Development Post

AUTUMN 2013

SPOTLIGHT Can developing countries

leapfrog out-dated Western models?

INTERVIEW Eureka! How to inject

The Education Puzzle: Putting the Pieces Together

We go back to school to report on the new ideas, policies, technologies, and insights on education in development

innovation into business as usual INFOGRAPHIC Navigating the elaborate

labyrinth of education INSIGHTS Ethiopia’s Deputy PM talks

policy, OPIC talks finance, and more

Contents Publisher Development Post Editorial and Creative Director Development Post Research Assistant Kristyna Pelikanova Writers Tristan McConnell Martin Roberts Illustrators Kymba Burrows Phil Howell Sodavekt Chris Wharton Layout Alexander Green Production Rhapsody Media Enquiries Anis Qizilbash 6 Mitre Passage London SE10 0ER Tel: +44(0)207 873 2054 Fax: +44 (0)203 006 8664 info@development-post.com www.development-post.com

Autumn 2013 THE LEADER

04...Briefing...Education for the masses in Colombia, gender parity in Gambia, and transformative growth in Indonesia 05...Feature...Making pipe dreams a reality: How technology could propel developing countries ahead of the West 19...Briefing...Connectivity and classic Nokia phones assist education access in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and across Africa 20...Infographic...We look at the challenges in delivering education 22...Insights...From the head of OPIC to the Deputy PM of Ethiopia, seven experts share their views on education

THE MOTLEY CREW 03...Intro...SciFi corner: A comment from DP on the genesis of the topic of education 09...Experience...Innovation guru Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg tells us how to foment innovation in organizations 13...Feature...We report on the flourishing business of tourism and the promise of job growth in the developing world

COPYRIGHT Š 2013 DEVELOPMENT POST LIMITED. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission.

16...Leader...Finance maven and the head of CDC, Diana Noble shares her experience in leadership and the risky business of investing for good 29...Outro... Parting thoughts from DP on habits

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inTRO / Ideas

THE TABLET IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD The stuff of science fiction is becoming a reality. The Roomba vacuum cleaner is reminiscent of Rosie, the robotic maid from The Jetsons cartoon. The rise of 3D printing smacks of the Star Trek replicator, though it will be quite some time before any of us can request “tea, Earl Grey, hot.” There is even an active global competition –the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE – to create the TV show’s infamous tricorder, “making reliable health diagnoses available directly to ‘health consumers’ in their homes.”

Fiction is becoming reality in the realm of education too. Neal Stephenson’s novel, The Diamond Age, follows the development of Nell, a female underling that learns to navigate through a highly stratified society to find her mentor and take the helm as the leader of the Mouse Army. She acquires the necessary tools and skills to make this journey through a stolen interactive book, a subversive primer intended to educate the reader to think independently and challenge the status quo.

Stephenson’s novel provided the inspiration for a controversial experiment from the people at the One Laptop Per Child project. The people at OLPC left tablets in sealed boxes without instructions in a remote Ethiopian village, presumably where children had never seen the printed word or heard English. Within two weeks, the children and other villagers were singing the English alphabet; later on, they had figured out how to enable (i.e. “hack”) the camera that had been disabled by programmers.

It is not clear that this technology can be leveraged to educate individuals beyond a remedial level. Yet The Diamond Age appears to be just as skeptical of artificial intelligence (in this case, education software) as education policymakers are about the lack of socialization and interaction in these more innovative approaches.

However, an interactive portable device has the capacity to improve access to education, a major issue for developing countries that suffer infrastructure deficits and a lack of teacher capacity. Clearly there is a happy medium to be found. - DP

03 / AUTUMN 2013

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Extending higher education from the elites to the masses Colombia The heated discussions over and the student protests against the proposed reform of Law 30 in 2011 resulted in a withdrawal of the proposal; this would suggest that the priority of the Colombian government is to reach a consensus with the youth. The higher education system in Colombia fares relatively well against its regional and international peers - notably, in terms of diversity of institutional landscape and consistency between national planning and policy formulation - but the country faces the challenge of “expanding enrolment and improving equity, increasing quality and relevance, and making governance and finance more responsive” (OECDWorld Bank, 2012).

The Ministry of National Education set up goals to increase enrolment rates in university or vocational training from 37 per cent to 50 per cent between 2012 and 2014, and tackling the high dropout rate of more than 45 per cent as of 2010. Among other measures, it is crucial not only to expand the highly successful student loan system ICETEX and enhance education access to students regardless their socio-economic level, but also to increase “college readiness” via an adequate secondary preparation.

The announced reform of the National Training Service (SENA), in cooperation with the IADB, aims at improving the coherence of the tertiary education system and ensuring better synergy between higher education skills and the job market, which is critical to curb the youth unemployment that currently stands at 17 per cent. - KP

Briefing / Policy

From gender parity to education for all The Gambia The World Bank has praised the education sector of Africa’s smallest country as the “rising star in West Africa.” Thanks to the initiatives launched by the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education with support from international donors (notably, the Girls’ Scholarship Program that exempted female students in public middle and high schools from the school fees), the Gambia achieved gender parity in primary education enrolment as early as in 2004. With a net primary enrolment rate of 65 per cent (AfDB, 2012), the country

is in line with Sub-Saharan African countries, but still well behind the MDG target of 95 per cent by 2015.

President Yahya Jammeh recently announced plans for free, compulsory, and universal primary education starting from 2014. A rapid increase in the enrolment levels may affect quality, but these risks can be mitigated by lessons learned from the campaign for girls’ empowerment, namely the need for a performance management system, involvement of parents and civil society, and the continuing support of the international community. Joining UNESCO’s Education for All Initiative, also planned for 2014, suggests that Gambia is on the right track. - KP

Leveraging eduction for transformative growth Indonesia For more than a decade, the Indonesian government has demonstrated increased commitment to education, integrating universal access to education and better quality at all levels into its ambitious plans of becoming one of the world’s top 10 economies by 2025.

In 2005, the Ministry of National Education initiated the School Operational Assistance Programme (BOS), providing local schools with block grants. As of 2012, 228,000 basic education institutions and an estimated 43 million students benefitted from the program, pulling the primary enrolment ratio to over 95 per cent. The government also benefitted from support from the World Bank and the European Union via the Basic Education Capacity Trust (2007-2012), which further contributed to equity, efficiency, and quality of basic education during 04 / AUTUMN 2013

the transition towards school-based management reforms. Significant challenges remain, notably in tertiary education: only 23 per cent of eligible students are enrolled in a university (compared to 40 per cent and 46 per cent in neighboring Malaysia and Thailand), primarily due to limited public supply. The Government is currently reviewing the higher education bill passed in July 2012 to find a consensus over the degree of financial autonomy and the competition between public, private, and foreign universities. - KP

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Feature / Education

Leapfrogging the West Enrolment rates are rising around the world, but numbers aren’t everything. Policymakers need to shift their focus from quantity to quality. Success may hinge upon harnessing new technology to help them make the transition.

Written by Tristan McConnell

M

ade almost entirely of corrugated iron, Amaf Academy Primary in Riruta, on Nairobi’s fringes, is a typical Kenyan school.

Getting there means travelling down ever diminishing roads: a paved highway gives way to a narrower tarred road, then one made of dirt with deep and wide ruts, and finally a muddy track scarcely wider then a car.

A flimsy metal gate swings open onto a rough, sloping compound bordered by rows of classrooms with uneven cement floors, walls and roofs made from tin sheets and chicken-wire for windows. There are 525 pupils in navy blue uniforms and 20 classrooms to house them. Each pupil pays Ksh1000 ($11) a month and for that they are given lessons and lunch.

So far, so ordinary. But what makes Amaf different is that for the last year it has been trialing the use of handheld tablet computers.

“We were nervous at first,” said Peter Lalo, the jovial principal.

“We don’t have computers at school, some of the kids don’t even have phones at home so this was passing several stages at once.”

That, some argue, is exactly what developing countries need to

do: not just play catch up but jump ahead.

For some years now Kenya, East Africa’s largest economy, has blazed a trail in technological innovations. Kenyans routinely pay household bills, transfer cash, buy goods and do their banking on mobile phones. As the country’s 3G networks expand and sub$100 smartphones become widely available, Internet, email, and social media (as well as phone calls and text messages) are available almost everywhere and to almost everyone.

People are getting better connected and better informed but this kind of technological accelerant has, until now, stopped at the school gates. Inside, rote learning instructed by teachers standing at blackboards while pupils sit at desks remains the norm.

Nivi Mukherjee is one of the founders of eLimu (“elimu” means “education” in East Africa’s Kiswahili language) a company aiming to use technology to transform the way Kenyan children learn.

“Do we have to follow in the footsteps of the developed world or can we forge our own path and 05 / AUTUMN 2013

leapfrog the mistakes they’ve made?” asked Mukherjee who cited digital innovations in other sectors as an inspiration.

“It has given us the confidence that we can do things differently and better than they’ve done things in the developed world,” she said.

By some measures education in developing countries appears to be enjoying a surge at the moment. Universal primary education policies, whereby states provide free primary schooling, are on the rise (Kenya’s was initiated in 2003) meaning more children than ever are now enrolled in primary education.

But what about the quality of education?

An initiative called Uwezo (meaning “ability”) aims to drive a shift “from the dominant focus on infrastructure and levels of enrolment to the actual learning levels of children” by conducting wide scale household surveys of basic literacy and numeracy across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Uwezo’s findings are sobering.

“Although children are now enrolled in school in unprecedented numbers, they are not learning core skills expected

feature / Education

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Photo: Nathan Heidt - positive6.com

at their age and grade level,” the group said in its most recent report published in 2012 after its third consecutive year of assessment.

Uwezo noted that more than two-thirds of pupils enrolled in Standard 3 failed basic Standard 2 level tests in literacy and numeracy.

One fifth of pupils studying in Standard 7 do not have Standard 2 levels of literacy and numeracy.

This survey data puts numbers to what many already know: “Schooling is not translating into learning,” the report concluded.

Kenya’s ambitions for economic and social development are captured in a document called Vision 2030, which charts the country’s aim of becoming a middle income nation over the next 17 years. But this cannot happen without better education.

“We’re not going to wake

up in 2031 and find ourselves in a developed country,” said Mukherjee. “We recognized that the kids who will be driving the economy in 2030 are sitting in a classroom right now. And that classroom is poorly lit, teachers are often not there, textbooks are missing.”

“We need to shift the focus and meet the gains we’ve made in quantity of education with quality of education,” she said.

Until last year Mukherjee’s project of creating a technologically improved education system seemed like a pipe dream, but then the government caught up, announcing a plan to provide laptops for all new primary school pupils.

President Uhuru Kenyatta made the promise a key plank of his 2013 election manifesto and reiterated it during his inauguration 06 / AUTUMN 2013

in April. Procurement is underway and officials say the laptops should be ready for distribution early next year.

But the hardware is only the beginning. Without the right infrastructure – power, internet, and security – content specifically molded to the curriculum, teachers who know how to use the new devices, and maintenance to keep them running, the technology itself is useless.

That is where private companies like eLimu can come in. “When I heard the government talking about one laptop per child I thought, ‘Forget about the hardware, they need to think about infrastructure, content and training’,” recalled Mukherjee. eLimu uploads the national primary school curriculum onto simple tablet computers, augmenting the six core subjects (mathematics, English, science, Kiswahili, religious studies, and social studies) with animations, videos, and photographs to grab pupils’ attention.

Games and class quizzes are included as well as sections on local news, stories by African writers, and examination tips. The tablets, or laptops, are preloaded with the software so that an Internet connection is useful, but not essential.

Mukherjee emphasizes the role of the quizzes in allowing teachers to track exactly what has been learned, as opposed to just what has been taught, by providing constantly updating class datasets. “How do we start teaching kids about multiplication if they don’t know how to add? The analytics show us what kids know so that we can know what else to

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Feature / Education

“Although children are now enrolled in school in unprecedented numbers, they are not learning core skills expected at their age and grade level”

teach them,” she said.

Quiz results are also accessible by parents, through a separate login, and if an Internet connection is available the data is also forwarded to eLimu’s developers.

Information on which pages and subjects children are most interested in is harvested, helping developers to create more gripping content and perhaps even to inform the curriculum as to what children are responding to.

“You push data to us, we push new content to you,” said Mukherjee.

Lalo, the principal whose school has given the new technology a test run, said pupils’ interest levels rose dramatically with the arrival of the tablets.

“The Kenyan curriculum has been like a punishment for pupils, but these tablets made it interesting. We don’t have to push the pupils to learn, they want to learn,” he said.

Of course, some of this is simply down to the novelty factor, but then test scores also improved. Lalo is a science teacher and said final primary results went from 53 per cent of kids passing to 72 per cent after the tablets were introduced.

“We wanted to make something that was more than just technology for technology’s sake,”

said Mukherjee. Results like these encouraged her to carry on.

Making something for a reason, not just because you can, is a key but often overlooked motivation, according to Michael Trucano, senior ICT and education policy specialist at the World Bank and a leading expert on education technology in the developing world. “My initial response [is always], what problem is this going to solve and how?” he said.

“If you lead with technology it is a supply-side solution to a problem that isn’t properly understood. Real understanding comes from looking at the needs,” said Trucano.

The solution, then, is not to import foreign ideas but to develop local ones.

“If you have folks living in communities, developing technology-enabled solutions for those communities, it is a lot different than someone developing a solution in Silicon Valley or Cambridge or Helsinki or Tokyo and having them say, Boy, I bet they’d like this in Kenya!” he said.

“It’s about solving problems for themselves, not some imagined group halfway around the world.”

For Mukherjee that argument is captured in something as simple 07 / AUTUMN 2013

as a mathematics problem that talks about mandazis (East Africa’s popular fried dough balls) rather than donuts or shillings rather than dollars, making the content local and relevant.

Even when developed locally and packed with local content, new technologies can hit a barrier in the shape of teachers who can be resistant to change.

“Change is very difficult, for pupils and teachers,” said Lalo.

“Many teachers are not trained in using computers at all, and you want them to teach with a tablet?

The traditional way of teaching is still prevalent in Kenya, with a teacher standing there, pumping knowledge from the front of the classroom.”

Putting computers and the Internet in the hands of pupils can seem threatening to teachers who fear they will lose control of the class with children able to read ahead or, worse still, question the teacher.

Resistance is a common phenomenon, said Trucano. “We see that sentiment in country after country. It’s very real and powerful.”

“A teacher at a chalkboard can say something and whether she was right or not none of the students in the classroom would know or challenge her,” said

feature / Education

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“Do we have to follow in the footsteps of the developed world or can we forge our own path and leapfrog the mistakes they’ve made?”

Trucano, “but now they can and that is potentially tremendously disempowering for teachers.”

Kenya recently suffered a lengthy teachers’ strike over pay with some grumbling that the money earmarked for laptops should, instead, be spent on pay rises. Others expressed the fear that computers might come to replace them, but in Lalo’s experience the opposite is true.

“We’ve realized that the teacher is very important to supervise,” he said.

Basic infrastructure problems, such as a lack of electricity, mean that the emerging “flipped classroom” theory – whereby learning is done electronically at home and homework is done under supervision in the classroom – that is gaining traction in the developed world is not yet viable in countries such as Kenya but it is drawing closer.

What this all points to, according to Trucano, is a realization that getting bums on seats in classrooms is not enough. “Education for all, the goal we’ve been working towards for 25-years, and quality education for all aren’t necessarily the same thing,” he said.

What use is a school-leaver who cannot write a grammatically accurate email, solve basic mathematics problems, or use the kinds of technology that are now the essential tools of the modern workforce?

“Employers want more than people who’ve been trained for 16-years in rote memorization skills,” said Mukherjee. “Our education system is failing if we’re not achieving the basics.”

08 / AUTUMN 2013

To have a lasting and wide impact there is agreement that not only must the hardware be available, the content be relevant, and the teachers be onside, but the government too must be on board.

“It’s absolutely key that the government buys into it. Where you’re talking about working in the formal education sector and doing things at scale these things cannot occur without active participation from government,” said Trucano.

In Kenya, where the government has got the rhetoric right it is now down to people like John Temba, ICT head at the Ministry of Education, to make the president’s promise a reality.

Temba talks the talk: “We are living in the 21st century and the skills of a few years ago are already outdated,” he said. “We used to be taught how to write a letter and post it, now we are talking Web 2.0 skills like Facebook and Skype.”

But there is a very pragmatic edge to this drive. “Technology is going to facilitate the kinds of 21st century skills that we need in Kenya,” said Temba.

For the next generation of school leavers to be fit for the modern jobs market the burden to get them there must be shared by everyone: government and donors, pupils and parents, teachers and technology entrepreneurs – the entire “constellation of actors” as Trucano puts it.

“There has to be a fundamental shift,” said Temba. “In our classrooms in Kenya we have blackboards and chalk. That is what an average Kenyan teacher knows and that is how he or she was taught. And that has to change.” - TM

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interview / Innovation

Global development is no stranger to innovation but over the past few years the concept has received more than its fair share of airtime. With aid budgets under pressure, there’s an urgency to do more with less; business as usual isn’t going to work. USAID and DFID’s recent joint venture forming Global Development Innovation Ventures tells us that there’s more to come. But how do you begin to innovate? We find out, with innovation guru Thomas WedellWedellsborg, co-author of Innovation as Usual.

In your book you mention, “building an architecture of innovation.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

It’s about creating routines and habits that support innovation, i.e. making innovation an integrated part of everyday life.

Very often, companies trying to drive innovation will host a trip to “brainstorm island,” perhaps in the form of a two-day workshop. That’s very exciting but you effectively isolate the innovation to only two days a year. But if you want to build a real culture of innovation, the trick is to make it a part of what people do every day. You have to go beyond trying to change mindsets. This is about changing behaviors. Typically, the way to do that is by working not only with what goes on in people’s heads but also the environment of the organization.

Can you give an example of how to use the environment to foster innovation?

Pixar. When you look at their track record, they’ve been fantastic at developing successful movies. They have simple routines for sharing ideas called dailies. If you’re familiar with the Agile Methodology, Pixar’s dailies are similar to something called stand ups. Every morning, you start in a group circle and you say, “This is what I’m working on. These are some of the issues I’m facing.” Through simple habits like this, you can stimulate innovation; in this case, making sure that people don’t work on an idea in isolation for months without getting input or feedback from others.

09 / AUTUMN 2013

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interview / Innovation

Why should people do this and how does it help?

Most ideas tend to be flawed. You have an idea that you’re utterly in-love with, and you think it’s perfect. You may spend a full year trying to build this thing and only when you take it to market do you realize you’ve made a couple of wrong assumptions. Had you uncovered those issues early on, you could have fixed them. So in this particular example, stand ups are a form of frequent feedback. It helps you to reality test your ideas very rapidly. You can find another example of this in startup literature, which is really about the notion of getting out of the building and exposing your ideas to the real world as quickly and as frequently as possible.

What are the most common barriers to creating a culture of innovation and how do you overcome them?

It differs from organization to organization, and one of your jobs as a leader is to diagnose your own organization. But one common mistake is focusing on trying to think differently.

Innovation isn’t about thinking differently, it’s about acting differently. In practice, that means if you don’t know what innovation or innovation behaviors look like, it becomes extremely difficult to make progress. You will be mired in abstraction, like talking about dinosaurs.

I hesitate to use the word culture because the word culture is so associated with mindsets and with what’s in your head. But this is about understanding the innovative behaviors that we want to see in our people and making them part of our everyday lives.

How can organizations pursue a path of innovation with no budget?

It’s a relative truth that you can’t do something really ambitious without a budget. But if you commit yourself to making things better and not necessarily aiming for a completely game-changing innovation, that’s where it becomes more possible.

First, look at innovating with what you’re already doing. Ask yourself, “What do we have? What are our existing tools and resources and what are the things we’re already trying to do? How could we use what we have differently instead of trying to dream up a new project?”

Second, find collaboration partners externally who have an interest in what you do and have budget to spend.

10 / AUTUMN 2013

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interview / Innovation

Finally, the less budget you have, the more you’re dependent on people’s time. One of the few things that can motivate people is to allow them to be part of something innovative, something in which they have a personal interest. A lot of companies say, “We need to innovate or the competition will beat us.” Maybe that’s true, but that doesn’t really motivate anyone. The innovators I’ve worked with tend to be motivated by personal interest. You’re lucky that in the development sector many people are driven by their own passions. If you allow people to tap into that, you’ll find that they’ll give far more of their time simply because they’re personally invested.

For organizations spending taxpayers’ money, how do you make failure acceptable? How do you define what kind of failure is okay?

First I want to make it clear that failure and risk are bad. That might seem self-evident, but a lot of people in the innovation business say you need to embrace failure, almost as if it were an end in itself. It’s not. The very definition of risk is that it is something you are trying to avoid.

Successful innovators try to find ways of minimizing risk instead of trying new things and minimizing failure. Instead of accepting more risk, the question should be, “If there’s something we want to do, can we find creative ways to minimize risk? Can we outsource some of this? Can we avoid risk and failure to the fullest possible extent?”

One useful tip is to be aware of the number of failures that will get you fired. No matter which organization you work for, there is an amount of money or level of failure that you can get away with, but once you push past that threshold heads tend to roll. So what is an affordable loss for you? For your department or organization? Take that as a constraint and determine how to best use that knowledge to make progress.

Secondly, it is important to define areas where people aren’t allowed to experiment. If you work in pharmaceuticals, you don’t mess with the compliance. Elsewhere, it could be ethical guidelines, safety, civil rights, etc. You can then define areas where there’s scope for innovation. Internal processes tend to yield lots of room for trying new things. For example, “how do we meet our customers? When we meet a customer now, we tend to do it like this. Is there a different approach we can try?” As a leader, you need to define the sandbox and say, “Hey, don’t try to get creative with these five things. These other eight areas though, feel free.”

11 / AUTUMN 2013

interview / Innovation

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Demonstrating value for money is important in the international development sector. How do you quantify innovation?

Before you start the quantification, have clarity on the goals you are trying to achieve. Second, be aware of which problems are worth solving and how you currently measure those. There must be some existing metrics in development organizations regarding lives saved or access to clean water etc. Third, there are lots of existing tools. A good book called Making Innovation Work, digs deep into the specific metrics question. For example, there are input measures, looking at how much you invest; process measures, mapping evidence of progress or learning; and output or outcome measures, which are really about impact.

There is a belief that innovation can’t be measured. That’s not true. If you delve into the literature, you will find the metrics. The real issue is matching the available metrics to a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve. If you want people to innovate, what is your specific goal? What is it you want them to do? Is it about getting better branding? Is it about attracting more employees and more talent? Is it about gaining market share? Is it about saving lives?

If you’re advising a leader, what’s the most important starting point for creating an architecture of innovation in their organization?

Think like a doctor and start with a diagnosis before you begin to operate. The reality is that you might not have too many shots at getting whatever you’re trying to change right. So a really, really important thing for leaders is to start by asking, “What’s stopping us at the moment? Is it a matter of defining clear goals? Is it a matter of connecting people to the outside? Is it a matter of encouraging people to share their ideas more quickly and freely? Is it because we don’t have connection systems?” There are so many different questions with equally numerous answers, but too often leaders assume they know all the answers and jump into a solution that doesn’t help them at all or has nothing to do with the real issue.

In many companies leaders have been quick to assume their company is not innovating because people are afraid of change.

Once they’ve made that diagnosis, however superficially, it becomes very easy to go out and say, “We need to buy into some change management courses. We need to make our people embrace change.” If the real issue is that you’re not promoting people who develop good ideas, then that has nothing to do with change management courses.

That’s why we like to say start with the diagnosis. “In which areas do we think we have the biggest problems? Is it because people don’t get clear guidance? Is it because they are too isolated in their daily work and unexposed to new input? Is it a motivation or incentive issue? And so on. Once you get the diagnosis right or roughly right, then you can start experimenting, and then you have a greater chance of eventually getting it right.

12 / AUTUMN 2013

Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is a partner at the management consultancy The Innovation Architects and co-author of Innovation As Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life.

Feature / Skills

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Tourism and training, a joint catalyst for development Developing countries hope to reap the benefits of one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing industries. But what will it take?

Written by Martin Roberts and Esther Werling

The

Seychelles Islands were seemingly locked into a colonialera cycle of dependence and poverty before they built an international airport in 1971. As a small, isolated, and sparsely populated archipelago, prospects for integration into the world economy were remote, while the islands could earn little of the hard currency desperately needed for investment, because they relied on unpredictable harvests for cash crops and depressed commodity prices.

Today, the Seychelles have the highest United Nations Human Development Index ranking in Africa, and even score higher than new European Union member Croatia. They have a diversified economy, which grew by an average of 5.1 per cent a year between 1977-2009, easily outpacing an average of 3.2 per cent for Sub-Saharan Africa.

Tourism has made the difference in the Seychelles, with manufacturing and financial services rising in its wake, and many developing countries hope to reap similar benefits from what is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing industries.

The U.N. World Trade Organization (UNWTO) estimates tourism turns over more than $1 trillion a year, or 9 per cent of the world’s economy, and creates one in eleven jobs worldwide. Looking ahead, international tourist arrivals in emerging economy destinations are expected to increase at double the pace of those in advanced economies between 2010-30.

Of particular interest to developing countries with fastgrowing populations is the potential for tourism to create jobs, especially among young people.

Global youth unemployment stands at approximately 73 million in 2013, or about 12.6 per cent of the workforce, and eight million job seekers join the market every year in Sub-Saharan Africa alone.

Fortunately, the region is expected to add 3.2 million tourism-related jobs over the coming decade.

As well as driving economic growth and job creation by earning hard currency, and luring foreign direct investment, tourism also provides other benefits to developing countries by contributing to socio-cultural exchange and understanding, fostering peace, protecting 13 / AUTUMN 2013

cultural heritage, and boosting cultural identity.

Tourism is not a quick fix, however, and there are many potential stumbling blocks to overcome before repeating the Seychelles’ success story. One of the first issues the Seychelles had to deal with was red tape tourists are not a captive market so convoluted and expensive visa application procedures will simply make them head elsewhere.

Less obvious is that care needs to be taken to prevent leakage i.e. tourist dollars from leaving a destination as soon as they enter, via foreign-owned suppliers such as tour operators, hotel chains, airlines, advertisers and by visitors consuming imported food and drink. An estimated 70 per cent of all money spent by tourists in Thailand ends up leaving the country, for example.

Another pitfall to be avoided with tourism infrastructure projects is to ensure they do not divert government resources from vital areas such as education and health.

Job-creation is also fraught with problems, because entry-

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FEATURE / Skills

“Tourism is laborintensive; the more clients you have, the more people you need serving them,” says Fred Kaigwa, CEO of Kenya Association of Tour Operators

level working conditions can be unsocial and irregular, including long hours and on-call shifts. Jobs are often casual and temporary, pay can be low and career opportunities limited.

The U.N. World Development Report 2013 suggests that jobs with the greatest development payoffs are those that raise incomes, make cities function better, connect the local economy to global markets, protect the environment and give people a stake in their societies.

Training is essential to ensure sustainable development and job growth, as well as prevent leakage, so many initiatives focus on training as a means of ensuring that jobs move up the value chain, and create a professional workforce to provide the services and infrastructure needed to keep tourist revenues in-country.

“Tourism is very good for job creation as you can have somebody ready to work in six months. It is labor-intensive; the more clients you have, the more people you need serving them,” said Fred Kaigwa, CEO of the Kenya Association of Tour Operators.

“Like any other industry,

tourism is structured from top to bottom. You have an apex, midlevel, service and basic. There is an opportunity for everybody, depending on how much they are ready to invest in education,” Mr. Kaigwa noted. “Every operator needs financial professionals, marketing and customer care.”

Coupled with government policy measures and training in many countries in SubSaharan Africa, tourism has begun to attract more foreign direct investment. The latter is important in countries whose domestic savings are too low to finance infrastructure. It also allows for skills and technology to be transferred from developed countries, which in turn creates jobs and reduces poverty.

Training also has the advantage of addressing problems on a region-by-region basis.

In Latin America, for instance, programs tend to tackle the region’s high level of violent crime – the homicide rate is 36 per 100,000 compared with a global average of 11 – which lose the region an estimated 14.6 per cent of its gross domestic product in potential earnings. Job creation 14 / AUTUMN 2013

also helps prevent young people from being caught up in violence, in which they are disproportionately involved as both victims and perpetrators.

Although university courses have long been offered in Fiji, where tourism is a main source of formal employment, investments in tourism schools and foreign language programs are still needed in some countries, especially in rural areas where literacy and formal education are low.

One program which seeks to plug the gap in education is the High Impact Tourism Training (HITT) initiative, which is backed by UNWTO and implemented by the SNV Netherlands Development Organization, with €2 million ($2.7 million) in funding from the E.U. The HITT benefits 8,000 workers and entrepreneurs in Benin, Cambodia, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Nepal, and Vietnam, with market-oriented, tourism training in major working areas.

Special attention is paid to groups that are almost always left out of vocational training such as women, young people, the unskilled, and semi-skilled.

The program improves their

Feature / Skills

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technical and management skill levels, enabling them to obtain better jobs, higher wages and greater employment security.

Meanwhile, they develop the know-how and contacts to capitalize on opportunities and help grow their sector, in a sustainable and pro-poor way.

In Ghana, for example, HITT is on track to help 1,200 people drawn from unskilled and semi-skilled workers, hotel and restaurant workers who receive on-the-job training, and street food vendors.

“There is one lady who had just left secondary school and had no tourism-related skills; she had worked as a cosmetics sales agent.

She showed an interest in the training, and now she has finished she has a job as a front desk officer in a hotel,”, HITT Ghana Country Coordinator, Mawuko Fumey said.

Another beneficiary is the Pink Hostel in Ghanaian capital Accra, whose guests are encouraged to visit the JayNii Streetwise Organisation, a grassroots NGO working to protect and educate street children.

City tours also take in the innovative social enterprise, Trashy Bags, where local people

Defining the economic contribution of tourism direct contribution COMMODITIES

•Accomodation •Transportion •Entertainment •Attractions

SPENDING

INDUSTRIES

•Accomodation •Food & beverage •Retail •Transport •Culture, sports & recreation

indirect contribution

•Travel & tourism investment •Government •Supplier’s purchases

D efiniti o ns Direct: immediate effects Indirect:impact on industries supplying products and services to hotels Induced: when employees of hotels and hotel suppliers spend their income locally

are employed to make recycled, eco-friendly bags and other products from the plastic trash that is becoming an increasing environmental issue in Ghana.

While the hostel takes social responsibility seriously, as a budget stopover aimed at international students it could not have afforded to set up in-house training without HITT. Hostel manager Marian

•Local's domestic travel & tourism •Business’ domestic travel •Visitor exports •Government T&T

induced contribution

•Food & beverage •Recreation •Clothing •Housing •Household goods

tota l c o n t r i b u t i o n

•GDP •Employment

Source: World Travel and Tourism Council 2013

Thompson and her staff are now taking part in a ready-made training package over three months.

“It gives a company a training model, an objective model that I’ll adopt after we finish,” Ms. Thomson said. “It’s useful, because as a small company it offers basic training I can incorporate into my business systems, and saves me from developing it.” - MR

With generous support from the The Hilton Foundation

Improving the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable people throughout the world 15 / AUTUMN 2013

interview / Leader

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different aim. Not for myself, but for other people. It also demonstrated to me that the world of the private sector and NGOs are coming closer together. There are organizations that use the best of both worlds to achieve great things in the world, so I suppose I was lucky enough to join one of those organizations that I felt was pioneering in that trend.

Diana Noble is CEO of the UK’s development finance arm, CDC. She shares her insights on hiring quality people, holding high standards, and focusing on the bigger picture.

You have a strong finance background, but you left private equity in 2005 for the Clinton Foundation.

Can you tell us why you made that choice?

It wasn’t exactly linear. I think lots of careers aren’t linear. I made the decision to stop pure private equity and investing and took a break to pursue a master’s degree at Oxford. I highly recommend further education to anyone at any point in their career, particularly as you get older, since you get so much out of it. I didn’t want the next phase of my working life to be about myself; I wanted it to be about having some kind of impact on the world, but I didn’t know what form that took. I was the classic finance investing professional who was ill-informed about the development world. When people suggested development, I said, “that’s definitely not for me,” and I used phrases like “long on good intentions and short on effectiveness.” What changed my mind was meeting Ira Magaziner, CEO of Clinton Health Access Initiative, who impressed me greatly. He talked my language, and my language is one of strategy, focused action, demonstrable results, and small inputs. Small costs and small teams, producing a multiplier effect in terms of results.

After that, I felt I could use my skills for a

How did you manage the transition into development?

It didn’t feel like a transition because I interacted with people with similar backgrounds and who spoke my language. We start by asking and analyzing the problem. The problem was that children across the poorest countries aren’t getting on ARVs, an HIV AIDs treatment, in the same way as adults are. As many things are in the social world, it’s a multi-dimensional problem, so how do we solve each one of these elements? At a global level, it was about getting drug companies to manufacture the right kind of treatment for children, getting them to completely change the formula and produce a simple pill that was easy to store, transport, and ingest. Some things were done at the patient level, like encouraging mothers to bring in sick children to get treatment; in other cases we had to approach the doctors’ level, specifically their training, because patients can’t always tell them what’s wrong and there are constant fluctuations in size and weight that make dosing very challenging. In other words, the approach and challenge of solving a multi-dimensional issue was similar within both the private and public sector.

Can you describe your typical day for our readers?

This year is very different to last year. Last year it was very much around people. When I joined, I realized the delta between success and failure was going to be the quality of the people we hire. We hired 33 people last year and we put a huge amount of effort into identifying people with the skills and motivation to do our kind of investing. That meant people we can trust to make investments in very hard places, to do the legals when your counterparty is in a very challenging place, or to understand what the environmental, social, and governance standards should be.

There is still more of that this year, but with nearly 80 people now we’ve really ramped up our investment activities. It looks like we’ll doing four times the activity we did last year. There’s been a big

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interview / Leader

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“The delta between success and failure is in the quality of people you hire”

element of honing and reviewing strategies, because we want to make sure that our capital goes to the right places. That means a lot of new processes as the new teams come on board. So it’s been a combination of sitting on investment committees, reviewing strategies, and trying to get processes structured correctly for a much higher level of activity.

What have been the biggest lessons of your career?

There have been several major lessons that are important and that I’ve been able to apply here at CDC. First, I learned at the Clinton Foundation that sub-market compensation isn’t necessarily a barrier to hiring fantastic people; not everyone is purely motivated by financial gain. Learning opportunities are hugely important. But for that to work, the organization has to create a platform where people can clearly see the impact for which they were directly responsible. If you can do that, then you will be able to attract fantastic people.

Second, it’s not just about the money at your disposal, it’s much more about people. Of course, we have a $4 billion balance sheet and that helps, but as a development organization, you always want to do more than what your budget allows. Yet if you can put together a team of high caliber people aligned around achieving common aims, it creates so much more impact and results than just having money.

The third thing I learned was at a different stage in my career, at Reed Elsevier. It was the first time I tried to put a model in place of dual purpose investing, where we were investing not only for financial return, but also for the commercial benefits of the corporate.

So we might come across a transaction that looks incredibly attractive from a financial standpoint, but we weren’t clear about the commercial benefit. Or we

came across the reverse, where there was fantastic commercial benefit associated with really bad financial investment. In reality, these things shouldn’t be a trade off; you should just have minimum standards for both. We really applied that dual objective here, for development impact and for financial return. If we don’t meet the minimum standards on either, then we don’t proceed.

CDC has come under a lot of criticism recently and in the past from various actors. Why do you think that is and what has been done to address it?

I think it happened because the stakeholders at CDC rightly felt that the development part of the mission had gotten a little lost over the past few years. They looked at investments being made in places like China, and thought, does that really need UK taxpayers’ money now? Certainly it did at one point, but China changed so quickly, and the organization didn’t keep testing whether it was right to continue investing there.

When I joined, we agreed we would focus on Africa and South Asia, because that’s where the majority of the world’s poor reside. And it’s aligned with our shareholder, the Department for International Development. We also decided to provide more capital directly, something CDC used to do. That would allow us to satisfy the demand for capital in a much more holistic way to those regions.

I’m a huge fan of funds; it allows you to be amazingly impactful across many companies. We support 1, 200 companies here, which we’d never be able to do if we did that all directly. Funds have an incredibly important role here, but they should be a balanced part of a portfolio, along with providing direct equity and debt.

Thirdly, we increased our focus on development impact. We’ve aligned our long-term compensation to this goal, so we only do well individually if we make development investments that are successful over time.

This is a very long-term business. I’m not saying, “we’ve cracked it, we’re successful, we got there.” What I can say is that I’m delighted with the progress we’ve made in the first eighteen months; we’re on a really good path. I will only say we’ve been successful when in ten or fifteen years, we can say our investments have achieved the things we wanted, primarily job creation in countries and regions of Africa and South Asia; we’ve played a major part in growing

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interview / Leader

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WHAT IS CDC?

“Really listen to the people you want to serve in the countries where you are trying to make a difference” and developing long-term sustainable responsibly run businesses; we’ve protected and slightly grown our balance sheet. Then I’ll be able to say we’ve done a great job. But there is a long way to go.

How do you plan to deal with it in the future?

This is a role that’s never going to be devoid of media attention or controversy, because it’s an area people feel very passionate about, and it’s taxpayers’ money.

I’m under no illusion that we will never get it wrong.

There will be times when we invested money in people who, even if we ran the best processes we could, we will look back and wish we hadn’t backed that person.

We will make judgements about whether a market will grow or the management team will get it plain wrong.

Across the balance of our portfolio, however, I hope that the ratio will be right.

I keep the big picture in mind. As long as my board, my shareholders, and I feel that CDC is holding itself to high standards for what we do, our processes, of how we direct our capital, what we’re trying to achieve, how we measure it, how we communicate that, I hope we will be forgiven the occasional slip up, because that‘s the nature of what we do. If you give someone a challenge of investing capital in the hardest places, you should expect there to be some mistakes along the way, and I am certainly prepared for that.

What advice would you give aspiring leaders?

In the development world, there are three things I would advise. First, in the early stages of your career, learn as many hard skills as you possibly can, whether that’s analytical frameworks, learning how to achieve more with fewer resources, financial skills, consulting type skills, etc. Or be a specialist in an area. I’d always advise that early on.

Second, spend as much time as you can doing and minimize time in the meetings with grandiose aims. I was slightly shocked at how much time

Formed in 1948, CDC is the world’s oldest Development Finance Institution (DFI) with a mission to create jobs and make a lasting difference in people’s lives in some of the world’s poorest places. Its portfolio of investments are valued at £2.25bn (year end 2012) and includes 1,250 investee businesses, which together employed 1,109,000 people last year.

CDC works across the following sectors, directly and indirectly: with a particular focus on manufacturing, agribusiness, infrastructure, financial institutions, construction, health, and education. It invests directly through: equity, debt, mezzanine, and finance to businesses; and indirectly through supporting fund managers aligned with their aims.

Wholly owned by the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID), CDC is self-funding and has not received taxpayer capital since 1995. In 2012, CDC invested £397m in businesses in developing countries, making a total profit (after tax) of £223m. people in the development world spend in meetings talking about big picture aims, sitting in Washington or London, compared to the amount of time spent getting things done. If I were starting my career, I would always be asking to be sent into the field, to get my hands dirty, and deliver results.

Third would be to really listen to the people you want to serve in the countries where you are trying to make a difference. Try to be, in my private sector phraseology, “market-led;” try to understand what the needs are, and what will actually work for that region and the people in it. We may be very good in a given sector, but we’re not quite good enough at asking or understanding what people will buy and what people will need, or how people will change their behavior.

I think everyone reaches an inflexion point in their career, transforming from a really effective individual into an effective manager. You suddenly realize how much pleasure you get from the success of the people who work for you, rather than from your own individual success. Once you make that transition, you can be a good manager because you genuinely care about the people who work for you and their achievements. - DP

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BRIEFING / Technology

Q&A with George Ferreira, Samsung Africa’s Chief Operating Officer Tell us about Samsung’s classrooms in Africa

We converted a 40-foot container into a classroom called a Solar Powered Internet School (SPIS).

Each classroom sits eight rows of three students, and each student is connected to a tablet or note PC. At the front, we’ve got an e-board for teachers to connect with students.

In the back are a battery, a server, and connectivity via 3G or area cell.

On top of the container are solar panels, which power the computers, the server, the lighting, and the air conditioning. Botswana’s Ministry of Education bought 20 containers, laying them next to and on top of each other to make a school in the middle of the bush where there was no school before.

How do the kids react?

In the first lesson they’re a bit hesitant and unsure how to press buttons, type, or search the Internet. By the end of the week these kids understand it, they know how to use it. I think it shows how much children can learn. They’re picking things up so much faster than adults. I see how quickly they adapt and embrace technology; shyness or lack of understanding is quickly overcome, and by the second period they are using it. -DP

Don’t throw that Nokia away Fifteen years ago, the computers we used in schools had between one and six gigabytes of hard drive space. Now, the Micro SD cards that from our mobile phones exceed that storage. The only difference between computers then and mobiles now is connectivity. It was this realization

that led Paiwastoon’s Mike Dawson to create Ustad Mobile, a simple mobile application for adult literacy education in Afghanistan. “The point of the device is to work and function reliably in the given environment. A new commercially available tablet costs $150. A basic Nokia phone costs $25, and in six months we haven’t had a single breakage,” says Dawson. With high levels of mobile infiltration in developing countries and an existing mobile phone infrastructure in place, the application overcomes the access barrier to basic literacy, especially for women and girls. Installed on a mobile SIM, the software contains up to grade three literacy and numeracy curriculum, in Dari and Pashto. The software is free but the monitoring is a paid service. “The point is the education outcome, the learning, and the content,” says Dawson, and with built-in metrics, teachers can monitor and measure learning, remotely. -DP 19 / AUTUMN 2013

Skype and skills deficit A major hurdle to delivering education is undertrained teachers, especially in rural areas.

Developments in Literacy (DIL), a Pakistani NGO, trains teachers in remote regions using Skype.

“Every teacher needs basic English proficiency development,” explains COO Anjana Raza. “Teachers definitely need more face time.

The main problem is they don’t spend enough time speaking and listening in English.” Two to three times a week, a team of volunteers from DIL’s offices around the world teach basic English through Skype to teachers sitting in small groups in remote areas of Pakistan. Given the unreliable electricity access and limited Internet penetration, DIL is now experimenting with satellite connectivity, with plans to expand access to meet demand. -DP

Insights / Financing

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Q&A with Elizabeth Littlefield, President & CEO Overseas Private Investment Corporation Financing education in developing countries can be challenging. OPIC tells us how they do it.

Can you tell our readers a little about OPIC? Our mandate is to help attract private capital, particularly U.S. private capital, to address development challenges in the lower-income countries of the world. We manage a portfolio of almost $17 billion, spread across 105 countries. That’s relatively evenly split amongst sectors that support sustainable economic development – infrastructure, financial services, telecommunications, transportation, power and energy, etc.

We operate on a fully commercial basis. Even though we take risks that no other institution will take, we generate income every year for the taxpayer and have a very good track record.

How do you see the role of development finance institutions in education development?

That most people think that education is something that should be provided by the government makes it a really tough market to finance. It is one

of the least attractive sectors from an investor’s standpoint because of the uncertainty and long-ended nature of financial returns and the challenge of taking collateral – it’s unthinkable to foreclose on a school.

We’ve had success with providing expansion financing for existing successful models. Stateof-the-art technology during teaching or brick-and-mortar facilities can be financed on a project finance model, i.e. where the cash flows can reliably repay the loan.

Frankly, education entities have the same problems that any other small and medium enterprise has, which is that there’s very little money of the right tenure and the right size available in the domestic markets. So, we look for alignment of like-minded, mission-driven investors that are bringing different types of capital together at the same time.

Are there innovative mechanisms and approaches?

OPIC is in the process of negotiating terms with Bridge International Academies on $10 million in financing for high quality, affordable schools in Kenya. The 237 low-cost private schools will educate an estimated 300,000 students in Kenya by 2022.

The rapid urbanization and growth of the middle class on the continent means that younger generations will seek work in upand-coming fields and require more training and education to do so. In this case, we are looking to combine our resources – usually debt instruments – to leverage the equity and grant money of other investors. Another 22 / AUTUMN 2013

potential innovative approach is development or social impact bonds; in the U.S. they’re called pay-for-success bonds. They’re very explicit about providing early stage capital for projects based on their results. Education could be an interesting application because educational outcomes are clearly measurable and there are likely willing funders that have an interest in those results.

What kind of deals have you done in the sector recently?

At the large end of the scale, our board just approved our first ever partnership with the Asian Development Bank to finance the Academic Health Center in Malaysia that will be serving the whole region. That $250 million will support Malaysia’s first fully integrated private medical school with a teaching hospital.

In the middle, we’ve just signed off a $30 million deal financing for the Aga Khan Medical Hospital and teaching hospital in Karachi.

Pakistan. The money we’re providing will expand the hospital by 40 per cent and the intensive care unit by about 60 per cent in terms increases in the number of beds. The hospital treats 100,000 in-patients and a million plus outpatients a year.

We also do small deals, like a $1.4 million political risk insurance contract for the American school in Bamako, Mali which enabled it to stay open when other schools in Mali had to shut down.

We’re thrilled about a financing transaction for an organization called NETKETABi, which means “netbook” in Arabic, to provide low cost laptops to community afterschool centers in the West Bank.

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What are the opportunities for financing education?

Building demonstration portfolios of school investment loans that have a track record of successful repayments is an interesting opportunity for the lenders. The advent of technology-based distance learning can be very attractive, too, because it enables higher quality education through lower cost facilities.

But an area that may be overlooked that has a powerful development impact is private schools. The schools that are strictly public sector tend to be the business for aid or the grant-based development agencies. When you get OPIC and other DFIs whose mandate is to work on commercial principles with the private sector, obviously, we are limited to private schools. The ability to charge a tuition fee is then pivotal in terms of our repayment. The important takeaway is the link between the presence of private schools and the ability to attract foreign direct investment into these markets.

Many of these lower income countries that are hungry for FDI can’t attract international companies unless they can bring expatriates to work in those companies and they can’t bring expatriates unless the expatriates have some place they can send their kids to school. So we see a direct correlation between the availability of private education in English and the ability of countries to attract foreign investments to their markets.

INSIGHTS / Policy

now, we have secured nearly $430 million but are still looking for another $100 million. Some organizations have already shown their commitment.

Q&A with H.E. Demeke Mekonnen Hassen, Deputy Prime Minister & Minister of Education, Ethiopia Ethiopia’s transformation has been nothing short of remarkable.

Meet the Education Minister who will help Ethiopia overcome new challenges.

How are the education programs being funded? How do you intend to plug the shortfall mentioned in the education strategic plan?

The number one driver of successful education today is government commitment.

Twenty-five per cent of the government budget is allocated to education; this is 4.5 per cent of the GDP. After government support is the public. The public facilitates school construction, rural schools, and the related courses. The third source of funding are our development partners. We have around 30 development partners engaged in different areas of education. Our primary contributors are the UK’s DFID, in coordination with the World Bank, the Global Partnership for Education, the Finnish government, Netherlands, Italian Corporation, USAID, and other U.N. agencies — organizations like UNICEF and UNDP. Through donors, we are entering the second General Education Quality Improvement Program. Up to 23 / AUTUMN 2013

How is Ethiopia ensuring the demand of the labor force is being met?

There is a big mismatch between the supply and the demand, which needs to be refined and corrected.

We’re already addressing the issue. We are gathering data on the needs of the private and public sectors; the education system should develop plans depending on the demand of the industry. For example, we’re mobilizing our education system to re-orient their plans in response to the known demand for civil engineers, electrical engineers, medical doctors, etc. As a developing country there is lots of construction: road construction, dam construction, buildings, housing, schools, hospitals, and so on. So a significant number of graduates should be technologists, engineers, mathematicians, physicians, and the like. Another important point is, at the higher level we have a 70/30 ratio. Seventy per cent of our students are expected to join higher education for science and technology, while only 30 per cent are expected to join for humanities and arts. This is also our mechanism to align the demand and supply side.

What are Ethiopia’s education challenges?

The critical challenge is quality, assuring quality at different levels.

Second is sustaining access and equity, especially in underserved

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regions and remote areas. The third challenge is finance; we have a funding gap. We have more than 30,000 primary schools, over 21 million students, and in excess of 400,000 teachers. You can imagine the challenge of fulfilling these needs; education is becoming more capital intensive. There are also problems with leadership capacity, the technical capacity of teachers, and technology.

The infrastructure is still poor; accessing the Internet, providing modern facilities and the like is also a challenge for us.

What is the government doing to help overcome those challenges?

To address the quality issue, we have adopted the best experiences and practices across the globe, from Asia to Europe, from Latin America to North America, and

Insights / Policy

customized them for the Ethiopian context. Having explored the local experience, we have developed a clear, quality assurance package for general education, vocational and technical education, and for higher education.

A government-endorsed package is already available for higher education; some school communities are already implementing this and the results are promising. We still cannot assure broad quality standards, but we are on the right track with that organized program.

For access and equity, again we look to scale up best practices in targeted areas. For example, for 2013 and ’14, we have a defined plan to enrol three million kids that are out of school today. We are also organizing parent committees and different social organizations

24 / AUTUMN 2013

to address this school enrolment problem and the issue of dropouts.

Regarding financing, the government is committed to increase the allocation of the necessary budgets without affecting other programs, and still we are working with development partners to increase their contribution and grow our implementation capacity.

To upgrade teacher capacity, we introduced a teachers’ training program, short term and long term, but that requires a lot of work. The program is already designed, implementation has already started, and the lessons are ready to export. The matter is how to scale up to all 30,000 schools, to all universities, as well as vocational and technical schools.

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Learning by doing Despite capacity challenges, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development is determined to mobilize communities to foster sustainable development.

Our objective is to create social capital at the grass roots level in Afghanistan. We are mainly involved in empowering rural communities by uniting them at the village and district levels through Community Development Councils (CDC). The leadership of CDCs are four executive members elected at village level. Each newly formed CDC registers with us to obtain resources. We provide block grants to each CDC, allocating $200 per household per village up to a ceiling of $60,000; they have to contribute a minimum of 10 per cent towards the grant.

The newly formed CDC creates a village development plan and they use the grant to implement the projects themselves. We provide

Briefing / Rural Access

training in project management, dispute resolution, procurement, and social issues. One of the projects they tend to prioritize is the school, which we encourage them to construct themselves, so they often commission local construction companies, mobilizing local resources. They get approval from the Ministry of Education, and after the school is built it is handed over to the education center with a plan for how to run it.

We educate communities in an informal way; it’s learning by doing. We help them to foster collaboration, improve social issues, discuss their community’s matters, and develop leadership, which we believe is a sustainable approach to better develop rural Afghanistan. We believe rural development is not only about physical infrastructure; it’s also about people and that’s where we engage with rural communities, to help them have a stake in governance. One of our successful models for the past 12 years has been the National Solidarity Program (NSP) where we involve national and international NGOs by using their capacity to facilitate our service delivery to every single village in the country.

The NSP is unique as it marks the first time we recruited rural

communities to manage and implement development.

In the past it was commissioned out to contractors or the public sector. Through the NSP, we mobilized communities across 40,000 villages and it has also allowed us to promote a culture of contribution. For the past 10 years, $1.2 billion of block grants have been given to 31,000 CDCs across Afghanistan and more than 70,000 projects have been implemented.

CDC contributions, donated through free labor, equipment, materials, and in some cases financial contributions, have added an estimated $180m on top of the block grants. When we compare CDC projects with projects from construction companies and other sectors, the cost of development is lower, while maintaining good quality and sustainability. We encourage community ownership, which is key to sustainability of development efforts. For the first time we have laid foundations for thorough and systematic partnership between villages and central government. This changes people’s political perceptions and attitudes. This contributes to better governance.

Mohammad Tariq Ismati, Deputy Minister for Programs at Afghanistan’s Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development

The Canadian Council for International Co-operation is Canada’s national umbrella organization that brings together the main Civil Society Organizations involved in international development. CCIC seeks to end global poverty, and to promote social justice and human dignity for all.

25 / AUTUMN 2013

Insights / Technology

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Alleviating teacher shortages and engagement through technology While I was attending a conference several years ago, a South African woman stood up and pronounced “Africa needs the Internet and roads.” Of course!

Both the Internet and roads are needed for communication and access.

Communication enables understanding through collaboration and sharing. It also supports the innovation and creativity that help countries grow.

The Internet improves access to education through digital resources – text, video, animations, sounds and images – that can often be adapted to meet individual learners’ needs more effectively than the printed word.

The Internet and growth of social media also help people to learn from others anywhere in the world adding authenticity and relevance to their learning. With 57 million learners still out of school and the quality of education in significant need of improvement, addressing teacher shortages and skills capacity is vital. Technology can play a significant role.

Cisco is addressing these issues through the development of a low cost, low powered solution for remote education and skills development in rural areas in India and South Africa. The

developments are an initiative of the Inclusive Growth Business Unit based at Cisco’s Global Development Center in Bangalore.

The Unit aims to empower and enable rural citizens by deploying technology to offer benefits in education, skills and healthcare.

Given teacher shortages in rural areas and the migration of better teachers to cities, the Cisco Integrated Classroom (CIC) was devised as a low powered solution focused on providing remote teaching, skills training, and healthcare across the Internet that would work well across low bandwidth (1mbps) connections. CIC comprises an integrated computer, projector, speaker, camera, microphone, power management, and wireless router that will support around 30 Internet enabled devices.

CIC also comes with a WebEx virtual classroom license so that teachers can teach from wherever they are via a remote classroom, interacting with local teachers and learners. In South Africa the solution is being trialled with mobile services as well as broadband Internet as 3G coverage is more likely to be available in remoter locations.

If a local teacher is not available to support learners, then a community member can supervise under the watchful eye of the remote teacher.

Early prototypes of CIC showed that learner engagement improved; several classes could be taught at one time; and, interestingly, learners were more willing to ask questions than when a teacher was physically present.

In 2012, the solution was used with 2,000 students in nine rural 26 / AUTUMN 2013

government schools in India and four government hostels for students with learning disabilities.

There was a 13-15 per cent increase in class attendance and 15-20 per cent improvement in grades, as well as increased learner confidence.

The latest version of CIC is being used for teacher training. 282 teachers attended a five-day course in 2012 on “Communicating in English in the Classroom” at rural centers.

The teachers were excited about new ways of teaching, which they tested out themselves during the course, directed by remote experts. The teachers used many of the ideas in their classrooms, and the district authority is enthused by the resulting outcomes.

Many commentators on education focus only on digital content, yet, communication with more knowledgeable others and expert teachers is of equal value in bringing better quality education to many more learners.

Dr Michelle Selinger, Education Director, Cisco Consulting Services

Briefing / Measurement & Fragile States

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Measuring education through learning instead of enrolment Millions more children attend school today than just a decade ago. Yet too often, young children aren’t learning basic reading, writing and maths skills, while older children aren’t learning the critical thinking skills that will serve them on the job market.

Curricula should emphasize learning goals that students can realistically achieve, and teachers should focus their instruction on meeting those benchmarks.

Regular support for teachers and consistent evaluation of students are key components for student achievement.

Learning camps in India run by the Hewlett grantee, Pratham, illustrate both the potential and the challenges of this approach to learning. During a site visit, a program officer observed camp kids excitedly engaged in

a numbers recognition game, while next door, their peers sat passively for a didactic “talk and chalk.” An evaluation indicated that children learned more in 20 days of Pratham summer sessions than they did during an entire school year ordinarily. So why are government schools reticent to adopt the camp’s teaching methods? Purportedly, teachers aren’t afforded enough flexibility from school administrators, who insist that teachers adhere to rigid syllabi and complete timeconsuming bureaucratic tasks.

Fortunately, such efforts are shining a spotlight on the looming crisis.

Policymakers are considering plans to renew the United Nations Millennium Development Goals when the international benchmarks expire in 2015. A panel of experts convened

by UN Secretary General Ban Kimoon recommends establishing educational goals focused on lifelong learning, such as ensuring that every child who finishes primary school is able to read, write, and count. Adopting such targets would help to align education goals with the outcome that matters most: learning.

Dana Schmidt, Global Development and Population Program, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Education in fragile states New figures from UNESCO show that half of the world’s 57 million out-of-school primary school-aged children were in conflict-affected nations in 2011, up from 42 per cent in 2008. Children in fragile, conflictaffected countries are nearly three times as likely to be out of primary school than in other low income countries. Enrolment rates in secondary school are nearly onethird lower in conflict-affected countries.

Focusing on education in fragile states not only helps students achieve their potential, it also promotes peace-building, reduces poverty, and fosters economic growth. The re-establishment of education systems in fragile states can provide a visible sign of a return to normalcy.

As the only multilateral partnership solely devoted to

CONCORD is the European confederation of Relief and Development NGOs. CONCORD is main interlocutor with the EU institutions on development policy. We work on 4 main areas: development finance, making EU policies more coherent with development objectives, strengthening the role of civil society organizations and championing a more pro-poor development framework.

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Insights / Outcomes

development post

getting all children into school for a good quality education, GPE is uniquely positioned to help children conflict-affected regions.

We help our country partners develop quality education sector plans, supporting them with technical assistance and financial resources to achieve real results.

Our approach involves convening and building consensus on education issues - at the global and country levels - to help countries develop effective education sector plans, and promote aid that is coordinated and aligned with these plans. A progressive approach of broad partnerships at the country level involving civil society, development partners and other stakeholders is key to building government accountability, with the aim to gradually transfer responsibility to government partners as their capacity increases.

Alice Albright, CEO, Global Partnership for Education

Why outcomes matter Outcomes matter more than inputs.

Ask any successful organization from Wall Street to the Premier League, and you’ll hear that same mantra. It explains why the richest team doesn’t always win, why the biggest business doesn’t always innovate first. But when it comes to the world’s development goals, have we always prioritized the improvements we can make, over the funds we put in?

For the past two years, I have worked with the government of Punjab in Pakistan and the DFID to create the “Punjab Roadmap” for education. This project focuses on learner outcomes and is based on evidence of successful school system reform, like the progress made by Minas Gerais between 2006 and 2008.

Officials in Punjab established

clear priorities and a systematic set of routines to drive implementation. Routine progress updates ensured accountability and ownership while the Chief Minister’s personal commitment was central to the initiative’s success.

Consistent data collection from all 60,000 schools in Punjab was fundamental to ensure honest discussions. We recruited around 900 ex-army men to visit schools each week by motorbike. To minimize the risk of corruption, they never visited the same school twice within a sixmonth period.

As a result, the independent Annual Status of Education Report saw “Significant gains in learning outcomes, with increases of 5-10 per cent in the number of children achieving basic levels.” Between September 2011 and December 2012, student attendance increased from 79 per cent to 92 per cent, driven by higher attendance from those already enrolled. We roughly estimate that an additional 1.5 million students between five and 16 have enrolled in school. Over the same period, teacher presence increased from 85 per cent to 92 per cent.

Sir Michael Barber, Chief Education Advisor, Pearson

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outro / Habits

development post

breaking bad We’re always looking for ways to improve our productivity at DP HQ. Recently, we came across an insightful book, The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg. Duhigg writes about the habits of individuals, organizations, and societies - how they are formed, how to change them, and how to leverage them to effect change. All habits follow a three-step process called a habit loop: a cue, which triggers your brain to go into autopilot; a mental, physical, or emotional routine (like over-run meetings or fear); and a reward, which tells your brain whether it should remember these actions for the future.

Duhigg’s theory is applicable to international development on a number of levels. From an individual’s perspective, we’re always striving to improve ourselves, kick a habit, or develop new empowering habits.

For an organization, it’s particularly relevant as the development industry evolves, having to do more with less and embrace new actors; there is greater need for innovation. Duhigg explains how organizational cultures grow out of keystone habits, so focusing on a key priority can act as a powerful lever, setting off a chain reaction that could transform the company. Finally, for customers and society, the theory is applicable to program design and implementation. A keen understanding of your customer’s preferences, behaviors, and habit loops empowers your team to create impact and ownership of interventions. - DP

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