Education Aid: Where to from here?

For as far back as many of us can remember it has been an initiative that schools in the UK have partnered with schools in Africa. These partnerships have ostensibly been started by schools in the UK with the purpose, often, of creating links to grow understanding and empathy with schools in a totally different setting, a sort of sharing of experiences to allow students the chance to meet and get to know a little more about each other’s lives. These relationships can, at times, be very positive and many students have, over time, really benefited from meeting other students from across the globe.?

But there exists an unfortunate downside to these relationships that no one intends but nevertheless grows over time, and this arises largely from a disparity in resources or wealth; UK schools often being comparatively well funded and resourced compared to their African counterparts. We would be naive to think that this point is not obvious to everyone involved, right from the start of any school partnership / link relationship.?

Many schools in the UK set about trying to level the playing field by making donations, creating fundraising initiatives and collecting resources for their link school in an attempt to try to redress resource imbalances. On the surface this is well intentioned but lacks contextual understanding and, lurking in the background is a far more complex dynamic at play; the growing of a paternalistic relationship with a clear ‘giver’ and a clear ‘receiver’, where benevolence and gratitude become adversarial colleagues. It is no surprise, therefore, that these link relationships then often fizzle out.??

In the past this type of relationship may have been acceptable to many people in both places, however, of late there is a growing awareness and in some cases discontent, with the paternalistic relationship between the global north and Africa. In truth, many Africans are reassessing and exploring the relationship with foreign aid and the idea of the ‘need’ to receive, and there is a weariness in the ‘old way’ of doing things. Far more prevalent in the conversation now is seeking relationships with the global north to be redefined as one of equality, where everyone has something to offer the relationships, and where money is only one of many things of value in a relationship.?

If we extrapolate this concept to a larger scale, that of educational development on a national scale, there is evidence to suggest that African governments are developing a growing belief that education sits at the foundation of progress. Investment in African education is coming in from all angles, often externally funded by wealthier nations, however an equally important investment, albeit not a financial one, are the conversations about decolonising and contextualising education provision for children and students across Africa. These conversations are gathering pace and beginning to manifest in policy-making in some striking examples on the continent.???

In Sierra Leone for example, the new education minister is making use of donor funding to develop teachers’ skills, providing schools with the tools to improve from within rather than with continuous external handouts. Another example is the Rwandan government who has created its own online professional development tool covering many elements of education, so that teachers have the ability to self-learn. And in Zambia and Ghana, the conversation about decolonising education is happening in the private education sector, and spreading into government departments, where policy will no doubt reflect this in the near future.

The great thing is that donor organisations are buying into this and they have, resultantly, made important shifts in their approach to development. There can be no doubt that the people who know what is best for Africa, are Africans. Funding is now often targeted at African companies who are trying to make change from within, rather than external companies and initiatives that emanate from the global north. This important shift should be, and can be, mirrored in individual school links. But what does this look like in reality?

A starting point should bring the focus of any partnership back to the development of empathy of the teachers and students on both sides. Instead of schools seeking to send resources and collections made at home to help level the playing field for ‘poorer’ schools, schools on both sides of the ‘wealth divide’ should try to establish relationships that foster an appreciation of what both schools have to offer. For example, instead of uni-directional resource sharing, the use of online competitions where children can engage on a level footing, could be one way. Or, if budget permits, another may be that schools invest in teacher swaps where teachers from both schools pay physical visits to the partner school to teach and be taught about the other cultures and educational experiences.?

Of course, there are schools that endeavour to do these things but often these efforts are accompanied by resource collection and financially motivated initiatives, which then tend to take centre stage in the partnership. Would it not be far more productive and effective to focus on student and teacher experience???

To round off, education is about preparing our children for a global future. This future needs to be about the development of understanding between people, and the understanding that development is less about one group of people feeling as though they are being seen through a certain lens by others, or as though a dominant collective voice or narrative views and fixes an unequal identity on another group of people, and more about valuing diversity in all cultures, and seeking to learn things in both directions of any relationship. This builds empathy across cultural and geographical boundaries, empathy that will serve us all well into the future.