A reader visits Dounko in the FAVL office in Burkina Faso:

Le samedi 05 mai 2012, visite de George Gnoumou, Sergent des eaux et forêts, au siège de FAVL. 

"Après avoir arrêté mes études en classe de seconde au lycée Provincial du Tuy en 2007 moi et mes deux camarades avons fait de la bibliothèque de Bereba notre lieu de recherche et de préparation aux concours. Ceci faisant, nous trois avons réussi aux concours de la fonction publique. Moi je suis forestier, l'autre Agent technique de l'agriculture et le troisième est enseignant du primaire dans la province des Balle. La bibliothèque reste et restera dans ma mémoire et je souhaite que mes frères et sœurs en milieu rural font comme nous. La lecture est ma passion actuellement. Au nom de mes camarades je remercie tous les donateurs de même que ceux qui œuvrent pour la réussis des élèves en milieu rural grâce à la lecture. Les mots me manquent car celui qui ta donné le savoir ne peut pas être oublié dans ta vie. Que Dieu accorde à chacun d'eux longévité et surtout le succès dans leurs services ou dans leurs activités rémunératrices afin de soutenir l'éducation complémentaire en milieu rural."

A film review by Elisée:

Interesting article about Alice Tiendrébeogo's views on girls education in Burkina Faso in 50 years (article in French) :

http://www.lefaso.net/spip.php?article39731

For my economics of gender in developing countries class we read a paper by Deon Filmer and Norbert Schady.  They analyze the effects on school enrollment of a program in Cambodia that gave scholarships to girls who were finishing primary school so that they would be encouraged to continue on to secondary school.  The grants were on the order of $45 to each student.  They resulted in increase in 20 percentage points of attendance, from about 60 to about 80 girls attending per 100 girls.  Filmer and Schady, in the working paper version I have, do not do any back of the envelope calculations, but if one does a very simple one, where if one pays the scholarship to 100 girls that means that 20 more girls attend school than would have otherwise, and one assumes that of the 20 attending 5 shouldn't be attending (i.e. they are failing, or really the value of an extra school for them is very low), so that the true positive impact is on 15 girls, then the expenditure is $4500 to benefit 15 girls, or $300 per girl per extra year of schooling. 

Our FAVL summer reading camps initially cost about $50 per student, and if replicated/scaled I presume we would get cost down to $25 per child, and these camps include meals and t-shirts, so the actual camp cost is about $15 per student per two weeks, so about $300 per student for 40 weeks.  Good to know we are in the "effect size" ballpark.  (Of course, the $5 transfers to the non-impacted girls who would have gone to school anyway are not a waste, merely a transfer, so the comparison is stacked in FAVL's favor.  ;-)

Great video by cdpeace showing typical schools in central Sierra Leone.  Notice the lack of pretty much anything on the classroom walls.  Not a word-rich environment!

Seems like a really interesting paper...

Allocation of Labor in Urban West Africa: Insights from the Pattern of Labor Supply and Skill Premiums

Authors: Dimova, Ralitza; Nordman, Christophe J; Roubaud, François

Source: Review of Development Economics, Volume 14, Number 1, February 2010 , pp. 74-92(19)

 

Abstract:

Using comparable data from five West African capitals, we assess the rationale behind development policies targeting high rates of school enrollment through the prism of allocation of labor and earnings effects of skills across the formal and informal sectors, and not working. We find that people with high levels of education allocate to the small formal sector, while less educated workers allocate to the informal sector. While high levels of education are given more value in the relatively smaller sectors of salaried employment, observed skills like education appear to be fairly unprofitable in the larger self-employment sector. The fact that only the small formal sector in urban West Africa both seems to absorb highly educated workers and provide high skill premiums may be an important reason for the observed low demand for education and high dropout rates.

From the AILA Africa Ren Newsletter - October 2009

Oxfam Report: West Africa's Literacy Challenge "From Closed Books to Open Doors: West Africa's Literacy Challenge" calculates the scale of the literacy crisis in West Africa, and explores what should be done about it. West Africa has the lowest literacy rates in the world. The report is launched in the context of the 2009 Global Week of Action on education, which focuses on literacy and lifelong learning, and the UN international conference on adult education, taking place in 2009 for the first time in 12 years. In West Africa, there are 65 million young people and adults who cannot read and write - more than 40% of the population - and 14 million children aged 7 to 12 who are not in primary school. Illiteracy is shutting these people off from the jobs, economic opportunities, good health and engagement in democracy. The consequences for them, their communities and their countries, is devastating. But the literacy crisis can be dealt with, and the doors to these rights opened. In the formal education system, there must be an effort to fill the gap in trained teachers, calculated at over three quarters of a million trained teachers. At the same time, governments need to put much greater priority on providing real opportunities to learn to read and write outside school, such as in adult literacy classes and youth training centres.

Read the recommendations and download the report here: http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/education/closed-books-open-doors-west-africa.html

It is a good report, but honestly, how can you write thirty single-spaced pages about literacy and never mention libraries?????

I'm a judge for the annual Tech Awards here in San Jose, and every year I write an article summarizing the Tech Award laureates and saying a few pearls of wisdom about technology and education.  So I sat down to write this year's article, and was reading last year's, and thought to myself, "Not bad... maybe I'll do a cheap reposting.."  So here are the first couple paragraphs and a link to more.

As an economist, I am sometimes asked to justify how my current research on reading habits in rural Africa is related to economics. "How do they let you study that?" people ask. A quick definition of economics as the study of how to make choices in environments of scarcity, and an addendum of economics as a toolkit of methods for empirical analysis, quickly reveals the naiveté of the question. Schools in Africa are grossly under-equipped for the task of developing the skills of an educated person, and parents, often non-literate themselves, have little appreciation of the power of reading practice as a way to reinforce reading ability. The same parents who will have their children patiently walk a young ox back and forth several hundred times, to train the ox how to plow a furrow, will believe that a child reading the same book twice is a waste of time: "She already read it." In this environment of enormous potential for improvements in "human capital," encouraging reading is crucial. Economics would seem to play a critical role in helping to understand.

     But for all its vaunted capabilities, the contribution of economics to the discussion of how to improve education outcomes is modest. This is because the more interesting and serious core problems in education fall rather squarely in the domain of psychology. Education is, after all, the process by which minds with particular ways of understanding the world (teachers) impart that way of understanding to minds that have different ways of understanding the world (students). Improvements in education come from more careful attention and insight into how the minds of children work in these structured interpersonal situations. What words should a teacher utter to inspire a student to overcome the hesitation and inertia that are the hallmarks of the reluctant reader? What practices can students carry out that will enable them, through repetition, to master a skill? How can active learning be fostered in a classroom with no electricity, no desks or worktables, and 75 students per teacher? Education psychology brings innovations to the table; economists are more likely to be technicians testing whether new methods actually work.

Read the full article...

DAKAR, 22 April 2009 (IRIN) - Illiteracy rates in West Africa are the highest in the world, cramping development and weakening citizens’ power to effect socio-economic and political change, say education agencies, who are calling on governments and donors to step up literacy and education efforts.

Sixty-five million West African adults – 40 percent of the adult population – cannot read or write according to a new study, 'From closed books to open doors – West Africa's literacy challenge'.

Of the 10 countries with the world’s lowest recorded adult – 15 and older – literacy rates, seven are in West Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone, the report says.

"Tens of millions of non-literate women, men and young people in West Africa are trapped behind closed doors, excluded from the living standards, educational opportunities, and democratic power that are their rights," said Mahamadou Cheick Diarra, coordinator of the African Platform for Adult Education (Pamoja).

“People [in West Africa] cannot access jobs or economic or technical opportunities that have been shown all over the world to be driving development," said the report’s author, Oxfam West Africa advocacy coordinator Caroline Pearce.

Read the full article here...

Private Secondary Education in Uganda: Implications for Planning
by W. James Jacob, Donald B. Holsinger & Christopher B Mugimu
Teacher's College Record— 2008

Results: Private schools in Uganda appear to be attractive, low-cost alternatives to government secondary schools. Per-pupil spending is significantly related to learning achievement, regardless of whether a student attends a private or government school. Thus, if higher performance is the desired ultimate student outcome, additional spending will be required. For their per-pupil cost, this article shows that private schools produce good learning gains—better, in fact, on a dollar basis, than government schools.

I can't see how they control for self-selection (better students go to private schools) because I have to pay for the article...