(4'0 Indigenous Knowledge Goes to School Potentials and Perils of Community Education in the lAkstern Sahel h or indigenous knowledge to have tive growth in Mali, (-3%), barely 4% in significant bearing on the future Niger, and between 1% and 2% a year in o fWest African societies, it must Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal. gain some currency in schools, the so- Coverage shrank in most rural areas. cial institution officially chartered to * Governments have begun turning to organize learning, certify knowledge alternate formulas and supply mecha- and train the next generation of citi- nisms to reverse enrollment trends, zens. And yet across the region educa- achieve coverage and/or increase rel- tion has been the sector least likely to evance. These include community embrace local knowledge or to regard schools, increased support for indigenous science as a legitimate nonformal education, and a variety of source of inspiration. Exceptions to the experimental programs. rule have mostly occurred in nonformal education and literacy programs, which * Traditional formal schooling has are more frequently conducted in Afri- been subject to increased cultural com- can languages and focused on local petition and critique from other mod- community needs. els: some centered on "appropriate de- velopment," others on religious in- struction, adult education approaches New Ways of Schooling or African-language curricula. Reform Changes that have taken place of primary and secondary schooling is throughout West Africa in the situation nearly everywhere on the agenda. of formal primary education over the * Civil society is playing an enhanced last twenty years, however, have begun role in educational supply. Non-govern- to breach the wall that separated mental organizations (NGOs), private No. 22 schooling and local society. They are at foundations and local associations are July 2000 the same time creating a space for new increasingly authorized and encour- curricula. Prime examples: * Universal primary education remains IK Notes reports periodically on Indig- an elusive goal. By reducing resources enous Knowledge (iK) initiatives in available for education and restricting the Africa Region's Knowledge and public sector employment, the struc- Learning Center as part of an evolving tural adjustment policies applied to IK partnership between the World West African countries beginning in Bank, communities, NGOs, develop- ment institutions and multilateral orga- the 1980s put a dent both in popular nizations Tr,, veiCv*, e(pressed in tbhs motivation for schooling and the ca- article are tr,o*- of trie author; and . pacity of the State to provide it. Gross should rot r,e at[r,r.ured to tne Worldi - pacity of the State to provide it. Gross Bank ir,c-up or 'ts partners in tris ini enrollment ratios at the primary level, tiative A v-r,page on IK i; avail3ble at o5'N .SI) 9 which averaged under 30% for Sahelian http:/ ^v%w %vorlobank org 3ftor ik countries in 1980, progressed very default htrr, little over the ensuing decade -nega- 2 aged to create their own schools. Government is less and less for rural or "native" populations from the kind reserved for concerned with exercising monopoly rights in the area of an urban elite. Excess demand for formal schooling, however, education, though it conserves key regulatory functions. or its perceived shortcomings led to a variety of alternative educational delivery models in post-independence Africa. The * The formal educational system itself is being decentralized Harambee movement in Kenya is a prime example of the to an unaccustomed degree, with greater discretionary pow- former: schools created by communities in the absence of ers being placed in the hands of regional inspectors and local y State provision, though subsequently taken over by the gov- educational councils. ernment in many cases. The Serowe Brigades in Botswana It is this diversification in provision and search for cultural and "Enseignementmoyenpratique" in Senegal exemplify the identity that has opened the door, however hesitantly, to new latter: attempts to make school curricula relevant to local curricula and new sources of inspiration and has created new development by infusions of appropriate technology training, opportunities for the recognition of indigenous knowledge. practical business experience and local cultural reference. There are, though, some important quantitative and quali- A History of Experimentation tative differences between the varied experiments in alterna- tive schooling or community sponsorship launched over the In one sense, of course, the search for alternate forms of early decades of West African independence and the situation schooling is not new to West Africa. In fact, the very notion of obtaining today. In quantitative terms, alternative and com- "indigenous curricula" is heavily tainted with remembrances munity-based schooling has become, for the first time, a sig- from colonial times, when terms like these were code words nificant slice of the overall national system in a number of for distinguishing the kind of education judged appropriate countries like Mali, Senegal and Burkina Faso. Such efforts were traditionally "pilot projects," destined - it seemed - never to expand beyond their select locations. They have bro- ken out of this enclosure to an increasing degree, accounting I K N o tes presently for nearly a quarter of all elementary schools in ru- would be of interest to: ral Mali and are projected to total 20 percent of those in Senegal in the next few years. Qualitatively, alternative edu- Name cation is no longer necessarily second class, though issues of equivalency with traditional diplomas and promotion Tnstitiitif,n schemes (discussed below) remain acute. The increasing le- gitimacy of instruction in African languages, gradual shifts in Address power toward local actors under slowly decentralizing re- gimes and changes in the employment prospects of school leavers have all eroded the hegemony of the single standard Western curriculum and opened space for different and complementary approaches. Letters, comments, and requests for publications The search for alternatives has taken a variety of forms - should be addressed to: State-sponsored community schools; NGO-sponsored com- munity schools; State-sponsored pilot or reform schools Knowledge and Learning Center (generally traditional elementary schools selected to adopt Africa Region, World Bank one or more of the innovative methods of community school- 1818 H Street, N.W., Room J5-055 ing and to apply it within a formal educational framework); Washington, D.C. 20433 E-mail: pmohanworldbank.org increased interest in Koranic schooling or hybrid Islamic- Western forms; and private or "wildcat" schools started by individuals or entrepreneurs, particularly in urban areas. 3 The Community Involvement Model zations like Tostan and ANAFA in the Djourbel region of In the Sahel as elsewhere around the African continent, com- Senegal, for example, combine their school sponsorship with a variety of other projects. This cross-breeding creates in- munity schools are premised on the notion of greater paren- creased opportunities for introducing local development top- tal and community involvement in the governance and deliv- ics into the curriculum of elementary and secondary school- ery of education. Local "ownership" of schooling is developed and expressed in several ways: ing, along with local sources of related knowledge. a Financial participation: Contributions to the construction and equipment of classes, to school operating expenses and Difficulties of Implementation to teacher stipends. Unfortunately, a great deal is still more said than done in this - Administrative participation: Involvement in decision-mak- realm. The indigenous knowledge elements in the commu- ing concerning school administration and regulations. nity school model tend to be those least frequently imple- * Curricular participation: An increased role for parents and mented, for they require the most imagination and energy, community members in choosing and specifying curricula, in not to say willingness to break with existing norms. In tact, there is a general tendency for schools of this sort to become simply low-cost if not low-quality replicas of existing primary Curricular participation is evidently the variety of commu- schooling, due principally to the resource constraints that nity input of greatest relevance to the inclusion of indigenous they face. knowledge in schooling, though financial and administrative participation may be necessary to make it effective. Among * Human resource constraintfs: Teachers generally have mini- mal training and may have limited previous education. In the measures proposed for achieving it in the case of outside- some models, literate villagers or parents are selected by the sponsored community schools are use of the local languages community itself to undergo a few days of training; in an- for instruction; adoption of local artisans as resources for in- other, volunteers paid by donated funds are recruited from struction, either through their actual teaching of courses or visits by children to their places of work; recording and teach- among unemployed school leavers and assigned to villages. ing of local history along with other subject matters; and in- - Financial constraints. Community education models are clusion of locally-inspired religious or moral education. designed to be inexpensive, a solution to the prohibitive costs of generalizing the existing school infrastructure. They In addition, some of the NGOs and civil society institutions involved in sponsoring community schools are animated by count, to the extent possible, on local materials and funds, Involved~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~n thes aresoin oftenmt scarce. Area wherete comniisaryx an explicit desire to create new curricula more appropriate to and these are often scarce. Areas where communities are ex- the challenges of local development in 21st century Africa. pected to pay teachers often experience particular problems. The Institut d'Education Populaire in Kati, Mali, for example, - Technical constraints: Building an alternative curriculum has labored long and hard on the elaboration of an elemen- takes experience and insight that are often in short supply. tary school "Ciwara" program (the Bambara word for the an- The biggest challenge is reconciling local content with a pro- telope-head totem symbolic of Malian identity) focusing on gram of studies that enables some, at least, to continue to the acquisition of leadership skills - in short, young further formal education should they desire to do so. This people's ability to play a decisive role in the development of synthesis, called "pedagogie convergente" in Mali, depends their own communities. to a great extent on finding a way to teach the international In both Senegal and Mali, moreover, the civil society part- language used in secondary and higher education from a ba- sis of literacy in the local or national language, and doing so ners involved in support for community schools tend to be as- with the assistance of teaching personnel who themselves of- sociations with parallel involvements in other sectors of local ten do not have a mastery of the former. The effort typically development, like natural resource management, health and agriculture. CEWIGAP in northern Mali ("Community Edu- takes such energy that little is left for developing the indig- cation, Water and Income Generating Activities") and organi- enous knowledge inputs into the curriculum. 4 m Political constraints: The success of community schools is erage a distinctly better record of female participation than partly contingent on the possibility of building institutional their formal sector counterparts. bridges to subsequent formal schooling, what are called "passerelles" in the Franchophone countries. This terrain tends to be heavily guarded by the proponents (and products) Education by all? of traditional primary and secondary education. Ironically, as Both the community school movement and the attempt to provision of alternate education is expanded and delegated to give indigenous knowledge a place in local schooling there- local associations and NGOs, there is often increased stasis fore face formidable obstacles. Community schools nonethe- on this political front, because local associations feel less less constitute one of the most massive opportunities for "empowered" to challenge the existing educational con- greater recognition of indigenous knowledge to have arisen stabulary on this terrain than might ministerial representa- so far in Sahelian West Africa and already have several major tives or large international organizations. accomplishments to their credit. As evaluation surveys in Concerns for Quality both Senegal and Mali reveal, they are generally well appreci- ated by consumers -that is, parents and local authorities - "Quality" and "equity" are keywords in the debate about the future of community schools in Sahelian West Africa. The principally because of their use of African languages and their potential congruence with local culture. former invokes the criticism most often leveled at the move- ment: education is made available to new communities and The recent move toward NGO and local association spon- students, but what education? Can poorly supervised teach- sorship has also meant a closer link with other realms of local ers who are unable to handle the lingua franca of the formal development where indigenous knowledge is both needed system and schools without textbooks or amenities offer chil- and used. And the movement constitutes a sizeable wedge for dren anything worth having? And doesn't this sort of provi- reform of schooling in general - as witness the number of sion pose as much of an equity problem as it resolves - by times that its example has been invoked in the "Estates Gen- creating a two-tiered system, where the rural and urban poor eral" (or national assemblies on education) convoked by get only the caricature of a "real education"? Sahel ian countries in recent years to address issues of educa- tional reform. Community education in fact embodies one These days proponents of community schools are very aware ponal form of education in a strat e s one of the issue, and internal evaluations within organizations needed to complement increasing emphasis on "Education sponsoring schools tend to focus increasingly on quality con- - an it represent en whin whichtin cerns. At the same time, proponents typically have two rejoin- eukw d it comesinto its wn. ders that at least serve to broaden the debate. First, what ex- actly is meant by "quality"? Do community involvement, lit- At the same time, the perils and potentials of the commu- eracy in the local language, incorporation of cultural con- nity school movement illustrate the kinds of policy changes tents and direct relationship to development concerns in that will be required to achieve the systematic promotion of other sectors figure in the definition, or are standardized test indigenous knowledge in contemporary West Africa. scores and passage rates to secondary school the only crite- ria? Second, in respect to equity, what are the tradeoffs be- tween local gender equity and increased parity between city and countryside? Community schools do at least have on av- This article was co-authored by by Peter Easton (Florida State University), Chris Capacci (Community Schools! Kolondieba, Mali) and Lamine Kane (ANAFA/Senegal). The research was carried out under thejoint aegis of the Club du Sahel/OECD, the Interstate Committee for Combating Drought in the Sahel/Comite Inter-etat Contre la Secheresse (CILSS ) and the Association for the Development of Education in Africa.