The Future

So I am going to try to be a bit different today and try to use something remotely close to engineering! Above is a graph.

The bars show the increasing enrollment figures in Saboba District (Northern Ghana) and the line graph shows the declining student’s performance in Ghana’s national standardized testing (in 2009, 34.9% of students passed; 15.7% of girls). If you were to hear from political figures or big donor agencies, our District would be a great success. 8 new school blocks built in the last 3 years; hundreds more students in school learning.

What you would not hear is the following – teachers are barely present in classes; the majority of teachers are volunteers from the community with no training; the pupil to teacher ratio is well above the national average; few students are passing standardized examinations and even less are pursuing tertiary education.

The quality of education has become one of the biggest issues in our District (and in the country) yet the plan continues to be the building of more school infrastructure. It is even argued that this is making the problems worse because the quantity and caliber of teachers keeps decreasing.

Speaking with a CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) officials, they say that the bottom line for them is that “x more children going to school.” And that is how all donors measure success; that is how they report to all of us. Before I came here, I saw the commercials and pictures of so many kids going to school in front of new schools and thought this is development. But the fact is that there is so much more to education. Building schools is not even half the battle. For students to do well, everybody knows (especially parents), it is not just a matter of kids being in school. They need guidance, they need support, they need inspiration, they need to be pushed.

We must realize that development is not only about infrastructure and material things. We must ask more.

We must ask not only how many more students are going to school, but how well are they doing? Are more going to forms of higher education? We must ask not only how many more boreholes or wells are being built, but are they being built in the best places? Is the water coverage (population served by water) increasing? We must ask not only how many mosquito nets are being handed out, but how many are actually using them? We must ask not only how many people are getting loans and paying them back, but have their incomes increased during years after when they stopped getting loans?

We much change the way we think about development. It is going to take more time, more investment and it is not always going to show the great results that we have all come to expect. But hey, who said changing the world would be easy?