See also: Babel In The Sahel,

Aid to Africa: New Hope for the Sahel
by Barbara Ash

A land tormented by political, internal and natural strife struggles to cope with a post-Cold War world.

Before "downswing" became a buzzword in the lexicon of American corporations, West Africans were familiar with the consequences.

At the end of the Cold War, when the region no longer was strategically important to any major power, the US, France, Canada and the Soviet Union all pulled the plug on the financial aid that for 30 years had shored up West African military regimes and dictatorships.

Shortly thereafter, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of Southeast Asia as a provider of the same raw materials West Africa relied on as exports wielded other powerful blows. As if this wasn't enough, nature weighed in with its own measure of grief: Five West African nations--lying in Africa's drought-stricken Sahel region bordering the Sahara Desert, were in danger of becoming deserts themselves. Spiraling population growth (up from 85 million in 1960 to 215 million today) in the region created a further shock with which few areas in the world have had to cope.

No longer backed by foreign money, once-strong central governments were forced to cut back. Government employment, for decades the pinnacle to which educated young people aspired, became scarce.

Just as the injection of money distorted the lens through which citizens viewed their governments, the lack of it caused them to focus on the corruption and mismanagement on which they had turned a blind eye for years. With central governments collapsing at every turn, and economies in acute trouble, the stage was set for political and economic reform.

Suddenly, people were talking about decentralization and democratization, about building a civil society. It was clear early on that political and administrative leadership was ill-prepared to direct the changes decentralization would bring.

It was equally clear that those who had a vested interest would have to take the future into their own hands. But the prospects of success at such an endeavor looked iffy at best for several reasons.

For one, West Africans lacked adequate education and training to accomplish any bootstrap improvement of their own. Thirty years of trying to improve literacy in the region had shown little progress--West Africa's illiteracy rate was still the highest in Africa.

The rest of the educational picture was equally dismal: The average primary school enrollment for the region's Sale members was just 51 percent, substantially lower than the rest of Africa (77 percent). It compared even more unfavorably to the poorest Asian countries, (89 percent).

With the decline in employment in the public sector, there was little incentive for the children of farmers to attend school. And even if their children had some schooling, locals questioned the wisdom of sending them off for higher education only for them to return to the farm to grow peanuts and rice.

Taking Responsibility

Naturally, the situation concerned major national and international donor organizations that had an economic as well as altruistic investment in region.

"You can decentralize and improve the laws on the books, but if the people don't have the skills to take advantage of the opportunities that decentralization presents and to deal with its problems, you won't be successful," Dana Fischer of the Paris-based Club du Sale says.

Club du Sale, a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a donor-country consortium, and its partners in the consortium, including CILSS (Interstate Committee for Drought Reduction in the Sale), in recent years have taken a particular interest in greater decentralization in West Africa's Sale region.

They see in this movement one critical means to empower local communities to better manage the region's natural resources and initiate efforts to create enterprise, rural growth and urban renewal that would spark lasting economic growth, Fischer says. So, the question members of these organizations posed was: "How do we provide necessary skills for people to operate in this new environment?"

Fischer's answer was to turn to Dr. Peter Easton (Ph.D. FSU), associate professor in FSU's Department of Education Foundation and Policy Studies and a senior research associate in the university's Center for Policy Studies in Education.

"Peter is an expert at evaluating case studies," Fischer says. "His ideas are original, and will result in major policy recommendations that can have a major impact on development of the Sale."

Fischer met Easton in the mid-'80s when they both were on assignment in Haiti. She was an education officer there, and Easton, working then with FSU's Learning Systems Institute, was responsible for designing and implementing a $20 million program to upgrade scholastic performance in primary schools in Haiti's poorest areas.

Before that, Easton had spent a considerable amount of time in West Africa, arriving first in the Republic of Niger in the mid '60s for a three-year stint as a Peace Corps volunteer after graduating in 1964 from Amherst College. He spent more than 10 of the next 15 years or so in Niger and the Republic of Mali working with village organizations, the Ministries of Education and UNESCO to create and evaluate adult literacy programs. Easton had become fluent in Hausa and French, the official language of the region, and had a good working knowledge of Bambara, a dialect of Mali.

The several trips he made over more recent years to West Africa to head conferences on literacy and to evaluate education programs gave him insight into what some people already were doing in rural areas to deal with their new economic and political situation.

"People weren't waiting around to be told what to do," Easton says. "They assumed responsibility and used common sense."

A New Approach

Easton proposed doing a participatory study of 50 communities in five Sahelian countries--Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Niger and Senegal--where people had made significant progress, or where they had encountered "instructive" failures. The Club du Sale jumped at the opportunity to work with Easton, Fischer says.

"Peter had just the right cut on the thing," she says. "He had a new approach to an old problem, and that intrigued people here. His approach pulled in people who otherwise wouldn't be included in research. A number of ministers of education in West Africa are following the study, and awaiting policy recommendations."

The 18-month study, Project for Support of Local Development in the Sale--nicknamed PADLOS for its French acronym (Projet d'Appui au Developpement Local au Sale) -- is in its final phases. It's financed by a $125,000 grant from OECD.

Easton and colleagues Mwenene Mukweso and Rosemary Closson designed the study to identify:
  • ways in which associations and communities have succeeded in mobilizing people and acquiring the skills they needed to assume new responsibilities;
  • obstacles they encountered in their efforts;
  • lessons to be learned from their experiences;
  • kinds of support and policy reforms that would enable groups to make their efforts more effective and self-sustaining.

The hallmark of the study is its participatory nature, said Easton.

"If you say you're going to do a participatory study, you better do it in a participatory way," Easton says. "It's management by directive. You give the local stockholders--families, teachers, students, shopkeepers, farmers--the objective of the research and the money, and let them pull it off.

"It's that kind of experience that will ensure that African researchers will be able to perform policy studies and overcome Africa's problems, and won't have to rely on high-priced researchers parachuting in from abroad."

The overall goal is to stimulate people to think about issues and to "own" the improvement projects introduced by the research team, Easton says, because ownership and participation are as important as engineering refinements and technical finesse.

Results of the study are only now being analyzed, but what researchers have observed so far has brought into focus the need for education that is tied directly to the development needs of the local community.

Easton says people in the Sale now are envisioning a renewed education system, directed by local people, that blends formal education with various forms of non-formal adult education and training.

"If the whole education system can be interlaced with practical development work--like crop improvement and infrastructure development--then you have a motivation for local people to get involved because they're learning what they need to know to run things themselves."

Learning By Doing

Many people had picked up skills and knowledge here and there from a combination of literacy programs, local self-managed businesses, and programs for village control of public service delivery.

Most adults had had at least rudiments of primary education. Some learned practical lessons while studying the Koran (most people of the Sale region are Muslim). Others had non-formal education to acquire functional literacy in African or French. Some had done apprenticeships.

With those kinds of experiences and sources of traditional knowledge, Easton says, most adults could master the new skills needed--if those skills are presented in concrete terms. What they need now is further instruction and practice to develop their confidence and skills.

But, unofficial, non-formal activities, referred to some educators as "post-literacy initiatives and cooperative-training schemes," have been looked down upon by donor countries as second-rate, not worth an investment. The lack of interest made it difficult for such programs to take root.

Easton, however, recognized early on what many decision-makers at national and international levels refused to acknowledge: This non-formal education has enabled village associations and local entrepreneurs to improve their own productivity.

"The answer to educational reform and how to sustain development initiatives clearly is non-formal education--churches, women's organizations, private companies, non-government organizations," Easton says.

In fact, in many cases, village residents have used literacy or non-formal training programs as means for taking over direction of domains as different as crop markets, natural resources and infrastructure development, health facilities, and primary schools.

Some examples of what newly literate Sahelian men and women have done with expertise acquired from literacy programs and other non-formal training:
  • They took over management of a series of local developmental enterprises, as diverse as grain storage banks and milling facilities, produce markets, village pharmacies, paramedical units and agricultural and forest management stations;
  • They created local and regional bi-lingual newspapers and publications on local history, culture and religion, as well as technical topics, and improved communication between villages; and most recently,
  • They've experimented with new preventive health strategies based on study of local parasites and diseases, and inventoried and analyzed the contributions of traditional African medicine and local pharmaceutical knowledge.

Such activities and their results, however, have pretty much been ignored by major national and international donors in the debate on educational reform, Easton says. The "doctrine of exclusive effectiveness of primary schooling tends to rule the roost," because of lack of alternate perspective and data," he feels.

"It's time to recognize the potential of these experiences and to bring their virtues and shortcomings to the attention of the national policy and donor communities by doing studies that are credible and reliable," he says.

Easton views examples of what local people have accomplished as evidence that "education" must be re-defined, at least as it applies in West Africa and possibly elsewhere.

"Formal education no longer can mean sending a child to school to learn philosophy and Latin. Today, parents insist--and society dictates--that there be ways to deliver practical and theoretical skills that help people build their economies."

There is little dispute that in the long run improvements in the Sahel's existing primary education system, which had inherited its curriculum from colonial days, are important, or that they play an important role in preparing people for their new responsibilities. But the current system is ill-adapted for today's immediate needs, Easton says.

The goal of linking education to local development, which has been so elusive for the region's formal educational system over the years, he says, has been achieved in some very promising, if partial, respects by the initiatives local people have taken.

"It's critical to document what the laboratory of daily life has produced," he says. "If we're going to design a new educational system or introduce educational reform, then donors and government must take a look at what local people have done themselves in the informal sector.

The hope is that donors will want to encourage training on a wide-scale by investing in (day-to-day practical realities of) non-formal education."