International DevelopmentWritten evidence submitted by CARE International UK

1. CARE International has been present in Afghanistan since 1961, except during the Soviet occupation when we supported Afghan refugees in Pakistan. CARE was fully operational during the civil war and Taliban regime, providing assistance to vulnerable Afghans across the country, including in the more sensitive areas of education and economic development. This submission focuses on education. However CARE is also able to provide the select committee with evidence on other issues raised in the inquiry’s terms of reference on request.

2. Impressive progress has been made in the education sector in Afghanistan since 2001. As DFID is already aware, from an enrolment rate of just over 100,000 in 2001, currently over 7 million Afghan children are enrolled in school, about a third of who are girls. And while these figures do not reflect retention and completion rates—which can be presumed to be lower, particularly in the south where up to 80% of schools are said to be closed—they still denote an important measure of success in a highly complex and volatile environment.

3. This progress has been due to a collaborative two-pronged approach to service provision which has been in place for the past several years. The first prong centres on establishing government schools at a rate consistent with the Ministry of Education’s (MoE) capabilities and new access to remote or volatile areas. The complementary second prong involves NGOs, including CARE, supporting classes in harder-to-reach or more volatile areas where the Ministry is still unable to go, through a Community-Based Education (CBE) approach. This collaboration—between the ministry and NGOs—has been, and continues to be, essential for ensuring the greatest possible reach of education services across the country. The international donor community’s commitment to MDG 2 and belief in the importance of education for the future of Afghanistan has played a critical part in enabling this to happen, and the UK has prioritised education in its assistance to the country.

4. Years of experimenting with and refining education programming have led agencies like CARE to identify the critical operative factors which make the right to education a reality, particularly for girls, in Afghanistan. CARE has been amongst the leaders of this evolution since the mid-1990s. Social, cultural, political and conflict factors in Afghanistan mean that a Community-Based Education (CBE) approach is essential. CBE providers understand how far is ‘too far’ for a school to be located if a girl is to be given the permission to attend, and have responded by placing as many outreach classes in individual villages (no matter how small) as possible. We understand the importance of providing female teachers who are respected by the local community, and have created innovative programmes to bring teacher training to women in their own villages. We understand the need for discrete facilities in volatile areas, and have pioneered support to home-based classes instead of focusing on new school construction. Understanding and addressing these components in our outreach plan has enabled NGOs to open access into areas which would have otherwise been entirely excluded from service delivery. As a consequence of these factors, dropout rates are much lower and retention rates higher in CBE classes than in formal schools.

5. In addition to service provision, important institutional progress has been made within the Ministry of Education, again in partnership with NGOs. In recognition of the need for community based education to complement the services of the state, a strong CBE policy was developed for the Ministry of Education (MoE) in partnership with education NGOs, and most recently, a CBE unit was established to help coordinate partnership with non-governmental service providers. For the past several years, CARE and other NGOs have played a key role in developing these positive institutional changes. CARE also hired and trained experienced CBE practitioners in the provinces to serve as outreach officers—thus beginning a process to provide the MoE with the capacity to monitor and support CBE classes handed over to the ministry by NGOs.

6. Unfortunately, this successful two-pronged model is currently in jeopardy. In part as a response to commitments to government-centred aid made at the Kabul Conference in June, 2010, and in part as a function of the Transition schedule and corresponding draw-down of international presence in the country, there is currently a trend to channel an increased proportion of development funding to on-budget programmes. In practice, this meant that funding previously allocated for NGO community-based education programmes is now being directed to the MoE.

7. While NGOs are largely in favour of on-budget development aid, presuming standards of quality and accountability can be assured, CARE cautions DFID and other donors of the risks of transitioning ODA from off- to on-budget too quickly. In the case of education, a lack of ministerial infrastructure and/or human resources in many locales (particularly outside of cities and towns), or a lack of community acceptance of government presence, means that not all classes established by NGOs can or will be continued by the MoE once the transfer of those classes to ministry management is complete, particularly if the transfer process is rushed.

8. CARE’s recent experience suggests that donor policy is not being driven by an effective approach to on-budget funding and state capacity-building in education. Until last year, CARE was the consortium leader of the largest CBE program in Afghanistan, PACE A. Consortium members and the MoE alike were given only a few months notice from the programme’s donor that the classes were to be transferred to the MoE. As a consequence, PACE A partners were forced to hand over more than 1100 classes which they had planned to support through the following school year which was due to begin just over two months later. CARE and partners were able to find alternative resources to continue more than 500 of these classes, because they knew these would not survive if handed over. More than 600 classes were handed over to the MoE. Of those classes:

approximately one-third were discontinued because the MoE did not have adequate time to incorporate them into their annual plans and budgets. Students were informed to report to the nearest formal MoE school. This resulted in some of the boys continuing their education, and the other boys and almost all of the girls dropped out;

approximately one-third were assured their classes would continue. However, due to lack of resources and accountability, these classes did not continue with the same results as stated above; and

approximately one-third of the classes did continue. However, in some cases the MoE replaced their teachers with what they considered as more qualified teachers—from outside the community. And in this case, many of the girls were withdrawn by their parents who did not know the teacher.

Meanwhile, the newly established CBE Unit that had been supported for only a few months by CARE was a fledgling unit with limited experience. While the donor used on-budget funding to continue paying CBE Unit staff to report to work, the donor pulled the plug on PACE A and CARE which effectively took away the unit’s source of consistent training, mentoring and support. The bottom line was that thousands of students—most of them girls—stopped going to school; hundreds of communities that had re-established education services for the first time in more than a generation were abandoned; and the one MoE unit which had the mandate to support education for all in the most remote corners of Afghanistan was cut short.

9. Finally, while primary education is important, if Afghanistan is to meet the objectives it sets out in the ANDS and NPPs, and if the UK is to meet its objectives in Afghanistan, a broader perspective on education must be developed. To stimulate jobs and economic growth, and fill the professional sectors with capable, qualified individuals (and women professionals in particular), the provision of primary education is insufficient. Currently there is a significant gap of donor attention to secondary school, in large part because of the international commitment to MDG 2. In Afghanistan, we’re witnessing a large cohort of children approaching the end of their primary school education, with no options for further education ahead of them. This will be hugely problematic.

10. It is no doubt very difficult to provide secondary school education in Afghanistan. GIROA policy on secondary education is consistent with the global (and cost-effective) trend of bringing students into hub schools from often many kilometres away, to be taught specialist subjects by specialist teachers. Predictably, Afghan society doesn’t allow such long-distance travel for young students, and for girls in particular. The current operating model, therefore, is incongruous with the reality, and impedes many eager and capable children from furthering their education. Over the last six years, however, CARE has developed a highly successful model for delivering lower secondary education to villages using a CBE approach. This programme enjoys a 98% retention and completion rate. Just this year, 29 out of 51 of our first class of rural female students graduating from high school passed their university entrance exams: this, in a country where approximately 4% of all girls reach high school at all—and almost all of those in the cities.

11. Afghanistan needs a secondary school champion within the donor community. The secondary education sector is badly underfunded, facilities are lacking, and the model for secondary school service delivery requires urgent revision. CARE encourages DFID to explore whether this is a gap that could be filled by the UK. If no champions emerge, Afghanistan and its international supporters will be hard pressed to reach their goals (particularly economic) in the long term.

12. In the case of both primary and secondary education, safeguards now need to be put in place to protect education from decline, and from direct attack, in the current context of increasing violent conflict. CARE learned through its 2009 research, “Knowledge on Fire—Attacks on Education in Afghanistan”, that schools which are overt symbols of state-building are significantly more likely to come under attack than either non-state schools or state classes which are more discretely established. This means that GIROA and its supporters should resist the understandable urge to treat the establishment of education facilities in previously under-serviced areas as a public display of state strength, and concentrate their efforts on providing safe and inclusive education for Afghan children. Continuing a two-prong MoE and CBE approach, as highlighted in paragraph 2, is also an essential risk mitigation technique.

Recommendations

13. To enable consistent, safe, progress in the education sector to continue, CARE calls upon DFID to champion the development of a two-pronged approach in the implementation plan of the Education National Priority Programme, the modality for which is currently under development. This, while openly recognising and publicly articulating the following three concerns:

14. First, the current limited ability of the Ministry of Education to extend its reach across the country. In recognition of this, the transition from off- to on-budget must be phased. NGOs or other non-state service providers should continue to play a role until the MoE has more sustainable access to communities in remote or volatile areas and the capacity to service them. Part of this phased modality could include capacity building offered by NGOs engaged in direct education service provision to Provincial and District education departments, in particular in the subjects of education administration, procurement, human resources, and monitoring & evaluation.

15. Second, the security challenges the education sector faces underscore the need for education stakeholders to adopt a deliberate risk-mitigation strategy, in particular with regards to girls’ schooling. DFID should remind education donors and the MoE that research indicates that schools in volatile areas which are discrete in nature are far less likely to be attacked; and indeed, that parents are far more likely to send their children to those schools. CARE and other education service providers have had significant success in establishing low-risk education models in these areas, both during and after the Taliban regime.

16. Third, the need for greater energy and resources to be dedicated to the provision of secondary education through models which are sensitive to Afghan perceptions of security and cultural norms, if Afghanistan’s long-term objectives are to be filled.

May 2012