Support for Primary Education in Africa:
A Retrospective Study
Swaziland: Step-by-Step Development
Philip R.
Christensen
January, 1997
Contents
Development of Swaziland’s educational system
Primary Curriculum Development Project
Impact of foreign assistance on educational development in Swaziland
Role of foreign assistance in Swaziland’s success
Message to the American people
His Majesty the King of Swaziland has summoned the nation to the Royal Kraal. The news spreads through his kingdom like the grass fires that race along its night-blanketed mountainsides whenever farmers prepare for Spring planting. It travels along formal networks—radio, television, and newspapers—and informal—the powerful African grapevine. Speculation is rife that the Ngwenyama (the Lion), King Mswati III, will replace his Prime Minister. Of course there is no question that the new head of the government will be a Dlamini, a member of the huge royal family. But which Dlamini will it be?
Swazis of all backgrounds gather in the kraal (coral) as the appointed hour approaches. Women and men, rich and poor, urban and rural, uneducated and educated, they come in their hundreds to hear what their monarch has to say. Many men have already gathered in the Regiments, traditional groupings that now provide a social bond for males willing to answer the occasional summons to work in king’s fields. Finally the time is right and the monarch appears to tell Swaziland the name of its new political leader.
In this defining moment can be seen perhaps one unique aspect of this tiny African country, the smallest in the Southern Hemisphere and one of three functioning monarchies on the continent. It is the powerful coexistence of two distinct cultures, two separate political and social traditions. On the one hand is a traditional African kingdom that can trace its history back for centuries and its human roots to the early Stone Age. On the other is a modern, Western-style political structure based on the British model of a constitutional monarchy. What makes Swaziland unique is how the two cooperate as equal but distinct partners. The Prime Minister serves as the head of a parliamentary government functioning like Westminster. Yet he serves at the real, not merely the formal, pleasure of his king. When Mswati III decides that Swaziland would do better under different political leadership, he chooses the new Prime Minister and he announces his choice. He is accountable to no one. This king is a true ruler with tangible power.
Swaziland repeatedly reflects this dichotomy. At first the outsider sees a small, but recognizably Western country, with courts of law, a legislature, an economy and an educational system that clearly owe allegiance to their British roots. Swazi tradition is visible in colorful ceremonies: the Bemanti people travelling by foot to Mozambique to collect the foam of the waves, renowned for its medicinal and mystic powers, in preparation for the great Incwala (first fruit) ceremony; male youth gathering the sacred Lusekwane shrub for the King’s enclosure at the same ceremony; unbethrothed maidens displaying their beauty during the colorful Umhlanga, or Reed Dance, where for many decades Swazi kings chose new brides.
Yet soon it becomes clear that traditional life in this modern nation is far from a mere show for tourists. On the contrary, at the very least it is an equal partner in Swazi society. A Swazi man who wishes to marry can choose to do so under civil law, in which case he must take only one wife. Or he may follow traditional rites, in which case he can (and almost certainly will) be polygamous. In certain circumstances a Swazi accused of a crime can be tried either in a civil court, under its British-derived code of justice, or in a traditional ("national") court, in front of a chief and his advisers. At government ministries Swazi civil servants in Western business clothes mix with colleagues wearing the Mahiya traditional costume, essentially two light, patterned cloth wraps for the lower and upper body. One senior official at the Ministry of Education, asked how he decided which style of dress to wear on a given day, replied with a smile, "The weather." Swazi dress is demonstrably cooler.
Of course this all can be a mixed blessing. Many Swazis argue that their traditions slow progress in important areas such as the status of women or democratization. Furthermore, for outsiders, if not for Swazis themselves, the two worlds can give policy and planning a surreal flavor. When a government minister who is also a royal prince makes a decision to grant (or not to grant) a concession to workers in a labor dispute, is he operating on the basis of Cabinet guidance or palace intervention? No one from the outside can ever know. Swazi decision-making is a classic black-box system. One can observe what goes in and what comes out, but never what happens inside.
That said, the existence of such vital traditional systems in a modern nation has offered many benefits to this small African country. It has provided a cultural anchor to help Swaziland ride out the kinds of social and political storms that have all-too-frequently swamped other African lands, a social compass that has helped guide its people into the 20th century without destroying its ancient character. Other advantages have also contributed to the country’s success, not the least of which is the existence of a single tribe, the Swazis, and the unifying influence of a single language, siSwati. On balance, the strong social fabric of Swaziland helps explain its unusual status as one of few African countries that has enjoyed relatively uninterrupted stability and prosperity since independence.
This article examines Swaziland’s development progress since the 1960’s and the role that foreign assistance has played in that progress. It looks particularly at the story of basic education, the foundation on which a country places social and economic progress. The review begins by briefly locating Swaziland geographically, economically and historically. It examines the development of Swaziland’s education system since independence, then looks at the specific contributions that the United States Agency for International Development, AID, has made. It assesses the impact of foreign assistance on the country’s educational development and discusses lessons that others can learn from this record. Finally, it asks Swazis to speak to those who have contributed the funds from which they have benefitted.
Smaller than the State of Massachusetts, at its longest Swaziland is only about 110 miles from north to south and 90 miles east to west. It is a land-locked country in Southern Africa, bordered on the East by Mozambique and on all other sides by South Africa. This small, egg-shaped land contains such a variety of climates and beautiful scenery that one can perhaps excuse its inhabitants for comparing their country to the Garden of Eden.
Abundant natural resources—rivers, forests, farmland and minerals—give Swaziland economic potential out of proportion to its size. As a result, the country is an island of relative prosperity on a continent where poverty is still all too common. Although it is the second smallest sovereign state in mainland Africa, it has one of the continent’s highest per capita income levels, at $1,160.
This is not to say that no clouds darken the horizon. One problem is a growing sense of concern that the economic situation is soon likely to grow worse. In the past few years Swazi taxpayers have watched a succession of current account surpluses begin a metamorphosis into annual deficits, swelling from $15 million in 1992 to a projected shortfall of more than $100 million in 1998. Inflation stood at 14.7% per year in 1995. An estimated 30% of the labor force is unemployed, with the small number of new jobs created each year unable to absorb even school graduates into the formal sector. The urban labor force has become increasingly militant, with several general strikes in recent years.
The country’s annual rate of population growth, at 3.5% one of the highest in Africa, severely strains social services as well as economic development. It is the primary reason that gross national product (GNP) per head has declined, in real terms, at an average annual rate of 1.3%. The extreme inequalities of income distribution seen elsewhere in Africa are also present in Swaziland. More than two-thirds of the resident population comprises families earning generally poor incomes from cash crops or subsistence agriculture on small plots. The condition of the rural poor has been largely unimproved by periods of rapid growth since independence.
Swaziland became a British protectorate in 1903. Its independence was restored on September 6, 1968. The king at that time, Sobhuza II, continued to rule as a constitutional monarch until his death in August 1982. Observers inside and outside the country generally see his 61-year reign as a period of wise government and peaceful progress. It was King Sobhuza who instructed his subjects to preserve the good in their culture while he steered Swaziland to full membership in the community of modern nations. His heir, crowned in 1986 at the age of 18, assumed the royal name Mswati III.
The 1990’s have brought political, as well as economic, turbulence to the tiny kingdom, with a growing opposition movement and calls for multi-party politics. Compared with its sister countries in Africa, however, Swaziland has enjoyed relatively peaceful (albeit slow) evolution towards an increasingly democratic system. It has not suffered the military coups, debilitating wars or the more blatant forms of human rights abuse that some of its closest neighbors have experienced. In harmony with much that characterizes Swazi society, its political evolution has been a deliberate, step-by-step march into the 20th century without losing the essence of its special past. Swaziland’s development has enjoyed the blessings of peace.
Development of Swaziland’s educational system
Education is not compulsory in Swaziland, but it is highly valued by parents who see success in school as a key to unlocking prosperity’s door. The education system has clear roots in a Western, and particularly a British, model. Primary (elementary) education begins when children are six years old, although in practice there are wide variations in students’ ages when entering school. Under the current arrangement primary school lasts for seven years, at which time there is a national "leaving exam," the Swaziland Primary Certificate (SPC). (English becomes the language of instruction at Grade 4.) There then follows three years of secondary school, culminating in the Junior Certificate (JC) exam. A final two years of high school leads to the O-Level (for ordinary level) examination. The Swaziland Examinations Council develops both the SPC and JC exams locally. The O-Level exam still comes from England, although there are regular calls for it, too, to be localized.
Following British practice, only children who pass each of these examinations receive a certificate and are eligible to move to the next level of schooling. In this sense the leaving exams are equivalent to American school diplomas. The difference is that under the Swazi/British arrangement children who complete one level (for example, primary school), but do not pass the corresponding leaving exam, do not receive any written recognition for their effort or accomplishments. The leaving exams are norm-referenced, which means that children are marked in comparison with each other ("grading on a curve" in popular parlance). Thus it is inevitable that some children will fail, no matter how much (or how little) they may have learned. This has obvious disadvantages. On the other hand, it does make the exams useful filtering mechanisms. For example, since there are not nearly enough places at Swaziland’s two university campuses to absorb all high school graduates, the O-Level exam provides a mechanism for selecting the best of the crop.
Educational progress since independence
Swaziland can claim much credit as it reviews its record since independence in the educational arena. In the introduction to a report issued to commemorate the nation’s 25th anniversary (a report whose educational statistics were supported in large part through technical assistance funded by AID), the Ministry of Education wrote:
"The Government’s goal since independence in 1968 has been to develop the human resource base of the Swazi Nation. In this regard much progress has been made. Teachers, students, parents and educators involved in building the education system can be justifiably proud. Classroom space has doubled, the number of pupils have increased three-fold and the number of teachers four-fold. In fact growth has accelerated in all aspects of educational development. Many new programs have been developed, planned and executed."
Mr. Leonard Lukhele is the Swazi educator responsible for administration at the Examinations Council of Swaziland. When independence arrived in 1968 he was already serving as an assistant inspector of schools. In 1974 he took over as head of the Primary Curriculum Unit (PCU) that the first AID education project in Swaziland supported. With AID’s support he eventually went on to Master’s and post-Master’s graduate studies. He explains some of the disparities that Swaziland inherited:
"Before independence there were three systems of education in the country. One was for the Europeans, one was for the Euro-Africans [colored, or mixed race], and the other one for the Africans. And then in 1966 the three were amalgamated. Invariably the government of the time took the European system. Hence the Africans were sort of disadvantaged because they didn’t have the materials. They didn’t even have the knowledge of the content that was supposed to be taught. For instance, I remember when I was still an inspector going to a school where they were supposed to teach about Magellan, who circumnavigated the world. But they didn’t know about him and they didn’t have any text books about Magellan."
In addressing the challenges of developing a new education system, Swaziland’s first objective was education for all. Every Swazi child needed schooling. Government achieved this in theory within 20 years, although problems remain in practice. In the words of the Ministry’s report:
"In the first two decades of independent development, emphasis was placed on building the capacity to support equitable access to education for all boys and girls. One hundred percent gross enrolment was achieved at the first level of education in the mid 1980’s, meaning that sufficient places were available for the total school-age population. Repetition and dropout, combined with a wide variation in class-age, have resulted in a high proportion of children being out of school. As a result the last decade has seen more attention focused on improving the efficiency of the whole system, while giving due regard to improving the quality of the learning process."
At independence Swaziland counted 358 primary schools with an enrollment of more than 62,000 children. Twenty-five years later there were 526 schools, and enrollment had risen to almost 172,000 children. A 1991 survey indicated that, on average, each primary school child possessed four textbooks.
Teacher training has kept pace with this system expansion, an important requirement to ensure quality as well as quantity. In 1968 there were a few more than 1,600 primary school teachers. As enrollments expanded, so did the teacher force, so that by 1976 some 30% of all primary school teachers were untrained. However, the Ministry of Education successfully reversed this trend, so that in 1995 only 9% of almost 6,000 primary teachers were untrained. The pupil/teacher ratio, which stood at 40:1 in the early 1970’s, decreased to 33:1 in 1993.
An ideal person to comment on Swaziland’s progress in education is Mr. M. E. Vilakazi. He is the Principal Secretary, or PS, for the Ministry of Education, the second highest-ranking education official after the Minister himself. When Swaziland achieved its independence in 1968 he was still a university student, destined to move up the ranks as a teacher, school administrator and head of a teacher training college before assuming his current position. This is how he sees more than a quarter-century of educational development:
"I think one of the major changes is that education has been systematized, in the sense that we as the Ministry now know what is happening in the schools. There is order. We know there is a curriculum that is being taught, and we are examining the curriculum. We know there are teachers teaching there. We have decentralized the administration. There are people nearer to the schools who are checking on what is happening there.
"And then, our teachers now are better qualified. We think there is definitely some teaching and learning going on in the schools. Even the people of Swaziland now are more aware of their educational needs, because almost everywhere in Swaziland you will find a school and people know they have to send their children to school. I think that has been a major achievement.
"Because of the development that has taken place even our standard of living has improved. People have been empowered through education. The other thing one could say is that the people now have greater expectations. There are certain things they expect the political system to deliver, because people are enlightened through education. So that’s why these days you hear a lot of talk about democracy.
And one other thing which is important, at least for Swaziland, is that we have had a fairly stable country for a very long time. Even changes, when they come, are smooth. For example, I am maybe the fourth or the fifth Principal Secretary [in the Ministry of Education]. No one was murdered or chased away. Everything has come naturally. We’ve not had any revolution. And because of that our system has had almost no disruptions. That has helped a great deal."
Justice Nsibande, Mr. Vilakazi’s predecessor in the position of Principal Secretary, describes himself as a teacher. He spent his entire career working for the Ministry of Education, beginning as a young teacher before independence. In 1968 he was an active member of the teachers’ association and a faculty member at William Pitcher Teacher Training College. "My background and my career was in education," he says. "I never changed."
When he retired from education in 1991 he had been Principal Secretary for 12 years. Retirement was not to be as relaxing as he might have expected, however. He was elected to the new Parliament, and there he was elected Speaker. He notes wryly, "Well, you retire from one activity into another."
So Mr. Nsibande found himself the Speaker of Parliament for Swaziland, a position closely parallel to the American Speaker of the House. He can thus look over the history of Swaziland’s educational development from two important vantage points: from the top of the Ministry of Education as well as from a senior political position.
"If I look back from 1968, we felt we should change the system from a British orientation into a Swazi orientation. Our reform exercise was two-pronged: first to change the curriculum so it was Swazi in character and then to develop expertise within the Swazi people themselves so that they should be the ones promoting these changes, the ones writing and developing the programs. I must say that we were very lucky, because we were able to do both.
"First we started with the curriculum with the assistance of the King’s friends, the international agencies. USAID was particularly helpful in that we established a curriculum center of which we are proud today. It is second to none in the region. Combined with that was an element of training, training of curriculum developers and writers. Eventually the curriculum today is written by Swazis. One is very proud of that.
The second thing was that we also developed expertise in terms of school management. We found that we needed managers who would be committed to curriculum reform. You cannot reform a curriculum in any given situation unless you have the support of teachers, in particular people in administration. So we worked with the curriculum people, involved teachers. Then we attacked teacher training programs as well in the teacher training colleges so that they should be favorably disposed towards the reforms that were being carried on. In the same way we then realized that we needed to improve administration, management of programs. Again we had another program. I’m happy to say I learned that these programs have worked very well."
From his perspective in Parliament he confirms the link between education and good government identified by his successor:
"Yes, [development of the education system] has made a lot of impact to the economy in terms of the number of people who have qualified to take up jobs within the country, and in creating awareness. Before I came to Parliament I wasn’t aware that in fact parliamentarians are groping with the same problems which are in education. But now I realize that without an educated population, even good governance may not be possible. If you don’t have a good school system, you cannot have good governance."
Mr. Peterson Dlamini, the current Principal of Ngwane Teacher Training College, was still a high school student at independence. He began teaching at primary school in 1974. After studying in England under British Council sponsorship, he became a school head and then a primary school inspector. He did his Bachelor’s degree with Eastern Michigan University (EMU), then a Master’s in Education at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, all through AID. In other words, foreign donors have sponsored all of his post-secondary studies. Mr. Dlamini adds a teacher’s perspective about these changes:
"I think that it has progressed tremendously. You know in the 1970’s, when I started teaching, the syllabus was prescribed for a teacher. A teacher was told what to teach, where and when that teacher should have finished. A teacher had no input in the formulation of the syllabus or the curriculum. That was when I started teaching. But now a teacher is fully involved in the development of the curriculum.
"And again, even the conditions of teachers have improved tremendously. You know when I started teaching, teachers were employed by different agencies. For instance, I was teaching in a mission school. I was taught by the missionaries and I was paid by the missionaries. A salary for a teacher who was teaching in a missionary school was far lower than the salary of a teacher who was teaching in a government school. Now we have got a Teachers’ Service Commission which employs all the teachers in the country. Things are more properly organized then they were when I started teaching."
Further educational development needs
Swazis are the first to acknowledge their need for further progress in spite of the impressive gains so far. The same report that counts the successes of the first 25 years of national independence also notes:
And yet there is still much that can be done to ensure that all Swazi citizens receive an education appropriate to their needs and abilities such that they contribute even more to the development of their country."
As Swaziland begins its second 25 years as a modern nation, its goals for educational development are moving beyond the important ones of quantity, of universal access and basic literacy, towards quality, to a focus on what students learn and how relevant it is to their lives and the needs of their country.
As noted in the Ministry’s 25th anniversary report, the goal of universal enrollment is still elusive in practice. Latest statistics show an estimated population of school-age children of just under 200,000. Yet primary schools enroll slightly more than 200,000 students! More significantly, 40,000 children of primary-school age, a full 20% of the total, are not enrolled at all. To a large extent this is the human cost of high repetition and dropout rates, what educational economists call internal system efficiency. Too many of the children actually in school (16% in primary schools) are repeaters who have been there too long. They clog the system by taking places that would otherwise be available for out-of-school children. Furthermore, too many children (34%) start school only to drop out before completing primary level, often even before the four years of education necessary to achieve and maintain functional literacy. Although 66% of all children entering primary school will complete it successfully, the government and parents will pay on average for more than 11 years schooling per graduate because of these factors.
Other challenges are primarily a function of tight government budgets, which also place greater burdens on parents and communities through school fees and self-help efforts. For example, classroom construction has not kept pace with the growth in the number of pupils, so a few classes must be held in church buildings or occasionally in the open air. More worrisome, perhaps, is the statistic that only 28% of primary school pupils have both desks and chairs. With parents already paying almost 30% of the overall cost of basic education, and education already consuming an equivalent percentage of the government’s recurrent budget, the resources available to address such concerns are limited.
The Ministry’s 25th anniversary report notes that issues of curriculum appropriateness and overcrowding continue to require attention:
"Relevance of the curriculum was raised... in 1975 and... 1985... and has constantly been in the public spotlight. However, the attempt to make education respond to socio-economic and environmental issues has tended to result in overloading the content of primary curricula indiscriminately. As a result, both basic and learning skills and the integrated approach to problem solving have been neglected."
Ministry officials also cite a number of specific challenges. According to the Principal Secretary, vocational education and education for employment is one that still requires outside assistance. Others include addressing the impact of urban migration and improving rural primary schools:
"One of the problems that has complicated the situation is the urban migration. You will find that some of the schools in the rural areas are beginning to have very few people and become costly to the government, while there is a lot of overcrowding into the urban schools. We need to expand those schools and maybe do a number of other things to accommodate the people who are coming from the rural areas into town.
"One other area which we want to concentrate our effort on is the improvement of primary education. The teaching is fairly okay but the facilities in some primary schools, especially in the rural areas, are still very rudimentary. And because the conditions are not good in the rural areas the good teachers tend not to go there.
"For the next five years or so we want to concentrate on improving what is existing, especially at the primary school level, to try to improve that and train the teachers on the job and also try to improve the physical facilities of the primary schools in the rural areas. That’s one big area which we think we should concentrate on. Then at higher levels maybe try to train for self employment and vocational education."
Overall, the United States contributes 7% of the more than $18 billion in development aid that the world offers annually to Sub-Saharan Africa. This is no inconsiderable amount ($1.3 billion in 1992), but still only a small fraction of the total aid provided to the region. Therefore, AID has sought to leverage its investment by supporting programs that offer the possibility of positive impact out of proportion to their cost. In the education sector, this has meant laying a solid foundation at the primary level. AID’s contributions here have been particularly valuable because for many years other donors mostly ignored basic and primary education in favor of secondary schools and universities.
In Swaziland, AID began planning its assistance to education in 1970, just two years after independence. In 1973, it awarded a contract to the American Institutes for Research to provide a curriculum adviser at the Ministry of Education for two years, focusing on primary schools in particular. Three major educational development projects followed: the Primary Curriculum Development Project (1975-1983), the Teacher Training Project (1984-1990), and the Educational Policy, Management and Technology Project (1990-1996). Training for Swazis in Swaziland and the United States supported the work of all these ventures.
Primary Curriculum Development Project
Swaziland faced numerous challenges when it took over the reins of its own educational destiny at independence in 1968. Not the least of these was the question of what to teach—in educational parlance, the curriculum.
The curriculum inherited from the British was only loosely defined in documents known as syllabuses, essentially lists of topics for the teacher to cover. Dr. Irma Allen is a Mexican-born American who has lived in Swaziland since 1960 and who has served as a technical adviser to every one of AID’s three major education projects there. She describes the situation that she and her Swazi colleagues faced in those early days:
"I was a farmer’s wife originally and then I started working as a teacher in Manzini Central School. It was a real experience for me. When I first arrived I asked some questions about the curriculum and they said, ‘What are you talking about?’ The word was not even used. When I explained what I was talking about they said, ‘Oh, you mean the syllabus. I think we can find a syllabus for what you are going to teach.’
"People were definitely driven by a syllabus. They didn’t participate in its development; they didn’t question it. They accepted this as part of their job. They had to follow the syllabus. The word curriculum was not being used at all."
In the United States during the late 50’s and early 60’s educators were developing a new approach to specifying the curriculum. No longer would content be described by what the teacher should do (i.e., the syllabus). Now the focus would shift to its rightful place, what the learner must do. This could be described in curricular objectives: statements of student performance ideally presented in measurable terms. It is the difference between saying "teach multiplication" and saying "given any two single digit numbers, the student will be able to multiply them mentally and say the correct answer within five seconds, nine times out of ten." It was to become one of the major revolutions in twentieth century education, yet Swaziland was unfamiliar with it.
Under the British educational model special officers known as inspectors visit schools regularly. In essence, they are supervisors. They monitor the performance of teachers (a bit like police officers) and assist teachers where possible (like counselors). In Swaziland, the Chief Inspector is the senior officer in charge of all schools at his level (primary, secondary or tertiary).
Mr. E. C. N. Dludlu is Swaziland’s Chief Inspector/Primary. Like most of his colleagues, he worked his way up the ranks from classroom teaching, serving as a headmaster, school inspector and regional education officer (something like an American school system superintendent) before taking his current position. Along the way he studied overseas several times under British, Canadian and American sponsorship. No one ever refers to him by his first name (Elmoth), or even as "mister." He is invariably addressed as "Babe," pronounced bah-beh and literally meaning "father." It is the siSwati equivalent of "mister," and it seems particularly appropriate for his position. The Chief Inspector/Primary is the father for all primary schools in Swaziland.
Babe Dludlu explains more about the relation of objectives to the syllabus:
"Before independence, when I was teaching, we had a syllabus. It was just points, topics. You were to teach about multiplication. You had to teach about the rotation of the earth and all those things—just topics. And as teachers we had to run around, find books of our own. You collected a lot of books and then searched for the information that was relevant.
"You did not even know the level at which you had to teach because there were no objectives then. You just had to teach. The objective was that children had to learn about multiplication, but how far—it was not described. When the [Primary Curriculum Development] Project came, objectives were to be made. Then we knew how long, how far a teacher had to teach a certain topic, a certain concept. Since then the teaching has been easier and the setting of the examination has been directed to something. The curriculum project did a lot in designing a scope showing up to what level you had to teach."
The problem was not only in how the curriculum was described, but in what it specified. In common with most post-colonial African countries, Swaziland had inherited a system that looked more towards Europe and beyond than towards its own continent. It taught Swazi children neither their history nor their language. Justice Nsibande explains:
"The problem was that before independence very little Swazi history was taught. We were learning about the Greeks, the Britains, the Russians, but very little was said about Swaziland as a people. If you think that the dynasty in Swaziland dates back to 1750, there’s quite a lot of history that could have been taught at that time.
"Secondly we learnt Zulu instead of siSwati. [These languages are closely related, but nevertheless separate.] The introduction of siSwati was only in 1968. That’s why the emphasis on developing siSwati writers became a very big priority. The first siSwati text books that were used came from the curriculum center established with support from USAID."
Irma Allen offers another example from her experience as a teacher in a Swazi high school:
"I remember a case where I was amazed to find that I had to teach something that required ice. It was about different types of dwelling places, including how Eskimos live in igloos. But none of my students had ever seen ice, and I didn’t have any. Remember there was no hydroelectric scheme at that time. At my farmhouse I had a kerosene fridge. I tried very hard to take ice-cubes to school so that the kids could understand what ice was because the books were talking about ice houses. None of them had ever seen ice and yet they had to learn that Eskimos live in igloos. So here I was trying to make the distance on a dirt road all the way from Malkerns where we were, 10 miles on a dirt road, to try to keep some ice cubes from melting.
"This was all from a very, very old British book. Many of the early books that were being used here had been left by old teachers and missions. There were a lot of English books at that time."
Then there was the challenge of training Swazis to undertake curricular reforms. As Leonard Lukhele recalls:
"From 1975 we started writing the curriculum materials. Invariably it was difficult for us to do something about that. In the local scene I was the only who had been trained in the theory of curriculum development, at Leeds University in England under the sponsorship of the British Council. The rest of our chaps had not been trained. They had to be trained on the job by these Americans."
The first AID educational development project in Swaziland was designed to help address such challenges. Known officially as the Primary Curriculum Development Project, many refer to it using the name of the institution contracted to AID in 1975 to carry out the work, Eastern Michigan University. The project’s audacious scope led to its description as a high-risk venture. It lasted eight years, in two phases, at a total cost to AID of just under six million dollars. It targeted two major objectives: establishing curriculum development systems that reflected Swaziland’s educational needs, and training counterparts to carry out the work. (In development projects, a counterpart is a local expert who works side-by-side with an outside adviser.) Enhancing AID’s contribution, the World Bank also assisted by constructing facilities while the Africa Development Bank funded staff training elsewhere on the continent.
AID sponsored two external evaluations during the project’s life span. Both reviewed the new curriculum materials for relevance to "national outcomes or educational goals." Both judged the new curriculum and its materials to be of high quality and more relevant than what had existed previously. Teachers studied in another evaluation demonstrated "overwhelming acceptance" of the new materials, and some studies suggested achievement gains by pupils using the new curriculum. In retrospect, the Swazis successfully addressed most of the main concerns expressed by evaluators, especially the organizational relationship of the Primary Curriculum Unit to the rest of the Ministry of Education, in subsequent years. The Principal Secretary summarizes:
"That [project] made a dramatic impact. It was one of the most significant, because before that we hadn’t had a systematic way of writing up the curriculum."
The second major AID project focused on teacher training. Originally scheduled to last five years from 1984, with an American contribution of 5.6 million dollars, AID eventually extended it until 1990. Described by its evaluators as a "complex venture," the Teacher Training Project was designed to improve pre-service training for student teachers at teacher training colleges, before they begin work as certified teachers, and in-service training to upgrade teachers already in the field. The American institution responsible providing this assistance was Ohio University, and to this day the project is commonly known in Swaziland as the Ohio University project. AID’s contributions complemented those from other donors, notably Sweden, the United Kingdom, the European Economic Community, UNESCO and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
The project’s strategy linked its purpose of improving teacher training for primary schools with Swaziland’s long-standing goal of achieving universal primary education. The story of education in post-colonial Africa has, to an almost universal extent, been the story of expansion at the expense of quality. More children receive an education, but the breadth, depth and value of what they learn diminishes as the new systems of mass education struggle to cope with greater numbers. A vicious cycle develops, wherein poor quality in schools leads to weaker graduates who, if they become teachers of the next generation, are weaker teachers. Recognizing this fact, the American and Swazi project designers wished to enhance the government’s capacity to "produce better-qualified and more highly-motivated teachers capable of improving the quality of instruction available to Swazi students through the use of more appropriate curriculum materials and teaching methodologies."
Speaker Nsibande explains the genesis of this project:
"We attacked teacher training by putting every [college faculty member] into an in-service training program, trying to create an awareness, a critical awareness, of whatever they’re doing so that they could see the need to reform and change. The exposure to the new curriculum material made them more agreeable to changes and also more willing to go for further training.
"We had assistance for that program. First we got Swedish technical assistance. Our approach then was to do it school by school, but we realized it was not going to work. Before the end of the [Swedish] project we realized we needed to redefine our goals and to change this thing completely. Fortunately we got assistance from USAID again. USAID was interested because of their interest in the curriculum. They saw this as a logical development into teacher training."
AID was already searching for ways to link one project to another, a strategy that became an important element of its successful support to Swaziland’s development. Mr. Nsibande explains more about the connection between the first two AID education projects:
"The relationship was that with the new curriculum you needed new teaching methods, new approaches in dealing with other subjects, new organization in arranging of classrooms. You needed a different format from the previous lecture type of education. You wanted students to participate and the only way of doing that was through teacher training so that the new concept would come through and the colleges would be ready to deal with the [new] curriculum....
"Together with that we also brought in in-service training. The teachers who were outside were going to be in-serviced through what we called TIDC’s [Teacher Innovation and Distribution Centers]. We had with Ohio used the TIDC’s, the teacher innovation centers, in the regions to provide in-service training for the teachers who were already in the field. In that project we were training trainers of trainers, people who were going to continue this work afterwards. With the assistance of some Peace Corps volunteers, I think they set up a very good program for teacher leaders who were going to in-service teachers already in the field. But at the college itself, in the pre-service section, the new methods were also being introduced. So it was a two-pronged approach which in fact facilitated the implementation of the project."
One Swazi educator directly involved with the Teacher Training Project was Mr. Israel Simelane. At independence he was a high school student, having started first grade at the age of 10 as was the custom in those days. After training and working as a high school teacher, he joined the in-service training department in 1985. He did his first university degree in the U.K. through the British Council, then a Master’s degree through AID’s EPMT Project.
"The in-service department then was still an upgrading [department], upgrading those unqualified and those lowly qualified teachers. There was need to upgrade them because a lot of schools came up after independence.
"In 1986 the upgrading of unqualified teachers was phased out because Ngwane Teacher Training College had come up, and it was producing teachers. William Pitcher [College] and Nazarene [College] were also producing primary school teachers. So there was no need for in-service to go on with the upgrading of the unqualified teachers. Somewhere in 1986, then, we had to switch gears. This was when the Teacher Education Project came in, to help us know exactly how we were going to go about in-service training those qualified teachers."
Mr. Simelane explains the project’s two main thrusts, beginning with efforts to upgrade pre-service teacher training at the country’s three teacher training colleges:
"We had to upgrade those qualifications from a two-year program to a three-year program and offer at the end the PTD, Primary Teacher’s Diploma, which is more or less at par with the Secondary Teacher’s Diploma. [Primary and secondary graduate teachers] were now going to get the same salary.
"The Teacher Education Project also influenced the university to introduce what we call the B. Ed. [Bachelor’s of Education] program, B. Ed./Primary, which is still there today. Primarily that program was supposed to help upgrade people who were teaching in the teacher training colleges and did not have [bachelors’] degrees. Eventually it ended up recruiting experienced teachers from the schools to upgrade them."
The In-Service Coordinator goes on to explain the second aspect of the project, in-service training for those teachers already in the field:
"The program that was attached to the in-service department was the multiplier effect program, whereby a small group of people were trained to go out and train other teachers in their sister schools. I think it was a good program, really. We were trying to get to the schools as much as possible. The weakness was that when you give somebody information, and that particular person has to pass on the information to the next one, and perhaps the next person has to pass it on to the next, by the time the information reaches the last person it is so diluted that it becomes weak, unless the first person who received the information has actually grasped it such that he can give it to the next person as it is, or even enrich it if he can. It was one weakness of the multiplier effect. But in any case it worked."
Did the Teacher Training Project succeed? Speaker Nsibande thinks so, and notes that the success of one project can attract support from other donors.
"It worked very well. I’m told these teacher trainers in the regions are still working. The British have got interested because they’ve seen the project. It’s a valuable one. It’s an effective program. So they’ve now joined in. As I said earlier on, we started with the Swedes. Then the Americans came in. And now the British have come in because they can see there’s something in the projects."
The project’s final impact evaluation concluded that its "major impact... has been reaching its objective of strengthening the primary teacher education system," elaborating in these words:
"The [project] has had a significant impact on curriculum revision, the quality of teacher training, the quality of teacher performance, the [Government of Swaziland] awareness of the significance of primary school education, and the [Ministry of Education’s] dedication to primary education. Findings suggest that improvements implemented during the Swaziland Teacher Training Project continue to be in place and functioning."
The evaluation noted that Swaziland’s financial contributions to teacher education had become a line item in the annual government budget, that the new three and four-year pre-service training programs were continuing, and that virtually all the 504 primary schools in the country were reached through the in-service program. Although it expressed some concerns at the challenges to sustaining these advances, the situation five years later shows that Swaziland succeeded in holding on to and extending the gains it achieved with project assistance.
Peterson Dlamini points out that the relationship between Ohio University and Swaziland has continued long after the end of AID funding:
"[AID’s education projects in Swaziland] had a very positive effect. Especially let me mention the Ohio Teacher Training Project. That has had a very important impact. Maybe I’m being biased here because we still keep contact with Ohio, when I say ‘we,’ I mean Ngwane College. We still have an exchange program with Ohio University. When students from Ohio University are doing education and they’re doing maybe their fourth year, they come to Ngwane College. We take about 15 of them. They come during teaching practice. They sleep in the dorms with our students. They interact with them and they go and teach Swazi children. I think that is very, very positive; that link is very, very positive....
"The arrangement between the Ministry of Education and Ohio University is done privately now, but we think it is a very good thing. We still have lecturers from [Swazi] teacher training colleges, especially from Ngwane, who go to Ohio University through that exchange program for their senior degrees, like Master’s degrees. We send one teacher in exchange for maybe nine students who come here. When they come here, they live here. We don’t charge them anything. We say, ‘Okay, you’re not going to pay. We will host you and you should at least host one of our lecturers there and give him or her a tuition waiver and give him an odd job to do.’ That is a very good program. It is helping both of us."
Educational Policy, Management and Technology Project
Finally, in 1990 the Educational Policy, Management and Technology (EPMT) Project began. Described by its evaluators as "an appropriate capstone to more than 20 years of USAID support to education in Swaziland," EPMT’s purpose was to improve both the quality and the efficiency of basic education. The first part of this purpose continued the strategy underlying its two predecessor projects. The second added a new dimension: addressing the high rates of repetition and dropouts that dramatically increase the costs of education and limit access to schools.
To implement the project AID chose the Institute for International Research, IIR, an international research and development organization whose roots go back to the American Institutes for Research, AID’s first educational contractor in Swaziland. IIR provided support in five crucial areas:
continuous assessment, to introduce a comprehensive system of mastery learning, testing and remediation into all primary schools,
head teacher management training, to provide specialized training for all school heads to equip them better to manage their schools and improve their quality of education,
management information systems, to give Ministry decision-makers accurate, useful information about the education system on which they can base effective policies and plans,
organizational development, to carry out research and strengthen the operation of the Ministry of Education, and
career guidance, to help students make more realistic decisions about their futures.
In the words of the mid-term evaluation, this was an "enormously ambitious" venture. It attempted "to bring about change at every level of Swazi education, from the way teachers teach to the way principals administer to the way policy is formed to the way students find jobs." EPMT was eventually to run for six years, finishing in 1996 just as USAID’s Mission to Swaziland closed its doors. U.S. contributions through the project exceeded six million dollars.
Justice Nsibande explains how the EPMT Project fit into the Ministry’s strategy with AID:
"The third project came in as a direct result of the successes that we had in the curriculum and teacher training programs. What came out was that in the Ministry itself we needed better management, better information systems, to provide feedback to teachers as to what is happening. So we thought that if we can improve, in particular, the management in the Planning Section of the Ministry, we would facilitate some of the work that’s being done in the schools. The third component was directly linked with the curriculum and teacher education; this is the continuous assessment program. Because after having changed the system from what it was, it meant that we should develop a new approach for examining the kids. You were no longer going to use the old system of end-of-the-year tests. You wanted to know progress on each unit that was done by the kids in school so we would be in a position to say at the end of the day, ‘These kids are capable of doing ABC,’ instead of saying, ‘They’ve passed the exam.’ So that was the reason why we thought EPMT should come in, in order to help consolidate and even assist teachers in implementing whatever they wanted to implement because they had already been trained and they were ready to move forward."
The biggest component, and perhaps the most visible aspect, of the EPMT Project was continuous assessment (CA). This innovation represented the culmination of Swaziland’s movement away from a teacher-centered, sink-or-swim education system to one with the learner at its center and that learner’s success as its goal. Before continuous assessment neither teachers nor students had any effective way to predict performance on the end-of-primary examination, and therefore no way for teachers to help students prepare for it by overcoming their weaknesses.
Ms. Concilia Munro heads the Continuous Assessment Unit at Swaziland’s National Curriculum Center. Herself a beneficiary of AID training, beginning with the Eastern Michigan University program, she now holds a Master’s in Education. At independence she was a primary school teacher. From there she moved to in-service teacher training and, after returning from studies in the United States, to the curriculum center. She joined the new Continuous Assessment Unit when it was formed at the start of the EPMT Project in 1990. This is how she explains CA:
"Continuous assessment focuses on a child. It focuses on every child being a successful learner. We put the child in the center and surrounding the child we’ll have the policy, that is our Ministry of Education in this case, deciding what is good for the child. We have the teachers taking care of the child. We have the National Curriculum Center designing materials to take care of the child. We have inspectors who are there solely to look after the interests of the child in school. We have teacher training colleges where teachers are trained to go and help a child. We look at the community to help the child, the parents to look after the child. So, continuous assessment focuses on an individual child. And, here we say that each and every child can do something given a chance.
"Now, our continuous assessment is then broken down into three main parts. First, there is of testing, not meaning that a child must be tested in order to fail, but that a child must be tested in order to be assessed, to be channelled. Which brings us to our second stage, which is remediation and enrichment. After testing the child is channelled, sent to remediation if the child needs more help or enrichment if the child has achieved the objective. And then thirdly, we make sure we keep records in order to keep track of every child."
The project design called continuous assessment "the centerpiece of the project’s strategy," and its final evaluation stated:
"It would not be an exaggeration to say that EPMT has had a profound impact on Swazi education, especially in the primary schools where CA has begun a process that may change forever the way teachers evaluate children. At its most effective, CA can move the center of gravity in a classroom from the teacher to the student, from teaching to learning. Ultimately, CA can change the culture of a school from one of testing, where children are primarily judged and ranked, to one of assessment, where children are given a chance to progress through a series of objectives to greater and greater mastery. EPMT has opened up the possibility for this transformation to take place in Swazi schools."
Like virtually every aspect of the EPMT Project, Swazi experts themselves identified continuous assessment as a priority, as early as 1975. However, not until AID offered technical support under the EPMT Project could they realize their dream, one primary grade at a time. Now Swazi educators have become the greatest proponents of the system they developed with AID’s support. Babe Dludlu puts it this way:
"Continuous assessment has been a cry of the whole nation. [In 1986] we tried to launch continuous assessment in schools. We sent forms to schools and requested that we should have records of children, that children should be continuously assessed. As inspectors we tried to enforce that, but there was no direction. There was no systematic way of doing it. And we failed. We wanted it. But we failed.
"Then when we started it now in this project, we feel we are going to have it next year in Grade 5. It’s continuing as when the project was still operating. And all the people are aware about it."
Furthermore, he links Swaziland’s new continuous assessment system directly to the issue of quality, the Ministry’s current priority:
"This had an effect because it’s talking about quality improvement in class. Many ministries, many people have been complaining about achievement, so this is addressing what people want. They want their children to go to class and learn."
In Swaziland, school principals are called head teachers or headmasters/headmistresses. The other component of the EPMT Project designed to affect Swazi classrooms directly was the head teacher management training program. Its goal was to provide specialized training to all school heads so they would be better equipped to manage their schools and improve the quality of education for their students. The project design saw this intervention as important to the overall improvement of the education system and vital for the effective implementation of other innovations, notably continuous assessment.
A five-week course was designed and delivered to virtually every primary school head teacher in Swaziland, some 530 in all. At the Ministry’s request, the program was extended to secondary schools, where almost 200 head teachers were trained. The final project evaluation noted several areas where training might be improved and lamented the lack of school-level studies to determine its impact. Nevertheless, it reported anecdotal evidence that the training program had a positive effect. The Speaker of Parliament confirms this:
"The numbers of head masters disappearing with funds have now reduced to a great extent. In fact the Public Accounts Committee, which looks at the audited statements, has shown that there is some improvement on financial management by some of the [head] teachers."
What do current Ministry of Education officials say? Israel Simelane, who is responsible for the program’s continuation, certainly has no doubt about its effectiveness:
"You can count a number of good schools. For instance, I went to Zonbodze Primary School yesterday. I was really pleased to see somebody who had gone through the head teacher training program doing so well. We discussed things like how the head teacher should visit the classes, assist teachers in their classes. He’s done that, and he has records for that. He showed me the records. He said, ‘Look, on such and such a day I went to see this teacher and this is what I got and these are the comments.’ Actually the teacher signs that thing."
Do such training results have an impact on the children?
"I with I could take you to that school, honestly. If you were to go to that school you would see [the effects of training]. All the classrooms have windows, no broken window panes. All the children have desks. The school is clean. If you go to see the teachers, all the teachers’ books, official books, are checked by the head teacher, and there is a record of classroom visitation.
"[And as for the children’s achievement], it goes without saying. Once there is a sound leadership in the school there will be better learning for the children. The teachers are being supervised, are being helped—not supervised critically but the head teacher is there to support them. He has records of the passes in each year. He has analyzed the external exams from 1993. You can actually see that there is progress if you look at the results."
He also remembers that Swazi experts have, indeed, confirmed these impressions through independent evaluations.
"You will remember when Dr. Nxumalo from the University of Swaziland carried out a study after we had trained the first cycle of head teachers. He was comparing trained and untrained head teachers, how they performed. There was a difference. Those who were trained were performing a little bit higher, depending of course on follow-up, because you can train a person, but if you don’t follow up then the person tends to go down. Some of the [reasons] why some of our schools are not performing very well is because they’re not being supervised constantly."
As has already been noted, the project’s final evaluation spoke positively of EPMT’s impact. It also identified some problems with project design. However, the general assessment was positive:
"In spite of these original design flaws [a bias in favor of high-tech, top-down approaches to educational change], however, EPMT overall has been a very successful project, in the opinion of the evaluation team.... In the end, this project will have made a profound difference in the quality of education in Swaziland."
Like its two predecessor projects, EPMT shows every sign of producing an impact destined to outlive AID funding. The final evaluation concludes:
"As to sustainability, the evaluation team found each of the project components to be viable with existing Swazi expertise and resources. While additional outside assistance would be useful, it is not necessary.... Moreover, the anticipated (and actual) grants in aid from UNICEF [the United Nations Children’s Fund] and ODA [the Overseas Development Agency, the British equivalent of AID] will serve as a bridge from USAID support to self-reliance."
This comment from the external EPMT evaluators highlights two important factors in the project’s success. First, the Government of Swaziland backed up its commitment to EPMT’s work with continued funding (and, as is noted below by Babe Dludlu, with new positions at the Ministry of Education). Second, USAID/Swaziland and the Ministry of Education have successfully leveraged American support to involve other donors.
The Ministry of Education is proud of the EPMT Project’s success. The Principal Secretary highlights its major accomplishments:
When it was introduced I was directly involved, firstly when I was still [Principal] at Ngwane [Teacher Training College] and then at the Ministry [as Principal Secretary]. EPMT, I think, had its own successes, especially continuous assessment. We are continuing with that and it’s now internalized, institutionalized. And that aspect, I think, has changed quiet a lot of practices in the schools. We are now going up to Grade 5 this year. We are continuing on our own. The government is committed to that and there’s a budget for it. So I think the foundation has been laid. And then the other thing that was very useful was the training of head teachers. All the primary school head teachers got training on management, how to manage their schools, the finances, the classroom management and all that which goes with the running of the school. I think even these days teachers are still talking about the EPMT Project."
Babe Dludlu emphasizes the impact that continuous assessment has had even beyond Swaziland’s borders:
"Many people are envying what we are doing. Last week we had a [British] expert to look at our English teaching. Out of the work that has been done by EPMT, he supported continuous assessment. He says he will have to take everything that has been compiled on continuous assessment [to share with other countries] because he has never seen such and he feels it is so successful."
In fact, Swazi continuous assessment experts are advising other African countries about this innovation, most recently in Namibia (which is also trying to introduce the approach) under the auspices of another AID basic education project.
Israel Simelane confirms that the work of training new head teachers is continuing with UN funding on top of government support, even as a new British project is building on and extending EPMT’s management training to all teachers.
"Also, we have not thrown away the training of new head teachers. It’s there to stay.... In fact when [EPMT] left we were actually doing it on our own. The budget has been set by Government to look after the training of newly appointed head teachers. Government is giving us the support; UNICEF is also supporting us, which is quite good."
AID’s overall training strategy supported all three of these educational development projects. Beginning in 1972, USAID/Swaziland implemented 41 projects having training components, in sectors such as education, agriculture and health. It supported academic degree programs at the graduate and undergraduate levels. It provided short-term training in Swaziland and in third countries for hundreds of Swazis. By 1992, a total of 857 individuals had been trained in long- and short-term programs overseas, and an external evaluation could conclude without equivocation that "education and training have made a difference to the development of Swaziland." Many senior staff members at the Ministry of Education, including the Principal Secretary, are among the group of more than 500 Swazis sent by AID for degree training in the United States. So are other government officials, including the Speaker of Parliament and the current Prime Minister.
AID projects usually spend money on three primary inputs, three ways of adding value to a country’s development efforts. The first is technical assistance, bringing outside experts into a country to work with, train and advise local colleagues on improving an educational (or health, or agricultural) system. The second is commodities, purchasing the equipment and supplies necessary to get the job done. The third is training, giving local officials the skills they need not only to accomplish immediate project or program objectives, but what is more important, to insure that they can sustain and extend those accomplishments.
In many respects training is the foundation on which donors build a successful development strategy. It can be short-term or long-term in duration, at a basic (bachelor’s) or advanced (master’s or doctoral) level, carried out in the host country, in the United States, or in some third country. AID’s approach to training in Swaziland took advantage of all these approaches. As Israel Simelane confirms, it produced substantial impact.
"If there wasn’t any assistance I think the differences [since independence] wouldn’t be that big. For instance, when it comes to training a lot of the personnel in all the ministries in Swaziland, not necessarily just the Ministry of Education, have been trained through foreign aid. I have been trained through foreign aid. In fact my diploma was through aid. My [Bachelor’s degree] was through aid; my Master’s was through aid. What the Government of Swaziland paid for was when I was doing my initial training as a teacher. Otherwise the rest of the qualifications that I have, it has been through aid. And a lot of the people in Swaziland have been trained through aid."
All three major AID education projects used an innovative combination of in-country and overseas training to provide many Swazis with the skills needed to take over their education system after independence. Babe Dludlu explains how this worked at first, under the Primary Curriculum Project:
"A lot of people at the Ministry of Education were trained through that Eastern Michigan program.... They started here in Swaziland and then went to complete their studies at Eastern Michigan University.
"When you get training through in-service, when you are trained on the job, my experience is everything that you do, everything that you learn about, is related to the job. I have found that most of the people who trained on the job are more effective. They are really effective. Because it’s not only theory. Each time they read, each time they do assignments, they always relate back to their work. This is what I was doing. In fact with everything I read I could always think and say, ‘I wonder how I would apply this.’
That said, Babe Dludlu also appreciates the value of study abroad, having spent two years in the States:
"There is always an advantage when you see things. You talk about things and then you see them happening. Then you can compare. When you go to the States or to the U.K. you can see children learning. It’s not only in the book. You read more, you learn more by looking at classes operating. Then you learn a lot talking to the teachers and interacting with the teachers. There’s a lot that you learn."
Speaker Nsibande holds his Bachelor’s degree in Education from Eastern Michigan University. He explains how this project, where the dual in-country/overseas strategy was first tried for Swaziland, ensured the relevance of the American training:
"If you just went to university overseas for training without a specific mission, the tendency was that you would be carried into the academic world and start comparing Swaziland to the U.K., to the U.S., which is not the right thing. But in this particular program the emphasis was that, here is a problem in Swaziland. You need to develop text books. You need to develop a curriculum that is all your own. So instead of looking at how good the curriculum in the U.S. was and so forth, you must say how you can make our curriculum comparable to what is in the U.S., but taking into cognizance all our cultural, social, environment factors, and so forth. The institutions that we sent our students into tailor-made the programs to make them relevant to our needs instead of making them western, if you like."
The Teacher Training Project took the same dual approach, as noted by Principal Secretary Vilakazi:
"I was trained at Ohio University and most of my colleagues at Ngwane were trained through that program. Some went for long-term training but there was also a lot of on-the-job training because we got a lot of people who were working with the project who came [to Swaziland] on a regular basis to conduct courses at the college. So it helped a great deal. Also, some of my colleagues went to America for short-term study tours and so on. That was very helpful.
"But I think the in-country training was also invaluable because the people who were involved with the project were in close contact with us. Most of them, if I may say, were people with a lot of experience in their own situations from America and other projects where they had been involved. So that was very helpful, I think.
"By and large the whole project helped to upgrade the staff. It may be one major achievement of that project was the upgrading of people who didn’t have degrees, because at the time there were some people who didn’t have [qualifications] to teach in a [teacher training] college. But through that project we were able to upgrade all of them. [It improved their effectiveness] a great deal because it gave them confidence to start with and also their expertise was sharpened. Even now some are still there and doing a fine job."
Even the final project, EPMT, which had more modest training goals, used both in-country and overseas training to accomplish them. Six Swazis received Master’s-level training overseas, while seven Swazis went to the United States on short courses. In-country workshops trained more than 120 trainers and 4,500 school personnel in continuous assessment and school management.
Of course many additional Swazis have received advanced training through the generosity of other donors. These include not just bilateral and multilateral sources, but private and charitable organizations. For example, Elliott Shongwe, Principal of Nazarene Teacher Training College, was helped by his sister church in the United States after having done all of his academic preparation up to his Bachelor’s degree in the Southern Africa region.
"I felt I needed more education, so since I was teaching in a church school, the Nazarene school, I negotiated with the schools manager and some missionaries that were teaching with me if it would be possible for me to further my education in the States. They really [supported] that, especially the schools manager of that time. He organized some funds for me, bought me a ticket. I also had some money, and I decided to go overseas. I went to Oklahoma, to the Nazarene college there. Today it is called the Southern Nazarene University. That’s where I did my second degree, which was a Master’s degree in Education."
Impact of foreign assistance on educational development in Swaziland
Role of foreign assistance in Swaziland’s success
Suppose Swaziland had not enjoyed the assistance it received from its overseas friends. Suppose there had not been any foreign aid to support the independent development of its educational system. What would have happened? Swazis agree that the pace of development would have been retarded. In the words of Speaker Nsibande:
"I think we would not have moved as fast as we have. The donor agencies have assisted us to achieve some of the things faster than we would have done if we didn’t get that help."
The Principal Secretary adds:
"I think it would have slowed down development. Let me direct my comment mainly to education. There was a time when we didn’t have enough primary schools. We were able through some assistance to build classrooms and to have schools almost everywhere in Swaziland. We are having 100% enrolment in primary. Of the children who finish primary school at least 70% of them would get admission into secondary education. And quite a lot of facilities that we have [were built with foreign aid], like the primary expansion program. We also got a lot of assistance from the World Bank to put up secondary school facilities. Because of the stability and the assistance that we have been getting we have been able to build a solid foundation, at least educationally speaking. So the donors have really made a major impact in Swaziland. Unfortunately almost all of them are going to South Africa now."
Using his experience with donor support at Ngwane Teacher Training College, Mr. Vilakazi highlights two important benefits of foreign assistance, budgetary flexibility and training:
"It’s difficult to imagine but I think [that without this help] we wouldn’t have had the resources that we had. For instance, the donors helped us with the furniture, the books, the training, besides the physical facilities. So I think the success that we had maybe would have been not as good as it was. Especially because at the time this college was built Swaziland was having some financial difficulties. Of course the situation has worsened now because we are beginning to feel the problems of the deficit. So in a nutshell I think the situation would have been very difficult because the government budget system doesn’t give you much flexibility to innovate and try a number of options. It’s a bit limited in a way.
"The other thing which is worth mentioning is that as the college expanded we then got some people who were maybe not as experienced as the initial lot. The training and support that we received [through foreign assistance] helped a great deal."
Looking at the Teacher Training Project in particular, Peterson Dlamini points out benefits on both sides:
"[Things] would be different [without aid]. Firstly, our lecturers would not have got the Master’s degrees that they have today. Secondly, we would have lost interacting with people from different cultures. That is losing, because what we have to learn is to appreciate other peoples’ cultures. How do you do that? You do that by interacting with those people, socially then academically. So if that project did not come into being we would have lost. Finally, Ohio University [would have lost], because coming to Africa, coming to Swaziland, exposes their students and their lecturers to Africa. When they’re here in Swaziland, they’re in Africa. They meet with Africans and the stereotypes that are being portrayed in America, by American television, are really answered, are really quashed. So both of us learn. The Americans and the Swazis, they learn a lot from this exercise."
Couldn’t Swaziland have accomplished these things by itself? Not exactly, according to Babe Dlamini.
"It could, but I doubt if it could have done it like these outside helpers have done it. We do have people who are very competent in the Ministry of Education, but where were we going to get the funds for doing what we wanted to do? We couldn’t. On top of that, if you want to use the local [officers] you can give me money, but the first thing you have to do is to train them for that particular job. That would be very, very expensive. But when you bring a project with an expert, the expert has already been trained by the donor. He comes and he imparts [his knowledge]. And somebody is understudying the expert. When the expert is gone, the understudy takes over.
"So in short I am saying that we needed the experts and we needed the money."
Special role and contributions of AID
Many donors have supported the successful development of Swaziland’s educational system. The World Bank, the United Nations, the European Union and individual countries such as Britain, Sweden, Japan—all of these and others have played an important role.
In Swaziland, as in all countries where it operates, AID tried to identify opportunities for assistance that were not being addressed by other funding agencies. It looked for programs that would have maximum impact on sustainable development and economic growth through improving the quality and efficiency of basic education. This resulted in a basic priority, support for primary schools, and a fundamental strategy, support at the classroom level. In Babe Dludlu’s words:
"There have been some projects, but most of them have not been on classroom teaching. They’ve been on facilities."
What about AID’s approach? Babe Dludlu continues:
"Maybe it came at a time when people wanted to see what was happening in class, so it was focused on classroom teaching. Because [with help] from the World Bank we’re studying quality improvement and analyzing the factors that affect teaching. We have found that there are a lot of them. There are facilities; there are teachers themselves, the training of teachers, the in-service training; and then books. There are a lot of factors that affect teaching. But you find that through [the earlier] World Bank project and the parents themselves, the communities in Swaziland have been building a lot of facilities. We have good classrooms comparatively, and the majority of our teachers are trained. But then what comes out of the class was not as good as that. There are still a lot of children failing, repeating. That is what people wanted to address. Then this project, the EPMT Project, came at the right time, because it focused on classroom teaching, on children achieving in class."
The Chief Inspector/Primary also remembers more concrete benefits:
"I have wonder what would be happening in Swaziland if we didn’t have the [Primary Curriculum Development] Project, because the first vehicle that we had in the regions was from that project. The first one that we were scrambling with, using, in each region, came from that project. It was used by the teacher leaders. Before that we did not have any vehicle."
What’s so important about a vehicle?
"The reaching of the schools. You cannot reach schools as inspectors without transport. At that time Government did not have even the scheme that is there now to buy vehicles for the inspectors. And it was difficult for inspectors to buy vehicles of their own. Through this project it was done."
What if there had been no AID program in Swaziland. Suppose no American funding had been available over a quarter-century to support the development of this new country’s education system. What would have been the impact? Israel Simelane looks at the broad picture:
"Really, I don’t think we would be anywhere near where we are today, because if I’m not mistaken Swaziland has one of the best education systems in the southern [Africa] region. We more or less have enough schools for everybody. Each and every child has a book. The qualifications that are held by our teachers are reasonable. Everybody who is in the school system is qualified, except of course for a few places in the primary [schools] because of the migration into South Africa of our teachers.... But otherwise we have one of the highest trained manpower through the projects.
"Suppose we did not have the curriculum project, the EMU project. I don’t think we would have the curriculum center. If we did not have the teacher education project I don’t think we would be having the B. Ed. program, B. Ed./Primary. I don’t think we’d be having the [three-year] Primary Teacher’s Diploma in the teacher training colleges. One good link with these projects is that the first project focused on curriculum development. Then the second project focused on teacher education, on improving the teachers. And the third project focused on strengthening the schools, that is training the head teacher, because the head teacher is the key person in the school."
Would there be a continuous assessment system operating now without U.S. support? Babe Dludlu:
"I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Even now it’s something that is very difficult. We have to supervise and monitor. It demands a lot from the teachers. In developed countries, if a child has not achieved you have to account. But we are a developing country. A lot of children that we teach in class get left behind as the teacher just teaches. And there’s no way of accounting unless you’ve followed that child, you know what the problems of that child are. And you pray that in Swaziland, when a teacher gets in front of children, the teacher will know his children and know the ability of all those children. And [continuous assessment] is the only thing that can help the teacher know the abilities of the children."
What lessons can we learn from AID’s educational development experience? Swaziland offers several that are clear and powerful.
Ask those Swazis who have been instrumental in using foreign aid to develop their education system what makes such assistance effective, and there is one universal reply: building a sense of local ownership through true collaboration. Speaker Nsibande puts it this way:
"In the past 20 years we have learnt one very crucial lesson. People, it doesn’t matter where they are, feel very proud if they are involved and do the thing themselves. This is one of the things that has been very crucial in our experience. The donor agencies have been very flexible in that they’ve allowed us to participate. Therefore, we feel very proud and even own the programs because they are no longer foreign programs. They are our programs. I think it’s one thing we never had before independence. Things were done for us."
Concilia Munro echoes this principle as she reflects on the impact of AID funding on her continuous assessment system:
"I hate to say what would have happened [without USAID and the EPMT Project]. The EPMT Project has helped us to form our own system in Swaziland, which we can stand for and say it is our own continuous assessment program."
Israel Simelane confirms the same lesson regarding EPMT’s head teacher management training component:
I think [what makes projects successful] is building in ownership. Fortunately none of these [AID] programs came and imposed things on us. We were there thinking together, implementing things together. And this was a good thing because now when they leave we know how the whole thing started. Take, for instance, head teacher training [with our American adviser]. We started by coming together, coming up with a training needs assessment questionnaire. We piloted that together. We worked together all the time. The materials that we are using in head teacher training were actually written by us with [our adviser] advising us. So you see even today we can sit down and develop some of those materials. We know how to go about it because we actually worked it out with him. So there is that ownership. I think in each and every project that you do you have to try and build in ownership. Let the people own it. They shouldn’t say, ‘Oh, it is their thing.’ They should say, ‘It is our thing.’ They should be in a position to defend it in case somebody attacks it."
Asked whether the EMU technical advisers did the curriculum reform work for Swazis or worked under the Swazis, Leonard Lukhele explains, "They worked with us. We were working together side by side."
Principal Secretary Vilakazi emphasizes the challenge of donors and host country nationals collaborating effectively:
"One of the problems that you can encounter with donors is that they at times come with their own expectations. Sometimes you find that [the advisers] have experience of how to do things where they come from and at times there might be a clash. I think by and large [the secret] is to be able to accommodate their views, to give and take, because you know there are certain things that they expect from you. You try to have a way of accommodating without necessarily having a confrontation. I say, ‘These donors want this and this is how I wanted to try it,’ and through some discussion reach a mutual understanding."
Does "accommodation" mean doing whatever the donor thinks you should do?
"Not that, but being able to make them feel welcome while at the same time not allowing them to dominate the situation. That’s why I say you make them realize that there are certain things that have to be done differently from the way they are used to doing things, and accommodate them."
The Principal Secretary points out that the project design must lay the foundation for a sense of local ownership:
"I think one of the problems with a number of projects is that you find at times that the designers try to put in what they think these people want instead of trying to do the things that the people want themselves. For example, in the projects we have had we said we want to improve the curriculum in the primary schools. It’s always best for the donor to get clearly what is the recipient really wants and try to help them. Because if you try to impose your idea then it becomes the donor’s project instead of our project. And if the project now belongs to the donor, as soon as they go the project grinds to a halt because the people have not really taken the project as theirs. It’s not really addressing their needs, so as the donors go away with their money the projects falls out. I think the secret is that donors should try and do what the people want instead of what they think these people need."
One of the most powerful lessons about effective foreign assistance that Swaziland offers is the importance of projects working together and building on each other. Principal Secretary Vilakazi notes that USAID/Swaziland’s project sequence demonstrates this:
"So [the Primary Curriculum Development Project] has left an indelible mark in the sense that the other projects that have come have, in fact, built upon that one. For example, the Ohio [teacher training] project built on the earlier project that was concentrating on curriculum. There was a continuation, as it were."
USAID/Swaziland successfully used one project to complete or correct work from an earlier one. For example, the final evaluation of the Primary Curriculum Development Project indicated concern that "formal relations between the PCU and the Nation’s teacher training institutions should be established and the institutional responsibilities for pre and in-service training of teachers in the use of the new curriculum detailed." It expressed the strong feeling that "the PCU cannot and should not be held responsible for doing everything." One main purpose of the Teacher Training Project was to help the Ministry of Education address just this issue. When that project, in turn, was unable to establish INSET, the in-service training unit, as a separate, viable organizational unit before its conclusion, AID continued to support the Ministry’s efforts to secure INSET’s future under the EPMT Project.
Israel Simelane is another Swazi educator who notes the effective sequencing of AID’s educational development projects in his country:
"I think they were building on each other. Let’s say, for instance, had we started by doing the head teacher training. That would be putting the cart before the horse. I mean, start by looking at the materials schools are going to use, which is the curriculum. Curriculum was established, books were written. Then we had to upgrade the level of the qualifications of our teachers in order for them to be in a position to use the already existing materials. And then after that we trained the head teacher... Whether that was done purposely or not I don’t know, but somehow these pieces seem to fit together nicely."
Babe Dludlu notes the parallel importance of projects from different donors working together:
"I don’t think [the EPMT Project] would have worked the way it has worked if we didn’t have sufficient structures as we’ve had [thanks to the World Bank project], if we didn’t have the teachers trained. More than ninety percent of our teachers are trained teachers. So it’s easy to tell them about more teaching strategies because they’re all trained. And most of our children are housed in better classrooms. So it’s easy to attend to the teaching and learning because the other facilities are there.
"I think it’s only now that I see the pieces fitting like jigsaw puzzle. But I think the ex-PS, Nsibande, really did have a focus. I don’t know how he started this but I have seen it fitting."
Assessing lessons learned from AID’s capstone education project, EPMT, the evaluators began with this point:
"If a project is attempting to change behavior that is deeply-ingrained, or trying to change the ‘culture’ of an organization, then a long-term project is needed—at least six years. Because the EPMT project was designed as a long-term project, originally for five years and subsequently extended to six, it was able to bring about sustainable change. If the EPMT project had been any shorter, lasting change would have been impossible."
Principal Secretary Vilakazi suggests precisely the same conclusion based on his experience. Speaking about the Teacher Training Project, he explains:
"It wasn’t one of these short-term projects that before you even know it, before you have the impact, the project winds up. So it was very useful."
Coupled with adequate time spans, projects need to evolve. USAID/Swaziland earns high marks for its flexibility in this regard, both from its Swazi partners (as the Speaker of Parliament has noted) and from project evaluators. For example:
"Flexibility, both on the part of USAID and the contractor (in this case IIR), is necessary to allow projects to grow ‘organically.’ It is rare that project designers can anticipate and predict how projects will evolve. It is therefore necessary for both USAID and contractors to allow for changes and shifts of emphasis within a project in order to adapt to the changing realities that impact on the original project design. The success of the EPMT project is a result of such flexibility and willingness to diverge from the initial project design."
On the negative side, the final report on the Primary Curriculum Development Project noted conflicting priorities between training and production, a problem that bedeviled subsequent projects, too.
"Curriculum development as a concept as well as a process was new to Swaziland. None of the Swazi staff had the educational training to write curriculum materials. None of them were college graduates nor did they have writing experience. Many had no tertiary level education at all. Yet from the beginning, PCU was expected to turn out a full year’s program in five or six different subjects each year. This would have been a formidable task even for a trained staff. Nevertheless, Swazi staff members were expected to make contributions to materials development and complete their university training at the same time."
In spite of their long-term nature, AID’s Swaziland education projects have felt the negative impact of time constraints. This problem has arisen most often when deadlines tended to force external advisers to do things for, rather than with, their local colleagues. Effective development, done properly, takes time.
When asked why some projects create sustainable results and others do not, Babe Dludlu comments:
"I think technical training is important. By ‘technical training’ I mean training people through the project and then creating posts [permanent staff positions] to supervise the project. For example, with the Eastern Michigan Project a lot of posts were created. They remained there after the project. The people went on working and they sustained the project. The same with the EPMT Project. There are people who have been trained and posts created. These people are still there doing what they did. Now it is done by the local people. They are seeing that what they trained to do, what they initiated, is continued. That’s what is different. The other project [supported by another donor] had lot of money but there’s not a single person that it did train. It didn’t have a structure that it created and then left in place. Because it didn’t have that structure there’s nothing you can trace out of that project. But there was a lot of money there."
Conventional wisdom might suggest that project planning be limited in scope to maximize chances for success. Indeed, there are examples in Africa of overly ambitious projects unable to meet their broad objectives. (AID’s final two educational development programs in Lesotho, another small Southern African country, come to mind.) Yet the success of AID’s partnership with Swaziland suggests the opposite conclusion. All three AID education projects were large, complicated, and risky. The Primary Curriculum Development project was described as "high risk;" the Teacher Training Project as "complex," and EPMT as "enormously ambitious." Sometimes it is necessary to aim high to find a target worth hitting.
How did the USAID Mission to Swaziland perform against these standards? Asked this question in terms of three criteria he had specifically identified—cooperation, accommodation and sustainability—the Principle Secretary replied:
"I think they’ve done very well. Like the project on the curriculum—we are still continuing. We have established a curriculum unit which shows that there is continuity because the curriculum center is still there. There are people who have been trained to write the curriculum and revise it. So that has been internalized and is now part of the system. The EPMT project—although the donors have left we are continuing. That shows we feel this is our project and it’s doing what we want ourselves. They’ve done fairly well. And teacher training—yes. One thing I forgot to say, with the teacher training component we started a degree program at the university and that is still continuing."
Virtually every aid donor adopts the goal of self-sufficiency for recipients. By design, agencies offer development funds to help create something, or to bridge some gap, so that the host country can eventually look after its needs more successfully. No donor wants to create a relationship of permanent dependency. In principle, neither does any recipient.
As is usually true, however, practice is more complex than theory. Swaziland has already begun to see diminishing donor funds. AID has already closed its country missions to Swaziland, Lesotho and Botswana, replacing them with one Botswana-based regional mission that has no current mandate to provide additional funds for educational development in Swaziland. This is the result of a difficult decision-making process within AID itself, which is attempting to spend a limited foreign aid budget in the most effective way possible. Ironically, Swaziland’s development success is now making it harder to justify further foreign assistance.
How do Swazis feel about this? They come from a proud nation, certainly not one that would aspire to continuing dependence on other countries. So one might expect them to share the vision of a Swaziland without any need for outside help. Nevertheless, things are not quite that simple. For example, the Principal Secretary suggests that assistance will still be required in the future, but focused on very specific needs. One is vocational education.
"I think if we can be more prudent on our expenditure we can cope with a number of situations. But there are some areas where we might need quite a lot of assistance for quite some time. There’s one case which is worrying me in education, vocational education. We have tried to do something, like the training of technical teachers, but most of them are taken away by industry, so we find ourselves back to square one. If we had a major project to train many people even to such an extent that if they go away some would remain... We also want to train our students for self-employment if that can be done."
Another example cited by the Principal Secretary is upgrading university faculty members:
"And there could be some other areas because life is dynamic. For instance, we still have a lot of expatriates working at the university. We need to train our own people to run the university, to teach there. Now with all the assistance going it becomes very difficult to train, for instance, university professors, because they have to be trained as Masters’ and Ph.D. levels. That’s still a problem."
Babe Dludlu notes the unique challenges of Swaziland’s economy:
"We are a developing country, a small country, and our economy is dependent on our neighbors. Swaziland has the resources if maybe we could mobilize them properly. But I don’t think it will be self-sufficient. Let me take one example, the production of siSwati books, that is books in the local language for secondary schools. We could produce these books, but the population is small. It becomes expensive to produce some of these things for a small population because there’s no machine designed to produce for a small country. The capital investment will be as big, the plant will be as big as the plant that is going to be used by people in South Africa, which has a big population. So it means we will keep on requesting. We can’t be self-sufficient."
Peterson Dlamini returns to his theme of two-way assistance in the context of Swaziland’s future needs. He shares a vision of a time when his country will become a giver, as well as a receiver, of assistance.
"My belief is that no person can be an island. No person can say, ‘I am satisfied. I can live on my own.’ We are a developing country... but if we are a little bit developed now, we can still be needed to go and help. There will be a time when Swaziland will be expected to send [its own] Peace Corps volunteers to other countries which are less developed than Swaziland. Even more developed countries will need us. They will say, ‘Okay Swaziland, we understand that you have been struggling like that. Now we want to help Rwanda or Zaire. How do you think we can do that?’ They’re asking people who come from that situation. So that is why I say they will need us: to plan and at times to be the implementation of whatever is going to take place in that developing country."
Message to the American people
The story of how Swaziland’s educational system has developed in almost 30 years since independence is an encouraging one. Building on its relative peace and prosperity in comparison with so many other African countries, Swaziland has moved closer to its goal of universal primary education. It has created enough primary-school places for all its children. Eighty percent of those children are actually in school. Classroom space has doubled. The number of pupils has increased three-fold, and the number of teachers four-fold. The curriculum has been re-oriented to the Swazi child and the Swazi context. Teachers have been trained to teach and assess children more effectively. Head teachers have learned how to manage their schools more successfully. The Ministry of Education’s capacity to plan and monitor the education system has been enhanced.
The United States, through the Agency for International Development, has played an important supporting role in this drama. As part of a larger cast of donor agencies, and over a period spanning a quarter of a century, it contributed approximately twenty million dollars to Swaziland’s education development. Using these funds Swazis were able to obtain training, technical expertise and commodities to help them develop their education system and their country.
One of the ironic facts about foreign aid is that the people who donate funds and the people who benefit from them rarely know each other. The money that AID brought to Swaziland came from American taxpayers. Even though they didn’t know it, a tiny fraction of their tax dollars found its way to this little kingdom in Southern Africa to benefit Swazis: children in primary schools, the teachers who teach them, the head teachers who run the schools, and the officials from the Ministry of Education who support the system. These Swazis will probably never get a chance to speak directly to the Americans who have assisted them. The Americans probably will never meet their Swazi beneficiaries. Yet suppose they could be brought together. What would the Swazis say?
Of course they would begin with "thank you." This is more than just protocol. Swazis are exceptionally polite people. It would be unthinkable for them not to express gratitude for a gift, and to express that appreciation with sincerity. Then they might talk a little about what American assistance has meant to them. In the end they could even philosophize about the implications of development aid in an interdependent world.
Concilia Munro begins:
"I would be grateful, thankful. I know they don’t know me. I know they would never imagine they would help somebody who looks like me. But what they did was great for my country. I got all the help I needed from people I don’t know, from people who don’t even know me."
Principal Secretary Vilakazi offers some details about that impact:
"I would thank them initially for the assistance that they have rendered to Swaziland, but also try to assure them that their money has been put to good use. If they would come here they would see for themselves the amount of development, especially in education. They would see that quite a number of people have benefited out of their tax dollars. It has improved the standard of living of the Swazi people. It has helped the Swazi child to gain access to education. The education because of their assistance has been improving over the years. And if I may say about our system—by African standards, we have one of the best. So we have really made good use of their monies."
He concludes with some reassuring words about fiscal responsibility.
"In some countries donor funds have been misused through corruption,. We have never had that here. At least we have been very prudent in using donor funds. There has been proper accounting for every cent. So every cent has been put to good use."
Israel Simelane’s thoughts echo a Native American proverb, "The gift must travel."
"One thing they must know is their money has been well spent. It has been well spent to improve other people’s lives. I wish we, Swaziland as a country, could also at some point give some small aid to some country which is struggling, which has not come up to our level. Honestly, I think what the American people have done, they have set an example which we need to copy and which we need to practice."
Perhaps as befits his position as Speaker of Parliament, Justice Nsibande takes an even broader view, pointing out that foreign assistance benefits both the donors and the recipients:
"One could say to any taxpayer really, if you invest your money to improve the quality of life of people you don’t know, people who would otherwise be in very difficult circumstances, you have put your money where your mouth is. Because one of the problems in the world today is that if you have one region underdeveloped and another highly developed, the imbalance is such that the developed countries would not be comfortable. That’s why there’s this global need for uplifting, for making the quality of life good to all people of the world. It’s even visible in Swaziland, small as it is. This disparity between regions, between developed and underdeveloped regions within Swaziland, is such that if you have one area that is backward the other regions are not comfortable. You don’t have peace and stability because of these imbalances. In order to ensure that there should be peace and stability you need to sort of balance the level of development throughout the regions, and of course this applies throughout the continents."
Finally, Peterson Dlamini adds to his personal thank-you a vision of how the model of American philanthropy is, in itself, a gift to Swaziland:
"Firstly, I would like to thank those people for their generosity, for making those contributions which end up helping developing countries like Swaziland. I know they don’t know what their money does but we people who receive this help from them we are very, very grateful. We have to thank them.... And what I can tell them is that they are not throwing away their money on Swaziland. They are investing it. They are trying to build a better world for our children, for all the children of the world.
"We believe in what they have done. They are teaching us as Swazis, as Africans, that we should also learn to contribute, to help other people. They have taught us that there’s no need for you to know the person you are helping, but you make contributions. That has taught us to contribute. We really appreciate these things that they’ve taught us, and we hope in the end they will also benefit. You know, an enlightened world is a better world. They enlighten us here in Africa."
Appendices
AID Agency for International Development
CA Continuous Assessment
EMU Eastern Michigan University
EPMT Educational Policy, Management and Technology (Project)
IIR Institute for International Research
INSET In-Service Education Training Unit
JC Junior Certificate (Examination)
MOE Ministry of Education
PCU Primary Curriculum Unit
PS Principal Secretary
PTD Primary Teacher’s Diploma
SPC Swaziland Primary Certificate (Examination)
STRIDE Swaziland Training and Institutional Development (Project)
TIDC Teacher Innovation and Distribution Center
UN United Nations
UNESCO United Nations Economic and Social Council
UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund
USAID United States Agency for International Development
Dr. Irma Allen, 25 November 1996
Mr. Peterson Dlamini, Principal, Ngwane Teacher Training College, 26 November 1996
Mr. E. C. N. Dludlu, Chief Inspector/Primary, 25 November 1996
Ms. Concilia Munro, Continuous Assessment Coordinator, 28 November 1996
Mr. Leonard Lukhele, Assistant Registrar/Administration, Examinations Council of Swaziland, 27 November 1996
Mr. Justice Nsibande, Speaker of Parliament, 26 November 1996
Mr. Israel Simelane, In-Service Training Coordinator, 26 November 1996
Mr. Elliott Shongwe, Principal, Nazarene Teacher Training College, 27 November 1996
Mr. M. E. Vilakazi, Principal Secretary, Ministry of Education, 27 November 1996
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This page was last modified on March 22, 1998.