The United Nation Convention on the Right of the Child adopted in 1989 was a global commitment towards ensuring that every child has ‘Rights to dignity and security, treated fairly and live free from oppression, as well as have a fair chance in life’. Furthermore, the Convention speaks to the need for societies to provide and care for their children and by so doing preserve the future with hope and optimism. This is in sync with the aphorism that says “children are the hope of the future”. Sadly, in Liberia, this hope and a possible bright future are seriously threatened by the recent decision of the Liberian Government to privatize universal primary education.
Liberia was devastated by the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) that was first reported in March 2014, after infection cases were reported in Guinea, and later Sierra Leone. The pandemic left death, fear, despondency and retrogression in its wake. Reports showed that 11,325 deaths were recorded globally from 15,261 Laboratory confirmed cases. Liberia accounted for 4810 deaths. About 8,000 children in Liberia, according to government sources, lost one or both parents to the virus. Thus leaving them vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and violence, with some forced to beg on the streets for food, work in bogus orphanages or shunned due to fears of Ebola. Quite a number were taken in by members of their extended families who in turn have been impoverished by the effects of the pandemic and further dragged down the poverty ladder.
One would think that part of the post-Ebola recovery measures, especially for children and those orphaned by the pandemic will be a massive roll-out of state-driven social services interventions. However, what one sees is the direct and harmful opposite. The Government of Liberia is seeking to undertake fee charging Public-Private- Partnership (PPP) for primary education. The government has since given approval to 5 for-profit outfits to explore and experiment with the policy with a view to commence a full-brown primary education exercise within the next three years. Bridge International Academies is one of the notable firms that have been granted this right. We shall come back soon to Bridge as a notorious champion of privatisation of education in Africa. By the way, Bridge Academies International is funded by the World Bank, The United Kingdom Department for International Development and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, others.
So what is wrong in the Liberian Government embrace of PPP to drive primary education, one would ask. Lots of things patently wrong with the idea, which scarily, the government wants to quickly establish as a policy and programme in her quest for human development.
First, education is a right that State parties of the United Nations and the African Union MUST guarantee – secure, ensure and provide for. Second, primary education is a universal basic right that every CHILD is entitled to. This much is eloquently implied in the United Nations Charter of the Right of the Child. The Universality of primary education is to the fact that it is a right that is superior to national sovereignty jurisdiction. In essence, national policies that tend to encumber or undermine this right are seen as wrong, misplaced, misapplied and must be fervently opposed and rescinded. The third argument is that in Liberia more than 70% of the 4.3 million population earn less than a dollar a day. If poverty is massive and endemic, development experts and institutions including the International Labour Organisation (ILO) are in agreement that state-driven social services delivery, which education is one, should be aggressively pursued to counter the effects of poverty and misery. It is this simple understanding that underpinned the Millennium Development Goal 2 – Achieving Universal Primary Education, which was doubly emphasized in the Sustainable Development Goal 4 – to ensure inclusive and equitable (…) quality Education for all.
The primary education privatisation experiment in Liberia will neither help children orphaned from Ebola nor help to provide access for inclusive and equitable education for the children of Liberia, especially to rural and urban poor and indigent children.
Besides, that is, if one factors in the teaching methodologies of Bridge International Academies, it should not be passed off as an exaggerated alarm to say that the quality of the education and the culture of the people will be undermined and compromised.
On Bridge International Academies’ website, it claimed that it is “… delivering high-quality education for just $5 a month (on average) … through the use of technology-enabled approach that allows us to keep costs so low”. We all know that Capital (business) never sees itself as an act and symbol of charity. Its perpetual and aggressive prime motive is profit accumulation. Thus, when Bridge International Academies claims to be providing cheap education as low as $5 per month, it is deliberately hiding the fact that her teachers are not professionally trained; they are poorly paid and overworked.
In fact, curriculum and contents are developed from abroad. Teachers are given crash courses and lesson notes sent via the internet for teachers to teach using iPad. Hence, contents seldom take into cognisance local realities, contexts and cultures. Small wonder the Bridge Academies was recently banned in Uganda by the court stating that they fell short of standards on education, hygiene and sanitation. The Ugandan Minister of Education, Janet Museveni, in a statement to parliament, said that in Uganda the material used by Bridge “could not promote teacher-pupil interaction” and that the poor hygiene standards “put the life and safety of school children in danger”. Gladdening, reports indicate that Kenya, another country where Bridge Academies International has opened shop, sorry, schools is seriously contemplating banning this for-profit nursery and primary education provider. We hope Liberia will quickly suspend her experiment and be more imaginative in ways to finance primary education.
Furthermore, who says $5 dollar a month (on average) is cheap and affordable, especially in the situation where most households earn less than $2 a day? By the way, Bridge Academies plans to charge $10 per month in Liberia. This fee is beside other auxiliary costs – books, school uniforms, PTA levies, etc. no doubt, more children will be withdrawn from school on account of inability to pay. Incidences of child labour in Liberia will further spike, which is also the highest in Africa compared to Asia and Latin America. For the girl child, her ordeals will multiply since household decisions on account of limited social spending continue to favour the boy-child. The girl-child will easily be recruited by her mother as additional help hand in her informal business, thus feminine generational poverty will persist. Besides, some poor countries and their governments might even begin to consider this option to address their social spending gaps. Then, we will see the naked “kicking away of the ladder” of development. Advanced economies of today used state-led interventions, including massive state investment in education to climb up the ladder of development. It cannot be different for Africa.
More worrisome is the fact that patriotic Liberian teachers, who themselves as parents have severally cried out to the government to quash this experiment have been savagely attacked by the same government. In fact, the President of the Republic on her arrival from a trip abroad, upon learning at the airport that pupils have taken to the streets to protest this privatisation ambition – ordered immediately that 13 teachers who she alleged incited and participated in the pupils’ protest action should be summarily dismissed. They remain dismissed, but not abandoned.
The union in that sector, the National Teachers’ Union of Liberia (NTUL) continues to strongly oppose the dismissal as well as the privatisation exercise. They have and continue to enjoy the full support and backing of the continental and international trade union movement. In fact, Education International (EI), Public Services International (PSI) and the African Regional Organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC-Africa) have individually, severally written to the Liberian President to reverse these decisions. We hope it listens!
Written by Akhator Joel Odigie, Coordinator Human and Trade Union Rights at the African Regional Organisation of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC-Africa).
