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The price of school fees By abolishing tuition fees, countries are releasing the demand for education that experts have long dreamt of tapping. As a result, millions more children are entering primary school. But how much are they learning in overcrowded classrooms? The challenge is to ensure access while maintaining the quality of schooling. Reading a newspaper article halfway around the world, you could feel the emotion surge across Kenya after President Mawai Kibaki followed through on his campaign promise to abolish school fees in 2003. Propelled by pent-up hope, frustration and new expectations, parents swarmed overnight to enrol their children in school. But the rosy reports soon dimmed with stories of principals turning away pupils and the spectre of “the masses” swamping an already fragile education system. Today, the good news is that more than a million new pupils are squeezing into classrooms. But unfortunately, the expected foreign assistance has not fully materialized. In short, “school fees were abolished with great euphoria but little planning”, according to Andiwo Obondoh of the Global Campaign for Education who promotes free primary education in Eastern and Southern Africa. The African movement The confusion is just a rite of passage in the bold but tumultuous move towards free primary education as seen to varying degrees in Malawi, which took the plunge in 1994 followed by Uganda (1997), Cameroon (1999), the United Republic of Tanzania (2001) and Zambia (2002). Today any debate on free primary education must inevitably focus on the experiences of these African countries. Their progress and setbacks offer valuable insight for Africa as well as for countries with high tuition fees such as Bhutan, Cambodia, India, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Nepal, Pakistan and Papua New Guinea. Steve Packer of the EFA Global Monitoring Report was in Malawi when the government removed all school fees. “Enrolment surged from 1.9 to 3.2 million in just three months. Some said it was crazy – the quality of the system was already appalling. In one sense, they may have been right. But from a human rights perspective, can you deny millions of children ANY education, even if it is poor quality?”, he says. No is the resounding answer by UNESCO, which has long championed a rights-based approach to education. “UNESCO believes that it is better to uphold the principle of free primary education and to address energetically the quality challenge posed by an enrolment surge than to ration access to school through fees,” according to John Daniel, Assistant Director-General for Education until May 2004 (see Edito). A policy shift While UNESCO focuses on the normative and policy front, UNICEF has taken a hands-on approach, launching a campaign to eliminate all primary education user fees in Africa. “Two major events led us to intensify our efforts,” says Cream Wright, UNICEF’s Chief of Education. “First, we have repeatedly seen that once you remove school fees, the demand for education soars. On the negative side, AIDS is leaving a wake of orphans while devastating the community and extended family networks that used to help poor kids go to school. Without drastic action, more and more children will have no chance.” Even the World Bank has joined the bandwagon, by making a 160° turn in policy and encouraging countries to remove school fees. Who can forget the mantra of “cost recovery”, which the Bank began hammering in the late 1980s, by insisting that loan-hungry countries charge fees for educational ‘services’, for instance textbooks. Today, the Bank’s lead education specialist, Bob Prouty, is trying to help countries remove those same fees. According to Prouty, the Bank was caught off guard by the African movement to abolish fees. For education experts in the field, these bold decisions were historic, unleashing the demand for education they had only dreamed of tapping. But the mood was not so buoyant back at Bank headquarters, where officials watched with scepticism that gave way to amazement. “We never would have expected such a response ten years ago. These countries have achieved the biggest success in Education for All overnight,” comments Prouty. The surge in enrolment also proved what organizations such as UNESCO and UNICEF, had been arguing for decades: fees deny poor children their right to education. Bank officials tried to deflect this argument by pointing to subsidy and waiver schemes intended to ensure that money was never a barrier. “But in reality,” says Prouty, “the schemes were very unevenly implemented.” Officially, the World Bank “does not support” tuition fees but experts like Prouty are pushing to actively encourage countries to remove all user fees, especially in Africa. Countries, rich and poor, generally charge a range of fees, including textbook costs or rental fees, compulsory uniforms, exam fees, community contributions to district education boards and the like. Unexpected costs According to a 2001 World Bank survey in seventy-nine countries, only Algeria and Uruguay do not have fees of any type. In the rest, about one third of the fees are “unofficial” or illegal, meaning they are not in accordance with national laws or constitutions (see box). This does not include indirect costs, like transportation, which in Cambodia, for instance, amounts to 21 per cent of household spending on education. The very poorest families are also hit with the opportunity costs of sending their children to school instead of work. There are also the ‘unexpected’ costs, which are carefully documented in a recent report by the United Kingdom aid agency, DFID, comparing how very poor families perceive and cope with primary school costs in rural and urban communities in Bangladesh, Kenya, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Uganda and Zambia. Officially, primary school tuition fees are illegal in all six countries. The case of Uganda, committed to providing free education, is most striking. However, parents continue to pay a range of official fees as well as ‘unexpected costs’, such as teachers’ funerals, year-end celebrations, classroom construction and telephone connections. When asked why pupils left primary school, 48 per cent of parents responded that they couldn’t afford the expenses. After food, education was the largest household expenditure in Uganda (and the other countries, except for Nepal ). If primary school tuition fees had not been abolished in Uganda would parents have had to pay these charges? ask the report’s authors. “This study does not propose that tuition fees be reintroduced. But it is important for governments to recognize that the removal of tuition fees may result in schools having to insist on other charges (monetary or otherwise), with the overall result that parents end up paying the same or even more than when tuition fees were paid.” In all of the countries surveyed, the authors found that households routinely make a range of sacrifices to continue paying for their children’s education. In Kenya, for example, parents tended to skip meals, while in Sri Lanka, they would defer medical treatment before pulling their children out of school. But the decision to make these sacrifices was not based upon cost alone. While price is a major barrier it alone does not determine the demand for education. Ensuring quality Quality is more or at least as important as price, in all of the communities surveyed. All poor families appraised were theoretically willing to pay slightly more for what was seen to be “good” education. On the contrary, when standards are not up to expectations, parents stop making sacrifices to cover the costs. When Uganda, for example, abolished school fees in 1997, total net enrolment reached 84 per cent but fell to 76 per cent by 2000. Some experts argue that the quality of education is to blame. With the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2005 focusing on quality, Steve Packer has seen evidence of rising dropout rates, usually one to two years after countries have abolished tuition fees. “To what extent is it caused by a classroom filled with 100 kids without textbooks and a teacher unsure about how to handle the situation? Then again, these are also children from the very poorest families who possibly cannot afford not to have them working.” While it is too soon to draw any firm conclusions, experts like Mary Pigozzi, Director of UNESCO’s Division for the Promotion of Quality Education, are concerned that countries are focusing exclusively on getting children into school without policies designed to keep them there. “There is a common misunderstanding that access to education must always precede attention to quality,” she says. “We must get schools up and running as soon as possible. But we need to do so with a vision of the future needs and expectations of students. Quality clearly costs money but can we afford NOT to address it?” The question has sparked soul-searching in countries like South Africa. How can the Rainbow Nation possibly charge fees for primary education? Because it doesn’t have the money to expand enrolment and maintain standards. India is also struggling with a constitutional amendment guaranteeing free and compulsory education up to the age of 14. Yet cash-strapped schools continue to charge tuition and textbook fees. From Latin America to East Asia, governments argue that they cannot possibly remove school fees without compromising the quality of education. Even formerly communist countries, which used to be intransigent on the right to free education, are introducing new fees. Whether or not you agree with this decision, there is no denying the fiscal constraints. But the situation changes when bilateral aid agencies use the concern for quality as an argument against abolishing school fees. “Quality is a very poor excuse to justify the marginalization of international development assistance for education,” says Katarina Tomasevski, named the first Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education by the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1998. Supporting countries For Tomasevski, the funding gap is not about economics but the lack of international consensus to provide free primary education. “Look at the Millennium Development Goals – not a word about guaranteeing free education. The Dakar Framework for Action does insist on free primary education. But it is still disappointing as earlier commitments to basic education have been redefined to mean primary education, which in countries like Angola, only lasts three years,” she says. Tomasevski comments that none of the governments that took the initiative to abolish fees are getting firm pledges that their efforts to enrol and keep pupils at school will be rewarded by generous aid and debt relief. Gaining donors’ confidence This is where the World Bank is trying to step in through its Fast-Track Initiative (FTI), considered to be the biggest and most important financing initiative for EFA. Eligibility basically means having a formally approved “credible” action plan. Mindful of the damage caused by the rigid requirements of its Structural Adjustment Programmes, the Bank is trying to avoid imposing a strict set of criteria for FTI eligibility. Instead, it has developed a set of benchmarks based on the general characteristics of successful EFA countries. For example, the credible plan should work towards directing 50 per cent of the education budget to primary schooling, and, more controversially, the average teacher’s salary should not exceed 3.5 times per capita GDP. These benchmarks are supposed to inspire the confidence of donors. Instead of individual agencies picking pet projects, they will contribute to the primary education plan. This marks a major shift for the Bank, which used to avoid financing recurrent expenditures, such as teachers’ salaries. “I think the FTI will provide a much better understanding of whether aid is moving to the right places,” says Packer. “But I am deeply sceptical that it will be able to mobilize the large resources which developing countries are now expecting.” According to the Report, about 5.6 billion dollars are needed each year to achieve universal primary education and gender parity. Whether or not that money will arrive, countries are indeed lining up to join the FTI, with the number of eligible members expected to grow from eighteen to more than forty next year. This is where experts like Abby Riddell, a UNESCO programme specialist on educational planning, step in. UNESCO is an FTI partner, working as a policy advisor for governments. While lauding the World Bank initiative, “there is always a trade-off,” says Riddell. Foreign aid negotiations used to focus on the details of a specific project. “Now, the donors are virtually underwriting social sector budgets of the most aid-dependent countries to get the money flowing” says Riddell. “But they may be jeopardizing the quality of education.” The role of aid Riddell points to Malawi, Kenya, the United Republic of Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. “In all five, you see similar visions of education,” she says, “but they are dealing with very different circumstances.” Uganda was able to abolish school fees in part by building on a tradition of decentralized government with truly representative local school boards. Zambia does not have this base, yet the policy reforms look the same. (1)Reaching the Poor – The Costs of Sending Children to School, by Siobhan Boyle, Andy Brock, John Mace & Mo Sibbons, U.K. Department for International Development, August 2002. (2)Because of Nepal’s harsh winters, clothing costs outweigh education spending. Fees of every stripe and colour According to a World Bank Survey (2001)*, the type of school fee charged varies considerably from region to region. In Africa, community contributions are the most common type of fee (81 per cent of countries surveyed), followed by uniforms (48 per cent) and tuition (41 per cent). Tuition fees, collected unofficially, are found throughout the transitional economies of Europe and Central Asia, marking a complete turnaround from communist uncompromising insistance on free education. In contrast, there are almost no tuition fees in Latin America, with the exception of Colombia. Textbook fees are also relatively rare (29 per cent of countries surveyed) but compulsory uniforms (76 per cent) and community contributions (65 per cent) are the norm. Most of the Middle Eastern and North African countries have the constitutional right to free education. Yet tuition fees are still collected in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and Yemen. In addition to community contributions, textbook fees are charged in half of the countries. Private tutoring is common in South Asia, where Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan charge tuition, although the fee is legally sanctioned only in Bhutan and Pakistan. Over half of the region impose textbook fees and require community contributions. Turning to East Asia and the Pacific, uniforms and community contributions are obligatory in 80 per cent of countries, followed by textbook fees (70 per cent). Tuitions exist in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands as well as China and Viet Nam. These fees represent as much as 20 per cent of all education spending, and an estimated 30 per cent in Africa and even 40 per cent in the Commonwealth of Independant States and Eastern European countries. *User Fees in Primary Education by Raja Bentaouet and Nicholas Burnett More