As education is one crucial area of policy making in a government, not least one with self-proclaimed affiliation with the farming population, the start of the academic year often brings a new wave of hype within the policy circles. It is not surprising, then, that officials of the education ministry are appearing more often in public media and promotional programmes are run by the same outlets. It appears as if what matters most is how the academic year starts, not how it ends.
This year, the hype seems to be education-industry linkage. For one, it is good to see the ruling EPRDFites embracing the critiques, including one by this newspaper, on the low level of attention they have been giving to education-industry linkage. This is even more important with technical and vocational training. As the saying, “better late than never” goes, it is a good sign that they have now realised the importance of the linkage and directed their promotion to the issue.
Even so, their approach has remained lopsided as it comes from the side of the education sector. By and large, the portrayal of the narrow industrial establishment as a traditional and passive sector with no desire to embrace new skills, technology and knowhow is far from the truth. Much of the problem has to do with culture, bad past experiences, a passive education sector, poor policy support, low production cycle and undeveloped management capability. A state that intends to create strong education-industry linkage, therefore, ought to understand the problem in a rational manner and bring about an apprenticeship programme that is cost-effective, effective and scalable.
As much as the upper ladder of the education system is crucial to bring about the intended structural economic transformation, however, the tough job resides in making the lower ladder fit for purpose. This means having a primary and secondary education system that supplies quality students to the upper ladders of the system. Certainly, this takes more than expanding access.
The issue of streamlining quality of education is not a new subject to the Revolutionary Democrats. They have been grappling with it ever since they decided to go on, against the popular tide, to replace the old national education curriculum with a new one in the mid-1990s. And there seems to be no other agenda that has remained as sticky to them as the quality of education.
For the socialist-turned-democratic developmentalists, changing the national education system was one big bet with huge risks. Not only had it stimulated many conservative nerves, but it had also enraged many interest groups. Thanks to the huge pump of adrenalin the Revolutionary Democrats used to have in their early days of power (which seems to have become rare lately), the tough decision was realised with minimal costs and systemic implementation.
Undeniably, the change has brought historic improvement in access to education. National student enrollment in primary schools is getting closer to universal level. Enrollment in secondary school has also surpassed 70pc. The tertiary level student population has increased over 16-fold between 1997 and 2015. Technical and vocational training has finally come to the mainstream.
This all means that Ethiopia, under the leadership of the Revolutionary Democrats, has become one of the few African nations that put huge emphasis on education. A showcase to this is the high, over 14pc on average between 1991 and 2014, to be precise, proportion of budget to gross domestic product (GDP) being extended to the sector. Of course, it may help to remind that both the Imperial and the Dergue regimes were also committed to the education agenda, even if not with the objective of universalisation. The Dergue was even globally acclaimed for its pioneer adult education intervention.
With the incumbent, however, the cost to the expansion in access is being paid in quality terms. And reducing the cost has remained a daunting task for the government.
Various interventions have been implemented with the intention of ensuring quality at various tiers of the education system. Parallel quality assurance institutional structures have also been established. Packages and implementation guidelines have also been crafted, largely through huge donor support. Yet, quality education remains a pipedream.
Education is one area where there seems to be less of a policy level gap. The EPRDFites have clear policy line on it. Translating the policy into an investable portfolio of projects is also not a problem, as the four consecutive Education Sector Development Programmes (ESDP) have shown. From the look of things, it also seems that higher level political commitment is not an issue.
The problem seems to lie at the lower levels of the state and political structures. Not only is there in adequate understanding of the role of quality education in structural transformation at this level, but a proper accountability structure is non-existent. Systems of honouring high achievers and meeting the special needs of laggards are lacking. Complemented with the subjectivity of the very issue of quality of education, the systemic gaps have created huge loopholes of political excuse at regional and local levels. And this is affecting primary and secondary education.
Local administrators and politicians seem to take comfort in talking about enrollment, while a high dropout rate, significant gender imbalance, lopsided student to textbook ratio, and low teacher-student ratio is dragging the whole system backward. The culture in most of the local government is to just invest their education budget in rather traditional lines, with no innovativeness in trying and testing new methods of quality assurance. Unlike the case with the Health Extension Programme (HEP), a globally renowned system of universalising primary healthcare, there is no mechanism of incentivising competition between local governments.
Regardless of high level commitment on streamlining quality, not to mention oft repeated political declarations, the quality of education cannot be ensured without technical and political commitment at local level. The actual work resides at school, wereda, zone and regional levels. This is not only what federalism has brought as a benefit, but it is also a responsibility that it has cascaded down.
The way out is not bringing another era of systemic centralisation. Instead, calling local governments and politicians to account against their achievements in education quality ought to be instituted. The era of repeating enrollment statistics needs to end. Quality ought to be the policy anchor in all local governments.
Policy gurus at the education ministry also need to think about ways of streamlining competition between local governments on the quality of education. They ought to take lessons from the HEP, and bring about innovative ways of infusing competition.
Higher up among the rank and file too, there is need for a realistic understanding that low local level political commitment is a determinant for the national effort to ensure education quality. Without it, as Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn admitted recently, the education system will continue to produce half-cooked students. Unaffordable! in every sense of the word.
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