The wheels of the cycle of reform go round and round
A dispatch from Ethiopia, where there's peace after two years of fighting, a new curriculum after years of planning, and the textbooks are... on their way?
I spent part of the summer of 2021 puzzling over “child-friendly budgeting”.
It was to be integrated into Ethiopia’s new curriculum. Although not explicitly part of any subject syllabus, authors were expected to seamlessly weave child-friendly budgeting into the new textbooks.
But what was child-friendly budgeting? What was an appropriate amount to include at each grade? And where had it come from?
The government’s vision was an Ethiopian curriculum, for Ethiopians, created by Ethiopians. Alongside the familiar active learning and 21st century skills it would include local priorities such as indigenous knowledge, road safety, health and hygiene, peace education, gender equality, tax, and – naturally – child-friendly budgeting.
Despite searching through policy documents, asking colleagues, Googling, I couldn’t find a clear statement. Perhaps this was indigenous knowledge? Perhaps everyone else understood what child-friendly budgeting was? In the end a generic statement in the briefing documents had to do.
As I stepped on a plane to Addis Ababa to deliver some follow-up training in November, it occurred to me that if I couldn’t find a definition, at least I could try to find out where it came from.
Happy Xmas (War Is Over)
When you think of Ethiopia, what comes to mind ?
Band Aid, maybe. Do They Know It’s Christmas? was originally recorded to raise money for the 1984 famine. Ethiopia is a majority Christian country surrounded by majority Muslim countries, so yes, they do know when Christmas is. It’s on 7 January, like every year.
Sorry, I missed a key detail there: it’s an Orthodox Christian country.
Or there’s Ethiopia’s prodigious success in marathon running. Addis Ababa, at 2355m above sea level, is a destination for elite athletes looking to acclimatise to the thin air. It’s home to Haile Gebrselassie, who set 27 world records, before going on to enjoy a successful business career. I can’t resist this detail from his profile:
As a child growing up on a farm in Ethiopia, Haile Gebrselassie ran 10 kilometres to school each day and another 10 kilometres back home. As an adult, he ran with his left arm crooked, the effect of years spent running with books under his arm.
Or there’s the war in Tigray and the resulting humanitarian crisis, which has left 600,000 dead and 400,000 in famine conditions. A year into the war, Haile Gebrselassie was one of the high-profile athletes to join the military in support of the Ethiopian government. In November this year, after two years of fighting, a peace deal was signed.
Landing in Addis Ababa, I find a city of contrasts.
Tower blocks of Western brands – Hilton, Radisson, Sheraton – cast long shadows over neighbouring single-storey dwellings built from corrugated iron.
Building sites are everywhere. Concrete skeletons of new towers are held up with wooden scaffold. Broken roads are lined with enterprising vendors selling gleaming chrome faucets, porcelain sinks, rows of toilets and even a roll-top bath, ready for when construction reaches the fixtures-and-fittings stage.
The city is speckled with reminders of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Neon kanji glow above the Yod Abyssinia Cultural Restaurant, where delicious plates of injera are served alongside traditional folk dance and music.
I share a car to the hotel with people from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, OECD, and a boutique NGO. The UN compound is hosting the 17th Internet Governance Forum. There’s excitement because the Forum is finally back, irl.
“I’m doing a lightning talk on the decentralised future of South-to-South collaboration,” one says, getting her pitch in early. Details of panels and drinks receptions are exchanged eagerly as we cut through mid-morning traffic.
Despite the presence of the Forum, the internet in Addis is often unstable. Intermittent power cuts are common. During the height of the war, when the Tigrayan forces were closing in on Addis, we were delivering training via Zoom and trying to work around periods of government-instigated internet blackouts.
We drive past an LED billboard showing delegates delighting as a small, deer-like drone delicately walks towards the camera.
A short history lesson
What’s taught in schools is often the result of history, culture and context.
Haile Selassie – Ethiopia’s last Emperor – had overseen the internationalisation of Ethiopian society. During his reign, Ethiopia joined the UN, discouraged the use of languages other than Amharic, and introduced English as a medium of instruction. (This last, apparently, as thanks for the British after Selassie spent five years in exile in England. The British army provided support in expelling Mussolini’s troops from Ethiopia in 1941.)
In 1974, however, there was a socialist revolution, Selassie was overthrown and the monarchy abolished. The Derg, a Marxist-Leninist junta, came into power. The combination of political alignment and Orthodox Christianity resulted in closer ties with Russia.
Russia advised the overturning of Selassie’s language policy. I’m told the Russian line was: “English is the language of Capitalism.” (Ethiopia still treads a delicate line with its international relationships, being one of 35 UN members that abstained to condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.)
But the Derg’s reforms went beyond language:
The socialist-inspired revolution of 1974 resulted in a formal reversal of Selassie’s homogenising policies, such that each ethnically-based national group was given ‘the right to determine the contents of its political, economic and social life, use its own language and elect its own leaders and administrators’ (Ethiopian Government Programme quoted in Getachew and Derib 2006: 47; emphasis added).
And so there are two factors that make the Ethiopian education system complex: devolved federal responsibilities and local languages.
There are 13 federal education boards, each of which is responsible for tweaks to the curriculum and production of teaching and learning materials for Grades 1–8. In each region, these grades are taught in several of around 40 different local languages. For example, one federal board may need to produce 14 or so different versions of Grade 4 Mathematics to cover the local languages of instruction in the region.
Since this is Absolutely Textbook, let’s take a moment to reflect on the production process.
The pace of roll-out was too quick to allow a master version to be produced in Amharic, adapted by local regions to reflect local context, and then translated into the local languages. Instead, separate author teams had to write parallel versions of the same book. This is no small undertaking.
Make livres not war
The Ethiopian Ministry of Education is at the business end of the current reform. Grades KG–8 started to be taught in schools in September. Grades 9–10 are being piloted in 98 schools, while 11–12 are still in development and 9–12 will be taught nationwide from September 2023.
When it comes to printing, the programme has faced a problem familiar to most publishers of late: increasing prices. I’ve written about why printing has become so expensive before, but the issue has become acute in Ethiopia.
A significant amount of the money for printing comes from the international aid community. The budget for the programme was agreed at the outset. But by the time the print tenders were issued, the price of printing had quadrupled.
The printing programme also faced a problem specific to Ethiopia. Getting textbooks into schools was important, but fighting the war in Tigray was urgent. And in the hand-to-mouth business of government-in-crisis, urgent trumped important. Funds earmarked for books were used to buy tanks and military drones.
In order to get maximum benefit from the aid programme, the printing needs to be done in Ethiopia. This keeps the money within the country’s borders, provides work for local businesses and employment for Ethiopians. However, there’s limited printing capacity in the country. One enterprising region worked with an Indian company to establish a local printer. But printing capacity continues to be a challenge in a country with 29.6 million children enrolled in school.
The scale of the reform is vast. In the summer of 2021, the fighting in Ethiopia was so intense the government would regularly turn the internet off. However, while the connection and power generators held, I was beamed in at the front of various training halls, opening multi-day workshops led by our in-country partners. We trained around 3200 authors.
Now I’m here in person for a few days to deliver training for a much smaller crowd. I’m sitting in the lobby of the Radisson updating my slides before the workshop. This isn’t my hotel – I’m here because my hotel’s wifi is capricious at best and the power keeps cutting out – but I’m surrounded by delegates from the Internet Governance Forum.
“See, we’re rolling out messaging in the Metaverse to priority countries only at the moment,” says the guy next to me. He’s on a Zoom call, hunched over his laptop wearing white earbuds. “But you want it, let me know and I’ll see if I can bump you up the priority list.”
[A couple of weeks later Meta would find itself on the wrong end of a $2bn lawsuit for its failure to moderate posts inciting violence during the war in Tigray.]
The woman to my right is interviewing a candidate for a virtual-only internship. “Yeah, so I’m in Addis at the moment. We travel quite a bit, but there’s no travel for this role. But tell me, what you want to get out of this position.”
The lobbies of international hotels are strange placeless bubbles. It’s easy to forget that outside, beyond the metal detector and the bomb-proof barricade and the security guard with the semi-automatic rifle, we’re in Ethiopia.
Back to school
The training is a success. After, there’s an opportunity to visit one of the 98 schools that are piloting the Grades 9–10 curriculum. I jump at the chance.
The school is in Addis and accessed via a narrow dirt road. Water bottles sliced in half and filled with wilting plants decorate corrugated iron fences capped with razor wire.
The classrooms are housed in tall, narrow concrete buildings. They have small, high windows to keep out the sun and there are open staircases either side of each building.
Ethiopia operates a home room system, so the teachers rotate between classrooms while the children stay put. We’ve arrived at break time and the students are hanging out on the open walkways, talking and watching us with the kind of casual disinterest universal to teenagers.
I sit at the back of a Grade 9 Geography class, behind 36 students sitting in pairs at metal desks. At the front of the class, there’s a whiteboard, a blackboard, and an empty stand where a plasma TV should be. No one has a textbook. The teacher has a loose sheaf of printed pages, which he refers to as he calls out questions to the class. The students rifle through their handwritten notes, hold hands in the air and wait to be called on to recite the names of sub-regions of Ethiopia.
Afterwards, I speak to the teacher. He’s been teaching for 35 years – mostly secondary Geography, although he did a stint teaching primary Maths. I ask him how he’s finding the new curriculum.
“It’s better,” he says. “There are pictures and maps.”
But the students don’t have books. The budget for pilot of Grades 9–10 hadn’t anticipated the rapid increase in the price of printing, so the pilot has gone ahead without textbooks. There are no maps in the classroom.
How do students connect the abstract concept of Ethiopia’s regions to something more concrete? “The plasma – they can see the regions and I can talk along to make sure they’re following.” Schools are timetabled centrally by the Ministry and 20-minute programmes are broadcast to be used in the scheduled lessons. “But the plasma doesn’t work. It’s been taken away.”
The plasma TVs have not been universally well-received by teachers. I’m told they’re referred to as “robot teachers” and treated with scepticism. Teachers have felt side-lined as the TV takes centre stage, leading to fears they’re coming to take teachers’ jobs.
Ethiopia has a long history of treating technology with suspicion, I’m told.
When the first telephones were imported from Italy in 1890 to connect the Palace with the Imperial treasury, local priests were concerned that the disembodied voices whispering in Emperor Menelik II’s ear were demons.
When the British introduced bicycles to Ethiopia, they were referred to as “the Devil’s horses”. And with this altitude, those hills and broken roads… Hieronymus Bosch could barely conceive a more hellish punishment.
Newtonian issues of time and space
The bell rings and we move to another classroom. This one is up several flights of stairs. Lungs burning from the thin air and trying to hold a conversation. (Could I make “the Devil’s elevator” catch on?). I recover my breath at the back of a Grade 9 Physics lesson.
The teacher is introducing linear acceleration. The class silently copies into their notebooks as he copies a full three-columned section of text from his phone. The teacher is rattling through at breakneck pace because the lessons today have been trimmed by 5 or 10 minutes to make time for a meeting at the end of the school day.
As he’s writing I notice another plasma-less TV stand sitting desultory in the corner. To lose one TV might be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both…?
We’re nearing the end of a worked example – the teacher hasn’t had time to ask the students a single question despite continuing at a breathless pace – when there’s a knock at the door. It’s a teacher for the next lesson. The Physicist barters an extra five minutes and cranks it up a gear. He underlines his final point, puts a cap on his pen with a flourish and dashes out the door. He’s late for his next class.
This reform has attempted to address the issue of curriculum overload. It’s a common issue around the world, visibly represented by the increasing size of textbooks (see this from April). The Ethiopian Ministry of Education faces a particular challenge: the number of issues, agendas, and cross-cutting themes that the donor community wants to see represented in the new curriculum.
There’s a fine line trod between the international aid community and Ethiopian government. It mostly works out, I’m told, because the donors figured out that they need to be more collaborative. But some other African countries refuse all donor money, because it comes with commitments and imperatives that often don’t align with the local government’s priorities. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Don’t get me wrong, themes such as peace education, gender equality, sexual health, hygiene and sanitation, and others are all important and should be included in the school curriculum. But, more often than not, they need to be seamlessly woven into the fabric of lessons, rather than explicitly called out in every subject. Seamless weaving takes skill and development time, and time is often in short supply.
I think about the mystery of child-friendly budgeting. I think I’ve found my answer.
Later that day, I’m back in the shuttlebus to the airport. Once more, I’m with the delegates of the Internet Governance Forum. They have strong end-of-conference energy. They’ve delivered their lightning talks, attended their special interest groups, expended their supply of business cards at networking events over glasses of warm white wine. Mission accomplished. They just want to go home and put on some comfortable shoes.
Later still, back home and rested, I check the Forum website. I’m still thinking about how priorities from the international community filter into the bedrock of local curricula. Ghosts in the machine. Compromises between an international agenda and the need for money.
The provisional recommendations from the Forum have been published and include this casual imperative:
Improving ICT infrastructure and access is not enough for better education and job creation. Digital competencies must be improved, and adaptations in teaching and learning methodologies are needed to adapt to the new digital paradigm of education.
I think about those classrooms, with their gaps where plasma TVs should be. “New digital paradigm of education,” you say?
In the inimitable words of time-hopping physicist Dr Sam Beckett: Oh boy.