The Global Partnership for Education has shown us their vision of the future. Let’s pay attention.

Posted on by

by Sasha Alyson

The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) is one of several major, multinational organizations claiming to improve education for the world’s poorest children, especially girls. After a quarter century, however, the schools subjected to this endless meddling have gotten worse. (More at: Schools Are Getting Worse)

The photo accompanying the latest GPE news release is downright scary:

An announcement from the Global Partnership for Education shows girls marching in lockstep. The boys in back appear less enthusiastic about the lockstep thing.

Scary, because this is their vision: Girls marching in lockstep. They could have looked for a picture of girls reading. Or acting independently. They liked girls in lockstep.

Scary, to realize that the groupthink at GPE is so strong that nobody within the organization said, “Maybe this isn’t the right image for our Education news release.”

Schools for the world’s poorest children, under the influence of the U.N. and agencies like GPE, are joyless places where children learn to memorize the right answer – maybe. If they don’t, at least they learn to accept their fate as nothing more than beans to be counted on in the enrollment statistics, creatures to walk and think in lockstep, following orders sent from another continent.

Just a day before GPE published this picture and story, an outside evaluation of its 5-year, $100-million education program in northern Nigeria became available. Did that money do any good? We dunno. The report states that while “[c]ontributions from several partners in Nigeria have modestly improved education planning in Nigeria,” we don’t know if that planning achieved anything because “stakeholder appetite for monitoring has been low.” Why would “stakeholders” want to be monitored, when the money flows anyway?

The report concluded that “effectively the GPE theory of change is not appropriate for Nigeria…. This means taking a bottom up approach – starting with Nigeria’s specificity, rather than a top-down approach, starting with GPE global theory of change and grant-making and partnership structures.”

That sounds promising: They learned that top-down didn’t work, so next they’ll try bottom-up! But if GPE actually wanted bottom-up, it’s had 18 years to try it. The latest $386 million is being passed along (after taking out whatever salaries and overhead GPE requires) to the same top-down organizations – the World Bank, Unicef, Unesco – that for years have contributed to creating disastrously bad schools in the global South.

They all prefer top-down. That’s how everybody gets their salaries.

None of them want to pass control to the populations of Chad, Eritrea, and the rest. They know full well that people who are running their own lives do not do it in lockstep.

The Global Partnership for Education has shown us their vision of the future. Let’s pay attention.

Other stories of interest

Left: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation vows transparency. But its database search function is broken. How hard is Bill trying?
Right: USAID funds a new education program in Pakistan. But the problem isn’t a lack of funding, the problem is that those who should be improving schools, are instead keeping an eye on the money.
Left: Schools in the global South are getting worse. The aid industry doesn’t ask why, and for good reason. It created much of the problem.
Right: High-level hypocrisy. Coca-Cola pushes a harmful product on vulnerable children. How can Warren Buffett be a trustee for the world’s biggest health foundation, and also Coke’s biggest investor?

Related stories

Left: Schools in the global South are getting worse. The aid industry doesn’t ask why, and for good reason. It created much of the problem.
Right: Willful blindness. As it tries to control school policies in the global South, the aid industry has data about every subject except one: Are students learning anything? It doesn’t want to know.
Left: Does the U.N. actually WANT rote schooling for children in the South? It sounds absurd, but that’s what the evidence says. And with a little thought, we can see how U.N. interests push it in this direction.
Right: The origin of modern schooling: Worldwide, children attend schools that use rote memorization to teach for the test, and leave students unprepared for the real world. How did this system become so widespread?
Left: Do African perspectives matter? The Global Partnership for Education shapes education policy in 70 countries, mostly in Africa and Asia. Its CEO, chair, and 7-member evaluation team are from the USA, Australia, and Europe.
Right: The campaign against reading. The aid industry says it promotes reading. But its actions — such as dumping unwanted books from the USA — are motivated by self-interest, and consistently undermine reading in the global South.

Other stories of interest

Left: Francophonie. By forcing children in its former African colonies to study in French, France thought it was spreading the glory of the French language. But students ended up learning neither French, nor much of anything else.
Right: Masters of Deceit. Raising funds for “girls’ education” has become big business…. and remarkably often, the aid industry has crossed the line into deceit and dishonesty.

Left: UNICEF preaches diversity. But for 75 years, it has ALWAYS had a USA citizen in its top spot. It’s hypocritical — and it leads UNICEF to push Western interests and unsuitable approaches.
Right: What would make a better future? There are ways that wealthier countries can genuinely help others, if they want to. Give the aid money directly to the poor, for example. Here are ideas.