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The cyberslum

Aisha Community School has 584 pupils, and 60 desks.

“Sometimes we lay planks across them so the children have something to write on,” the headmaster tells us.

Even by Zambian standards, this is not a wealthy school. Aisha occupies a tiny maze of concrete rooms in the middle of Ng’ombe, a high-density slum area in the suburbs of Lusaka, surrounded by box-like dwellings and brown dirt roads. The headmaster’s office is at the back of the maze, next to the toilets, which smell. It’s the Easter holidays, but random children are lurking in corners of the school for want of anywhere better to play.  

Aisha is one of a new breed of low-cost schools that have spread across Zambia in recent years: Ng’ombe alone has fifty-four of them. These ‘community schools’ are private enterprises which have sprung up to fill a gap in the market, in between Western-style private schools, which are way beyond the means of most local families, and the local government-run school, which is at the bottom of the pile . Whilst the government school is nominally free (though its school uniforms aren’t cheap), Aisha charges between $6 and $30 per pupil per term. Last year the fees were higher, the headmaster tells us, but this was more than parents could afford, and when chased for the money some responded by withdrawing their children from school. Since the drop in fees, attendance has increased.  Aisha may be under-resourced, and virtually unregulated, but to parents it clearly offers value for money.

“Our pupils get good results,” the headmaster tells us proudly. “85% of them pass their exams.” He attributes this success to the fact that Aisha, unlike many community schools, uses only trained teachers.

“Do you find it hard to attract trained teachers to come and work here?” I ask.

“No, we get stacks of applicants this thick.” He separates his hands widely. “There are lots of college graduates looking for work.”

As a private enterprise, Aisha gets no money from the Zambian government. It must meet the cost of employing these teachers out of the small sums it earns in school fees.

 “Does the school get any other support?” I ask.

The headmaster fishes in a cardboard box and hands us a plastic packet of what looks like dried risotto. NUTRITIOUS SOY MEAL, says the label. “We get these under a feeding programme,” the headmaster tells us. “We distribute them to the children.”  It’s a way of reducing hunger and getting kids to attend school: two Millennium Development Goals for the price of one.

In one of the strange juxtapositions of old-fashioned poverty and high technology that increasingly characterise the developing world, the school also has a computer room. First came ten old, broken computers donated by a local bank. Those were all useless, but a more responsible donor later provided six working computers and trained the teachers in how to use them. AfriConnect, the company that set up iSchool, contributed some laptops and a free Internet connection. This has allowed Aisha Community School to establish Ng’ombe’s only Internet cafe.

Slum-dwellers are not heavy computer users, and earnings from the Internet cafe are modest: $50 in a good month. But this (remarkably) pays the salary of the school’s IT teacher, a geeky-but-cool young man who divides his time between running the Internet cafe , imparting IT skills to pupils, and teaching occasional computer classes to adults. Only a few adults have taken up the classes, but they help supplement the Internet cafe’s modest income and earn goodwill among the community.

Sustainable business this is not: 12 of the 21 computers are already in disrepair, and the school is clearly unable to afford replacements. Without outside help, it is hard to see how schools like Aisha will ever be able to afford to provide pupils and the community with more than the bare minima of an education.

One might also question - as Bill Gates, not a noted technophobe, once famously did - whether computers are really the best use of donor resources in desperately poor parts of the world.

“'Mothers are going to walk right up to that computer and say, ‘My children are dying, what can you do?’”, Gates said of efforts to introduce computers to the developing world. “They're not going to sit there and, like, browse eBay or something.”

In Ng’ombe, children are dying – probably a hundred or so of them a year, if the slum’s infant mortality rates are around the national average. Yet nobody seems to be complaining about the computers. And in the Aisha computer room one or two people are sitting there and browsing (though admittedly not on eBay, which is fairly useless if you don’t have a credit card or a postal address). What they seem to see in the computers is not a waste of resources, but a hope of a less decrepit and marginalised future. Whether this hope is justified or not, I don’t know, but maybe the hope in itself is worth something.

Or perhaps they are just too polite to tell us that, while computers are very nice, what the school really needs is enough desks for its pupils.

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Tags: Challenges, Education, Zambia

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Comment by Andrew Parker on April 14, 2011 at 16:07

Absolutely - there are some shallow pockets out there and lots of demands on hard-earned money.

 

Thanks again for the update and look forward to hearing from others - and your next instalment!

 

A

Comment by Andrew Gray on April 14, 2011 at 15:55

Thanks, Tom and Andrew, for your encouraging comments. I completely agree, computers can be a worthwhile investment in poor communities. While living in the South Pacific I actually wrote an article for the Vanuatu Daily Post expounding the benefits that eBay could bring to isolated communities if only problems such as of lack of credit cards could be overcome.

Nevertheless, we must recognised that in an environment where there are so many other (and superficially more attractive) demands on very scarce resources, we need to be able to make a powerful case for the importance of ICT. One of the benefits of the iSchool pilot programme is that it is helping to make this case, by providing a demonstration of what computer-based learning can achieve when implemented well.

Comment by Andrew Parker on April 14, 2011 at 15:42

Yes, thanks Andrew, very interesting.  I used to work for a school feeding programme called Mary's Meals, and so have been in and out of government schools and the odd private one across a few African countries.  

 

They're fascinating places to be - meeting intelligent teachers who have thrown themselves into the hurricane of illness, lack of energy, absenteeism, theft, lack of resources and huge number of kids, in an attempt to improve things, and maybe get a better job out of it further down the line when they've done their time.  

 

There is an argument for these school feeding programmes giving a very high social return on investment - as you say, 'two MDGs for the price of one', or more than two even.  So I agree too we've got to deliver the basics for people, and I often thought in my previous work 'Why are people looking at solar lights / computers / multi-coloured phones when people are starving?'

 

BIG question - but I'd also say that the number of teachers are woeful and the way teaching is delivered may, as again you suggest in the previous blog, be a construct of non-African countries and we need to get out of the traditional mindset.  One benchmark is looking at a school in the UK - they've changed beyond all recognition from even 20 years ago when I was stuck in one!  It may set people free and as Tom says close the equity (or inequity) gap.

 

When faced with such enormous challenges, even being part of a burgeoning school feeding programme I had my moments of despair - what if the kids get less food at home as a result of getting fed at school?  What if the education they get here is simply so basic or limited its not worth coming at all?

 

The answers are sometimes in the statistics, sometimes hidden from the statistics.  We know through some studies that primary education in particular is a great multiplier for wealth creation - even for those who don't go into formal jobs.  There are ratios to say that for every year of primary school a farmer gets, his / her productivity increases.  Hidden info?  Anecdotally I know that children who get fed sometimes save some of their food to give to a younger sibling.  Or, if they get less at home as a result of food at school, that food can be passed on to other siblings.  So can we fully capture all these effects, or the general effects of interventions in education?  No - I don't think we can - you'd need to look at the results over 50 years, and you'd still never be able to untangle the effects from other variables.

 

Nevertheless - we have to make decisions and avoid staring into the chasm!!!  My money is on informed action.  I think on the computer side, there is a chance to give some kids a different option, a new opportunity, and this could give Zambia the edge going forward.  The back streets of Lusaka could yield the future generation of people who can tap into much bigger, unforeseen world opportunities if they are up to speed.  Look at www.alibaba.com - its a world version of eBay!!!!  You could sell 1,000 tons of Zambian crops in an hour! - and I think one of your kids there could do it.

Comment by Tom Harrison on April 14, 2011 at 10:05
Hi Andrew, another great blog, I'm really enjoying the series.  You reflections about whether its really approriate to provide Aisha with computers is an interesting one indeed.  I recall years ago I was working on a large tea estate in Uganda.  I was commenting on the poor quaility of the drivers we were employing, who were fully trained but still seemed to have too many accidents through lack of  a kind of 'common road sense'.  It was pointed out to me that some of these men would rarely have even been in a car as a passenger as a child, and certainly lacked the easy familiarity with machines that kids in the North pick up from a very early age.  To say that 'students need desks more than computers' in this day and age may be to prolong the huge equity gap between North and South longer.
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