Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Education, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, Poverty & SDGs

HAITI: Exhausted School System Gets a Second Chance

Amy Bracken

NEW YORK, Sep 8 2006 (IPS) - September is a particularly stressful time of year in Haiti. As schools open, parents across the country hope for help in the form of bonuses from employers or money orders from loved ones overseas. Many have already been skimping on food, medicine and other essentials just to pay for their children to attend classes.

In the poorest country in the Americas, primary education is rarely free and often out of reach, making the cycle of poverty inescapable for many. But Haiti’s government and international bodies have pledged to change all this. Very quickly.

Six years ago, Haiti joined 188 other countries and the world’s international financial institutions in signing onto the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals declaration. The deadline for achieving the eight goals, designed to target the root causes of poverty, is 2015.

Objectives include reducing child and maternal mortality, the spread of HIV, the number of people living on less than a dollar a day, and environmental degradation, as well as improving gender equality and international cooperation and providing universal primary education.

As if the goals were not hard enough, the 2000 declaration was followed in Haiti by government overthrow, devastating natural disasters, and an unprecedented upsurge in gang violence and kidnappings.

Reports from international development agencies and financial institutions over the past two years have indicated that little progress has been made toward most of the goals, and in many cases things are just getting worse.

Haiti’s education system is no exception. It is one of the feeblest on the planet, and the goal of primary education for all seems unattainable. Yet this is one objective toward which Haiti and the international community are poised to make great strides.

Less than 15 percent of Haitian children ages 6 to 11 are enrolled in public school – one of the lowest rates, if not the lowest rate in the world, according to the World Bank’s Sam Carlson, who is working with the Haitian government and other international bodies to achieve the millennium education goal. Non-public institutions fill some of the gap, but still most Haitian children do not make it to sixth grade.

Illustrating the miniscule involvement of the government in Haitian education, Carlson pointed out that the Haitian Department of Education’s annual budget is 90 million dollars (for a country of eight million people), compared with 1.5 billion dollars for Montgomery County in the U.S. state of Maryland, alone.

With the predominance of non-public schools, parents pay more than 100 dollars a year each on average for tuition and other school expenses – in a country where most people live on less than two dollars a day. And so many parents can only sporadically pay tuition that most of those enrolled in primary school are at least two years above the age appropriate for their grade.

Now the Haitian government and international bodies say they are prioritising primary education. And as much of a pipe dream as universal elementary school might seem in Haiti, leaders say they can make it happen.

“It’s absolutely doable to achieve primary education for all by 2015, but it takes a real concerted effort,” said the World Bank’s Carlson. “The current government and the international community [believe] that improving education and helping Haiti achieve education for all is an absolute priority.”

Soon after Haitian President Rene Garcia Preval was elected early this year, he met with World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz and asked him to help Haiti reach the millennium education goal. The Bank agreed and, along with UNICEF, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and other international agencies, is working on a 10-year plan.

The plan will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, Carlson said, and will involve helping households pay for school, providing school lunches, training and hiring thousands of new teachers, and increasing school expenditure transparency.

After extensive meetings with the international bodies, the Haitian government is scheduled to make its plan public in December.

According to UNICEF’s Cesar Pazos, who has been studying education costs in Haiti, this plan – including the government’s ownership of it – is key. He said in French that international cooperation and assistance is obviously important, but Haiti “cannot be dependent on international bodies… and I think that what’s important is now defining the route that must be followed.” And the government must remain much more engaged, he said.

But sustaining any progress is another challenge in a country whose state, environment and public safety have long been characterised by instability.

Since 2000, efforts to achieve the millennium goals have been overshadowed by disaster and suffering on the levels of environment, health, economy, security and education. On the eve of Preval’s presidential inauguration, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group warned that the new president would have to make dramatic changes or the country would risk becoming “the hemisphere’s first permanent failed state”.

And while distinguished as the only country in the Americas on the U.N.’s list of “Least Developed Countries,” Haiti is not alone globally in lagging in progress toward millennium goals.

In the forward to the 2005 report on millennium goals progress, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote, “If current trends persist, there is a risk that many of the poorest countries will not be able to meet many of [the goals]. Considering how far we have come, such a failure would mark a tragically missed opportunity.”

He went on to reiterate what he wrote in a previous report: “Let us be clear about the costs of missing this opportunity: millions of lives that could have been saved will be lost; many freedoms that could have been secured will be denied; and we shall inhabit a more dangerous and unstable world.” And a world in which at least 500,000 Haitian children are not in school, according to Pazos.

Carlson said the World Bank and parents across Haiti share an understanding that education is an important way out of poverty. It remains to be seen if world leaders share the sense of urgency evident in September when Haitian parents do what they can to get their children into school.