Celia W. Dugger
New York Times
October 24, 2004
More than 200 first graders, many of them barefoot, clothed in rags and dizzy with hunger, stream into Rebecca Mwanyonyo's classroom each day. Squeezed together on the concrete floor, they sit hip to hip, jostling for space, wildly waving their hands to get her to call on them. Their laps and the floor are their only desks. One recent afternoon, the line of wiggly children waiting to have Mrs. Mwanyonyo check their work snaked around the bare, unfinished classroom walls. Girls and boys crowded around her, pressing their notebooks on her. Some cut in line. Fights broke out. Boys wrestled. Girls dashed from the room. Giggles and shrieks drowned out her soft voice.
Mrs. Mwanyonyo pulled a boy in front of her and eyed his attempt to list his numbers. "Can you write 1 and 2?" she asked quietly. His head sank to his chest as he shook it no. While she laboriously graded each child's work, the noise level rose to deafening. "Quiet, keep quiet!" she shouted, her voice on the edge of desperation. Overnight, more than a million additional children showed up for school last year when Kenya's newly elected government abolished fees that had been prohibitively high for many parents, about $16 a year. Many classrooms are now bulging with the country's most disadvantaged children. Kenya is not alone. Responding to popular demand for education, it is one of a raft of African nations contending with both a wondrous opportunity and nettlesome challenge: teaching the millions of children who have poured into schools as country after country - from Malawi and Lesotho to Uganda and Tanzania - has suddenly made primary education free. Mozambique will join them in January when it abolishes fees. The explosion in enrollments has put enormous pressure on overburdened, often ill-managed education systems.
What hangs in the balance is the future of a generation of African children desperately reaching out for learning as a lifeline from poverty, even as poverty itself presents a fearsome obstacle. Near the end of a school year that runs from January to November, Mrs. Mwanyonyo, an earnest wisp of a woman, is still struggling to teach most of her students the alphabet and basic counting. She knows the names of only half of them. She estimated that 100 of her 250 students - split into morning and afternoon shifts - would have to repeat the grade. Salama Kazungu, a willowy girl of 12, sits among Mrs. Mwanyonyo's multitudes, her small shapely head rising above those of the 6- and 7-year-olds. She failed last year in the class of another first grade teacher who had 248 pupils. ("If I could have, I would have run away," the teacher confided, relieved he has just 110 pupils this year.)
Not Enough to Eat
It is hard for Salama to learn because her belly is often empty. Her mother sells charcoal but makes too little to buy enough food. Salama never eats breakfast. For supper, she often has only boiled greens foraged from the wild. On her hungriest days, the child said, she looks at Mrs. Mwanyonyo and sees only darkness. She listens, but hears only a howling in her ears. Yet she is determined to continue. At 12, she has already had her fill of the African woman's lot: fetching water, collecting firewood and carrying it to market on her back like a beast of burden. "I was always working and working," she said. "I told myself that the best way to get out of this is to come to school and get an education."
In large measure, the idea of free education has gained powerful momentum because politicians in democratizing African nations have found it a great vote-getter. Deepening poverty had meant even small annual school fees - less than an American family would spend on a single fast-food meal - had put education beyond reach for millions. The abolition of school fees is also owed to the changing politics of international aid. In the 1990's, the World Bank, the largest financier of antipoverty programs in developing countries, encouraged the collection of textbook fees. Its experts had reasoned that poor African countries often paid teacher salaries but allotted little or nothing for books. If parents did not buy them, there often were none.
But evidence began to mount that fees for books, tuition, building funds and other purposes posed an insurmountable barrier for the very poor. In 1996, Uganda's newly elected president, Yoweri Museveni, abolished fees for four children per family. His message that education was free sounded through the country like a clanging school bell. In 1997, 2.3 million additional children showed up for class, nearly doubling enrollment to 5.7 million.
Then in 2000, world leaders met in New York and agreed on an agenda to reduce global poverty, setting as one of the main goals that every child should be able to complete an elementary education by 2015. That same year, Congress, lobbied by advocacy groups for the poor, adopted legislation requiring that the United States oppose World Bank loans conditioned on user fees in education. In 2002, the World Bank, already supporting several free education initiatives, officially reversed its policy, deciding to oppose all such fees. The tide had turned.
"In sub-Saharan Africa, almost all countries are under pressure to abolish school fees for primary education," said Cream Wright, education chief for the United Nations Children's Fund. "It will spread, especially if we show it works." The track record is mixed. Malawi's decade-old, underfunded and largely unplanned experiment is generally regarded as a disaster. The number of children in a first-grade class averages 100. Four out of ten of first graders repeat the year. Children's achievement scores are among the lowest in Africa. Uganda, often held up as a model, also found that achievement fell as classes swelled with highly disadvantaged students. But in the past eight years, donors have invested more than $350 million and the government also increased spending. Test results from last year show that achievement bounced back, though more than half of third graders still performed poorly in math and English.
Quantity Versus Quality
Some experts worry that the drive to expand enrollment rapidly has overshadowed the push for quality. "Just herding kids into classes and counting that as education hasn't worked," said William Easterly, an economics professor at New York University who was a research economist at the World Bank for more than a decade. Even those immersed in the basic issues of achieving universal primary education acknowledge the challenges. "You can get kids into school," said Paud Murphy, who recently retired as one of the World Bank's lead education specialists, "but keeping them there and making them learn involves a whole lot more than we've understood." The students at Gahaleni Primary School, more than 900 strong, gathered for morning assembly under the spreading arms of cashew nut trees, their voices rising through the branches in sweet song.
But the moment of grace was shattered when the teacher in charge, Andrew Ngundi, ordered all children not wearing uniforms to come stand before the rest of the school. As part of its free education initiative, the government prohibited the expulsion of students who cannot afford uniforms - required for students in many African countries - but the new rule has not stopped administrators from pressuring poor children to get them. "How come you're sitting there and you still don't have a uniform," Mr. Ngundi said sharply, pointing at a boy who was frozen in place. Slowly, barefoot children in torn, filthy T-shirts and hand-me-down dresses with broken zippers separated themselves from students neatly dressed in orange shirts and green shorts or skirts.
Salama quietly slipped behind some taller students, hiding her shame - a skirt covered with big blowsy flowers she had bought used for about a quarter with her firewood earnings. But Selina Malungu, a fatherless 8-year-old, stood before all her classmates in a grimy, red party dress adorned with torn lace and gay little bears climbing trees. It was her only outfit. The other children mock her for looking like a street urchin, she said. The lack of a $4 uniform is one of the many miseries poor children endure. Still, they persist. Boys and girls interviewed at two schools here in this district hugging the Indian Ocean voiced a simple faith that an education will make it possible for them to get decent jobs. They have only to look at their parents to see the alternative.
Twelve-year-old Asha Charo's mother, Kadzo Menza, a gaunt woman abandoned by her husband, makes 50 cents a day swinging a hammer to break rocks into small stones, a common building material. "I'll break stones until she gets an education," said Mrs. Menza, who never herself got the chance to study. "When she finishes school and gets a job, I will rest." The free education initiative has sent expectations soaring It was only in the election of December 2002 that Kenya emerged from almost a quarter century of autocratic rule under President Daniel arap Moi, who nurtured corruption and bequeathed rising poverty to his people. One of the first acts of the new president, Mwai Kibaki - chosen in Kenya's first elected change of government since independence from Britain in 1963 - was to abolish fees, fulfilling a promise he had made to cheering throngs as he campaigned across this country of 31 million people.
But the government is still struggling to turn around an economy plagued by high unemployment and low growth so it can begin producing jobs for the children it is educating. And it has only begun to change an education system where teachers too often face classrooms filled with too many children. Asha, who breaks stones each morning with her mother, is currently struggling in Mrs. Mwanyonyo's afternoon class for more than 130 of the slower learners. The school has heard it may get one more teacher - it now has 9 for 954 students - but none have come yet to relieve Mrs. Mwanyonyo.
Worried about her inability to give students enough individual attention, Mrs. Mwanyonyo earlier this year removed her own 7-year-old daughter from the first-grade class she teaches and used some of her modest salary to send her to private school. "Nobody can really teach such a mob of children," said the headmaster of her school, Andrew Thoya Muraba. "But what can we do when we are told by the government that the ministry has no money to employ teachers?" Up to now, Kenya has not hired more teachers, though the country has an estimated 50,000 unemployed teachers and enrollment has surged to 7.2 million this year from 5.9 million in 2002.
A Broader Problem
Kenya actually has a decent average ratio of one teacher for each 39 students, but its schools suffer from a severely unequal distribution of teachers. Education Minister George Saitoti said in an interview that there were pockets of extremely large classes, but a 2004 spending review by the Kenyan government identified a more pervasive problem. It found "vast differences" in the staffing of schools within districts, as well as significant regional imbalances. Here in the Malindi district, the most crowded in the nation, the teacher to student ratio among the 100 schools ranges from 1 to 17 at the least crowded school to 1 to 111 at the most crowded.
Even within primary schools, teachers in higher grades have much smaller classes than those in lower grades, which are swollen with the huge influx of first-time students since last year. In part, those chasms reflect the difficulty of getting teachers to work in remote rural areas and big urban slums. But the problem is also a legacy of political patronage and mismanagement, experts and officials said. Money alone will not fix things. It will require political will. Transferring large numbers of teachers to understaffed schools will mean taking on Kenya's powerful teachers' union, as well as communities and their political patrons who resist losing teachers to other areas.
The World Bank, the largest international donor supporting Kenya's education initiative, is pushing the country to rely more on teacher transfers than costly new hiring. But the education minister, Mr. Saitoti, said in an interview that transferring female teachers would effectively force them to abandon their families. He estimated Kenya will gradually need to add 20,000 new teachers. The country is also short of classrooms, latrines and water tanks. Since 2003, Kenya has increased its own spending on education to 7.6 percent of gross domestic product, more than double the average in sub-Saharan Africa. And the World Bank has provided $40 million for textbooks and other materials.
In thousands of schools where books had been a rarity, millions of Kenyan children now share math, English and Kiswahili study guides. They also have pencils, notepads and other essentials. As the paperbacks wear out, Kenya will need about $20 million a year to replace them. And there is still little money for classroom construction. The ministry estimated more than 40,000 additional classrooms are needed. The cost will be more than $200 million. So far, there are scattered efforts. The African Medical and Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Nairobi with an affiliate in New York, has adopted 10 Kenyan schools and will soon take on 40 more. At the Mkaomoto primary school in Malindi, where children had to learn under mango and neem trees last year, the foundation has built six new classrooms, a library and nine latrines. Parents have contributed their labor to help keep costs down.
The World Bank expects to spend $100 million on education in Kenya over 5 years. The British are donating $75 million, the Swedes $7 million, the Canadians $6.7 million, the Americans $3 million and Unicef $2.5 million. Michael Kremer, a Harvard University economics professor who volunteered as a high school math teacher in Kenya after college and who has done years of research in Kenyan schools, said Kenya clearly needed both more foreign aid and domestic reform of its own education system. Kenyan officials agree. But as the country scrambles to cope with rising demand for education, they also plead for help. "There's a real need for our partners to look at ways and means of bridging the gap between where we are and where we are going," said Karega Mutahi, the education ministry's permanent secretary, "to help relieve suffering before there's time to turn around economic growth, to take the pressure off democracy."
Seizing an Opportunity
Word that education was free spread swiftly from child to child. And the children themselves have hungrily seized the opportunity. Joseph Lolo, 16, had worked six days a week since he was 13 grazing and watering the local headmaster's cows. The headmaster, Peter Mzungu, paid the boy $4 a month and gave him Sundays off. Joseph had watched enviously as the headmaster's children returned from school each day in their crisp uniforms. He longed to attend the public school the headmaster ran. But his family was too poor to pay the fees.
Then last year, Joseph heard that fees had been abolished. Slowly, his resolve to go to school strengthened. This year, he went to his father, a crab trapper, who told him he should keep looking after Mr. Mzungu's cattle. The family needed the extra income. They live in two tiny, falling-down shacks. Only six of Joseph's 13 siblings have survived. Hunger and sickness have plagued the family. But Joseph said he asked his father, "What will save me if I don't go to school?" Next, Joseph went to the headmaster, quit his job and asked for a spot at the headmaster's school, Kadzuhoni Primary.
A tall strapping boy whose ears stick out from his closely shorn head, Joseph looks like a giant among the Lilliputians in the class of 83 first graders. The floor of the classroom is loose dirt and the children sit on ragged chunks of coral rock that tear holes in their shorts and skirts. Joseph, who always sits against the wall, looks sheepish when the teacher insists they all stand to recite a child's refrain, "Head, shoulders, knees and toes." He towers over the other children, and his deep voice stands out among their high pitched ones. Still, he pats each body part along with them. He feels lucky to be there. His teacher, Chengo Yeri, said he is a clever student, ranked fifth in the class. Joseph worked again for the headmaster during the August recess and used most of his earnings to buy a uniform so he can fit in better.
On a recent morning, Mr. Yeri spelled out colors in English and asked the students, whose native language is Giriama, to say the word aloud. "B-l-a-c-k," Mr. Yeri said. Joseph's hand flew up, his fingers snapping. Mr. Yeri called on him, and Joseph whispered the correct word, a glint of triumph in his eyes. "Say black, all of you," the teacher replied, and they all chorused Joseph's answer in unison. On the other side of the stone and concrete wall sat Dama Sulubu, 13, in Randu Nzai's class of 128 second graders.
Dama is excruciatingly shy, but she has a will of iron. None of the four girls born to her father's three wives had ever gone to school. Dama's chances for an education shrank further when her mother, the youngest wife, fought with her father and left home four years ago. Dama became the responsibility of the elder wife, who felt a girl's place was working in the fields, not studying in school, Dama and other family members said. Several months before school fees were abolished, she left home, complaining there was not enough to eat, and found a $10 a month job in a nearby town as a live-in maid. At 11, she worked long hours mopping the floors, cleaning the toilets, cooking the meals and tending the children. But when the woman stopped paying her, Dama quit and took a bus home.
Like Joseph, Dama had made up her mind. She wanted an education and she would not be denied. She went to her father, a farmer and cow herder. "Dama fought to get into school," said her illiterate father, Chula Mbita, as he sat in their dusty courtyard, chickens pecking around his feet. "She came to me and said, 'Now that school is free, I have to go. All the children are going.' " Her father consented. The elder mother said she supports Dama's desire to go to school, but Dama said, in fact, her father's senior wife is still opposed to her education. Asked if she would stay in school, Dama replied, "I have two hearts." One told her to keep going just to prove her elder mother wrong. The other heart told her to give up.
But Dama's teacher, Mr. Nzai, a natural showman who slides his oversize eyeglasses down his nose as he grades papers, has given her the little doses of encouragement lacking at home. He knows that it is the older girls in class who have defied family tradition to come to school - and it was the older girls he called on this day to tell a story aloud. As Joseph was sounding out colors in English on one side of the wall, Dama rose to her feet on the other side to read from a picture book. Shyly, she held the book up high, so no one could see her face. The session drew to an end, and Mr. Nzai called the girls to the front of the class. With great ceremony, he presented each with a sweet cracker, a special treat for children who never have enough to eat. And he shook each one by the hand, thanking them for their effort. "You have participated very well," he told them with a courtly formality. "Let us clap for them because they have really tried." The rhythmic clapping rose into the rafters as the children applauded their classmates' small victories and a teacher's tender mercies.
