In the developing world's largely-successful push to meet Millennium Development Goal #2 (By 2015, all children will be able to complete a full course of free primary schooling), there has been a critical failure; the failure of quality. Massive increases in enrollment, seen across the globe, has strained already deficient state resources and stretched carrying capacities to the limit. Schools in some countries have 175 children to a classroom; others continue to be beset with more "traditional" issues such as teacher attendance problems. (See, Duflo, 2007: Monitoring Works). However, what the researchers are not connecting is the fact that teacher attendance is inherently tied to educational empowerment, to understanding, to capacities both of the teacher, the administration, and the students; disillusionment can occur quickly even in the best-equipped, most ideal teaching situations, let alone, one with an enormous child-load, few educational resources, and low incentive rates. Thus, none of these factors can be seen in isolation; they must be approached as pieces of a larger puzzle, and the puzzle must first be approached from the most foundational level, which is empowering the children to learn, and giving the teachers the tools to do their jobs. I have highlighted the efforts of Save The Children's Literacy Boost program, which I have been researching for a consulting project here in London; their program evaluations and data streams look very strong in the first 6 countries where the program has been implemented; the program looks to be a replicable and scalable model. However, the critical issue of funding comes into play when looking at this scalability. Another such success story that I was able to highlight last year was Pratham India, which has launched its Read India program a few years back which is now reaching 30million children in the nation. Independent evaluations from the Poverty Action Lab have testified to the effectiveness of this program in boosting literacy rates and numeracy rates, especially amongst marginalized students.
Pratham has mobilized a vast number of volunteers to work with communities and teachers to train and empower teachers in new methodologies, isolate learning variables, understand and implement more proper groupings of students, and has also worked with parents and local and state governments in both seeking support and partnership. The outputs have been extremely successful, and, like Literacy Boost, shows great capacity for scaling up, with a larger tendency for cost effectiveness due to the voluntary nature of many of the Pratham workers.
The huge challenges brought by the successes of the MDG Goal 2 need innovative solutions: I will continue to highlight and connect to these sources of innovation in the weeks and months to come.
