 STATUS OF BASIC EDUCATION IN
DEVELOPING COUNTRIES A 
LEAGUE TABLE

This section presents a general picture of the status of basic education in 87 developing countries for which certain statistical data are available.

Following the Jomtien Conference, the scope of basic education is recognized to extend well beyond primary schooling - the focus of this report - but statistics on other components such as early childhood development programmes, non-formal education for children and adults, and education through the mass media are woefully inadequate or simply unavailable. The five indicators presented in the following table therefore give at best a partial impression of each country's current situation and efforts to maintain and improve the basic educational level of its population.

The countries are grouped and ranked according to their net enrolment ratio (NER) for primary schooling (column D), which shows what proportion of the population in the official primary school age- group is actually enrolled. Since the age-group concerned varies from one country to another, the NER is not a truly comparable indicator, but it does indicate each country's progress toward providing Universal Primary Education (UPE) according to its own definition of "primary education". The four levels of primary schooling (column A) have been determined by the common statistical method of calculating the mean NER for all the countries listed and the standard deviation from the mean.

Column E, the survival rate to Grade IV, shows the per cent of pupils entering school together (age cohort) that reaches the fourth grade, with and without repeating earlier grades. This may reflect the "efficiency" of schooling during the first crucial years and "wastage" due to pupils dropping out of school and eventually joining the ranks of illiterate adults. However, it may also reflect policy concerning automatic or selective promotion in the early grades.

The pupil--teacher ratio (PTR) (column F) is a rough indicator of the "effort" a country is making to provide primary schooling; the more teachers employed, the lower the ratio will be. Since teachers' salaries constitute the major item of recurrent expenditure on edu- cation, often more than 90%, this ratio also reflects the level of public expenditure on primary schooling. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the PTR is not a reliable indicator of "quality".

Column G, the total literacy irate, shows the percentage of adults 15 years and older that are considered literate - a key result of past efforts to provide basic education. It also indicates the ground yet to cover to attain universal adult literacy. Since literacy statistics are generally obtained from census data, they are considered less reliable than school-based statistics, and they are updated quite infrequently.

The female-male literacy gap (column H) is a rough indicator of gender (in) equity in past efforts to provide basic education. Equitable efforts and results are apparent in the case of a few countries where the literacy rates for women and men are nearly equal.

Three cautionary remarks are in order. First, the data used for this table have been drawn essentially from the most recent official statistics reported to UNESCO by national authorities; most data are for the year 1990, sometimes for prior years. Insofar as possible, data gaps have been filled from other sources or through careful estimates, and these data are shown in italics.

Second, despite their individual shortcomings, the five indicators help sketch a profile of the status of basic education, but that profile needs to be completed with other indicators before drawing any policy conclusions.

Third, none of the five indicators indicate the direction of change, i.e. whether basic education is progressing or retrogressing. In fact some indicators are unlikely to change much during the 1990s, particularly the two on literacy rates for reasons mentioned before.

More detailed explanations of these indicators are given in the footnotes to the table and in Annex 2.

Future issues of this report will attempt to present a more complete picture of basic education and show its evolution since 1990, the year of the Jomtien Conference.

The basic education index

The final two columns (I and J) relate to a first attempt to build a composite index for basic education that might help countries measure their progress toward Education for All and situate their position in relation to other countries. The experimental Basic Education Index (column J) represents the relative ranking on a cardinal scale of the unweighted average (column I) of the cardinal rankings for each of the five indicators. (See footnote 8 for more details of this method.)

Like all composite indices, the experimental Basic Education Index is vulnerable to many critiques and cannot be more robust than its constituent parts. It correlates highly with NER, but the ranking of individual countries on the BE Index varies considerably nevertheless.

Is it potentially useful? Can it be significantly improved? Readers interested in these questions are invited to communicate their comments and suggestions to the Forum Secretariat.

Technical notes

1. This table includes only developing countries with a population over 1 million and for which data are available for at least four of the five indicators.

2. The four levels of universal primary schooling have been determined by taking into consideration the simple mean (69.0) and standard deviation (24.5) of the net enrolment ratios of the 87 countries.

3. Unless otherwise indicated, figures for net enrolment ratios (NER) have been taken from UNESCO's Statistical Yearbook 1992 or estimated using data from two documents published by the UNESCO Division of Statistics: (a) Primary Education: The Excluded, STE/2, March 1991, and (b) Demographic Pressure on Primary Education, STE/I, January 1990.

4. These figures have been taken from the UNESCO Division of Statistics special issue Primary Education: Survival, STE/6, December 1991. The reconstructed cohort method has been used to calculate survival. However, the apparent cohort method has been used when figures on repetition by grades were not available.

5. These figures have been taken from the UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 1992. The figures shown in italics refer to the following years : Gabon (1987), Honduras (1986), Cote d'lvoire (1985), Zaire (1986), Guatemala (1987), Haiti (1987), Sudan (1986), Afghanistan (1986), and Somalia (1985).

6. Unless otherwise indicated, figures for total literacy rates have been taken from either UNESCO's Statistical Yearbook 1992 or World Education Report 1991. They refer to the year 1990 except for the following countries: Mauritius (1989), Trinidad and Tobago (1980), Singapore (1980), Lesotho (1979), Lao P.D.R (1985), Malawi (1981) and Ethiopia (1984).

7. The female literacy gap has been calculated by dividing the female literacy rate by the male literacy rate. A ratio equal to unity reflects gender equality in literacy rates, whereas a ratio less than unity shows that females are less literate than males; a ratio greater than unity means that the female literacy rate is higher than the male literacy rate.

8. In constructing the basic education index, each of the five variables (indicators) was ranked on a cardinal scale, which shows the relative distance between values. Accordingly, the best value in each column was ranked 100 and the other values were ranked as percentages of the best value. For example, the best value in column D (NER) is 100%; in column E, also 100%; in column F (PTR), 12; in column G, 98.4%; and column H, 1.00 i.e. absolute parity between males and females. The average of these five cardinal rankings (column I) was then ranked on a cardinal scale (the best value 96.9 = 100), and column J shows the resulting ranking according to the basic education index.

Incomplete schools exist in Eastern Europe and in many countries of Latin America, where the primary cycle covers eight or more years, but the phenomenon is most common in the rural areas of Africa. In most Sahel countries for example, four of every five rural children are forced to transfer from their incomplete village school to another more distant school in order to complete remaining primary grades. But with limited transportation facilities, too often children simply drop out of school.

In the coming years, it will be important to monitor countries' responses to incomplete schools. School-mapping at the local level can help to rationalize the school network, abolishing, consolidating and upgrading incomplete schools to cater to present and future demands for schooling.

Grade repetition

Grade repetition is not only an important part of the quality puzzle but also an indicator of the internal "efficiency" of primary schooling. Repetition rates are particularly high in the first two or three grades where the unrestricted admission of children from a wide age-range typically leads to overcrowded classrooms and unsuitable conditions. For many pupils, repeating one or more unproductive years at this early stage of their education can be the first destructive step towards dropping out.

There is a significant waste of material and human resources: 20 or more per cent of children in sub-Saharan Africa repeat at least one early grade, while the corresponding figure for Latin America is 10 to 15 per cent and close to 10 per cent in other developing countries.

10 - 20% of pupils repeat an early grade

In the past two decades, some countries reduced repetition rates by introducing an "automatic promotion" system, whereby pupils progress from one grade to the next regardless of achievement. But this has not proved to be a satisfactory solution. A genuine com- mitment to grade repetition may require introducing community-based early childhood programmes to help prepare children for school; boosting the quality of teachers and learning materials in

the first few years of schooling; identifying pupils with learning difficulties and providing special support for them; and launching school-health and feeding programmes.

School survival

School survival rates reflect the consequences of drop-out, which continues to be a major problem in all developing regions, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and South Asia, where less than two-thirds of all children who start Grade 1 finish Grade 4. So long as this continues to be the case, Universal Primary Education can never be achieved. in certain countries of sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab States and South Asia, more girls drop-out than boys, further affecting the disparity between girls' and boys' educational opportunity and achievement.

What are the reasons behind drop-out? Countless studies have analysed the phenomenon, and most of them have identified factors such as health problems, absenteeism, child labour, high opportunity costs and early marriage of girls. But that is not the whole story. In too many school systems, the underlying reason - even at the primary level - is that the school screens and selects the "fittest" at the expense of those with special learning needs. This runs counter to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which clearly states that "everyone has a right to education". It also goes against the commitment made by 155 countries in jomtien to meet the basic learning needs of all.

Considerable additional resources will be needed to allow developing countries to raise school survival rates to 90 per cent or more, as observed in most industrialized countries. But money is not enough. Pedagogical renovation - a willingness to innovate is needed to cope with children's individual differences and learning styles. Above all, the faith of parents and communities in the school as a place of learning must be restored.

Lack of teaching and learning materials

The economic crisis of the 1980s aggravated the widespread lack of teaching and learning materials in most developing countries. A World Bank study (1989) found that in Nigeria, for instance, it is not unusual that fifty children share one single book. The situation is similar or worse in rural areas of many other African countries. In Peru and Paraguay, two-thirds of all primary school pupils in 1989 had no school books at all. in Guatemala, a country experiencing bouts of civil war, the production of new textbooks stopped altogether in 1974 and has not resumed. As a result, books are usually absent from classrooms.

A more recent study (1992) analyses the share of teaching-learning materials in overall recurrent expenditures on primary education. Generally speaking, developing countries spend only 1.4 per cent of their primary education budget on textbooks, teachers' guides and other instructional materials.

Teachers' qualifications

In order to meet the soaring student enrolments in the 1970s and 1980s, many developing countries appointed poorly prepared or totally untrained teachers. Today, this "ill-prepared teaching force" constitutes a serious obstacle to boosting the quality of basic education. While data are scanty and difficult to compare, it appears that most developing countries today hire teachers with only a secondary education certificate and give them little pedagogical training. The selected country data in the graph below illustrate the problem.

Measuring learning achievement

Sending a child to school is of little benefit if the child does not learn something useful there. Unfortunately this is the case in too many classrooms, especially in the developing world.

The World Declaration on Education for All specifically addressed the problem of learning achievement: "whether or not expanded educational opportunities will translate into meaningful development - for an individual or for society - depends ultimately on whether people actually learn as a result of those opportunities, i.e., whether they incorporate useful knowledge, reasoning ability, skills, and values." The Declaration therefore called on countries to "define acceptable levels of learning acquisition ... and improve and apply systems of assessing learning achievement" (Article 4).

Most developing countries presently lack the capacity to monitor the quality of learning in primary schools. Where tests are administered, their results are generally used to select pupils for promotion to the next grade or level of education, rather than to detect and correct deficiencies in instruction.

The Netherlands-based international Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and similar research bodies carry out cross-country studies on learning achievement. In 1990-91, IEA tested ..the ability to understand and use the written language forms required by societies and/or valued by the individual" among 9-year-old primary pupils in twenty-six countries (including four developing countries).

As can be seen below, there is considerable variation in learning achievement even among countries of similar economic status.