Passing Thoughts (13): Internationally Funded Education: Does Funding Failure Pay? Under-resourced, culturally deprived and educationally disenfranchised: who are these people? The widest arc of the global population, mostly living in rural hinterlands in emerging economies. Many languish in urban ghettos. Those trying to educate them rely on donor funding. But donor funding is finite. You can spend only so much in a given time regardless of the realities and pressures on the ground. Imagine for a minute the process of education delivery (via international Aid Agencies) to be a stream. Like all streams, the flow begins from the top: setting up a brick-and-mortar structure, followed by the hiring of teachers, the setting up classrooms, toilets, administrative wing, books, teaching materials, systems and procedures etc. This teaching/learning flow connects those who deliver (NGO’s) to those who receive (an under-resourced community). The past six decades or so have generated such streams in the developing world in tens of thousands, thanks to donor-funding, mostly international. By the same token, a majority of these streams turn swiftly into a trickle and run dry. It’s because the round of donor funds has completed its cycle. Donors pull the plug on education’s life-line, and go on elsewhere to repeat the same create-and-destroy cycle. Brand new donors with slightly slanted needs, often more nuanced, always rise on the horizon so new streams are generated once again. And these too flow until funding ceases. It’s a process that appears endless, bewildering many. The incessant rise, continuity, disruption and fall of such schools (some of them ghost schools but many others not) over six decades leave deep, often incurable scars. The innocents who are affected begin to suspect that education for those such as them, is a very non-serious and uncommitted cause. Its delivery varies with the whims and winds that blow through the ivory castles of the privileged givers. And possibly even with the political situation that dominates their international constituencies. Education as we know it today, for the under-resourced, flows with donor funds. And ceases with it. The streams run dry, exposing in their dried beds, a population of angry teachers and students who grow cynical…at best agnostic….about this whole business of education: its motives, meaning and goals. In the development world, “education” in the minds of many deprived populations is increasingly associated with instability, the planting of false promises and the harvesting of deep misgivings, doubts and toxic suspicions. Many fathers and mothers remind each other cynically of the fate awaiting their sons and daughters as they see them trundle off to the nearby village school. Those perceived to have the power to bring electricity also control the levers that switches the main grid off. If the “world of education” follows such a model, few if any will associate the meaning and value of education with knowledge. Because it leaves others feeling worse than they did before: emotionally, spiritually, socially, cognitively, collectively and personally. As after a spate of un-ending power-failures Quite the opposite of what the acquisition of knowledge is supposed to make you feel…..or help you become. (c) Copyright Shad Moarif, 2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 13:59:00 +0000
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