When Gordon Brown visited Olympic primary school, one of the five government schools located on the outskirts of Kibera, the largest slum in Kenya and in Africa, he told the gathered crowds that British parents fully supported their taxpayers’ money being used to provide free places at that school. Bob Geldof and Bono rave about how an extra 1m-plus children are now enrolled in primary school in Kenya. All these children, the accepted wisdom goes, have been saved by the benevolence of the international community — which must give $7 to $8 billion (£3.8 to £4.4 billion) per year more so that other countries can emulate Kenya’s success.
The accepted wisdom is wrong. It ignores the remarkable reality that the poor in Africa have not been waiting, helplessly, for the munificence of pop stars and western chancellors to ensure that their children get a decent education. Private schools for the poor have emerged in huge numbers in some of the most impoverished slums and villages in Africa. They cater for a majority of poor children and outperform government schools, for a fraction of the cost.
My research has found this in Kenya — where the international community might excuse the inadequacy of state education as a blip while free primary education beds down. But it’s as true in Ghana and Nigeria too — where free primary education has been around for a long time, supported by generous handouts from the British government and the World Bank.
In the poor areas of Lagos State, Nigeria — the same is true in poor areas of Ghana — my research teams combed slums and villages and found 70% or more of all schoolchildren in private school, more than half in schools unregistered and therefore unacknowledged in any official statistics. In the teeming shantytown of Makoko alone, where 50,000 people live, many in wooden houses built on stilts sunk into the dark waters of the Lagos lagoon, we found 32 private schools serving some 4,500 children (75% of those in school from Makoko) from families of impoverished fishermen and fish traders, and all off the state’s radar.
Parents gave the same litany of complaints about government schools, that teachers don’t turn up, or if they do they don’t teach. I visited the three government primary schools on the outskirts of Makoko; although my visit was announced, and I came with the commissioner of education’s representative, I saw the headmistress beating children to get them into the classrooms, and found one teacher fast asleep at his desk. The welcoming chorus of the children didn’t rouse him.
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The commissioner’s representative, however, described parents who send their children to the mushrooming private schools as “ignoramuses”, wanting the status symbol of private education (saying this, without irony, standing by her brand new silver Mercedes), but hoodwinked by unscrupulous businessmen.
“They should all be closed down,” she told me. At least she admitted that these schools existed — the British government’s representative, co-ordinating the Department for International Development’s £20m aid (all to government schools) denied flatly that private schools for the poor exist.
But was the commissioner’s representative right about the low quality in the mushrooming schools? We tested 3,000 children in maths and English, from government and private schools, controlled for background family variables, and found that the children in the unregistered private schools, so despised by the government, achieved 14 percentage points higher in maths and 20 percentage points higher in English than children in government schools. Teachers in the government schools were paid at least four times more than those in the unregistered schools. The private schools were far more effective for a fraction of the cost.
Would Kenya be the same? Although the education minister told me that, in his country, private schools were for the rich, not the poor, and so I was misguided in my quest, I persevered, and went to the slum of Kibera, home to half a million people crowded into an area of some 1Å square miles.
Within a few minutes I found what I was looking for. A signboard proclaimed Makina primary school outside a two-storey rickety tin building. Inside a cramped office, Jane Yavetsi, the school proprietor, was keen to tell her story. “Free education is a big problem,” she said. Since its introduction her enrolment had declined from 500 to 300 and now she doesn’t know how she will pay the rent.
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Her school fees are 200 Kenyan shillings (about £1.45) per month, or about 10% of the expected earnings of someone living in Kibera. But for the poorest children, including 50 orphans, she offers free education. Yavetsi founded the school 10 years ago and has been through many difficulties. But now she feels crestfallen: “With free education I am being hit very hard.”
Jane’s wasn’t the only private school in Kibera. Right next door was another, and then just down from her, opposite each other on the railway tracks, were two more.
My research team scoured every muddy street and alleyway and found a total of 76 private schools, enrolling more than 12,000 students. In the five government schools serving Kibera, there were 8,500 children — but half of these were from the middle-class suburbs. The private schools again were serving a large majority of the slum children.
Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa concedes that mushrooming private schools exist, but reports that they “are without adequate state regulation and are of a low quality”.
But why would parents be foolish enough to pay for schools of such low quality? Exploring further, I spoke to parents, some of whom had taken their children to the “free” government schools, but had been disillusioned and returned to the private schools. Their reasons were straightforward: in government schools, class sizes had increased dramatically and teachers couldn’t cope with 100 or more pupils, five times the number in the private school classes.
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Parents compared notes when their children came home from school, and saw that in the state schools, notebooks remained untouched for weeks; in contrast, in the private schools children’s work was always marked. One summed up the situation succinctly: “If you go to a market and are offered free fruit and vegetables, they will be rotten. If you want fresh fruit and veg, you have to pay for them.”
The final rub was that “free” primary education was not only poor quality, it was also not “free”. Perhaps to keep slum children out — certainly the headmistress from Olympic, where the chancellor visited, was candid that she objected to the “dirty, smelly and uncouth” slum children in her smart school — state schools insist that parents purchase two sets of uniforms before the term starts, including shoes — prohibitively expensive to parents from the slums. One parent told me: “I prefer to pay school fees and forget the uniform.”
Curiously, the success story of private schools for the poor is not being celebrated. But poor parents want the best for their children, and know that private schools are the way forward. The question is: will anyone with power and influence listen to them?
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James Tooley is professor of education policy at Newcastle University. His film Educating Africa will be shown on Newsnight on June 29