I sat overlooking Kibera, a vast slum of mud huts and tin roofs close to the heart of Nairobi, talking to Caroline Sakawa, who runs a support group helping young girls continue their education. The girls on Sakawa’s project burn with ambition. A third are Christians, a third Muslim and a third from families that follow traditional African faiths.
I wondered whether Sakawa saw any differences between the parental attitudes toward education. She was unequivocal: “No matter what their religious faith, they all believe in education.”
That is perhaps the most striking finding from my research in 2009, sponsored by Cisco, looking at education in the poorest parts of the fastest growing cities in the developing world. Education has become akin to a global faith. People saw hope in education, especially when it was allied to technology that allowed them to learn, acquire marketable skills, have fun and find out about the wider world.
In the next few decades, hundreds of millions of young, poor families will migrate to cities in the developing world in search of work and opportunity. Many will be the first generation in their families to go to school. It is vital that the hopes they invest in education are not disappointed.
Four Strategies: Improve, Re-invent, Supplement, Transform
Our report, Learning from the Extremes, outlines four strategies governments in the developed and the developing world can pursue to meet these hopes. The most obvious strategy is to spread and improve schools. The lesson of high-performing schools systems such as Finland’s is that to get good results, you have to attract, train, and motivate good teachers and provide them with good facilities to work in. Too much schooling in the developing world delivers too little learning as measured by high rates of teacher absence, high dropout rates among poorer children, pupils repeating years in large numbers, high failure rates in final exams, and low progression to further education and training.
Even in parts of the developed world, sustained investment in schools and teachers has not led to expected improvements in educational outcomes.Yet school improvement on its own will not be enough to meet the need for learning on the timescale needed. Governments must turn to more innovative strategies. Different kinds of schools are needed to teach new skills in new ways. Innovators such as the Lumiar Institute in Brazil, charter schools in the U.S., and independent schools in Sweden are reinventing school by using technology more creatively and providing more personalized, collaborative, creative, and problem-solving learning, in schools that have many informal spaces for learning as well as classrooms. Even reinvented schools, however, may not be enough to change cultures in communities where learning is not valued. That is why innovation beyond the classroom is vital to supplement schools.
The Harlem Children’s Zone and the preschool play groups run by Pratham in India promote learning in communities, outside schools and often without formal teachers. However, to get learning at scale to the hundreds of millions who will want it in the developing world, transformational innovation will be needed: new ways to learn, new skills, outside formal school. Transformational innovation is being pioneered by social entrepreneurs such as Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall and the Barefoot College in India, the Sistema in Venezuela, the Centre for Digital Inclusion in Brazil, and many others. These programs:
- Pull families and children to learning by making it attractive, productive, and relevant
- Rely on peer-to-peer learning rather than formal teachers
- Create spaces for learning where they are needed, rather than just using schools
- Start learning from challenges that people face rather than from a formal curriculum
The test of these approaches is whether they get useful knowledge into the hands of people who need it. It is not measured by exam pass rates.
Disruptive Innovation for 21st-Century Education Demand
To make learning effective in the future, to teach the skills children will need, on the scale they will be needed (especially in the developing world), will require disruptive innovation to create new, low-cost, mass models for learning The chief policy aim in the 20th century was to spread access to and improve the quality of schooling. In the future, it will be vital to encourage entrepreneurship and disruptive innovation in education, to find new and more effective approaches to learning.That kind of disruptive innovation may come from the best schools. It will also come from social entrepreneurs who seek to meet huge need without the resources for traditional solutions: teachers, text books and schools. Disruptive innovation frequently starts in the margins rather than the mainstream. That is why we will need a new wave of educational social entrepreneurs all over the developing world in the decade to come.