Education, War and Peace

The Surprising Success of Private Schools in War-Torn Countries

James Tooley, David Longfield

• Publisher: London Publishing Partnership
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780255367486
• Edition: 1

The authors of Education, War & Peace travelled to Liberia, Sierra Leone and South Sudan to conduct research on education in these conflict-affected countries. They uncovered an inspiring story of entrepreneurs stepping into the breach and providing low-cost private schooling to large numbers of children in areas where government was not working well and basic infrastructure had been destroyed. For-profit schools also expanded quickly to soak up educational demand once the conflicts were over. The fees were affordable to families on the poverty line and the children did better academically than those in government schools. Yet international agencies continue to promote government-run schools, even though state education has been a major source of both conflict and corruption in these countries. This groundbreaking study advocates a different approach. Low-cost private schools should be welcomed by policymakers as a means of providing high quality educational opportunities for all.

1. Introduction
   The Beautiful Tree (Tooley 2009) highlighted how an extraordinary grassroots revolution in education is taking place across the developing world. Based on research from Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and India,1 it showed that in slums and shanty towns, low-­income urban and peri-urban2 areas, a large majority – around 70 per cent – of children are attending low-cost private schools. In rural areas, the percentage is lower, but a significant minority are in private schools – in rural India, for instance, the figure is around 30 per cent, rising well above 50 per cent in certain states (Day Ashley et al. 2014).
   Low-cost private schools are generally managed as small businesses, charging fees as low as $5 per month. One of the drivers of parents enrolling their children in these schools may be the extremely low quality of government schools serving poor communities. Teacher absenteeism is rife and, not surprisingly, learning outcomes are better in the low-cost private schools than in government schools. This is the case even though teachers in the low-cost private schools are typically less qualified and experienced than those in government ones.
   It is an incredible success story – a grassroots initiative out of Africa and Asia where poorer people are taking their destinies in their own hands, refusing to acquiesce in low-quality government provision. Not everyone in the international development community sees it that way, however. The earlier research had many critics. Some academics seemed perturbed that the poor were not going along with the accepted wisdom that only government education, supported where possible by international agencies, was good for them. The poor seemed to be going against 65 years of the development consensus since the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
   However, one criticism of this earlier work that did gel with us was that the research had not shown low-cost private schools meeting the needs of the world’s poorest children. It was looking, after all, at children in countries not at the bottom of the development rankings (Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, China and India – although within those countries of course it was investigating children of the poor). We accepted this criticism and its implicit challenge, agreeing that a powerful, indeed compelling claim could be made about the virtues of low-cost private education if it was shown to be serving the world’s poorest children better than other alternatives.
   It is widely accepted that children in conflict-affected states in general, and in Africa in particular, are among the world’s most deprived. (‘Conflict-affected’ is the term used by development experts to describe conflict and post-conflict countries). So we decided to extend our research into three conflict-affected states in Africa to see what we might find there. The countries eventually chosen were Sierra Leone, Liberia and South Sudan. In the latest Human Development Index (2016), these three are ranked among the ‘least developed countries’, with Sierra Leone ranking 179th out of 188 countries, Liberia 177th and South Sudan 181st. All three countries are categorised by the World Bank as ‘fragile’ states, featuring weak institutions, poor governance, endemic violence and limited administrative capacity. Such fragile states feature growing levels of extreme poverty, the opposite to what occurs in most low-income states.
   The three selected countries are at different stages of emerging from conflict. Probably the most stable is Sierra Leone, which ended its decade-long civil war in 2002. The second set of national elections held since the war were concluded in September 2007, and were considered well-administrated and generally peaceful, as were the 2008 local elections. Political tensions remain, however, especially in urban areas in the south and east. This relative improvement to the security situation has not yet translated into improved prosperity: as noted above, Sierra Leone ranks as one of the world’s poorest countries. Tragically, as the country appeared to be attracting investment and its economy recovering, the Ebola crisis pushed everything back by a couple of years.
   The conflict in Liberia ended in 2003, and the security situation is improving, although still somewhat volatile particularly outside of Monrovia, the capital. UN peacekeepers are still deployed across the main urban areas and along major trunk roads. Violence can quickly emerge out of localised political protests, as occurred in June 2009 when a demonstration outside a major hospital ended in the complete destruction of the hospital and other official buildings. During 2010–11, it was reported that the political climate ‘on the streets’ was ‘becoming more volatile’ as controversial Bills made their way through the political process and the Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s activities were publicised. However, the situation is calm now and Liberia appears to be stable, despite suffering a setback with the Ebola crisis.
   The situation in South Sudan is the most volatile of all three countries. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) was signed in January 2005 and brought to an end the long-running conflict in what was then called southern Sudan. It also set a timetable for the referendum on South Sudan’s independence, which was held in January 2011 and culminated in the creation of the independent state of South Sudan in July of that year. The situation remained volatile with sporadic internal conflict and clashes with Sudan in the border areas. In 2013 there were various changes in the government culminating in the dismissal of Vice-President Riek Machar and his cabinet. In December 2013, the political power struggle between President Kiir and his ex-deputy Riek Machar descended into violence with fighting breaking out in Juba. A rebellion rapidly spread around the country, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and displacing over a million people. Despite intensive international efforts and pressure, the many ceasefire agreements have not held.
   This book first outlines what we call the ‘standard approach’, the accepted wisdom of development agencies and academics about the role of government and private agencies in education in conflict-affected states (Chapter 2). Perhaps surprisingly, in view of objections to a role for low-cost private schools in developing countries in general (see Day Ashley et al. 2014), it appears to be part of this accepted wisdom that some types of private schools are not only emerging but are also acceptable to the development experts. The standard approach is something along these lines: yes, some kinds of low-cost private schools do arise in conflict settings. However, as soon as fragile states are able, there is an urgent need for governments, in concert with donor agencies, to create a ‘proper state’, complete with a proper Ministry of Education and all its accoutrements. In other words, the accepted wisdom sees the rise of low-cost private schools as a temporary necessity, which needs to be overridden as soon as is feasible with a ‘proper’ government education system.
   Chapters 3 and 4 then outline some of the findings of our own research on private sector involvement in the three conflict-­affected states. It turns out that these states are not especially different with regard to low-cost private schools than the countries in our earlier study. We researched urban and peri-urban areas, as well as rural areas close to capital cities. We explored differences and similarities between for-profit and non-profit school types. We saw how there was an educational ‘peace dividend’ in each country, with sometimes exponential growth of for-profit schools in particular soaking up educational demand once conflict was over. We also saw how many of the schools were off governments’ radar; if these were included in official data, then far higher proportions of children were in school than the government believed. And we were able to do detailed calculations about affordability, showing how low-cost private schooling was affordable to families living on internationally accepted poverty lines.
   These findings raise the question (Chapter 5): why should this spontaneous order of low-cost private schools be viewed only as a temporary measure, as in the standard approach, tolerated only until a proper government system is brought in? The private schools appear to be doing better than the government alternative, providing better value for money. They are not even significantly more expensive to parents either, once all the costs of schooling, such as uniform, books and transport, are taken into account. Why would this more advantageous option be seen as only temporary? (In this monograph we assume that generic objections to low-cost private schools playing a role, such as that education should be free at the point of delivery, perhaps because of human rights, or that education is a public good, have been addressed and found unpersuasive. These arguments can be found in, for instance, Tooley (2009, 2012, 2013, 2015) and are not tackled further here.)
   Moreover, when these new research findings are put into the context of the existing body of evidence from earlier and more recent studies (see, for example, Tooley 2009; Tooley and Longfield 2015), then the idea that the low-cost private schools should be seen as only a temporary solution appears more puzzling still. For, as we have noted, evidence from elsewhere in the developing world shows private education is serving a majority of the urban poor, and indeed is growing in size. And it is not confined to ‘fragile’ states at all. Evidence from Nigeria, India, Kenya and Ghana, for example, shows that even newly emerging middle-­income countries have the same phenomenon.
   So this leads to a possible new approach, different from the standard view: it suggests that in conflict-affected countries (but why not by extension to other non-conflict countries too? – a question left unanswered in this paper), the role played by low-cost private schools should be celebrated and seen as a major contribution to providing educational opportunities for all. The new approach says: let education in conflict-affected states be as far as possible left to the private sector, not as a temporary expedient but in the long term too.
   With this new approach outlined, Chapter 5 also asks if indeed there could be advantages to this new way forward. It is suggested that there are likely to be important advantages, particularly around the issues of corruption and patronage. Three propositions are set out as hypotheses to be further tested against evidence. These focus on how reducing the power of the state in education can reduce the potential for patronage and oppression; how reducing the role of government in education could limit the potential for corruption; and how private education, by delivering higher education standards, could help provide a better educated populace as a bulwark against failed states oppressing their people.
   Finally, Chapter 6 sets out conclusions and makes policy recommendations, discussing what the phrase ‘as far as possible’ italicised above could mean in practice.3

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1 Also rural China, where slightly different findings pertained (see Tooley 2009: Chapter 5).

2 The area immediately adjoining an urban area, between the suburbs and the countryside.

3 Most of the material presented in this book has not previously been published, although three (unpublished) working paper reports giving research findings and method are on the E. G. West Centre ...