etc. UNESCO has been procuring for a number of schools on a trial basis science kits to be used in the schools where they don't have labs in place, to help teachers to be able to demonstrate and make things more hands on for the students. There is also a huge shortage of science and math teachers here. UNESCO has been working with the institute of education on curriculum development and things like this, and is training teachers in using the science kits, and works with teachers on issues like educaiton for sustainable development and new teaching approaches that are inclusive to all children.
Has UNESCO done any work with local language literacy? (The national language of Swahili is spoken by many, but not all the population, leading to the problems found in many areas of the developing world, in which the language of instruction is not the mother tongue, creating a dissonance, and a critical learning disadvantage, as a result).
Local languages should be taught for the first number of primary school years, according to UNESCO, and we support mother tongue development in this arena. However, this remains a sensitive issue in this country. Nyerere (the founding President of the nation) was a staunch supporter of Swahili being the national language, in order to unify the nation. It has even recently been chosen as one of the African Union's four main languages. However, there are adverse affects with this, and the public school system does not support any other local languages.
In addition, threatened languages, as many of the smaller, tribal tongues have become, are a concern here with the culture sector; there has been support in oral storytelling in local languages for this reason, to safeguard them, but this is very little in the grand scheme of thing. Mother tongue research has shown that not using the mother tongue disproportionately affects girls development, as they are less prone to be out and about in the community and thus, more negatively affected by the lack of programs in this area.
What resources are currently most needed by the schools system in Tanzania overall?
Books, mainly textbooks. The government has an official policy of having one book for every 3 students, but the numbers are nowhere near this. What other ways of teaching and learning are there if this basic need for books is not being met? This is the biggest challenge. The teachers and the teacher training system is also a huge issue. Teachers are very unaccountable. Many do not turn up. In some cases there is no teacher housing in the rural areas, so teachers do not show up if they are assigned there by the government. Very often, this is a huge problem here in Tanzania, teacher accommodation. This is also linked to conditions and salary, working conditions, but also the teacher trainers are there because they have no other choices, not because they actually want to be doing this. The newest government exams were a catastrophe this year for the system. The teachers are recruited from the lowest levels of the national exams, at the C and D levels, so they have no other choices. People don't become teachers because they want to , but because that's the only job available. The initial pre-service teacher training is ok, but then there is no ongoing content support or in service training. How do we deal with promotions and transfers, how fair and transparent are these, is there a connection between hard work and a promotion?
What are the possibilities for reforming the teacher training in this country? How realistic are these possibilities?
Reform needs to first look at who is being recruited. How are they being motivated? How is this motivation linked to promotions? How do we make sure promotions are linked to professional development? All of these need to be addressed and coordinated.
Is there the will to reform? Tanzania knows that education is important, so there is good will in the area, and they have done a lot and they do have intentions, but they are not allocating enough to education yet. The institutional setup at the Ministry is very low and the capacity is very low, and things, in general, happen very slowly. There is little in the way of strong human resources to implement the strong changes that are needed. There are also issues because of the decentralization of power to the local levels, and thus, the Ministry has become more of a technical entity, and it is not totally clear who is running things, with regards to the implementation of new initiatives and in who is totally responsible for what. Decentralized systems are good, but all of the sudden money goes missing and is not spent on what it was intended to be spent on at the local level. There are also too many people giving easy donor money here in the country, this has been a problem in the past. Although the partners do put conditions on things, the quality has not been there in a lot of ways in education.
There has been a huge focus on enrollment in these countries, however, the quality is not there. Nothing meaningful is going on in the classrooms. There are no materials, etc. The numbers are there to please the donors, but the quality is not. The enrollment is actually leveling off here, because of the lack of quality, people are becoming discouraged, the parents and students. It is worse to fail at school and leave the education system labeled a failure than to never have gone in the first place. Communities may be poor, but they can choose quickly if it is worth it to send their kids to school. A backlash will ensue.
What are the alternatives at the rural level? What kind of vocational programs can be implemented?
Folk Development Colleges, which had been implemented on the Scandinavian models of educating rural populations there in the 1800's, were set up here in the 1960's and 70's with the help of Scandinavian governments. They were meant for rural youth, working on farms, to teach academic and social skills in their communities, such as life skills and personality skills; this has played a big roll in democracy in Scandanavia. They were set up with the same intentions to serve the rural populations who have not been served with basic vocational skills such as painting, mechanics, sewing, crafts, etc; they have also recently added on some technical training. The problems have been that you have to pay to get in to these and there is not a diploma given, which has been a reason why they have not been used. We would like to revamp these schools and revise their objectives and to make them more relevant to alternative education in the rural areas. The network already exists, but it needs to be improved.
Has UNESCO done any work in supporting ICT in education in Tanzania?
ICT has been supported through community radios-these have been useful in the social mobilization level, especially on Pemba (an outlying island north of Zanzibar), which was supported to increase the enrollment of girls in school, and which has been quite successful. This is a locally established radio program in which locals are trained to do the radio programs and given ideas about the content. In the past elections they were used to reach out to women with the information needed. In terms of other technology applications, they have been limited. The biggest fear is a lack of implementation with computers and ICT systems. We have seen so much waste with computers that have been donated and never used; this is one of the biggest shames.
(My own commentary...)
The themes seen again and again start to paint a very stark picture of the challenges facing international educational development. These themes have strong universal characteristics throughout the global south, and threaten to nullify any future progress if unique approaches are not intertwined with the radical solutions demanded. Unless the status quo, which has not worked for the vast majority of the citizens of the developing world, is to remain, systematic changes need to be addressed. However, these challenges are both numerous and extremely daunting. Only the strongest systemic will created by the strongest systemic leadership will garner enough momentum to overcome generations of sub-par implementation in the educational field of so many nations. Lofty goals and haughty plans, combined with dazzling governmental statistics often combine to completely fail everyone but the continued perpetuation of the dependence of aid. A radical approach, combining the best aspects of what has been tested and what has succeeded in other regions of the world; there is no need to reinvent the wheel here; educational technology and the will to implement it to truly address the critical digial divide issue; high quality teacher training supported at the highest levels of a progressive government, willing to truly focus its resources, and, even more critically, its attention and praise, on these public servants; accountability in pay and promotion, a strict code of ethics for teachers and administrators, stern oversight, and finality with both achievement and reprimand; and the critical resources, such as books both in the local languages and national languages, and stationary supplies, to ensure that all have access to the basic tools of societal advancement. Innovation and simplicity. Accountability and leadership. Progression and quality.
