Why is it so Hard to Improve Education in Developing Countries?

Image source: worldbank.org

Education is one of the most powerful tools that we have to fight global poverty, invest in human dignity, and change the trajectory of entire countries. Despite the important role that education plays around the world, the quality of education in most developing countries remains abysmally low. The development community is partly responsible for this. Over the last several decades, the goal of international organizations and NGOs was to ensure that every child was in a classroom. As the current state of education around the world shows, simply attending school is far from the same thing as learning.

The good news is that the development community is quickly learning this lesson. There has been a massive wave of research studying interventions to improve the quality of education in developing countries in recent years (a new study surveys the results of nearly 750(!) randomized-control trials that measure education interventions) [1]. The bad news, however, is that this research shows that improving the quality of education is not just painfully hard, it’s also very expensive.  

Failing to improve the quality of education around the world, and do so quickly, would be one of the greatest moral crises of our lifetime. If we don’t find solutions to drastically improve education, entire generations will be left behind. In one of the most staggering examples of this, it would take Brazil’s schools until 2094 — 75 years from now — to catch up to the average rich-country if they continue to improve student math skills at current rates [2].  

 Why is it so hard to improve education in developing countries? The answer is both systemic and circular. Investment in education throughout the developing world is historically low and uncertain. Many countries fail to invest in high quality teachers, training and materials. This often leads to underqualified teachers providing poor education. In Haiti, for example, nearly 80% of teachers lack basic pre-service training [3]. This creates a cycle of poor learning outcomes. When the quality of education is low, families don’t see the value in sacrificing their limited resources to keep their child in school. When children don’t see value in attending school, the likelihood of recruiting talented teachers falls.

Breaking the cycle of poor learning is critical to improving education around the world. This starts with increasing teacher capacities and inspiring a culture-change in education. By training teachers to make school fun, student-centered, and learning-focused, we can begin to chip away at the barriers to learning. If teachers are inspired to improve their classrooms, they will also be motivated to do the hard work that is necessary to ensure that students see value in attending school. When students see value in their education, they are likely to stay in school longer and retain more of what they learn. If the culture of education changes for the better, higher quality individuals are more likely to be drawn to a career as an educator.

This is not to understate the difficulty, time and resources that are necessary to make these changes happen. Breaking the cycle of poor learning is proving to be one of biggest challenges in the fight against global poverty. There is a lot of work still to be done, and we need innovative, scalable approaches in order to ensure that entire generations are not left behind.

[1] https://www.cgdev.org/blog/we-need-interventions-improve-student-learning-how-big-big-impact

[2] https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2018

[3] https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1862/FINAL_EducationMarch2017.pdf