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International Review of Education (2007) 53:701–708 Ó Springer 2007

DOI 10.1007/s11159-007-9058-8

PARENTAL AND COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION IN IMPROVING


EDUCATIONAL QUALITY IN AFRICA: CURRENT PRACTICES
AND FUTURE POSSIBILITIES

NANCY KENDALL

Education and development in Southern and Eastern Africa

In many countries in Southern and Eastern Africa, international development


financing and involvement in education, particularly basic education, has
increased significantly over the past two decades. International development
funding for education, never a primary focus in early development financing,
declined significantly following the oil crisis of the 1970s and the Structural
Adjustment Policies of the 1980s. The 1990 World Conference on Education
for All heralded a new era in international development education financing,
programming, and theorizing. The Education for All (EFA) framework
focused primarily on the need to expand basic formal education services to
previously underserved populations. It laid out two central threads to ratio-
nalize such expansion. The first was economistic: rate-of-return studies con-
ducted in the late 1980s by economists, particularly from the World Bank,
suggested that state investment in basic education – and particularly basic
education for girls – had very high public rates of return (Psacharopoulos and
Patrinos 2002). Such arguments were central to expanding international aid
and political support for basic education. The second was rights-based: it ar-
gued that every person had a right to receive a basic education, quite aside
from any other outcomes that might result from such education. Rights-based
approaches tend to assume that such provision will result in particular politi-
cal and social outcomes related to, for example, empowerment, equity, and
political democratization.
Although not initially focused only on formal schooling, the EFA frame-
work in practice led to extensive support for the expansion of state-orga-
nized fee-free primary schooling for all children. A number of states in
Africa (for example, Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda) adopted fee-
free or fee-reduced basic education policies following the Conference.1 Such
adoptions were usually couched in terms of both economic and rights frame-
works, and they received extensive international support. These expansions
generally resulted in rapid and massive increases in the number of children
involved in the formal education sector. International and state discourses
praised expansion policies for democratizing educational opportunity, but at
702 Nancy Kendall

the same time argued that rapid expansion had a deleterious effect on educa-
tional quality (MOESC 2000).
As basic education services have expanded and concerns about access
have diminished, worry about educational quality has come to the fore.
Often, the two are seen as trade-offs, expansion at the cost of quality or vice
versa, although a growing literature disputes this claim (Michaelowa 2001).
One way of conceptualizing current debates about the link between educa-
tional expansion and decreasing educational quality is as a response to the
perceived failure of educational expansion to trigger expected development
outcomes. Many relatively poor states invested significant resources in
education, particularly primary education, and have taken on huge loans to
maintain the expansion of this sector. Up to one third of some governmentsÕ
annual budget is now dedicated to education. In some cases, international
development organizations refocused significant resources on education; the
World Bank now provides about 8% of all loans to the education sector, a
doubling from 5 years ago (World Bank 2007).
Despite these tremendous investments made in the rapid expansion of
primary schooling, the expected economic growth, health improvements,
and other development outcomes have not materialized. Given the political
impossibility of rolling back educational expenses by cutting access, gov-
ernments and international organizations are constrained in the practical
responses available to them. Educational quality frameworks offer a
response to this dilemma: the problem is not that basic schooling might
not in fact result in certain types of state-level development, nor is it that
it might not be the most important human right upon which for states to
spend their resources. Instead, the problem is that the intervention, the
educational service itself, is not of high enough quality to result in either
the economic or the social changes imagined for it in previous development
models.
Can educational quality be understood, measured, and improved? In
much of the mainstream development literature, the processes by which
schooling results in particular outcomes (decreased fertility and HIV rates,
increased schooling for the next generation, increased individual agricul-
tural productivity) are not well understood. In-classroom and in-school
processes remain a black box, preceded by educational inputs and
succeeded by outputs (Case and Yogo 1999). Studies of educational inputs
have provided relatively few consistent answers about how to improve
schooling, and few of these could be state-financed. Those that have been
tried on a large scale often have not resulted in quality increases large
enough to meet the expectations of policymakers and development
professionals.
There has therefore been a shift in the educational quality literature
towards thinking about how to better measure outputs (usually in the form
of large-scale, validated tests) in order either to better inform inputs or to
force improved outputs through a backwards-mapping approach to quality
Current Practices And Future Possibilities 703

improvement. There has also been a shift towards randomized experiments


that test the effects of relatively simple inputs (for example, deworming) on
retention and achievement measures (Miguel and Kremer 2004). In contrast,
there are limited data available on more complex measures of school pro-
cesses or school-community interactions, from the complex relations among
official language policies and assessments, classroom-based language usage,
and school-community interactions, to student and parent expectations for
educational outcomes, and the effects of changing monitoring and adminis-
trative practices in decentralizing education systems. This lack of informa-
tion significantly constrains ‘‘evidence-based’’ arguments for complex change
models of quality improvement within existing development paradigms.
The current environment consists, therefore, of: (1) a relatively consistent
failure to significantly improve quality measures like retention, dropout, and
test achievement; (2) relatively little understanding of what happens in
schools on a daily basis; (3) relatively little understanding of how or what
school-based inputs or processes affect particular outcomes in African
schools (Heneveld and Craig 1996); and (4) relatively little discussion of
what basic schooling is intended to achieve at the individual, family, or com-
munity level. In such a situation, those attempting to improve quality may
find comfort in participatory development approaches. Participatory
approaches are assumed to positively affect both the democratic/human
rights and the economic outcomes of any development effort. In participa-
tory development frameworks, expanded ‘‘stakeholder participation’’ is dis-
cussed as a key mechanism for improving educational quality, as well as the
quality of all education development efforts.

Development and participation

Over the past 20 years, the concept of participation has infused development
discourse and planning across sectors and strategies (Cooke and Kothari
2001). As with arguments for education expansion, key arguments for partic-
ipatory approaches and partnerships include human rights and anticolonial
arguments, and economistic efficiency and sustainability arguments. The first
set contends that individuals and communities who receive international
development funding have the right to be active participants in determining
what kinds of policies and programmes are adopted and how they are imple-
mented. Participation, broadly defined, is presented as an effective way to
democratize and decolonize development approaches and developing states,
to empower individuals and collectivities, and to implement relevant and
sustainable approaches to state and community development.
The second set of arguments provides a techno-rationale for the need to
have stakeholders ‘‘buy in’’ to development approaches in order to create
more efficient and effective planning and implementation. Within this frame-
work, stakeholder participation is a necessary correction to previous
704 Nancy Kendall

development failures stemming from states and communities not fully ‘‘own-
ing’’ a particular policy or project. Initially, many of these arguments focused
on including the perspectives of elite policymakers (for example, Ministry of
Education personnel) in development planning and implementation. Argu-
ments for the involvement of a wider group of stakeholders, including
sub-national government personnel, teachers and principals, parents, and
occasionally students have, over time, become central components of such
frameworks. By involving these stakeholders throughout the development
process, these rationales claim that states and aid organizations can improve
the chances that the populace supports the goals and aims of these projects,
and thus improve the functionality of development efforts (World Bank 1996).

Improving educational quality through participatory development education


models

There has been a flurry of discussion, programming, and policymaking aimed


at improving educational quality by increasing parental and community par-
ticipation in primary education. Not surprisingly, these have drawn on and
combined efficiency and rights arguments to explain the need and determine
the shape and scope of such participation. Parental and community involve-
ment in schools has been posited as affecting quality in a number of ways.
These include: providing an oversight of school budgeting and teacher atten-
dance and performance; managing student attendance and homework; provid-
ing resources (labor, money, etc.) for school building, teacher hiring, and other
school infrastructure and services; and advocating at local and national levels
for changes that may improve educational access, retention, and completion.
Many of the programmes and policies designed to increase parental and
community participation have focused on creating formal structures (such as
School Committees or Parent-Teacher Associations) through which parents
can play active and regularized roles in the school. Decentralization policies
may be implemented to transfer power over school budgets, school personnel,
and school planning to parents or local governments. Infrastructure construc-
tion support may be predicated on the community providing some percent of
the cost of construction, often in labour, before the state or international
funds are released. These policies and programmes are often large-scale
(national or multi-district) and relatively top–down in their design and imple-
mentation. A number of studies have claimed that school quality has
improved as a result of these programmes and policies (Heneveld and Craig
1996).
A smaller number of programmes have tried to empower parents to create
local definitions of quality and then implement locally-planned efforts to
improve quality. For example, the Malawi-based Social Mobilization
Campaign for Educational Quality (SMC-EQ) had action researchers work
with parents and communities to pinpoint issues that they felt were resulting in
Current Practices And Future Possibilities 705

low quality at their local school, and then to mobilize the community to action
in response to these issues. The project provided support for communities to
create action plans and, where necessary, to apply for needed external funding.
The project resulted in communities and teachers participating in a range of
activities, from creating local teaching and learning materials, to forming par-
ent groups that escorted children to school every day, to building roads and
bridges to the school, to changing the timing of local initiation ceremonies.
These programmes have also been shown to improve educational quality,
in this case as measured by the individual communities involved in the pro-
gramming, and are often sustained by the community. More information on
SMC-EQ can be found by contacting the implementing NGO, CRECCOM,
at: www.sdnp.org.mw/creccom. Generally, however, they are extremely local-
ized and localizing; they empower communities to improve their school within
their existing resource constraints or the limited resources they might be able
to raise. They have not generally addressed systemic issues viewed as affecting
quality, such as teacher training, curricular issues, school financing systems,
and so forth, nor do they provide a scalable model of quality-improving inputs
or processes. Likewise, the participatory process models that they embody are
generally not viewed as easily scaled up, successful though they are.
The various programmes and policies designed to improve educational
quality through participatory practices have had successes and failures.
Much has been written about these, and space does not allow a review of
them here. Participatory development approaches have been widely critiqued
both by those who believe firmly in the value of participation (Groves and
Hinton 2004), and by those who believe current participation paradigms
must be fundamentally questioned (Cooke and Kothari 2001). This note
does not aim to offer the second critique, although such a critique could be
quite useful. For example, does it really create a sense of ownership to
require that parents who are at the margins of desperate poverty provide
resources they do not have in the name of ‘‘participating’’ in school con-
struction? Likewise, when parents offer a critique of decentralization reforms
as a state effort to shed responsibility for providing citizens with basic
services, such critiques are seldom taken seriously and parents may in ex-
treme cases even be accused of laziness or of ‘‘misunderstanding’’ the roles
that states should play in the 21st century.
Putting aside for now a wholesale critique of participation, the promise of
the current focus on improving participation in order to improve quality
may be that much of the work currently done to improve educational qual-
ity is only shallowly intersecting with communitiesÕ, parentsÕ, childrenÕs, and
teachersÕ daily educational experiences and desires. When it does intersect, as
in the case of the SMC-EQ project, its size and scope is generally limited.
Such programmes show, however, that educational quality, as defined by
various local and non-local actors, could be strengthened by good participa-
tory approaches. Such participation may also be central to creating long-
term community, parent, and student support for and involvement in
706 Nancy Kendall

schools. This is no small matter on a continent in which a number of coun-


tries have experienced declining enrollment rates over the past 15 years.
Programmes like SMC-EQ also indicate that good participatory ap-
proaches start at the very beginning. They create venues in which parents and
communities, policymakers and teachers, financial planners and activist
groups can talk about the elephant in the room in current educational quality
efforts: who gets to decide what primary schooling is supposed to accomplish?
Current educational quality discourses regularly expound on the impor-
tance of parental and community participation in improving educational qual-
ity. But what exactly is such participation supposed to improve? If parents
feel, for example, that educational quality means that each child can write a
letter in a colonial language by sixth grade, or that graduation from secondary
school assures a stable civil service job, or that children learn forms of disci-
pline and social control that are anathema to many international development
organizations, do these perspectives count more or less than those of Western
aid organizations? If teachers and parents are upset that advancement through
primary school has been made automatic in order to improve the efficiency of
the system, or that the high-stakes test students take is now multiple choice in-
stead of open-ended, or that teachers refuse to teach when government budget
reforms hold up their pay in the name of accountability, who will determine
how progress and advancement is measured?
In so many ways, communities and parents have only been allowed to
‘‘participate’’ within restrictions already set by state and international actors
(Mosse 1994). In large-scale projects in particular, these restrictions include
not only the types of activities that external actors are willing to consider as
constituting ‘‘quality improvement’’, but also the mechanisms through which
communities and parents can participate in such projects. These restrictions
might result from a lack of capacity on the part of external actors to engage
with community members (for example, if there is no shared language), a
lack of programming or funding flexibility to respond to community ideas,
external planning that provides for ‘‘community participation’’ only at one
or two phases of a programme (often implementation and possibly monitor-
ing), and so forth. In short, the goals, scope of potential interventions,
implementation plans, and evaluation mechanisms are already determined in
most development programming.
Having parents and communities participate broadly, such as by partner-
ing with state and international actors to set the agenda for what primary
education is expected to accomplish and how such accomplishments should
be measured, could significantly improve educational quality. Such participa-
tion would require new models of education development planning and prac-
tices (Hickey and Mohan 2005), and would likely result in models of
education and educational quality that, at least in part, do not look the way
those in power expect or want (Nelson and Wright 1998). And that, in the
end, is exactly what participation should mean and exactly how a ‘‘quality
education’’ should look.
Current Practices And Future Possibilities 707

Note

1. Adoption of fee-free schooling is often discursively and practically related to offi-


cially democratizing or democratic political events. This linkage has obvious impli-
cations for understandings about the goals and expected outcomes of both
participatory practices and schooling (Kendall, forthcoming).

References

Case, Anne, and Motohiro Yogo. 1999. Does School Quality Matter? Returns to
Education and the Characteristics of Schools in South Africa. National Bureau of
Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper No. 7399. Cambridge, MA: NBER.
Cooke, Bill, and Uma Kothari (eds.). 2001. Participation: The New Tyranny? London,
New York: Zed Books.
Groves, Leslie, and Rachel Hinton (eds.). 2004. Inclusive Aid: Changing Power and
Relationships in International Development. London: Earthscan.
Heneveld, Ward, and Helen Craig. 1996. Schools Count: World Bank Project Designs
and the Quality of Primary Education in Sub-Saharan Africa. World Bank Technical
Paper No. 303. Washington, DC: World Bank.
Hickey, Sam, and Mohan Giles. 2005. Relocating Participation within a Radical Politics
of Development. In: Development and Change 36(2): 237–262.
Kendall, Nancy. 2007. Education for All Meets Political Democratization: Free Primary
Education and the Neoliberalization of the Malawian School and State. In:
Comparative Education Review 51(3): Forthcoming.
Michaelowa, Katharina. 2001. Primary Education Quality in Francophone Sub-
Saharan Africa: Determinants of Learning Achievement and Efficiency Considerations.
In: World Development 29(10): 1699–1716.
Miguel, Edward, and Kremer Michael. 2004. Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education
and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities. In: Econometrica 72(1): 159–217.
Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture (MOESC). 2000. Joint Review of the
Malawi Education Sector: Review Report. Held at the Malawi Institute of Management,
Lilongwe, Malawi, 2–10 October, 2000. Lilongwe: MOESC.
Mosse, David. 1994. Authority, Gender and Knowledge: Theoretical Reflections on the
Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal. In: Development and Change 25: 497–526.
Nelson, Nici, and Susan Wright (eds.). 1998. Power and Participatory Development:
Theory and Practice. London: IT Publications.
Psacharopoulos, George, and Harry Patrinos. 2002. Returns to Investment in Education:
A Further Update. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 2881. Washington,
DC: World Bank.
World Bank. 1996. The World Bank Participation Sourcebook. Washington, DC: World
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World Bank. 2007. Education. At: http://go.worldbank.org/U074PVL8Z0.
708 Nancy Kendall

The author

Nancy Kendall is Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the


University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her major research interests include the
interrelations of Education for All, political democratization, gender, child-
hood and vulnerability, and HIV/AIDS in Southern and Eastern Africa. She is
currently examining the effects of US funding for abstinence-only-until-mar-
riage education on HIV/AIDS and sexuality education practices in the United
States, Malawi, and Mozambique.
Contact address: Department of Educational Policy Studies, 1000 Bascom
Mall, Rm. 205, Madison WI 53706 USA; nkendall@education.wisc.edu;
website: http://www.education.wisc.edu/eps/faculty/kendall.asp

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