Educating rural people: a low priority

Access to quality education in rural areas has been consistently neglected. Many governments either lack the political will or the capacity to meet the educational needs of the huge numbers of rural people who remain outside the mainstream education system. Today in many parts of the world, growing up in a rural region often means growing up without a decent education. School attendance is generally low and drop-out high, with girls, mountain populations and ethnic minorities losing out most.

This is not surprising, considering the distance many children have to walk daily, only to find a school in poor condition, without furniture, learning materials, drinking water or toilets, and sometimes even without a teacher.

Rural people are often caught in the vicious cycle of having no access to the services and opportunities that might lift them out of poverty – education, gainful employment, adequate nutrition, infrastructure and communications. The upshot is that over 70 per cent of the world’s 1.2 billion poorest people – those living on less than a dollar a day – live in rural areas and 85 per cent of them are concentrated in thirty-five countries spread across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

“There is evidently a lack of political interest in the rural world,” points out Aicha Bah-Diallo, Deputy Assistant Director-General of UNESCO’s Education Sector and Director of the Division of Basic Education. “In many cases, legislators don’t assess rightfully the importance of education for rural people in the development of their countries.”

This indifference towards rural people is the result of a strong urban bias on the part of politicians and policy-makers. “Rural people have no real political voice, so when there is competition for limited resources – and education for remote areas can be costly – they tend to lose out”, says Lavinia Gasperini, Senior Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Abhimanyu Singh, Director of UNESCO’s Division of International Co-ordination and Monitoring for Education for All, puts the problem down to inefficiencies in the delivery system, which he attributes to “excessive centralization, lack of transparency and weak accountability.”

Key to rural development
Lack of access to quality education in rural areas is not a new problem, but it has been consistently neglected. Yet, over 60 per cent of the world’s poor will still live in rural areas twenty years from now, and this figure is not expected to decrease even with unprecedented increases in global standards of living and rapid urbanization in many developing countries.

“Education for rural people lies at the heart of rural development and this is fundamental for reducing poverty worldwide,” comments David Atchoarena, Senior Programme Specialist at the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP).

It is an accepted fact that rural people with basic education are more likely to adopt new technology and become more productive, and can deal better with change. For example, a World Bank study indicates that increasing women’s primary schooling could boost agricultural output by 24 per cent.

However, there are no quick fixes for providing education to the rural poor; this requires a long-term effort and commitment, with concerted action at the local, national and international level.

Access denied
One major challenge for education in rural areas is under-enrolment. According to the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2003/4, it is estimated that a mere 1 per cent of girls and 1.6 per cent of boys in rural Ethiopia completed the eight-year primary cycle in 2000.

According to a UNICEF survey of forty-one countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America covering the period 1990-1995, almost half of the countries showed a rural-urban gap of 20 percentage points or more. For instance, in Burkina Faso, 75 per cent of primary school-age children in urban areas attend school, whereas only 26 per cent in rural areas do. The country has now adopted a ten-year plan for basic education, aiming to increase school enrolment nationwide.

Despite the costly and complex nature of rural development some countries are addressing these problems and showing positive results. For example in Cuba, which has implemented strategies for children living in isolated areas, there are no significant differences in academic achievement between rural and urban areas.

In China, where more than 60 per cent of the population of 1.3 billion live in rural areas, the government is increasingly focussing on education in disadvantaged zones. “Rural education used to be the weakest part of our education system,” explains the Chinese Minister of Education Zhou Ji, “but now that’s changed”.

The country adopted a series of measures that included more money, more teachers and more schools for rural areas, developing information technology to link urban and rural school systems, providing financial aid to students from the poorest families, and attracting teachers by converting their status from min-ban (locally hired) to gong-ban (state hired), which meant higher salaries and benefits (e.g. pensions, housing and health care).

Community schools
There is also evidence that more and more villages in developing countries now have a school that is within walking distance and that more teachers are living in the villages. This progress is the result of both decentralization efforts in recent years and local initiatives involving many players, including NGOs and donors.

For example, Mali, confronted with enormous problems in education in the early 1980s (72 per cent illiteracy and primary school enrolment of 50 per cent), developed its first community schools for primary education. From 176 schools in the mid-1990s, the country counted a network of 1,428 in 1998/99 – representing almost a third of primary schools in Mali. Most of these schools, founded and run by local communities and approved by the national government, receive financial and technical support from a variety of NGOs, including Save the Children and World Education. “The role of NGOs has been very important,” says Atchoarena. “They are often the only ones present to fill the education void in rural areas, and have built up much expertise at the local level.” But governments cannot escape from the fact that it is their responsibility to provide free and compulsory primary education.

NGOs cannot be left alone to play this vital role.How much decentralization?
When governments decide to get involved one of the most widely implemented – and debated – strategies to bring education to rural areas is decentralization. But it can also pose certain risks. It may foster inequity and create confusion about who is in the driver’s seat.

Successful decentralization relies on sufficient local capacity and correctly targeted resources. “It’s not enough to decentralize responsibilities,” says Gasperini, “resources also have to be decentralized.”

In the 1990s, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh decentralized education and adopted a scheme to universalize primary schooling. Based on the premise of “a primary school within a kilometre”, the Education Guarantee Scheme pledges to provide a primary school within ninety days of public demand in any rural hamlet with forty children and no educational facility. The community provides a qualified teacher and space. Today, all primary school-age children in the State have access to schooling. “The provision of demand-based education facilities through decentralized decision- making is an important step in providing access in backward rural areas,” says Singh. “A serious challenge is supervising these additional schools and maintaining quality.”

The role of incentives
While the number of schools – and their accessibility – is a crucial factor for developing education for rural people, other major factors are quality and relevance. “Unless rural people can be convinced that education will better their lives and those of their children, they may not think it worthwhile to make the necessary effort and sacrifices,” says Atchoarena.

To encourage families to keep their children in school, a number of countries are providing parents with incentives. For example, in Brazil, 25 per cent of all school-age children (or 10 million out of 40 million) receive the Bolsa Escola, which is a nationwide education grant scheme that pays families a monthly stipend so that their children can attend school and stay there. In Niger, for example, enrolment increased in areas with a school canteen and girls’ enrolment shot up from 34 per cent to 41 per cent over four years.

Another crucial issue is that the curriculum must be relevant to rural people’s needs and taught in a language they use; this is especially true in regions where there are many different ethnic groups and languages. One approach is to rely more on available local skills and talent, to recruit and train teaching staff in villages, and to develop curricula that combine core content with local content.

An interesting example is Argentina’s Third Cycle of Basic Education for Rural Schools that combined national basic content with specific learning materials for rural schools. These were distributed to rural teachers, who also received training. “The programme greatly improved the access and quality of education in the poor rural areas,” says Cecilia Braslavsky, Director of the UNESCO International Bureau of Education (IBE).

“The challenge of developing a good curriculum for rural environments is not one of ‘adapting’ contents to rural life,” she adds. “The real question,” Braslavsky says, “is how to define at national – and perhaps at world level – key competences that make sense to everybody in an ever more interdependent world."

Monitoring progress
While it is clear that in many parts of the world, education for rural people is becoming more of an issue and getting more attention, how far this is going and in what direction it is moving globally remains to be seen. Most countries keep national statistics but these are not internationally comparable. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics is currently working on how to measure regional disparities. One of its projects in seventeen countries, including Brazil, China and India, is looking at who gets access to quality education, and how human and financial resources are distributed at the sub-national level.

Another project looks at how the supply of teachers and investment per pupil as well as the socio-economic status of households affect learning achievement in urban and rural schools.

The extent to which mainstream education can meet the needs of rural people is put into question. Currently education systems are catering for 84 per cent of primary school-age children. The challenge for governments is how to educate the last 16 per cent – those who are the most difficult to reach.