Support for Primary Education in Africa:
A Retrospective Study
South Africa: Free at Last
Philip R.
Christensen
January, 1997
Contents
Development of South Africa’s educational system
Laying the groundwork for post-apartheid transformation: stories of selected NGOs
Education Support Services Trust: innovative learning materials
Open Learning Systems Education Trust: teaching by radio
Early Learning Resource Unit: early childhood education and anti-bias training
Media in Education Trust: using print media for teaching
The Teacher: a monthly newspaper for educators
National Literacy Co-operation: a network of literacy organizations
Education Foundation: better information for better decisions
Independent Examinations Board: transforming assessment to transform education
Impact of foreign assistance on educational development in South Africa
Message to the American people
Members of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) listen quietly as another victim of their country’s violent past tells her story:
"That morning I did something I have never done before. My husband was still at his desk busy with the accounts of our business. I went up to him and stood behind his chair. I put my hands under his arms and tickled him ... he looked surprised and unexpectedly happy ... ‘And now?’ he asked. ‘I am going to make tea,’ I said.
"While I poured water on the teabags, I heard this devastating noise. Six men stormed into our study and blew his head off. My five-year-old daughter was present... That Christmas I found a letter on his desk: ‘Dear Father Christmas, please bring me a soft teddy bear with friendly eyes... My daddy is dead. If he was here, I would not have bothered you.’"
In their first year of work the TRC commissioners endured many such tales, from victims seeking truth and from perpetrators seeking forgiveness. The victim was most often black, but many were white. The perpetrators came in all shades. The brutality of apartheid’s death throes saved its worst for the poor and defenseless, for people of color, but it left no group untouched.
Perhaps, then, it came as a surprise to the commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, when late in 1996 a group of South African Non-Governmental Organizations, led by the National Literacy Cooperation (NLC), asked it to investigate a different type of human rights abuse:
"Since May 1996 the Commission has highlighted the situation of many victims of human rights violations and an overall picture of the gross violations of the past is gradually emerging.... Our country is beginning to come to terms with the nature and extent of the physical violence and abuse created and perpetuated by the system of apartheid.
"In addition to those who suffered physical violence however, many people were victims of nonphysical violations of their basic human rights during the apartheid years and their stories still need to be investigated. These rights include the right to an education, which in our country often translates into the right to work and earn a living. In the context of the country’s high levels of illiteracy, infant mortality, poverty, rising unemployment and the resulting increase in violent crime, especially within the black communities, the denial of educational opportunities to the majority of people not only closed the doors of learning to these communities but also systematically deprived them and their families of the means to life."
The submission enumerated several specific violations of educational rights, including equitable access to quality schools, quality teaching and learning, and educational advancement; the rights of rural learners, adult learners and learners with disabilities; and the rights of teachers to develop professionally and practice their vocation
It’s possible to follow apartheid’s educational philosophy to extremes so ridiculous that they strain credulity. For example, here is a system under which one provincial government actually prohibited overweight teachers, mainly white and colored (mixed-race) women, from promotion and permanent appointments. It maintained secret height and weight tables against which to judge its employees.
The nightmares of physical violence retold to the Truth Commission evoke horror, not ridicule. The statistics compiled in support of the NLC’s submission represent another kind of tragedy. It is the tragedy of entire groups of people being deprived of access to quality education because of race, and only race. In 1979 81% of white pupils completed primary and secondary school; 29% of black pupils made the distance. In 1988 there was one teacher for every 14 white students, and one for every 38 black students. More than four times as much money was spent on educating a white child as on a black child. Colored and Indian students fell in the middle, always doing better than blacks but never as well as whites. Thus child’s race determined what kind of education he or she would be offered. That education determined the child’s future.
This article examines South Africa’s progress in laying the foundation for a new, non-racial education system and the role that foreign assistance has played in that progress. After highlighting some of the challenges and contrasts characterizing the country, it focuses on how its educational system has developed, during the apartheid era and after democratic elections. It then moves to the United States Agency for International Development’s (AID’s) support during those two periods, exploring the American strategy for basing future success on past progress and looking in more detail at eight of the NGOs that have benefited from U.S. funding. It assesses the impact of foreign assistance, especially American aid, on South Africa’s development, discusses some key lessons learned arising from that assistance, and tests the viability of AID’s strategy for the future role of the NGOs it has supported. Finally, it offers South African NGOs the opportunity to speak to those who have contributed the funds from which they have benefited.
While this discussion emphasizes primary education, a broader brush is needed to paint South Africa’s full picture. As in other countries, teacher education is part of the story, too. The quality of primary schools cannot be improved without attention to primary teachers. More uniquely South African, perhaps, is the need to look closely at adult basic education. Many South Africans never had the chance to receive decent primary schooling, or indeed any primary schooling at all. National goals cannot be achieved without taking these people into account, too.
No country in Africa is more familiar to Americans than South Africa. This is due in some measure to its long-standing position as an economic powerhouse on the continent. By far the most important reason, however, lies in four decades of increasingly violent confrontation over the doctrine of apartheid, theoretically the concept of separate but equal development but practically the domination of the vast majority of the country’s people, who are not white, by just 18%, who are. Although the Afrikaner Nationalist Party introduced apartheid per se when it took power in 1948, white political and economic control was a fact of life from the merger in 1910 of four British dependencies to form the Union of South Africa.
Long years of struggle finally bore fruit on May 10, 1994, when Nelson Mandela, released from prison just four years earlier, became the first president democratically elected by all South Africans. His inaugural address inspired a vision that confirmed his stature as one of the great leaders of the twentieth century.
"We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people. We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity—a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world."
South Africa remains a country of extraordinary contrasts, expected and unexpected. Until recently, Nelson Mandela was probably the only leader of an industrialized nation who did not have access to potable water in his home—not, of course, his two official residences, but his traditional home at Qunu in the Eastern Cape Province. Until a local insurance company installed a $50,000 pipeline there (in advance of a larger scheme to bring water to the entire village), when the president visited Qunu he had to wash and drink from six-gallon drums trucked about 60 miles from Umtata. On the other hand, in other parts of the country cellular telephones are making inroads to places not yet served by land lines. This sophisticated technology brings modern communications to underdeveloped regions such as the Transkei, not just for community services but also for rural entrepreneurs. Having once dismissed this market as economically infeasible, one major cellular service provider now finds its largest dealer in Transkei.
Great visions are not easily achieved, of course. South Africa faces major challenges in its quest to become the rainbow nation of President Mandela’s dream. The London-based research Fund Research group recently characterized it as:
"... a country of 41 million people surrounded by some of the worst poverty in Africa, with a rigid and under-educated labor force, an oligopolistic economy and high real interest rates. One of the major problems is the high and increasing level of unemployment and, with a third of the labor force without jobs, the growth in crime threatens social cohesion and economic progress."
External assessments tend towards mixed reviews of current performance but cautious optimism about the country’s longer-term economic potential. For example, in the United States the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal gave South Africa three marks out of five on their index of economic freedom, but lauded its transition to democracy and judged national reconciliation to have been impressive. World Bank estimates put per capita income (GNP per head) at $2,910 in 1994, placing South Africa well ahead of other countries on the continent (with the exception of Libya and Gabon) and in the upper-middle-income ranks of the world’s nations. On the other hand, the country’s Gini Coefficient (an index of income inequality), which stood at 0.64 in 1985, is one of the highest in the world, reflecting the unequal wealth distribution among different racial groups that was the goal and the result of apartheid.
While admitting serious ANC mistakes in its first years of power, President Mandela marked 1997’s beginning with an optimistic assessment of South Africa’s progress and prospects under democratic rule. He spoke of solid foundations having been laid, of reconstruction and development’s impact being felt. He highlighted the signing of the new constitution as "a fitting way to end the year," and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as "a powerful instrument of healing." He took pride in the fact that millions of people have gained access to water, electricity and health care, that quality education for all is taking shape, and that programs for land reform and housing are now "firmly on track." Speaking of the economy, he noted:
"The year ahead will be a testing time for all: government, business and labor; producers and consumers alike. But the fundamentals are sound. By keeping our sights on the long term we can manage the ebb and flow of the present."
Development of South Africa’s educational system
The problems of the apartheid educational system went beyond overt racism and inequity. Some of its subtle weaknesses affected all students, black and white. For example, under the old regime formal education was largely based on the conservative values espoused by a policy officially called Christian National Education. Its underlying philosophy, in the words of a 1983 South African government paper on education, included the "molding" of good citizens to "fit into ordered society" and to be obedient to the state. This emphasis on conformity served to reinforce didactic theories of knowledge and authoritarian teaching practices, emphasizing "facts" with little concern for insight or application. A common complaint from university faculty about the white graduates of the country’s elite secondary schools was that they first had to be taught to think.
The great burden of the former system, however, clearly fell on the shoulders of South Africans of color. In its submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the National Literacy Cooperation puts apartheid education into this context:
"The architects of apartheid employed a multiplicity of strategies, including the fragmentation of the education system into different sub-systems along ethnic and racial differentiations. Education was used as an instrument to dehumanize and indoctrinate black people into submissiveness and acceptance of their inferior status. The passing of the Bantu Education Act, for example, underscored the efforts of apartheid governments to deny black people the right to an education by denying them access to educational institutions and centers of literacy development, providing inequitable financial and material resources, neglecting rural education, discriminating against disabled students and through state-planned violence that created the breakdown of what came to be known as the ‘culture of learning and teaching’ in most black communities...."
Through the Bantu Education Act of 1953, the Department of Native Affairs gained control over all African schools and laid down a syllabus for them geared to serve apartheid’s objectives. Urban students faced a period of increased politicization, culminating in the late ‘70’s in the infamous township uprisings that cut off an entire generation of youth from schooling. Rural children faced difficulty even finding schools to attend. When they did obtain a place, it was likely to be in conditions so harsh (a one-teacher school with 169 children, for example) that effective teaching and learning became almost impossible.
From these roots grew the inequities documented in the NLC’s submission, an educational system in which access and quality were directly determined by a child’s skin color. Blacks faced large student numbers with inadequate supplies of classrooms and teachers, producing large class sizes and high pupil/teacher ratios. Large numbers of non-white students were retained in lower grades through failure. Dropout rates for African learners were especially high relative to whites. Almost 100% of white students passed the high-school leaving exam, while at best only about 50% of African students finished successfully.
As democracy dawned in South Africa, nowhere was the need to break with the discriminatory past more evident than in the education system. No social sector evoked higher interest among the general public, black and white. In response, the new government allocated a quarter of its annual non-interest expenditure to education and committed itself forthrightly to a series of policy initiatives intended to "open the doors of learning for all" and to "build a just and equitable system which provides a good quality education and training to learners young and old throughout the country." These were based on the principles of a fundamental right to education, one non-racial system, compulsory basic education, lifelong learning, and a division of powers between the national and provincial levels of government.
The fact that these goals are natural and necessary makes them no less audacious. The challenge of implementing them, to no one’s surprise, has proven daunting. Almost three years into its mandate, the new government still struggles to move from conception to reality. Widespread concern grips the public. Those who enjoyed the privileges of the former elite system fear a collapse of standards. Those who were previously excluded vent their frustration at the slow pace of change and that the staggering inequities that remain. The excitement of giving birth to new vision is giving way to the sometimes overwhelming challenges of turning it into reality.
On the first day of the 1997 South African school year, readers of The Star awoke to front-page headlines warning "tidal wave of school pupils hits Gauteng." South Africa’s huge central province, the country’s economic heartland that encompasses both Johannesburg and Pretoria, faces at least 80,000 new pupils, largely as a result of migration from other parts of the country. Mary Metcalfe, head of the provincial education department already facing accusations of mismanagement in the administration of the critical "matric" high-school leaving examination, reported that at least 100 new schools are needed now. About 150,000 of the province’s children are not enrolled in school at all, generally because of special needs or because they had no school to attend. To make matters worse, many learners would start the year without textbooks because of a "glitch in tender procedures." She admitted:
"We are not going to be able to keep up with the backlogs, not this year, not next year, not in the [immediate] future. The backlogs are entirely understandable. They will be addressed as we achieve economic growth. We hope to see in the next 10 years every child in a classroom, but until then, we are working to make sure resources are used adequately."
No one would deny that such problems are real. No one expects them to disappear overnight. As noted by a spokesperson for the national Ministry of Education, with almost half a million employees the largest government sector, transforming education entails a "process of magnitude and complexity that confronts no other government function." It will not be made any easier by pending budget cuts to most national ministries, including education, described by Minister of Education Sibusiso Bengu as "a threat to transformation plans."
On balance, though, the nation definitely is making progress towards its goals of a transformed educational system. The old apartheid laws are gone. Racially fragmented bureaucratic structures have been torn down; new, united organizations are being built in their place. One of the government’s major accomplishments in 1996 was to pass new legislation, the Schools Act, which replaced five racially based education laws, introduced a new non-racial system of school governance and funding, outlawed admissions discrimination on the basis of race, enshrined parental oversight, and eliminated vestiges of the past such as corporal punishment. Others included policy papers on the organization, governance and funding of schools; legislation promulgating the South African Qualifications Act, the National Education Policy Act and the Educators’ Employment Act; task team investigations into technology-enhanced learning and education management and development; work in progress on gender equity and language policy; and the funding of programs to promote the culture of learning (including improvements to school buildings, quality of learning and school governance), building of new schools, and community colleges for youth not attending school.
In fact, the day after its "tidal wave" warning, The Star ran a page-three story under the headline "children cram into classes but most schools cope well" and reported "the smoothest and most orderly return to school in years." One of its (white) commentators, in the midst of a fierce attack on the early retirement of thousands of experienced teachers in the name of resource reallocation, spoke of an education department "which has otherwise done a good job,... that has moved South Africa from segregated to integrated schooling, from partial to mass education, in just one year." He added a telling comparison to the comparable American experience:
"Thousands of schools have been integrated all over the country, including the most conservative areas.... And it has happened almost without incident—with only one brief protest demonstration by a handful of right-wing parents at a school in Potgietersrus.
"When one recalls the turmoil that accompanied school integration in the American South, when President Kennedy had to call out the National Guard to force the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi, and Governor George Wallace flung his gauntlet in the dust at the door of the University of Alabama, this is nothing short of astonishing.."
Vusi Mona, a teacher who now edits a monthly education newspaper, believes that many underestimate the successes achieved so far:
"A lot of changes have happened. Unfortunately for South Africans, because we are involved, sometimes their significance escape us. We have what some people call the Tina Turner syndrome. I’m told that Tina Turner, after performing on stage, will go back to her room and think about things that went wrong. South Africans have that syndrome. There’s a lot of change taking place in education, but because we are involved sometimes these changes escape us. A few years back there was no nation to talk of. We were on the brink of catastrophe. Today we have a country; we have a nation. A few years back there was a lot of violence in our schools, perpetrated by school kids against teachers. There was a lot of confrontation between students and teachers; today we see a lot of cooperation. The culture of learning and teaching had collapsed in almost all the urban schools. Today we see our kids again committed to education. They want good education. All those things, to me, are significant. Change has taken place. Change is taking place, although some people will argue not at their desired pace. But we’ve come a long way."
Such changes have not happened entirely without outside help. For example, the United States has spent nearly a billion dollars in the past decade on development in South Africa. The scope of these efforts has been broad: strengthening NGOs and CBOs, helping lawyers defend victims of apartheid, building houses, restructuring government ministries, and, of course, supporting a variety of educational reforms. To take just one specific example, the U.S. was the largest single donor to voter education efforts during South Africa’s first non-racial national election. Evaluations have praised the innovative character and emphasized the impact of American interventions. At a time when foreign aid is increasingly under attack at home and abroad, some have offered AID’s South Africa program as a model for foreign aid that works.
At the same time, recently some Congressional critics have accused the agency of "interfering in South Africa’s domestic affairs and often going against President Mandela’s commitment to a non-racial society." Local newspaper articles under headlines such as "major US aid programs under fire for ‘meddling’" repeated charges against AID by House International Relations committee staffers ranging from forcing whites out of projects to ignoring a shortage of 50,000 classrooms in favor of overspending on conferences and seminars.
To some extent such criticisms seem to reflect a lack of understanding about AID’s development strategies. For example, the agency rarely is involved in construction projects such as building new classrooms, preferring to offer technical assistance, training and commodities to support African development. But the dichotomous praise and blame also originate from some unusual features of AID’s South African program.
Unlike other nations highlighted in this retrospective series, South Africa’s story is, in many respects, just beginning. Most other countries on the continent where AID works (with the notable exception of Namibia) achieved their independence more than two decades ago. Nations such as Guinea and Uganda have entered demonstrably new phases in their national development with U.S. support. Swaziland has bid farewell to American assistance, albeit reluctantly, as its own economic and social progress meant that other sister countries could claim greater need. If these places represent new chapters in the development story, or even the end of the book, South Africa has just completed its preface. The preparatory phase, written during the final years of apartheid, is over, but the first chapter in the story of a free, democratic South Africa is only now unfolding.
The other unique feature of AID’s South African program arises from the special nature of that preparatory phase. Prevented by principal and by law (specifically, the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act) from providing funds to the apartheid government or its agencies, USAID/South Africa ventured into the relatively uncharted waters of NGO funding. Whereas in other countries AID projects usually work through host governments, in South Africa the USAID Mission responded to unsolicited proposals from small organizations outside of the apartheid political system. The result was, by agency standards, a huge national program when measured in numbers of grants and recipients, and an unusual one when assessed strategically. This alternative approach has yielded some of AID’s greatest successes in South Africa. It has also caused some real management headaches.
Preparing the ground through NGOs
The story of American assistance to South Africa goes back to the 1960’s, long before any USAID office opened in the country. Bureaus such as the United States Information Agency, working through the American Embassy, sponsored small programs (including a human rights fund) and larger training projects that eventually reached over 1,000 students with bursaries for study in the U.S. and elsewhere in Africa. The agency’s major program work in the country, however, began in 1982, after Congress approved $4 million for scholarships to South Africans disadvantaged by apartheid.
In 1986 AID/Washington sent a staff person to South Africa, marking the beginning of its on-site presence in the country. The true watershed in the development of the American approach to assisting South Africa came a few months after the arrival of that first AID staff member, when increasing public repugnance towards the apartheid system and the brutality it fostered led Congress to pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA). Its purpose was:
"... to set forth a comprehensive and complete framework to guide the efforts of the United States in helping to bring an end to apartheid in South Africa and lead to the establishment of a non-racial, democratic form of government."
Soon after this legislation passed Congress, AID initiated a separate South Africa country program and began making preparations to open its own office, or mission, in the capital city of Pretoria. The CAAA prohibited the U.S. from assisting any agency "financed or controlled" by the South African government. It required instead that American funds be channeled through non-governmental organizations. This posed a particular challenge for educational development. Some of apartheid’s most visible inequities were reflected in the school system. Yet that system was very much a government activity, with only one to two percent of the country’s schools private. Therefore, the new USAID office in South Africa had to work with NGOs who were creating innovative models for redressing the balance and preparing for a democratic future. It funded organizations working in many different areas, including policy formulation, in-service training for teachers and school principals, curriculum development, student organizations, and pre-primary education. In many of these realms AID provided grants to five or six separate groups taking different approaches to the same problem.
The release of Nelson Mandela from prison in February, 1990, and the beginnings of negotiations for an end to white minority rule stimulated a dramatic increase in the level of U.S. assistance. Annual AID funding doubled from $40 million in 1990 to $80 million in 1992. Almost half of this money was aimed at education. In response, USAID/South Africa began to review its funding strategies, moving towards bigger grants focused on major strategic areas. The mission also sought to become more proactive, responding to fewer unsolicited proposals.
Further complicating the situation were complex political realities. Many of the very groups targeted by AID’s strategy were suspicious of the motives and objectives of American funding. They viewed foreign assistance in general as a weak and unacceptable substitute for sanctions, a reflection of the failed "constructive engagement" concept. Furthermore, they worried that AID’s agenda would be determined by U.S. security interests. One American familiar with that period described it as "a kind of wild, wild west mode." Fundamental agency procedures such as competitive tendering were rejected for fear of giving too much information to the State. However, no blatant intervention by USAID personnel materialized. On the contrary, agency staff members proved themselves concerned, supportive partners. Their fears assuaged, a growing number of NGOs and CBOs sought AID’s assistance, arguing that it was possible to use U.S. funds to finance projects of genuine benefit to disadvantaged South Africans. Eventually the first American contractor firms were allowed to begin work in the country.
Just days after South Africa’s first democratic elections in May, 1994, the Clinton administration announced a huge three-year aid package more than half a billion dollars in size, with AID assistance projected at approximately $130 million per year. USAID/South Africa targeted about a quarter of this annual amount, approximately $30 million, to the education sector. Although the expansion of the total package reduced education’s percentage somewhat from previous USAID/South Africa budgets, this is still a respectable figure, close to funding levels in the years immediately preceding democratic elections. Still, it is only a small fraction of South Africa’s $2 billion education budget. In keeping with its global strategy of leveraging its investments by supporting programs that offer the possibility of positive impact out of proportion to their cost, AID has sought to play a "catalytic role" in the country’s post-apartheid educational development.
What AID is trying to do in South Africa has not changed very much since the days of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. The agency continues to work towards the broad goal of good education for all South Africans. It continues to emphasize South Africans who were unable to obtain high-quality education, or indeed any education at all, under the apartheid system. All of this is summarized in USAID/South Africa’s new strategic objective for its education work: a transformed system based on equity of access and quality.
How AID is trying to achieve its objective has changed substantially, on the other hand. Its South African program has evolved towards a more common AID funding model. USAID/South Africa still works at all levels of the education system, from primary to tertiary. It still supports further education and training for disadvantaged South Africans. However, it has begun to tighten its focus somewhat, pulling back from areas such as career guidance and secondary education. Its university and professional training approach is being revised to take into account the fact that South Africans of color are no longer excluded from such opportunities within their own country. USAID/South Africa continues to design and propose new interventions, rather than responding to unsolicited proposals as it once did exclusively.
The biggest shift in AID’s implementation strategy, however, affects who receives its funds. Money once given exclusively to local organizations now goes increasingly to support the government’s objectives, although the funding continues to support NGO collaboration. The previous, NGO-based approach was dictated by the existence of a non-democratic government, excluded from support (or even contact) under American law. The advent of democracy in 1994 removed these restrictions. Consequently, AID is now able to deal directly with the South African government. Indeed, it is anxious to do so. Strengthening the new, democratic administration is an obvious development priority. Increasingly, then, funds that previously would have gone to NGOs and CBOs are now provided to the South African and to selected provincial governments as bilateral aid.
To accomplish its objective of increased equity of educational quality and access, AID plans to support three major areas: policy formulation, system development and capacity enhancement.
First, it wishes to see policies for transformation enacted. A new system needs to operate under new rules that ensure fairness for all. AID has already played a catalytic role in supporting policy formulation at all levels of education through technical assistance and funding to organizations who have contributed to policy research, analysis and public consultation. For example, much of the policy on financing basic education at the provincial level builds directly on work done by the Education Foundation, an AID-supported NGO.
Second, responsive systems must be functioning. These are the mechanisms that will translate good policy into effective practice. In the realm of primary and basic education, USAID/South Africa has conceived its role as supporting the development of models, or "blueprints," for effective systems. One example is the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), a system for integrating in-school and out-of-school education and training established under the new South African Qualifications Authority Act. Under the NQF a worker who never had the opportunity to complete primary education can receive equivalent training as an adult learner, training that will be recognized as the qualification necessary to proceed to secondary-level education (which can be delivered in or out of school).
Finally, the educational system’s organizational capacity should be enhanced. AID is focusing on all players in the drama of transformation: national and provincial governments, educational institutions, youth commissions, and NGOs. What can be done to improve the ability of South African groups to implement the policies and run the systems that will increase access and quality for historically disadvantaged individuals?
AID’s essential strategy for educational development in democratic South Africa is based on a "development hypothesis:" that its work prior to1994 outside of government, through NGOs and CBOs, prepared the ground for success in the arenas of policy, systems and capacity. These organizations have already contributed directly to development in these three areas. Furthermore, the NGO community represents a reservoir of expertise from which the new national and provincial governments can draw as they grapple with the challenges of achieving equity for all South Africans. In its post-apartheid funding it continues to support NGOs and CBOs, although on a reduced scale both in terms of numbers of organizations and levels of contributions. Beyond this, AID expects that government itself will purchase relevant services from NGOs, often with the very bilateral aid funds that the United States has provided.
In this sense AID’s post-apartheid strategy is evolutionary, not revolutionary. If its developmental hypothesis is correct, its work with NGOs in the years before 1994 has laid the foundation for transformation under a new, democratic government. The bricks making up that foundation are the achievements of those cooperating NGOs in policy formulation, systems development and capacity enhancement, as well as the strengths of those organizations to continue working in the same areas.
Laying the groundwork for post-apartheid transformation: stories of selected NGOs
How can such a hypothesis be tested? One starting point is to examine some specific organizations, to explore their work in transforming the education system and to hear the comments of their staff about the past and the future. This article looks at eight such NGOs, covering a spectrum from direct support to schools and teachers to broad policy reform.
Education Support Services Trust: innovative learning materials
Established in 1986, the Education Support Services Trust (ESST) provides innovative, learner-centered materials to pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. AID’s funding helped the organization expand its services, test innovative materials with teachers, develop teacher guides for mass distribution, and conduct research to improve materials development. Its Program Director, James Olivier, traces ESST’s roots back to the fundamental inequities of apartheid education that became evident when he was teaching at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), in those days primarily a "colored" (mixed-race) institution.
"In the ‘80’s when the political barriers in the Western Cape started breaking down, a lot more African people came from outlying areas to UWC. They found themselves at an enormous disadvantage because of the schooling they had been through. Compared to the local folks, their schooling had been minimalist and incredibly poor. The [faculty] would say they have a language problem; they are poor in English. And the first thing you realize is that it’s not a language problem. It’s a problem of educational quality that spans over the children’s lifetime until they reach the age of 18 or 19 or 20, when they come to university and the whole disaster unfolds. They are unequipped to handle the university curriculum."
Out of these concerns came the English Proficiency Program (EPP), the first focus of AID’s support to ESST. It developed inexpensive learning materials for students in Grades 4 to 7 that were clearly related to the children’s backgrounds. Using methods that required minimal guidance to the teachers, ESST was teaching more than facts and ideas. It aimed at a new attitude to life and learning. As James Olivier explains:
"They [black students] did not have the experience and the exposure to the range of stimuli to make it possible for them to enter into a strange setting and say, ‘Hey, I know how to handle this one.’ In a world of political oppression they were taught to be docile, even by their own family and their own teachers. We had to seduce them into an ability to look at their situation and assess it critically. I’m talking about 10, 12-year-old kids. We tried to give them the kind of mental stimulation that would make it possible for them to respond creatively."
Lydia Abel, ESST’s Senior Research and Educational Coordinator, notes that another unique element of her organization’s approach was its work at the classroom level.
"We are one NGO that has actually had access into classrooms, intervening at the level of the pupil. I think we didn’t realize what a difference we were actually making at that level. In my interviews with teachers that’s the thing they’ve been saying. Just having the materials and knowing that they could pick up the phone to somebody and say, ‘Help, do something.’— that, for them, was a tremendously liberating experience."
As the new decade dawned, the South African political climate began to change in ways that would bring about Nelson Mandela’s release and the country’s first democratic elections sooner than many had believed possible. ESST changed, too, expanding into new areas: materials for higher grades, African language instruction, teacher education, community work, company training, and adult basic education and training. AID’s funding made some of this expansion possible, as James Olivier explains:
"1990 to 1993 were years in which we were slowly expanding our service to teachers with far too little money. In the middle of ‘92 USAID came on board to help us expand into the rural areas because no local funders were really interested. They were all interested in the urban areas, where their factories and their businesses were. The second two years of their four-year commitment was specifically to strengthen what we call the Teacher Methodology Program. AID was our first international donor. It was also our biggest single donor when it came on board."
ESST’s programs have had substantial impact on primary and basic education. The English Proficiency Program has expanded rapidly since its inception. Students using it have shown improved test scores and tend to use English more spontaneously than those not using it. ESST directly distributes its materials to a large number of schools (primarily in the rural areas) and several companies have subscribed to the program for their employee’s children. In addition, many informal schools and educational organizations use EPP materials. The demand by schools and communities for EPP materials continues to grow exponentially. The program has recently been adopted by the Northern Cape Department of Education for province-wide distribution as part of an innovative business-government-NGO partnership, using newsprint to publish low-cost materials for all Standard 3 students. It will soon be replicated in the Eastern Cape and the Northern Province.
As for the effect of the Teacher Methodology Program, one teacher speaks for herself:
"Pupils did research on medicine, hospitals, diseases, and had to compile a book about the topic. It was a group activity, and they had one week to do this. Today, one class reported back. They did very well—talked and explained everything in their books. I was amazed with the quality of work they handed in. There were interesting facts about the disease AIDS that I, myself, did not know. The pupils taught me something (actually a lot)."
Open Learning Systems Education Trust: teaching by radio
OLSET, the Open Learning Systems Education Trust, was founded in 1990 to investigate how technology can help the disadvantaged majority through quality instruction at lower cost. Its primary activity is the Radio Learning Project, which uses radio (with printed materials and face-to-face teacher training) to teach primary-school children and to train teachers. The trust’s director, Gordon Naidoo, explains:
"The rationale for setting up OLSET was to offer very cost-effective, high-quality, interactive instructional design in classrooms within the spheres of English second-language teaching, mathematics and science, these being the three key high-failure areas for black learners throughout the country at the junior primary level. One of the big concerns in this country, on the part of the NGOs and the liberation movement generally, has been the very high failure and drop-out rate within the junior primary echelons in South Africa, driven by a number of factors: the very high over-representation of junior primary teachers in the unqualified categories, the very extreme under-resourced syndromes that were prevalent throughout the majority of black schools, the very high pupil/teacher ratios in black schools, and the language issue. Afrikaans was the medium of instruction, and most kids in most parts of the country didn’t speak Afrikaans. Another reason might be inappropriate classroom practises [and teacher training] relevant to the needs of black children at that sort of level. Those were some of the factors that essentially fed into the hemorrhage within the junior primary sector for possibly 40 years."
The particular model of radio instruction used by OLSET was actually developed under an AID project in the 1970’s to teach mathematics in Nicaragua. AID funded extensions of the methodology to other subjects in other places, including a series of programs in Kenya and Lesotho entitled "English in Action." OLSET has adapted this series to the South African situation. It has also pilot-tested mathematics programs and explored possibilities in science.
AID funding for OLSET’s radio work began in 1992. Gordon Naidoo recalls:
"We’ve been very fortunate in getting a considerable amount of funding from USAID in the initial years, particularly where OLSET and its staff were going through a very steep learning curve. In those initial years AID was our primary funder. I suspect without the funding in 1992/93/94, we would not have been where we are currently. [Later] we received money from the Joint Education Trust, from the Independent Development Trust, and some money from the Japanese Embassy. The Liberty Life Foundation was another funder, and one or two others. Subsequent to that we’ve received funding from the Royal Norwegian Embassy. They became our primary funder over the last two years. Now AID has come on-stream again with a two-year tranche."
Radio English is now being broadcast by the national radio service in seven of South Africa’s nine provinces. English in Action reaches between 60,000 and 75,000 students. Evaluations have shown the programs to be highly effective, particularly among remote rural schools and in communities where English is not commonly spoken or taught. Learning gains of 20% were measured at an annual per-pupil cost of approximately one dollar. One teacher from a black township outside of Pretoria puts a human face on these statistics:
"I knew that I had found a cure for my class. I sing, dance, play and talk with my children. The barriers have been broken. They don’t only have to sit and listen to the teacher, now they get involved. They ask questions. They answer questions. They formulate their own sentences. The learning gains can be seen."
Studies demonstrate that radio learning attracts both students and teachers. Gordon Naidoo notes:
"As one practitioner said quite soon after the elections, the biggest victory we could score would be to get more kids inside the classroom than outside of the classroom. If you look at our case study, you’d find that. A lot of teachers say that students come to school because they don’t want to miss the English in Action program. We’ve been heartened by that."
Early Learning Resource Unit: early childhood education and anti-bias training
Success in primary schools is built on the foundation of early learning, whether in the home or in pre-schools. When primary school children come from disadvantaged backgrounds, early childhood education (or educare, as it is sometimes called in South Africa) becomes even more important. It compensates for past handicaps and prepares for future success.
The Early Learning Resource Unit (ELRU) is a Cape Town-based research and development agency that provides training, support and resources throughout Southern Africa to help communities offer learning opportunities to young children. To carry out this mission it undertakes advocacy, develops programs and materials, trains trainers and offers non-formal adult learning. Growing out of the work of one early learning center in the Cape Town area, ELRU now concerns itself with national strategies to benefit the nearly six million preschool children in South Africa. Its director, Freda Brock, summarizes the work in these terms:
"Primarily we do training of teachers in pre-school, parents, and training of trainers. Probably that’s the area where we’re pitching our main thrust, because we believe that we have our highest impact and are able to make a difference. The training is supported by various other things. Research and materials development is a very big component of our work. We have a very strong research base, and we consider that to be a strength of the project. Research feeds into program development, but it also feeds into policy development."
ELRU’s Research and Information Services Coordinator, Linda Biersteker, adds:
"One of the things that developed during the ‘80’s was our training of trainers. Because at the time when we started there really weren’t any NGOs offering [early childhood development] training. So we had quite a strong hand in others to be developed in other parts of the country. We started training their trainers, and now there are probably 80 NGO training agencies."
AID’s funding has supported expansion of ELRU’s program, aimed particularly at influencing early childhood policy advocacy and multicultural curriculum development. The program includes staff development, training for rural educare workers, training and program development for parent playgroups, policy research initiatives, information dissemination, pilot models, linkages to junior primary school and anti-bias training for trainers.
This last area, anti-bias training, has been of particular interest to AID and to South Africa. Thikam Pillay, who coordinates ELRU’s efforts along these lines, explains:
"In the early 90’s lots of the schools became open schools. Previously white schools were opened to accept children of other cultures and language groups. Teachers weren’t equipped to deal with it. A colleague of mine, Helen Robb, who was involved in the project at that stage, saw the need for further training for herself. We realized that if we were going to facilitate such workshops... There were always sessions where people burst into tears, where it became quite hot with discussion. And underlying it all were issues of racism very often. We then saw the need to develop a course that would help trainers like ourselves. This is when USAID was approached. Funding came for our three-year project, which has now come to an end, what we refer to as our anti-racism training program. That started back in ‘93.
"The difference with this program as opposed to our other ELRU courses is that it wasn’t just early childhood development. We cut across all sectors of education. So we had people from tertiary, secondary, as well as early childhood, NGOs and the formal sector. Three years down the line, we’ve trained 150 [trainers of trainers]. We’re proud of the figures."
ELRU receives high marks for its training of educare workers, including teachers, child-minders and parents, for the materials it develops, and for its outreach programs. ELRU training courses and workshops have reached some 5,500 adults and benefitted over 800,000 children. Its awareness programs have reached an estimated 7,000 parents.
ELRU has changed the lives of many of the women whom it has trained. Some have found their voices for the first time. One woman comments:
"I think [shyness] has something to do with the custom and how we were growed up by our parents. Now in the community I don’t sit down. I stand up and talk even if it’s men now. I’m challenging men now. I know that women are like me when I was starting these course. Now I’ve developed; I must stand up and help other women now."
Media in Education Trust: using print media for teaching
The Durban-based Media in Education Trust (MIET) developed from another AID-supported organization, the Education Foundation. It became an independent NGO in April, 1996. MIET’s vision is to help transform classroom practice, teach critical thinking and bring about real learning, particularly for educationally disadvantaged South Africans. It uses the print media to do this, developing education supplements and promoting the use of newspapers and magazines as up-to-date, low-cost, disposable learning tools for teachers and learners. It also trains teachers.
MIET’s Director, Wilna Botha, went to the States in 1992 as part of an Education Foundation research project on media, especially the print media, in education. She returned "with a whole range of ideas and materials" and began working with people experienced using newspapers for education in what was then Natal Province (now KwaZulu Natal Province).
"We started running workshops in partnership with the Education Department which then in Kwa Zulu Natal seemed to be very much ahead of other departments in terms of starting to work together. We started to run workshops throughout KwaZulu Natal for teachers from different departments. I remember going to Kokstad at a time when there was a lot of conflict in the area and the daily newspaper had a headline ‘Kokstad is a powder keg waiting to explode.’ And we had, for the first time ever, teachers from the previous black, Indian, colored, and white schools, sitting together and workshopping, saying, ‘This is history being made.’ The project grew from that. Very much a part of its strength is that it ties together teachers from different environments.
"We then also became involved in the development of newspaper and magazine supplements. Right from the start we made a decision that we would be dealing at lower levels where it was possible to effect changes in approaches, methodology: primary school level and also junior secondary."
Lynn Larcombe, MIET’s Training Manager, emphasizes its rural focus:
"I don’t want to sound as though I’m boasting, but I think we’re one of the few NGOs that have really persevered in working in rural communities. It is really difficult. It’s expensive for one, and distribution is difficult. But it was how the project actually started. In fact Wilna has from the beginning used a picture of a rural child as a kind of touchstone. We keep going back to that. Are we making a difference to that rural child in what we’re doing? We’ve really persevered with training in rural areas so that we can make a difference to those rural children."
MIET’s accredited training programs in rural areas are largely funded through AID. The materials are primarily sponsored by South African newspapers and magazines, as well as by local businesses. Lynn Larcombe describes how U.S. contributions have helped:
"In terms of the training, we were at that point I described as two-hour workshops. Then USAID providing funding to develop a course, which gave us that opportunity to actually develop it into something that is really worthwhile and really meeting the needs, I believe, of teacher training out there. And now with further USAID funding, [we are] able to really pilot it and evaluate it."
MIET has already trained more than 12,000 teachers in three provinces. Many more teachers have been served through its expanding "train the trainers" program, which has already reached about 250 teacher-trainers. The newspapers and magazines carrying its education supplements have a combined circulation of about 660,000, and reach a readership of 4.5 million people.
The Teacher: a monthly newspaper for educators
MIET is not the only AID- supported NGO working to harness the power of the print media in service to education. Another innovative endeavor is The Teacher, a monthly newspaper aimed at primary and secondary school instructors. It is a project of the South African Newspaper Education Trust (SANET). Established in 1987 and based in Johannesburg, SANET trains young journalists from disadvantaged communities across the country.
A national, non-partisan newspaper, The Teacher is a color tabloid that includes a mixture of editorial content and advertisements. It provides needed information and support to South Africa’s disadvantaged teachers during this period of educational transformation. Recent headlines have ranged from "curriculum debate gains to momentum" to "risking our lives to teach."
Vusi Mona, who describes himself as "a teacher by birth, by profession and by inclination,"is The Teacher’s editor. He describes the significance of his newspaper:
"The Teacher is an excellent publication, a publication that came just at the right time in the history of this country. Because for quite a long time the teaching profession has been characterized by a culture of silence. This has much to do with the kind of history from which South Africa has emerged, where people were not free to say their say.
"It is a newspaper which provides the platform for teachers to air their views on any issues on education and also to share ideas on what has worked for them inside the classroom. It’s a monthly newspaper, usually ranging from 20 to 32 pages. I have received some criticism from people who say, ‘As a monthly, can you really be on top of issues? Can you splash out the news like the dailies will do and like the electronic media will do?’ But I think it gives us an advantage being a monthly, because we can provide the kind of background and analysis which dailies and weeklies cannot. At this time in South Africa teachers need to be involved. Teachers need to know the background that informs some of the education policy decisions that are taken by government. Being a monthly has really helped us a great deal because our research is in depth."
AID’s support is intended to pay for approximately 20 editions of the newspaper, while the project becomes self-sustaining, as well as training for its editor, sponsoring workshops and writer training for urban and rural teachers, and underwriting scholarships for classroom innovation. Vusi Mona explains its impact:
"USAID gave us the seed money. That money has helped us a great deal because we have been able to pay staff salaries, we have been able to pay for our printing costs, and other infrastructure like offices that we are renting. So the money has proven to be of great help. It has provided us with a solid foundation from which we could build the success of the paper. I am positive three to five years down the line this paper will be self-sustainable. But we still need a bit of funding to help us break even and thereafter start generating profits."
The newspaper targets 300,000 employed teachers, as well as 82,000 trainees in teachers’ colleges. It set a target of reaching more that 40,000 subscribers by the end of the two-year AID grant that began in 1995. The current figure of more than 100,000 subscribers substantially exceeds that objective. Most of these are members of the South Africa Democratic Teachers’ Union, which has agreed to supply The Teacher eventually to all 140,000 of its members. Individual subscriptions are also sold to approximately 8,000 teachers at a cost of about four dollars per year.
National Literacy Co-operation: a network of literacy organizations
The first line of defense against illiteracy is primary schooling. In the case of South Africa, however, that line has been repeatedly breached, first by the challenges facing any African country (too many people, too few resources) and then by the special forces of apartheid (intentional marginalization of non-white students and teachers, breakdown of urban education). The result is a literacy challenge that belies South Africa’s status as the continent’s economic leader. One expert estimates that 12 to 15 million adults in the country are functionally illiterate.
Transforming primary schools will not help those South Africans who have already missed their chance there. If they are to learn how to read, write and count, they must do so as adults. Thus AID’s strategy for strengthening basic education also includes what South Africans call ABET, adult basic education and training.
Prior to democratic elections in 1994 this was officially the job of the Department of Education and Training, or DET, the government department charged in practice with delivering inferior education to non-whites. DET ran night schools to teach adult literacy. Whatever their technical strengths and weaknesses, the DET night schools were politically unacceptable to many South Africans. A host of NGOs and CBOs sprang up to offer alternatives.
The National Literacy Cooperation (NLC) is a black-led, independent, Johannesburg-based network of such groups. Established in 1986, it is the largest national umbrella organization representing literacy and adult basic education NGOs in South Africa. By coordinating and supporting the work of its ABET NGO affiliates, the NLC aims to make a significant impact on reducing the number of functionally illiterate adults. The national Ministry of Education has identified the NLC as the leading literacy NGO to help facilitate its literacy campaign. In fact, Khetsi Lehoko, now in charge of the Ministry’s national ABET program, is a former NLC staff member, and its former director, Kumi Naidoo, now heads the South African National NGO Coalition.
Enrico Fourie, NLC’s Acting Director, traces its history:
"There were three phases of the NLC. The first phase was from ‘86 to about ‘89, when there were a few organizations who were trying to network around the theory and practice of literacy. They broadly formed themselves into some kind of network. The NLC had no national office or provincial offices. It didn’t really have a center. It was more supportive work, bringing together ideas.
"The second phase was when networking started to be formalized between organizations and there was some structure emerging. You’re talking ‘89 to ‘93/’94. This was a critical period, also about developing models of curriculum materials, models of training in the field, and models of provision, or direct classes. Right at the end there was a lot of work done by the NLC organizations around mass-scale literacy programs for a future South Africa, when it was clear that we were going to have elections in ‘94.
"The third phase of the NLC is when it becomes a real organization, attempts to consolidate affiliates. Now we have about 160 affiliates and growing. Then the NLC becomes a national office with a national structure, with a set of policies and guidelines, and we begin to look at how we can begin to build a system of accreditation of the different kinds of provision in the voluntary sector. Another aspect of the period, more during ‘95/96, is testing mass skill provision. So we have something called the Thousand Learner Unit Program [with European Union funding]. We have reached a thousand learners per province as a pilot study to look at what will it take to develop a far more mass-scale form of provision of adult basic education in the country."
AID has provided two grants to the NLC. At the time of the first, the organization was staffed by only two individuals and the literacy community was fraught with fragmentation and intense competition. During the 18 months of the grant’s life span, the NLC succeed in building capacity and infrastructure in each of the nine provinces and facilitated the development of a national framework for the delivery of adult basic education in South Africa. The second AID grant, in 1995-96, aimed at further strengthening the NLC. Enrico Fourie explains their importance:
"Those grants were directly supporting the activities of the national office in so far as our policy and advocacy programs were concerned. They were critical in sustaining our work at that level, making the policy interventions, writing policy documents, funding the national office infrastructure cost and salaries. We motivated the funding for that because we were playing a critical role in this transition period."
Education Foundation: better information for better decisions
Established in 1990, the Education Foundation’s mission is "to address the critical lack of contemporary and accessible data and information about education in South Africa." It is dedicated to helping educational decision-makers make better decisions and to making education a better place. The foundation develops and provides data, decision support, training and information systems to a wide variety of groups, from communities to provincial and national government. It has established a strong non-partisan reputation based on its ability to respond rapidly and objectively to critical issues and problems.
Peter Badcock-Walters, the foundation’s Executive Director, describes its development:
"We’re there first and foremost for the child in the classroom and consequently our mission is to ensure that sufficient information reaches the hands and heads of decision-makers at all levels. In our first year of operations we set up a free query service. We found to our surprise that the biggest users of the service were the government education departments themselves, essentially getting back the data [they had reluctantly given us] in a comprehensive form.
"We got the heads of education departments and the government of the day, heads of the ANC education desk and other key democratic roll players, around the same table to dialogue over the future education options of the country, in a situation where they were jointly confronted for the first time with a real overview of what the options were, what the real data looked like and what the likely outcome of any policy positions would be. We were able to bring a healthy dose of reality to what were up to that time some incredibly optimistic and perhaps naive visions of what a future education dispensation might deliver.
"For example, we would have people outside government saying because the whites had always had 20 pupils to one teacher, they too were demanding 20 pupils per one teacher in a future dispensation. And our role was not to comment or play any kind of judgmental position, but to get people engaged in the creative process and then to introduce a reality check. The reality check in terms of the policy model comes when you come face to face with the real cost of your decision making. As we were fond of saying at the time, all this looks great but you, as the hypothetical Minister of Education, now need to explain to the Ministers of Transport, Health and Housing that they don’t have any budget left because you spent it all.
"We took an organizational decision after the elections to concentrate our focus and energies at a provincial level because we saw the greatest need and demand there. While the national department of education has responsibility for norms and standards, the provinces have to implement and administer education. In our field—education policy, data, research—we saw an almost total absence of those kinds of resources and skills. So after the elections we set out to work with the education departments in each of the provinces to help design and establish EMIS (educational management information systems) units in each of the provinces and empower those units with training, with skills, with the wherewithal to become independent of us over time."
AID has supported several key aspects of the foundation’s efforts, including modeling work carried out in conjunction with the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, the EduSource user-friendly education database, the training of black South Africans in policy options modelling, and the media in education project than evolved into MIET. Peter Badcock-Walters explains:
"In fact AID probably came on-stream within our first 12 months of activity. They have been our most consistent funder. What we did from those early days was work hard to leverage the kind of money that AID was making available to us with funding from other sources."
Independent Examinations Board: transforming assessment to transform education
As with most English-speaking countries on the continent, South Africa’s education system has its roots in a Western, and particularly a British, model. Not the least of the European influences is the concept of a terminal, or "leaving," examination. In South Africa this is the "matric," for "matriculation examination," the end-of-high-school exam that determines a student’s future standing in general, and eligibility for further education in particular. Students who do well on the matric can look forward to a place at one of the country’s best universities. Students who fail do not even possess a high school diploma with which to console themselves.
In any such exam-driven system, one of the most effective change agents is assessment. By altering what is examined and how it is examined, educators can quickly change the priorities and practice of students and teachers alike. In this fact lies much of the Independent Examination Board’s importance. Established in 1988, its initial role was to take over the functions of the Joint Matriculation Board, an early attempt to establish non-racial and national, as opposed to provincial, examination (and, therefore, curriculum) standards. Now its mission is to train educators in modern approaches to assessment and to support learners through assessment systems that promote quality and access. In addition to administering the independent matric exam to an estimated 3,500 students in 1996, the IEB is also involved in setting adult basic education examinations recognized by government and industry, training teachers in assessment, supporting the development of an accreditation system for early childhood development practitioners, helping design the new National Qualifications Framework (NQF), and establishing pilot Standard 7 (Grade 9) examinations as a mechanism for assessing compulsory basic education.
Ed French, Director of Communication and Research for the IEB, elaborates:
"What we’ve got to do is to shape differently the quality of the instruments of assessment and what they’re assessing, since they have such a huge influence on what is actually taught. There was the perception that our practice in the past was to create the curriculum and then tag on the examination. Reality was that people worked to the examinations, especially the powerful public examinations, and disregarded things, however valuable, that were not examined. After years of running programs that were meant for transforming education, again and again teachers went back into a system which neither demanded nor supported those innovations. However committed you managed to make people to educational innovation, to progressive change, these things would fail. What we’ve got to do is to build into that end point the real things that we’re striving for, and we’ve got to give power to them. To some extent you’re then obliging teachers to change.
The Standard 7 exam is one contribution that the IEB makes directly to the primary system. Ed French comments:
"[The IEB founders] started a Standard 7 public exam, to hone their skills in organizing and running an exam and also to prepare those students who would be working towards the new IEB exam some years later. In a sense they worked towards the broad core curricula which were prescribed nationally. They tried to introduce a lot of outcomes-based features into these exams.
"Standard 7 came to be declared the government’s official General Education Certificate level. The Standard 7 exams remain relatively small and vulnerable at the moment because there’s not a huge amount of social pressure to write them. But we’re building up that pressure. We find a lot of need, especially in the poorer provinces where they just want to do some tracking and motivation of quality lower down the school system then happens at the moment. After twelve years [the school system] really only has its quality check at the last moment."
AID is supporting the IEB in the areas of adult basic education and training (for Department of Education staff training and quality assurance systems) and primary education (assisting provincial departments improve access and quality). Reviewing the history of U.S. support to his organization, Ed French notes:
"Even at the best of times, I wouldn’t say we live from hand to mouth, but like any non-profit organization that can’t recover its costs and is doing innovative work we’re absolutely dependent on money. USAID has been absolutely fundamental to our work. What we’ve particularly valued is the way the Agency has listened, has shared with us in shaping a vision and helping us to realize it."
Impact of foreign assistance on educational development in South Africa
Many countries can take credit for supporting South Africa’s struggle for liberation and development. Just about every major donor is actively represented in the country now. Many played important roles during the years of struggle. Some are well known to Americans: the World Bank and various United Nations agencies on the multi-lateral side, and on the bilateral side Canada, the various European powers, and Japan. Others perhaps seem more obscure, but are no less important. For example, the Nordic nations supplied about $750 million directly to anti-apartheid forces and contributed between half and two-thirds of the ANC’s non-military budget in the 20 years preceding the 1994 elections.
Enrico Fourie of the National Literacy Cooperation demonstrates the importance of foreign assistance by comparing adult literacy to youth development:
"If you take a sector like the youth sector, where there was very little equivalent foreign donor support for the development of a youth culture, you have this huge social stratum of angry and dislocated youth that has built up. If that was the case [no donor support] for adult basic education, we would have had a similar phenomenon. I think that’s quite an important thing."
Special role and contributions of AID
AID, therefore, stands in good company on a crowded foreign aid field. All of the NGOs surveyed here see U.S. funds as having been vital to their success. All of them acknowledge the particular benefits of AID’s assistance. OLSET’s Gordon Naidoo asserts:
"I really don’t think that radio learning would have taken off the way it has in this country [without AID funding].... I certainly know that we couldn’t have gotten [support] from the government of the day and we certainly couldn’t have gotten it from local funders. I think the boldness of the AID vision and the conviction of its appropriateness and future relevance was what made us get this far."
James Olivier of ESST notes that AID’s contributions went beyond money to organizational development, a process that not only improved his NGO’s effectiveness but also its ability to raise additional funds.
"[Without foreign assistance] our present existence would have been doubtful. Because when USAID came in in ‘92, significantly speaking the first overseas donor, they were very, very emphatic about systemic change, about systemic strengthening, about organizational development. It strengthened our developmental capacity, it strengthened our printing capacity, it strengthened our staff capacity and all over it strengthened our organization’s ability to do its work and to do it better. Now that’s heavy because it enabled us to go further afield, seek further funding, and say, ‘Look how much more strong and viable we are now than we were a year ago.’ So, I’m afraid I have to give those people the credit for strengthening us at the point in our career where it was a watershed. The alternative could very well have been a failure to grow strong enough to serve a wide-enough community."
Lydia Abel builds on his last point:
"I think that’s really the issue. There are many organizations doing really good work. I think one theorist refers to them as ‘victory gardens.’ But the problem in South Africa is one of numbers. You can do wonderful work with 10 or 20 people, but when you’re working with 200,or 2,000 or 20,000, or two million, then the whole thing becomes much more difficult. I think one of our strengths is that we’ve actually been able to reach so many people. That wouldn’t have been possible [without foreign donors]."
Linda Biersteker highlights the impact of AID funding of developing ELRU’s capacity, as well as its special programs:
"For us at that stage, it was a very big grant. First of all, it was a very large amount of money for staff development, which has been extremely useful in building staff capacity. For the first time we were able to bring in research staff at a higher level than we’d had before. It started building that department, which has been quite active in policy. The anti-bias program would have simply not been here [without U.S. funding]. We picked up a lot of rural work, and also that whole community-based [effort]—getting out into very difficult circumstances. There was a health and nutrition training component, management workshops at that local level. And that contributed to developing our community motivator strategy, which is a whole strategy for reaching the unreached."
Peter Badcock-Walters of the Education Foundation concludes:
"I don’t think much of this would have happened [without AID’s support]. I think we would have achieved some of what we’ve managed to do, but one must remember that this is an extremely tight environment. In that kind of situation, had it not been for the agreement of AID to support precisely this kind of important activity, I don’t think it would have worked. I don’t think we would have had enough funding to carry off the full agenda of activity. So it was quite simply critical to our success. Through USAID, [we could] access a remarkable body of international expertise based in the U.S., and essentially be exposed ourselves institutionally to a great deal of financial discipline and development innovation.
"The other important point about the leveraging of one set of funds with another is that USAID is very specific and very earmarked. In its own right it could have been quite restrictive in respect of the often dynamic circumstances of the education environment here. So we were able to use the corresponding funding from [other sources] to be able to move forward our activities that might otherwise have taken AID quite a long time to approve."
Those unfamiliar with the situation in South Africa during the apartheid era might be surprised at the level of suspicion over foreign donors, especially the United States, described earlier in this article. Linda Biersteker of ELRU describes her own organization’s initial concerns about accepting American help:
"We wavered for quite a long time at the time we first got a grant from USAID. There was a lot of anxiety in South Africa about whether we should take the money. There were a lot of concerns kicking around at the time about CIA connections and all that. We actually checked out with the democratic movement that it was OK to get the money. And then very suddenly after that, it was fine. USAID became an enormously sought-after donor. But during those deep struggle years there was a lot of anxiety about foreign money. We were quite satisfied that there wasn’t an agenda behind the [AID] funds."
As she explains, eventually the NGO community gained confidence that support would not equate to control. Experience vindicated that confidence. None of the organizations surveyed here expressed the slightest concern about their independence. Vusi Mona, who as a journalist would be more sensitive than most to outside influence, is unequivocal:
"Well, honestly, my editorial independence has never been interfered with. USAID does sit in our editorial advisory board, but simply as observers. My editorial independence has never been under any threat."
Ironically, the place where AID’s oversight really has caused some problems lies at the bureaucratic, not the political, level. One of the most commonly articulated NGO complaints has to do with AID’s requirements for frequent, detailed reporting. Such obligations, difficult even for American universities and contractors with substantial experience implementing AID projects, can prove overwhelming for small organizations. One organization’s head described new reporting procedures "so extreme as to create a really negative reaction, not just from NGOs but importantly from government." Another claimed that it was necessary to hire a full-time staff person just to deal with USAID. A third commented that AID funds have been helpful "in spite of Washington’s bureaucracy, which makes anything a misery in a way"
Peter Badcock-Walters summarizes in these terms how an NGO must respond:
"We make damn sure we operate effective financial management and controls, because ultimately the reporting requirement of any donor organization are a lot more rigorous than most NGOs are used to. So consequently we recognize that up front and ensure that our already pretty good systems are tailored to meet exactly the kind of needs that USAID articulated."
On the other hand, these same organizations recognize the need for accountability. Many acknowledge some value to themselves from comprehensive reporting. The senior ESST staff acknowledge both the pros and the cons of AID’s requirements. James Olivier notes:
"They irritated us, they irritate people, because they have very precise demands on accountability, on financial reporting, on staff employment policies, on doing this, doing that, doing the other. So it’s irritating when you’re trying to get on with your job. And in retrospect all of those irritants were good irritants."
Lydia Abel continues:
"They were very important. We went to speak to [another donor]. They were having a problem. They funded all these people, and they were having difficulty in getting people to account for what they had been doing with their money. They didn’t have a system in place. And we were able to say to them, ‘But look, this is what we do for USAID. Why don’t you just take the same system? It works.’"
A particularly contentious policy issue for USAID/South Africa, as for the United States and South Africa as nations, has been affirmative action. Nothing better illustrates the dilemma facing AID’s South African program than the CAAA’s directives to empower black leadership and the "victims of apartheid" while at the same time supporting South Africa in its goal of creating a non-racial society. Critics in the United States have charged USAID/South Africa’s leadership with excessive zeal in carrying out its affirmative action mandate. According to South African press reports, Congressional staff members charge that whites have been forced out of AID projects.
A recent evaluation of AID’s South African program, however, concludes:
"Any genuine effort to implement [the CAAA] mandate leads unavoidably to the giving of preference to black groups over white ones in the dispensing of aid, and USAID/SA has unashamedly pursued this policy.... Excessive zeal is, however, hard to find. The data shows that, despite USAID/SA’s efforts at implementing an affirmative action program, it was only in 1994 that black-led organizations, for the first time, received total awards greater than white-led South African organizations, although white South Africans constitute [less than 20%] percent of the nation’s population."
Some white NGO staff see value in USAID/South Africa’s policy, even though it precluded their own funding through AID grants. For example, James Olivier of ESST, emphasizing that "my salary isn’t paid by USAID," explains:
"USAID forced us to check our own mind sets. But more important than that, we’re dealing with market forces. If you want the skilled creative artist, writer or illustrator, 99 out of 100 applicants will be white, because they’ve had the training, they’ve had the exposure. The chances of us getting black applicants who are suitable for the job are so very, very low. And also we didn’t have the money to invest in people. We had to take people on board, pay them a salary, and get every cent’s worth out of them. Affirmative action is a form of investment. You very often pay for results that you aren’t getting yet. We see it as investing in people, people that we’ve taken on board who couldn’t perform on strength yet. We were forced by USAID to strengthen that aspect. And two, three, four years later, we are reaping the results."
Also balancing such concerns are frequent expressions of appreciation by NGO staff for the moral and technical support provided by USAID/South Africa. Typical are Gordon Naidoo’s comments:
"In my experience with USAID, or the [Norwegians] for that matter, we’ve had very few strings attached in the sense that we were directed in one way or another. AID have given us the latitude, have brought a number of perspectives to the table, and have allowed us as South Africans to determine what the curriculum would be, to develop new models of teacher development and integrate that into the radio learning program. Basically they have given us carte blanche and said, ‘It’s your country, your situation. You develop your radio learning program in a way that you see fit for your culture and for your situation.’
So I think we’ve had that sort of very open relationship which also moved away from the financial. We’ve had very genuine concern within the [USAID] mission. A number of AID people have actually been engaged with what was happening in the project, visited the project often, came into the classrooms, attended teacher support groups, attended teacher training workshops, and so on."
Wilna Botha of MIET agrees:
"Our personal experience has been that with USAID there’s been far more interaction than with any other donor, sort of ongoing communication interaction. We’ve been very fortunate."
The Education Foundation’s experience also confirms this, as Peter Badcock-Walters explains:
"AID has been our most consistent funder, but more than funder, partner. I think we’ve had a remarkably honest and interactive relationship. We’ve not always agreed on every point of activity, but they have listened very attentively to whatever information we could provide on our view of the education environment, and they’ve responded extremely flexibly. AID is not renowned in the view of many of the NGO sector for being flexible, but in our own view, they’ve very often been remarkably accommodating. I don’t think we can point to an occasion on which AID didn’t listen hard and carefully and come to a pretty well-reasoned decision for supporting or, as the case may be, not supporting us."
Testing AID’s development hypothesis
Returning to AID’s strategy of building future progress on the accomplishments of NGOs before democracy’s advent, can one make any judgments yet about its validity?
The stories of the NGOs reviewed here do confirm that AID’s investments during the struggle years produced tangible results in its three target areas. In the realm of policy formulation, for instance, AID can point to:
ground-breaking work by the Education Foundation on the entire range of policy issues facing the new, democratic government, from educational financing to pupil/teacher ratios
contributions by OLSET to the new national policy on technology and education
ELRU’s lobbying on behalf of early childhood development policy, to "put young children on the map," including submissions to the constitutional assembly on children’s rights
NLC’s contributions to planning and delivery policy for adult literacy and basic education
new policies on assessing basic education pioneered by the IEB
MIET’s successful advocacy for policy changes on accreditation, allowing NGOs to offer recognized teacher training
input to the new national curriculum in areas such as outcomes-based education and curricular learning areas from NGOs such as MIET
policies on more effective teaching methods to replace rote learning, pioneered by several of the highlighted NGOs such as ESST
Turning to systems development, AID-supported NGOs have delivered:
innovative, learner-centered materials for primary-school children from disadvantaged backgrounds produced by ESST
OLSET’s radio learning model, now being examined by several other NGOs working in different sectors, including early childhood education
MIET’s model learning materials and innovative distribution methods using the print media
NLC’s model adult basic education delivery systems
alternative in-service teacher education models introduced by several highlighted NGOs,
ELRU programs for anti-bias training and community motivators
the Education Foundation’s information systems for government and NGO’s
IEB’s new assessment systems, from design to logistics
Finally, AID’s development partners have enhanced system capacity in many different ways:
teacher training programs from NGOs such as ESST and MIET in how to change the classroom into a learning environment
general support for teachers through The Teacher newspaper
ELRU’s programs to prepare early childhood education trainers and to give women access to further training
new approaches to national curriculum development based on OLSET’s pioneering radio work
adult basic education capacity-building workshops for government and other NGOs sponsored by the NLC
training for individuals and organizational support for government departments from the Education Foundation
IEB’s provincial-level training in new assessment models
These accomplishments, in turn, have obvious potential to help transform South Africa’s education system by improving equity of quality and equity of access. In the view of many of the responsible NGOs, the alternative models they are pioneering have already made a difference. For instance, Freda Brock of the Early Learning Resource Unit says:
"Using alternative models, for instance the community motivator—that is increasing access to the millions of children who would never be able to get into centers or schools as they exist because of fees, or because of their location."
OLSET’s radio programs offer a similar advantage, as Gordon Naidoo explains:
"Rural communities didn’t have access to mainstream education. Black communities didn’t have access to mainstream education. Girls and women didn’t have equity of access to education of any significance. Radio offers that sort of immediate access to all of these communities without any of the biases: without the gender or race bias, without the distance bias, and so on. The radio learning program has also shifted the perception of English language teaching. It has shifted the perception of the cost of delivery of education in this country. It has also shifted the perception of quality dissipating the further you moved away from the hub. Radio learning has shown that you can provide exactly the same quality of instruction in the remotest of rural areas as you could in the center of the city."
The National Literacy Cooperation’s Enrico Fourie extends the argument to adults:
"In the programs we are delivering and will be planning for, we have provided access for millions of illiterates to the system—the potential for access either in terms of life-long learning and further education or immediate access in terms of access to the economy, access into social institutions, access into education, the education ladder."
Of course these effort is still at the early stages. Ed French notes:
"I think one of the huge challenges of the future is to develop equity and quality. A funny thing about our adult exam system is that when you’re actually working in there you become almost physically aware of the transformative capacity of an assessment process like this as you conduct it. You become also intensely aware that unless you build quality you’re not going to be building equity, you’ll just be opening doors that people actually can’t go through."
Vusi Mona stresses the importance of teacher training, a major aspect of the work of most of these NGO’s and the rationale for The Teacher newspaper:
"Transformation is taking place, but in practice a lot needs to be done on teacher retraining, because at the end of the day teachers are the implementers of the policies. Otherwise it could be said that we have changes without any difference: change at national level, change in so far as policies are concerned, but no tangible changes in the classrooms and in our schools. But I must say that teachers in this country are enthusiastic about the future. They are prepared to embrace change. They are prepared to play their role in transformation."
Finally, Peter Badcock-Walters cautions:
"I think one of the issues that we all failed to recognize at the outset is how long transformation in education really takes. We delude ourselves that we can declare policy and fix things, but in practice, particularly in a system as big and complex as South Africa’s, it is a long, time-consuming and painful process of attrition."
AID’s approach to linking its apartheid- and democratic-era funding strategies depends on two assumptions: that the work of NGOs supported with U.S. assistance prepared the ground for the new dispensation, and that the same groups will provide a reservoir of expertise on which government and society can draw in the new South Africa. Having demonstrated their clear impact in the preparation phase, what can be said about NGO prospects for future contributions?
Crystal balls are always less clear than hindsight. Certainly South Africa’s estimated 30,000 non-governmental organizations are themselves wondering what the future will bring. Ironically, the democratic government itself comes under attack in this regard. Ben Turok, an ANC Member of Parliament and himself the controversial head of an NGO, recently suggested, "We have to admit that the new South Africa owes the [NGO] movement an apology." He cited several causes for the problems faced by non-governmental organizations, including "a large hemorrhage of skilled personnel who have moved into government," "a huge loss in funding," and a "chronic incapacity" to work harmoniously together towards a common vision.
Efforts by government to "coordinate" foreign assistance funds, which are at the center of AID’s strategy to build future reforms on past successes, have garnered the most criticism. In the words of Kumi Naidoo of the South African National NGO Coalition:
"It was a tragic error and resulted in many NGOs going to the wall. Of course international agencies have so much more interest in funding government. Regardless of the government’s policy to encourage foreign donors to work directly with NGOs, it’s not happening."
In general, the future seems brighter for the AID-supported NGOs described here. For example, the Media in Education Trust has already begun successfully working for, as well as with, government. Wilna Botha explains:
"In terms of the materials, we are increasingly responding to the needs of national and provincial government. For example, at this very moment our colleagues are developing a launch document for the new curriculum. We were asked by the national department of education to do that. They are paying us; it’s a contract."
Lynn Larcombe also sees the possibility of generating fees from MIET clients:
"We do see ourselves perhaps moving into being an organization that offers this [teacher] qualification. Teachers would enrol with us and pay their fees to us, rather than to a university, for example. So we see that as an avenue of sustainability where external funding, donor funding, might no longer be available."
However, some organizations do have very real concerns about their prospects for becoming stronger, or even surviving. In part this depends on the constituencies they address. Organizations serving people at the bottom of the social ladder or those with the most limited resources are the most dependent on outside funding, whether from overseas or within South Africa. Freda Brock explains this principle from the Early Learning Resource Unit’s perspective when asked where her NGO will be in five years:
"Without foreign aid, nowhere. You see, the foreign donors have been poised for so long waiting for the government to kick in with funding. It hasn’t been able to do that. It hasn’t even been able to develop within its own programs the capacity to do the kind of work that we’re doing. And we’re hoping that good will and good sense will prevail. Basically, if that doesn’t happen, if there isn’t a fairly prolonged, conditional funding period, because of our constituency we don’t think that we’re going to be able to generate enough income to sustain ourselves."
One of Ms. Brock’s points is that NGOs often serve people who cannot afford to purchase services at commercial rates. This suggests the need for some sort of ongoing funding as a means of helping those who are economically or socially disadvantaged. Ed French of the IEB notes the same problem:
"It’s very difficult to charge people in rural NGOs what it costs us to run the exams, so there’s still been quite a lot of backing for that. We’ve certainly received major support from international donors. USAID, I would say, has been one of our greatest, and in a sense most loyal and nicest, supporters."
Several NGOs see tripartite cooperation as the logical next step. For example, Lydia Abel of the Education Support Services Trust comments:
"We’re looking at entering into partnerships with government and a donor or donors. We’ve been approached by government, and we’ve approached them, depending on the circumstances. We’ve got a health project that we’ve put together on primary health care which the government are interested in. We have to now go and scratch around and find somebody to put the money together so that it can be done under the auspices of the government."
Why is it necessary to seek additional funding when donors are supposed to be providing it already as bilateral aid? She explains that, so far at least, the theory works better than the practice.
"[Donors] want to channel the money through government. What happened is, there’s a hiccup between the giving of the money, the issuing of tenders or contracts, and taking on board an NGO. That next step has not happened yet. [Provincial governments have] been told monies are available, but for a variety of reasons they are not accessing the money. They are not acting as a conduit to NGOs. I reckon that it’s going to be at least three to five years before the provincial governments are in any kind of position to, I’m not saying take over the work of NGOs, but at least buy into some of the work of NGOs where they can make a financial contribution."
Gordon Naidoo of OLSET shares a cooperative vision:
"I see us working more in sync with the provincial ministries rather than against the system, as has been the case in the past. The ultimate mark of success would be our working ourselves out of a job completely and the ministry rightfully taking over the role of provisioning in schools, in all the provinces, itself rather than NGOs doing so. Having said that, I also think that NGOs are the civil society balance in South Africa and probably are conducive to maintaining a very healthy democratic atmosphere, even if they aren’t the primary providers of education 10 years from now."
According to Enrico Fourie, the National Literacy Cooperation sees possible future relationships with government that are substantially different from its past experience.
"We have really two options. One is that we go into the State as an allied arm of the State and get funded by the government in terms of our policy work. Or we set up an institute as an autonomous organization which is funded directly by government. In our motivations for funding and grant agreements, we’ve always classified this period as a period of transition to the year 2000. In the long term, adult basic education should be a State-provided service. We should be providing education as a State. So we don’t see ourselves as being a separate entity unless we want to set up an institute or a national center, which then we would not function in the way that we function now."
Finally, while Peter Badcock-Walters also speaks of a development partnership, he also sees the necessity of NGOs becoming more effective and commercial:
"We’re going to be drawn more and more into providing services in direct commercial competition with the private sector and with far more commercially driven NGO organizations. That means we’re going to have to get a great deal more effective, cost-efficient and commercially motivated. The future is going to be about very, very specific scopes of work, generated by the education departments, carried out by the resource providers like the Education Foundation and financed either by the departments themselves or by the donor community or even through the raising of finance through development or other banks. The bottom line is we’re probably close now to realizing a vision that I think we have long pursued, that is a real partnership between the NGO sector, the education departments per se and the enabling capacities of development agencies like USAID."
Message to the American people
The development of South Africa’s education system from its apartheid past to its democratic future is still a work in progress. Most other African countries can already look back on a few decades of educational transformation; South Africans see a job that began just a few years ago. Yet even in that short time much progress has been made. A new Schools Act is awaiting the President Mandela’s signature. Racist laws are gone. Racially divided bureaucracies have been replaced by new, united structures, which are already making progress towards smoother functioning (albeit with great room for improvement). An entire nation is coming to terms with the new dispensation, with much tumult but surprisingly little conflict.
The United States, through its Agency for International Development, has been an important player among the many donors assisting South Africa. Prior to the 1994 elections, AID’s support strengthened a large number of non-governmental and community-based organizations working to compensate for apartheid’s ravages and to prepare for a new political dispensation. That dispensation achieved, AID is now spending approximately $30 million a year to help government as well as its former NGO partners transform the education system, to give all South African’s equal access to quality education, on the basis of a foundation laid in policy formulation, systems development and capacity enhancement.
As is the case everywhere, the South Africans who have benefitted from this assistance and the American taxpayers who contributed it do not know each other. Nor are most of them likely to ever meet. Yet suppose they could be brought together. What would the South Africans say? James Olivier of ESST begins:
"I’d say to them we are busy building our society. In South Africa we are in the absolutely singular position of being able to redesign our society. And we are part of the world society. The American taxpayer is helping to fund ESST, which is helping to resuscitate our South African society. We have a black government. We have a black president. So we are rebuilding our society from a perspective that is very, very far from the perspective in which I grew up. I find it exhilarating to be living within a social ideology that I walked into. As I grew old, I walked into it. I didn’t come out of it. And the same goes for probably all South Africans. We’ve walked into a very futuristic notion of South Africa. Ten years ago people would have laughed if you told them what was happening here today. Now the American taxpayer is doing this same thing globally. They are walking into a new universal society. And that’s what I would tell them. Thank you very much for funding that universal society."
Wilna Botha of MIET echoes this appreciation and this global vision:
"One is thankful in the sense of knowing that they [the American taxpayers] are very far away. There are huge, pressing needs in the United States, and obviously one’s first sense would be to want to address those needs. But I think we all are becoming more part of a global community, and that in the end what happens in one area of the globe must affect what happens elsewhere. I do think that maybe what’s been developed in this country also has the potential of having an impact on the rest of the continent."
From the perspective the Education Foundation, Peter Badcock-Walters suggests that both sides benefit from the relationship:
"I think that if the U.S. has any aspiration to remain a world leader, it can only do that if it has a world that is competent to work with it and to work alongside it. In South Africa we have a fighting chance of being able to pull off a development paradigm that can really provide a meaningful partnership for the rest of the developed world. In that sense, any kind of U.S. dollar contribution to making that happen, to giving South Africa a fighting chance, that translates into a seriously rejuvenated and energized education system that produces the kind of people that you need to work alongside—any contribution along those lines makes the future of Africa and the U.S. better."
OLSET’s Gordon Naidoo points out that some Americans do get to see the results of their contributions after all:
"Recently we’ve had a group of American educationalists visit South Africa through the Citizen Ambassador program. A number of them opted to come to Soweto and other townships and look at what OLSET’s been doing. They came away very, very impressed. Those were American taxpayers, and it’s their dollars that impacted the lives of children in disadvantaged communities in this country. One of them said to me, ‘It’s ages since I have been so misty-eyed in a classroom situation.’ He was emotionally shaken, visibly affected by what he saw happening in a classroom. I suspect that most Americans would be equally touched. They would feel extremely proud of what they saw and where their money went."
Continuing to focus on the human level, the NLC’s Enrico Fourie points out:
"At the basic level it’s about people, people who have struggled. I want ordinary Americans to appreciate that their money is going to black South Africans. It’s going to the poorest and the marginalized in our sector, and that is a hell of a contribution to make. It’s about people helping people; it’s so important in the world today. It’s not money that’s spent on beer, on videos, on cinemas, clothing. It’s money spent on people in a township who have probably never seen the sea or a big cinema or a Michael Jackson video, who lost their opportunities in apartheid, and who go to classes two or three times a week."
Linda Biersteker of ELRU emphasizes that the story is really about people:
"One of the things that is quite moving is that so many people from the United States really care about us here, that in numerous ways they have contributed. I think that maybe the thing that needs to be shown to them is the kind of things that move us most. And it’s not all this big stuff we’ve been talking about. It’s the voices of women in the communities that have been touched by the training and empowered to help other women, to help their neighborhoods, and to help children. And you can only see it drop by drop. At a personal level there are these really stunning kinds of things which radiate out. Agencies like ourselves can act as a catalyst in releasing that kind of talent, of creativity, of skills, which would otherwise just lie there and not be used."
So let the final comment be spoken by one of those beneficiaries, an early childhood development practitioner serving extremely under-resourced communities, through ELRU’s Freda Brock:
"I’m going to cop out and use someone else’s words, a very dear colleague who’s come through ELRU training. She describes ELRU as being ‘the breast that never dries up.’ It has been nurturing, it has provided in very far-reaching, sustaining ways. And I just want to thank, on behalf of people like her, the American people for feeding into ELRU. Because without that we certainly would have dried up."
Appendices
ABET Adult Basic Education and Training
AID Agency for International Development
ANC African National Congress
CAAA Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act
CBO(s) Community-Based Organization(s)
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
DET Department of Education and Training
ELRU Early Learning Resource Unit
EPP English Proficiency Project
ESST Education Support Services Trust
IEB Independent Examinations Board
IIR Institute for International Research
MIET Media in Education Trust
NGO(s) Non-Governmental Organization(s)
NLC National Literacy Cooperation
NQF National Qualifications Framework
OLSET Open Learning Systems Education Trust
SANET South African Newspaper Education Trust
SIDA Swedish International Development Agency
TRC Truth and Reconciliation Commission
UN United Nations
UNESCO United Nations Economic and Social Council
UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund
USAID United States Agency for International Development
USAID/SA USAID/South Africa
UWC University of the Western Cape
William Duncan, Director, Office of Social Development, USAID/South Africa, 29 November 1996.
The Education Foundation (Peter Badcock-Walters), 10 December 1996.
ELRU (Freda Brock, Director, Linda Biersteker, Research and Information Services Coordinator, and Thikam Pillay, Coordinator of Anti-Bias Program and Trainer), 13 December 1996.
ESST (James Olivier, Program Director, and Lydia Abel, Senior Research and Educational Coordinator), 18 December 1996.
IEB (Ed French, Director, Communication and Research), 10 December 1996
MIET (Wilna Botha, Director, and Lynn Larcombe, Training Manager), 11 December 1996.
NLC (Enrico Fourie, Acting National Director), 6 December 1996
OLSET (Gordon Naidoo, Director), 12 December 1996.
The Teacher (Vusi Mona, Editor), 6 December 1996.
Abel, Lydia, draft copy of unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cape Town, 1996.
Africa South of the Sahara 1994, Rochester, Kent, England, Europa Publications Limited, 1994.
"Basic Education Sector Assessment," Pretoria, USAID/South Africa, 1995.
Biersteker, Linda, "Non-Formal Education in the Early Childhood Development Sector and Women’s Development: Experiences of Some Women Trainers in the Western Cape," Cape Town, 1996.
Cape Times (daily newspaper), Cape Town, various 1996 issues as cited
"The Early Learning Resource Unit (ELRU): Case Statement," Cape Town, ELRU, 1996.
"The Education Foundation Trust: Report of the Trustees," in "Annual Financial Statements," Durban, The Education Foundation and Deloitte & Touche, 1996.
The Europa World Year Book 1996, Vol. 2, Rochester, Kent, England, Europa Publications Limited, 1996.
"Facts about Media in Education," Durban, MIET, undated.
"Independent Examinations Board Mission Statement," Johannesburg, IEB, undated.
Leigh, Stuart, Changing Times in South Africa: Remodeling Interactive Learning (LearnTech Case Study Series No. 8), Washington, DC, Educational Development Center, 1995.
Mail and Guardian (weekly newspaper), Johannesburg, various 1996 and 1997 issues as cited.
Potter, Charles, "English in Action: Case Studies of Interactive Radio Learning in Schools in Four Regions of South Africa," Johannesburg, OLSET, 1994.
"Program Evaluation, USAID/South Africa: Final Report," Washington, DC, Aurora Associates and Creative Associates, 1975.
The Sowetan (daily newspaper), Johannesburg, various 1996 issues as cited.
The Star (daily newspaper), Johannesburg, various 1996 and 1997 issues as cited.
"Submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Gross Violations of Human Rights in Education: Presented by the National Literacy Co-operation and other educational stakeholders, prepared with the kind assistance of the Education Policy Unit (University of Natal, Durban)," Johannesburg, National Literacy Co-operation, 1996
Tilton, Douglas J., USAID in South Africa: Learning Lessons, Continuing Debates, Washington, DC, Africa Policy Information Center, 1996.
"USAID Mission South Africa: Strategic Objective 2" (draft dated 2 August 1996), Pretoria, USAID/South Africa, 1996.
USAID/South Africa organizational fact sheets for NGOs described
van Rensburg, Heila Janse, South Africa Yearbook 1995, Second Edition, Pretoria, South African Communication Service, 1995.
This page was last modified on March 23, 1998.