Its time to stop blaming 2/3 of humans who are Asian for their consciously open minds and love of education. |
It is time for the UN and other international bodies to move beyond a singular focus on enrollment numbers and grapple with the problem of quality in education. A child’s potential is truly unleashed only when he or she learns to spot and seize the opportunities his or her parents never had.
By Belinda Goldsmith
LONDON, Nov 18 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - For Fazle Abed, giving the rural poor in developing nations the chance of a better life is not just a dream but an obsession that has become his life's work.
Founder of Bangladesh-based BRAC, the world's largest non-governmental development organisation, Abed has spent nearly 45 years helping the landless poor by educating children, teaching women about healthcare and funding small businesses.
His work has made him the recipient of the 2014 Trust Women Hero Award, chosen from 150 nominations for the prize given annually by the Thomson Reuters Foundation to recognise bold thinking and high-impact work that has helped women.
Abed, 78, said BRAC may have started small in 1972, focused on helping just one village in Bangladesh, but he always knew the organisation had to grow to make a real difference.
"I always had the view that small and beautiful would not be very helpful for Bangladesh. You need to grow to have impact," Abed told the Thomson Reuters Foundation ahead of an award ceremony at the Trust Women Conference in London on Tuesday.
Abed said dealing with poverty was a stark contrast with his upbringing in a wealthy family in what was then British India.
Educated in Dhaka and then at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, Abed trained as an accountant before returning to East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, to join the Shell oil company.
He rose quickly through the ranks and a successful corporate career stretched before him, but in 1970 everything changed.
A devastating cyclone hit the south of the country, killing 300,000 people, and upsetting Abed so much that he quit corporate life to set up the organisation HELP to provide relief and rehabilitation to victims of the disaster.
DEATH AND DESTRUCTION
Then came East Pakistan's nine-month fight for independence from Pakistan in 1971, which left the new nation in ruins.
Some 10 million refugees flooded back into Bangladesh and a further 30 million people were displaced.
"The death and devastation that I saw happening in my country made my life as an executive in an oil company seem very inconsequential and meaningless. From then on I was committed to helping change lives," Abed said.
Selling his flat in London, Abed founded BRAC, originally the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, then the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, with the aim of improving the lives of the landless poor, particularly women.
"People thought I was crazy," he laughed.
At first BRAC focused on improving the lives of the poor in just one remote village in Bangladesh but it quickly grew as it saw the need to address crucial problems in Bangladesh, like infant mortality and illiteracy, that no one else was tackling.
BRAC staff started going from door to door, teaching mothers in 16 million homes how to cope with dehydration caused by diarrhoea, a major cause of child mortality.
BRAC also ran a four-year programme to encourage child immunisation, during which the immunisation rate rose to 70 percent of all youngsters from four percent.
"We were different from other organisations as we went from house to house to get the message across, largely to women," Abed said.
"I observed in villages that young girls looked after children, cared for household animals and collected twigs for cooking. The management of poverty was done by women in rural Bangladesh, so why not the management of development?"
The organisation also developed sustainable business models that can be replicated, creating networks of self-employed micro-entrepreneurs using microfinance to build business.
For 30 years BRAC focused its efforts on Bangladesh but in 2001, as millions of refugees started to stream back into Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, Abed realised his experiences in his home country could help other nations too.
"We found programmes that worked in Bangladesh worked well in Afghanistan too, so we then went to Africa with our same strategies but with some cultural adaptations," Abed said.
After more than four decades, BRAC has grown to become the world's largest development organisation, in both its breadth - serving an estimated 135 million people - and its workforce of 100,000, of whom about 70 percent are women.
BRAC operates across Bangladesh and has expanded to 11 countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean - Pakistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, South Sudan and Uganda.
Abed's work has earned him a string of awards, a knighthood in 2010, and this year he was ranked 32nd in Fortune's list of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders.
Looking back, he said the achievement he is most proud of is BRAC's education programmes which have given seven million children the chance of schooling.
"My only regret is that I should have gone faster and maybe I should have gone abroad earlier because it took us 30 years to come out of Bangladesh," Abed said. (Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith, Editing by Tim Pearce)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
DHAKA – As the World Education Forum meets in Incheon, South Korea, it is time to confront some unsettling facts about the state of education in the world today. More than 91% of children of primary school age are now enrolled in school, but progress on educating the remaining 9% has slowed to a near standstill. The numbers have barely moved since 2005, and girls are still disproportionately left behind.
Worse, the headline figures do not describe the true depth of the problem. In poorer countries, even children privileged enough to have access to a classroom often do not receive a good education. According to UNESCO, of some 650 million primary-school-age boys and girls, an estimated 250 million will not learn to read or count, regardless of whether they have gone to school.
Moreover, in many parts of the developing world, state school systems are leaving tens of millions of children behind because of poverty and discrimination. These children’s true education will be that of the soil or the streets. They will grow up working as smallholder farmers, sharecroppers, and wage laborers, and will struggle to send their own children to school.
It is time for the United Nations and other international bodies to move beyond a singular focus on enrollment numbers and grapple with the problem of quality in education. In September, my organization, BRAC, joined a collaborative effort, led by Hillary Clinton and former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, that puts more girls in school while addressing the problem of quality for both genders.
As part of that effort, BRAC, which is already the world’s largest private secular education provider, plans to invest at least $280 million to reach 2.7 million additional girls and train 75,000 teachers by 2019. We call on others to make similar investments.
All too often, poor countries’ approach to education remains stuck in the colonial era, favoring rote memorization over true learning. Schools do little to impart the life and work skills needed to prepare young people for the twenty-first-century knowledge economy. Children are awarded higher grades for writing sentences exactly like the ones they see in textbooks than for coming up with ideas of their own.
Subscribe to Project Syndicate
Our newest magazine, The Year Ahead 2022: Reckonings, is here. To receive your print copy, delivered wherever you are in the world, subscribe to PS for less than $9 a month.
As a PS subscriber, you’ll also enjoy unlimited access to our On Point suite of premium long-form content, Say More contributor interviews, The Big Picture topical collections, and the full PS archive.
SUBSCRIBE NOW
This is an approach that fails to foster curiosity, self-confidence, and independent thinking. It is also especially ill-suited for children from poor backgrounds, who find much of what they are taught in the classroom to be irrelevant to their daily lives.
I was pleased when, in May, a panel tasked by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon came up with a post-2015 development agenda that included quality education, not just universal access, as one of its recommendations. Setting targets based on quality rather than quantity will be difficult but not impossible.
Basic outcomes of literacy and numeracy are imperative. But so are standards for social and emotional learning, which stresses the importance of recognizing our emotions, learning how to deal with them, and fostering empathy for others. These skills, known as “emotional intelligence,” are just as important for children in poor countries as they are for children in rich countries.
In conflict and post-conflict environments like Afghanistan or South Sudan, a safe and peaceful future will depend on a new generation being able to heal its emotional and psychological wounds, just as it did in my native Bangladesh after our Liberation War in 1971. Even in countries not scarred by war, navigating one’s way out poverty requires emotional intelligence, in addition to problem-solving skills and critical thinking.
Given recent cuts in aid for education, some might object that focusing on quality and emotional intelligence are luxuries that we cannot afford. This is not the case. In Bangladesh, we have found a way to bring quality education to the poor, with schools that cost just $36 per student per year. With community support, local women are trained to teach children to think for themselves. One-room schools operate out of rented and borrowed spaces to save costs. A majority of the students in every classroom are girls.
We need to promote universal standards for education, not just universal access, for both girls and boys. A child’s potential is truly unleashed only when he or she learns to spot and seize the opportunities that his or her parents never had. This is the standard we should set, and it will be a great moment indeed when it is universally adopted.