THIS remote village in Ndonga, Central Afri-can Republic does not have an official school, and there is no functioning government to build one. So the villagers, desperate to improve their children’s lives, used branches and leaves to construct their own dirt-floor schoolhouse.
It has no electricity, windows or desks, and it does not keep out rain or beetles, but it does imbue hope, discipline and dreams. The 90 pupils sitting on bamboo benches could tutor world leaders about the importance of education — even if they struggle with the most basic challenges.
“It is hard to learn without a paper or pen,” Bertrand Golbé, a parent who turned himself into a teacher, acknowledged with a laugh.
“But, this is the way we have to do it. They do not have breakfast when they arrive. They are hungry. It is difficult.”
Yet the students do learn, here, in one of the poorest countries in the world: They spoke French with me and some were doing real geometry when I happened to drop in.
One student, Doria Seleyanca, 13, said his father had been killed in the warfare that has engulfed Central African Republic for 14 years, and that his family does not have much.
“I eat one meal a day,” he explained stoically.
Seleyanca said he wanted to grow up to be a teacher — and he knew that an education was the only ticket to a better life.
I am on my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a university student with me on a reporting trip. My winner, Tyler Pager of Northwestern and Oxford universities, has been visiting schools with me here in the Central African Republic — and they underscore the need for a new global focus on schooling.
“Tragically, aid to education has been falling since 2010,” says Julia Gillard, a former Australian prime minister who now leads the Global Partnership for Education, an international effort to support schooling in poor countries.
The United States talks a good game about global education, but it has never made a huge commitment. Barack Obama pro-mised, as a candidate, to start a US$2 billion (RM7.9 billion) global education fund, but nothing more was heard about it. As for President Donald Trump, he wants to slash aid, although Congress boosted support for the Global Partnership.
The US has invested enormously in the military toolbox to reshape the world, but it has systematically underinvested in the education toolbox. The trade-offs are substantial: For the cost of deploying one US soldier abroad for a year, we can start at least 20 schools.
The paradox is that education has been a huge global success. Until the 1960s, a majority of humanity had always been illiterate; now, fewer than 15 per cent of adults worldwide are.
But, now, we have run into something of a global crisis: 60 million elementary school-age children remain out of school, and tens of millions more go to school but do not learn a thing. That is because many schools in poor countries are abysmal, suffering from corruption and inefficiency. Teachers routinely do not show up — and are paid anyway — or are only barely literate themselves. Progress cannot involve simply pouring more money into broken systems.
The World Bank found that only 0.3 per cent of teachers in Mo-zambique have the minimum knowledge needed to teach, along with 0.1 per cent of teachers in Madagascar. In Niger, it is zero per cent.
In dysfunctional schools, students do not learn.
The World Bank said in Uganda, only 10 per cent of fourth-graders could read a simple paragraph. In Mozambique, fewer than half can add single-digit numbers. And in South Sudan, a girl is more likely to die in childbirth than to graduate from high school.
Yet, done right, education can be transformative. Evidence suggests that it reduces extremism, empowers women, and promotes development; for the same reason terrorists blow up schools, we should build them.
Education is also a bargain: By my back-of-envelope calculations, for about one-half of one per cent of global military spending, the world could vanquish illiteracy forever by ensuring that every child completes primary school.
If schools are often dreadful, the students are heroic. In the town of Boda, in a junior high school with 700 students and two functioning classrooms, we met an orphan named Lionelle Ngombe.
Ngombe had missed a year of school when she could not pay fees. Then the Catholic Church gave her a few dollars to start a “small business”. So, now, every day, she sells peanuts in the street when she is not in school, to raise money for her school fees.
“I do not know if I can stay in school,” she said gamely, “but I will try.”
As world leaders drop the ball, Ngombe could teach them something basic: The best leverage we have to change the world is education. NYT