Working politically for school fee reform in the DRC
This policy brief relates the progress made by ACCELERE!2 (A!2) – a six-year FCDO funded education programme in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – in reforming the school fee system to reduce the financial burden on parents and improve the quality of public education. Our team’s ability to work politically on the school fee issue and then to support the call for free basic education, known as Gratuité, was critical for making progress on what is a sensitive and divisive subject in the DRC. This brief recounts the narrative of change in recent years and shares our experience navigating such a complex political landscape. In particular, we will discuss the importance of political economy analysis (PEA) and the use of roadmaps to define our vision and technical approach.
“In a fragile state like DRC, information is power. Without access to information, most people cannot become actors of change. Working politically is about making sure all different stakeholders are informed of the stakes of a situation. The aim is to sow the seeds of long-term change by empowering actors through awareness raising.”
What is the story so far? A!2 started in 2015 with the aim of supporting the Government of DRC’s efforts to improve governance and accountability in the education sector. Launching a governance reform project was always ambitious in the DRC, however the context became ever more uncertain, given political unrest and the postponement of elections. School fees were traditionally collected at the school level and then funnelled up the system right up to the ministerial level. What started as short-term fix to a crisis decades ago, when parents were asked to step in to temporarily fund teachers’ salaries, evolved into an institutionalised system of parents financing the education system from the bottom up. It was – and still is - a politically sensitive subject due to the complicity of actors at all levels of the system in collecting and using fees, not always for the benefit of the education system. To complicate matters, approximately 70% of state schools are managed by religious networks, who also levy their own fees from the schools, which often contribute little to the running or improvement of the schools. With such a complicated landscape, where each actor is complicit in one way or another, we noted a pervasive ‘blame culture’ with no-one accepting responsibility for their actions, instead choosing to blame other system actors for the problem.
How to move the needle in such a politically-charged context? School fee reform in the DRC presented a paradox. Those who stood to gain the most from change – school children and their parents – had no voice in the conversation; whereas those who could bring about change – from school councils up to the ministry of education – would lose out financially by doing so. Our approach was to tackle several levels of stakeholders in parallel to build enough critical mass to push for change and reform – to tip the scale. In parallel, we increased the research base on school fees and the cost of the education system, to provide the Ministry and other key actors with evidence.