OneWorld.net (U.S.)

“I think that there is a role for ICT, but have we explored the extent to which that can be harnessed in education? I don’t think that there is enough discussion between education and the ICT sector”, tells Erma Manoncourt in an interview with Anupama Ramakrishnan of OneWorld South Asia.

What is the UNICEF’s mission in education in South Asia?

Erma: UNICEF has at its base a medium term strategic plan, which is our corporate positioning in terms of programme priorities, determined by development goals such as the MDGs set by the UN assembly and by documents such as A World Fit For Children. So these instruments, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child will have us looking at education in terms of quality education. In terms of region, there is a strong push in South Asia for girls to get into education, getting girls into school for there to be fair play and for girls to be mobilised.

How does UNICEF tie Education For All and the right to education with what it wants to do in education?

Erma: UNICEF supports programmes as the government’s primary partner, so when you talk of a UNICEF programme, you are talking about a government programme. We provide assistance. In the case of India, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is the umbrella under which we provide our particular support. When we talk of the right to education, it deals with access…getting boys and girls to go to schools. And when they are there in school to really get them to have quality education.

When we talk of the right to education, what we are talking about is really trying to operationalise it. In India, the government has made schools available for the large part. The difficulty is in their retention, keeping girls back in school.

What is the status of the girls child’s access to upper primary education? How do girl children fall behind due to poverty?

Aarti: On a technical level we do face a problem, the transition from primary to upper primary is a bottle neck. We do see a fall in numbers. The norm of one school per kilometer (km) shifts to one school per three kms in upper primary, so, a physical bottleneck already exists. Adding to that, further problems like cultural, economic, social factors, increases the problem of access.

A lot of research and smaller studies show that poverty is not a deterrent to entering school, but it becomes a deterrent in terms of performance and staying on in school. There is a demand and desire for education, which is tied up to the issue of quality, there is the question of quality, once there is a relevance to the education that is being provided. So you see, its not an insurmountable barrier. Its very hard to do a unidimensional cause analysis, and poverty is a convenient scapegoat. Every context would demand a more systemic analysis to understand girls education.

What is UNICEF doing to deal with the issue of space? For example, high drop- out rates of upper primary girls are often caused by poor infrastructure. In what way does UNICEF plan to operationalise the SSA and improve school infrastructure?

Erma: We have a quality sensitive package, where we have the agreement of the government to demonstrate a pilot approach so that when one says quality education, we are looking not only at what the teacher says, but looking at the classroom itself. In that classroom, you bring together different things: a teacher who is trained and motivated, a school that has sanitary facilities, the lack of which is a major deterrent for older girls, a school that is clean.

Sometimes what you see in education is that you have one part right and the rest of it is falling apart, so how do you bring it all together? What does it take to make it happen? What we do is to work with teachers and supervisors at cluster centers to bring the whole together so that we can demonstrate what kind of benefit you can get if everything is in place. What is it that a community can bring to it? That the adults ensure teachers going to school, the toilet is clean….The government is building infrastructure, but in some places that may not work. What works in some areas does not in others. We are trying to build on good practices by looking for positive deviants.

What UNICEF can do is to test what is working, and can test it out…can you make education joyful, can you make it fun? Can you do things in a classroom that it isn’t rote, and isn’t painful? So its that kind of work that we are doing. We are looking at education not literacy.

Aarti: We are also looking at accelerated learning programmes, especially for girls. There are a lot of existing programmes: UNICEF has a camp in Barabanki, which is a perfect opportunity to bring girls to school, especially into the upper primary, where girls can get back into the mainstream.

How do you see the SSA’s targets?

Erma: I think that they have ambitious targets, I think the MDGs are ambitious too, but I think that’s ok. I think the key is not setting the target, the key is the monitoring, there is no dishonour sometimes when you don’t reach some place, but you need to understand why. The dishonour is in not knowing why you got there. But yes, today,there are some real obstacles out there and it’s the aspiration and ,I think, it is important to have an aspiration. The key is for the government to put in place solid monitoring to see if it is on track.

But isn’t one of the main criticisms of the MDGs and the EFA that action is sidelined?

Erma: I think we have the MDGs, but you can’t forget the Tenth Plan targets, which are probably far more ambitious than the MDGs. So I think the issue is monitoring and tracking. It takes commitment. We are for example, involved in helping train different cadres of educationalists and supervisors on how to monitor so that it does not become so cumbersome. What are the tools that a teacher, a supervisor, a cluster coordinator can have at his or her disposal?

I think the target is always there to strive towards, and I think that we should always have ambitious targets. Sometimes we surprise ourselves at the serendipity of what happens that none of us ever anticipated. And sometimes we wont get there, but we will get closer. The point for me is that targets are the kind of thing when I want to go where I haven’t been, it’s a movement where you know you are not going to stay in one place. To me its relative. With this government which is going into a mid term review of the five year plan, it will be a wonderful opportunity to assess where are we in terms of what we aspired to? Are we on track? Are we putting the right interventions and activities together? Have we thought about everything? Or do we need to make some readjustments? To me that’s what targets are good for… we lay them out and say, are we doing what we need to? Next year is critical in terms of assessments and studies asking if we are on target, because if they can achieve some things that the Tenth plan has proposed, they will have surpassed what the MDGs have to say.

Do you think that girls education is on target?

Aarti: I would agree with what Erma has to say in terms of the targets, but we will have to be careful because the SSA targets are not completely synchronised with the EFA targets. Although you have gender parity being a target for MDGs in 2005, SSA wants that in 2007. The Indian targets are very different from the international targets. So I think the relativeness of those targets need to be taken into account.

In this paradigm, where do you see Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and Non Governmental Organisation (NGOs) who use ICTs in education?

Erma: I think civil society has a critical role. If you think about the CRC and if you think about rights, then you realise that there is a role for everybody to play and the government cannot do it by itself. Neither can the multilaterals. Its got to be everybody understanding what they can do to contribute to the world. What is perhaps needed is more discussion. There is more than one way as they say to get to the mountain. And I thinks sometimes we tie ourselves in knots, as if we have to go on the same road, or do the same thing. So for example, I think that there is a role for ICT, but have we explored the extent to which that can be harnessed in education? Are there other ways we can be doing things? I don’t think that there is enough discussion between education and the ICT sector. Maybe ICTs are further ahead than where education may be, but that does not mean that you cannot help educationists think something different.

When do the two come together to talk? What I’d love to see is when both say that this is a problem and this is how we tackle this. Then you begin to hear a common discussion of where the synergies are. What’s not to say that there couldn’t be someone from civil society or the private sector who will say that we will try a new way, we’ve got this new gadget that will help get this a little further, and this is what it will look like, and with technology that is reasonable and so forth and this is how it can be done. That kind of discussion needs to occur, but I am not sure if it occurs here in India, and I think that ICT people and education people do not show up in each others’ meetings, because they are not sure if the other will be receptive to them. I think young people and their minds are far more elastic than adults give them credit for. For example, we have been supporting an effort in Hyderabad where computers are used to teach village women about health. Here they can see things happening, and everybody thinks that you have to be in school to learn these things. We all know that you put a child with a computer and the children do better than the adults. There is a natural curiosity and this is where I think things happen. Maybe that part of government where you have the education and the IT departments are parallel all the way down. Where is the discussion here?

How do you visualise access to ICTs for girl children and other such disadvantaged groups in terms of schools, homes, etc?

Erma:There is a lot of work done in community radio around the world, for example, and we seem to use it in India more for entertainment and not for education and not for other kinds of things. For example, there are a lot of things on television and everybody assumes that everybody has a television. The fact is that most people have radios.

The fact is that radios can be used with teachers. In Latin America a lot of work has been done with schools and radios where people talk to each other. So there is a way of doing it.

Another example is telephones. We know that in the country there is a STD telephone line in places that we never even thought of… so could we look at that differently. There are other ways of getting the information in? Maybe you can put it on a mobile video thing, it is about trying to figure out how do you put out information to the people? I agree with Aarti here, I think the desire is there. I think that in 2004, most people however poor they are, want a better life for their children than they as parents have. And in India because of the pressure and emphasis placed on education, that is seen as one of the tickets out, and no matter how poor people are that ticket is still there.

Aarti: I think that technology has an important role to play. Technology is introduced in a system where there are existing social relations. But technology is not gender neutral, which one has to be consistently aware of and this must be constantly interrogated. If you introduce it blindly, you might exacerbate the digital divide. It’s a question of using it sensitively.

Is the UNICEF working elsewhere in India?

Erma: ICTs frankly are an experiment for us, we are not as far along as we probably would like to be… and we are learning as we go along. That’s why we participated in several kinds of ICT fora to understand better how it works. But no we don’t have it in all of our programmes in the country.

What are the UNICEF’s programmes in India?

Aarti: We are working across 14 states, including Delhi, where we have independent projects. But the main emphasis is on the quality of education so as to make sure that children are learning something. The second is reducing gender disparity. The third is addressing issues of access in terms of disadvantaged groups. And when I talk of access, I am also talking of quality. They both are interrelated. You cant have access without quality and you can’t have quality which is exclusive.

Erma: Some of the states dealing with quality education are looking at working children, with a particular emphasis on girls, at tribal education and at education in an urban environment. This is because as soon as you get into an urban environment, you know that there are some things going on in that environment that are very different. It is important to keep in mind that we assist governments and civil society. We are a bridge, we look at what everyone is doing and work at how we, the UNICEF presence can add anything. So we try to minimise duplication and look for complementarity. If we think that someone has succeeded we can try to help in documentation and try and give visibility to what is being done.

So, would the UNICEF support techno-logical interventions into education?

Erma: Potentially we have the capacity to do that if technology were part of our negotiations with the government. If the government says that they are trying to position themselves to bring ICTs into education, within that we have an umbrella to work. Our work has to fit within the larger context of what the state or federal government intends to do. We have to do a formal negotiation with the government for a programme which sets a broad umbrella, so the potential is always there for inclusivity.

About Erma Manoncourt and Aarti Saihjee: Erma Manoncourt is Deputy Director and Aarti Saihjee is APO, Girl's Education, UNICEF, India.