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| Features |
| Gains of school fees abolition |
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by
Limbani Nsapato, a correspondent, 04 May 2007
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07:00:07
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As the world reflects on progress towards achieving the six Education for All (EFA) goals and under the theme “Education as a human right” during this years’ Global Week of Action in the last week of April a key factor that has to be considered is the abolition of school fees in primary schools.
Over 260 countries, including Malawi, made an agreement on the six EFA goals in 2000 in Dakar, Senegal.
The goals, expected to be achieved by 2015, call on all countries to adopt universal and compulsory primary education for all.
One of the goals (Goal 2) is to ensure that by 2015 all children particularly girls, children in difficult circumstances and those belonging to ethnic minorities have access to free and compulsory primary education.
In 1994, Malawi introduced Free Primary Education (FPE) programme, effectively abolishing school fees in all public primary schools.
Some critics condemned the programme, saying it lacked proper planning and that it had a lot of flaws.
But for sure this bold initiative was a positive step towards achieving the 2015 EFA goals. Measures need to be taken to seal the gaps and sustain the programme.
Recent figures from Unesco, Unicef and World Bank reports show that the world has 115 million school-aged children, out of school at the global level, with 45 million in sub-Saharan Africa where Malawi belongs.
One of the contributing factors to this pathetic situation is that many countries are still charging school fees.
In Malawi, nearly five million people have not seen an inside of a classroom, according to recent National Population Census figures.
Making primary school free and compulsory would significantly reduce the number of children out of school.
Although Malawi is yet to make primary school compulsory, making it free was a step towards making it compulsory.
Statistics indicate that the year after the government abolished school fees, enrolment in primary schools almost doubled from 1.9 million to 3.2 million.
Else where in sub-Saharan Africa, school fees abolition also had similar positive results.
When free primary education was introduced in Uganda in 1997, for instance, enrolment nearly doubled from 3.4 to 5.7 million, rising to 6.5 million by 1999.
Our neighbours in Tanzania also experienced the same celebration as enrolment in their country rose by 1.5 million, courtesy to free primary education.
It is a fact that school fees abolition does not only bring about easy access to primary school, but also equity, an aspect which when taken together with access and relevance makes up the vision of the country’s education system.
The abolition of school fees gave an opportunity to all children from rural and urban areas, poor and rich households, vulnerable or non-vulnerable to have access to school.
While some of these categories of children are at more advantage than others, one cannot convincingly argue against the fact that abolition of school fees has reduced the gap towards equity of enrolment.
In financial terms, abolition of school fees minimises the costs borne by households.
The costs include tuition fees, compulsory uniforms, charges for textbooks and other learning material; transport to and from school, meals, examinations fees, as well as the various miscellaneous charges such as Parent, Teacher Association dues, and school-based activity fees.
While I do not have current statistics on how much of a burden school-related costs are to households in Malawi, figures from other countries show that these costs account for up to 18 percent of total household spending.
A regional workshop held in April 2006 in Nairobi on School Fees Abolition revealed that school fees account for 16 percent of household spending on non-food items in Zambia, and 12 to 18 percent in Ghana.
This means that if we slide back to the school fees syndrome, households would become poorer and poorer with serious repercussions on retention of pupils in primary school.
This entails that the current rates of dropouts and absenteeism which are high would increase further because households would not be able to raise money for ensuring pupil’s upkeep such as giving them adequate food and buying soap and clothing thereby making the pupils disgruntled with school.
Worse still communities would find it difficult to participate in developments around schools such as management and maintenance as recommended by the country’s National Strategy for Strengthening Community Participation in Primary School Management.
While a lot of gains have been made with the introduction of free primary education and subsequent abolition of school fees, one cannot be blind to the fact that there are challenges the country is facing to sustain this initiative.
One of the challenges, for example, is that the abolition of school fees has led to overcrowding in schools as there are inadequate resources to build more classrooms and supply classroom facilities.
Other demands are to ensure that there are qualified teachers, adequate teaching and learning materials, and maintenance of schools in order to enhance the quality of education.
The lack of resource arise because of little funding to the education sector with the education budget hovering around 13 percent of the total budget which is far less than the minimum of 26 percent recommended by the international community to achieve the 2015 EFA Goals and MDGs.
To deal with this challenge the government of Malawi needs to make policy reforms and political choices and trade-offs regarding education expenditures by, for instance, deliberately making a provision to allocate nearly 30 percent of the national budget to education, 50 percent of which should go to basic education.
This would need commitment of the Ministry of Education and Finance to come to a common agreement and negotiate political, financial and technical support to ensure better coordination across and investment of other sectors and to address the funding gap in the long term.
Moreover, donors and cooperating partners need to come in with increased external assistance to close the budget gap in the short and medium terms.
Other challenges include deficiencies in enforcement of the school fees abolition policy due to lack of commonly owned systems and mechanisms.
This has resulted in some schools and communities imposing other forms of fees on pupils like development, textbook and other user fees.
This has forced some pupils to be absent from school and eventually drop out. One way in which this challenge could be addressed by among others ensuring that the free primary education policy is reviewed to identify gaps and patch them up.
In addition, there is need for commitment by government and stakeholders particularly communities to enhance school supervision, inspection and monitoring to detect any practice of charging fees and act on them.
When all is said and done it remains important that school fees should not be tolerated in our primary schools as it sharply contradicts efforts to ensure universal primary education which is a prerequisite to development at all levels, individual, national and international.
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