Falling education standards

Advocacy groups have rated the Zambian government’s performance in providing access to education as “one mark above a fail,” activists told IRIN on Monday. According to recent research, less than 60 percent of all eligible pupils get school places, and of those that do, the vast majority drop out during the course of their schooling. “The major problem is the lack of school places coupled with increasing poverty,” an education researcher said. “The situation has become progressively worse.” However, an Oxfam report, ‘Education Now’, is a little more encouraging over the government’s performance. Using an Education Performance Index, a composite indicator aggregating basic education statistics, Zambia is placed 52 out of the 104 developing countries surveyed - behind Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and South Africa in the southern African region, but well above its income ranking. The report notes that education gains are fragile and are under threat from mounting financial pressure. Between 1993 and 1996, Zambia allocated an average of 10 percent of GDP to debt-servicing and less than two percent to primary education. As a result of the government’s cost recovery policies, the burden of funding schooling is increasingly falling on cash-strapped parents. In Zambia, 50 percent of total elementary school spending is financed directly by households. Not surprisingly, school enrolment figures are falling, and in the first half of the 1990s, Zambia had one of the world’s lowest rates for 6-11-year-olds. According to the Oxfam report, in eastern Zambia rural households spend an average of US $24 a year to keep one child in primary school in an area in which two-thirds of households have incomes 30 percent or more below the poverty line. Rural families also cite the problem of school fees falling due during the pre-harvest period. In a situation where one quarter of the country’s classrooms lack a blackboard and chalk, only two thirds of children have a pencil, and teachers have seen real incomes fall by almost 500 percent since 1980, the quality of education inevitably suffers. A major national survey found that only 25 percent of grade six pupils could reach a minimum performance benchmark. According to the University of Zambia’s Vice-Chancellor Mutale Chanda, quoting recent European Community figures, 232,000 pupils enter primary school each year, 50,000 drop out before grade seven and 120,000 drop out at grade seven. Out of the 22,000 that gain grade 12 certificates, “16,500 look for jobs without any skills while 5,500 enter formal training or university without skills too,” Chanda was reported as saying.