COMMENTATOR (COMM): In Bangladesh, 16 year old Dulalli and her friends head off to school from their village, thanks to a national drive to give more girls the chance of education.

In Indonesia, Saiapah suggests an idea in her village meeting. It’s part of a scheme where the people themselves have taken over planning for new roads, water supply and building.

Two very different approaches to improving the lives of poor people – one through education, the other through what’s known as ‘community-driven development’.

In this programme Life looks at how well they are working - and asks whether they can be replicated in other countries trying to meet the targets of the Millennium Development Goals of halving the number of people living in poverty by 2015.

Shilmundi in Bangladesh – a village in the vast Delta in the south of the country. Like many villages across Bangladesh, it’s a farming community. The children here attend a local school, and are doing their homework – voluntarily! They’ve come together to study out of hours - a sign perhaps of their enthusiasm for learning. But the real question is how long they’ll be able to continue.

DULALLI: I want to study up to the final exam. I’ve taken a lot from my parents, and in the future I want to develop more. If I can’t look after my parents, then at least I can look after myself.

I think everyone should study. This gives them an understanding. They might miss out on earnings while being at school but it opens up opportunities and advantages to them.

COMM: Millennium Development Goal Number Two aims to ensure all boys and girls complete primary school education up to grade 5. It’s an aim widely supported - both by educationalists and the public:

Dr MUSHTAQ KHAN, Economist, University of London: A lot of people including myself, we see education as a right. I think people have the right to be educated and there’s unquestionably a productivity gain that comes from having higher education.

TEACHER: To improve the nation we need people to become educated. They have to study and they have to get a good result. The guardians and teachers have to be careful and attentive as well as the students.

NARGIS: I want to make my daughter well-educated. My husband drives a rickshaw. We are poor but I still hope to educate my daughter. I studied very little up to year 5 and my husband didn’t study at all. Now he wishes he had. If we’d studied then we would have been in a better situation, and had good jobs. We work in the fields and drive rickshaws. To achieve anything we have to work very hard.

DIPALI: It is painful. It’s better to die than live life like this in pain. My sister and I, we didn’t study which is such a shame.

MINARA: I have a mouth but I am mute, I have eyes but I cannot see. If someone writes to me then I have to take it to somebody else to read it to me. If I had some education I wouldn’t be sitting like this, I could have got a job. And stand on my own two feet and help myself.

COMM: In Bangladesh, primary schools are free and it’s estimated attendance is high but not yet universal. But even where children do attend, primary school education stops at the age of 12. After that, 98 per cent of secondary schools are private, and their fees vary school by school.

This cost is compounded by the loss of income children could be earning. It’s one of the obstacles to them continuing school as well as cultural pressures which especially affect girls:

TEACHER: Still there are families who don’t value education. Those girls that got a first class pass have been married off and are just doing the housework and it hurts me really badly. if they were continuing education they could get a good job and higher status but they don’t get that opportunity.

Dr MUSHTAQ KHAN: You’re asking parents to say, send your girl to school or college. The relatives are saying “that will make your daughter unmarriageable”. If that is the only option which many people have for living, then you’re actually reducing the options for your daughter, not increasing them.

RUNA: There are a lot of girls who really want to study but their parents won’t let them. They say their daughters have to be married off. That’s why they don’t send them to school.

DULALLI: Girls’ situations are worse. They want to live a good life, but many of them suffer from no source of income.

NILUFAR AHMAD, social scientist: Girls before used to get married very early. The average age of marriage was 13 or 14. A lot of maternal death, infant death was very high in Bangladesh like in other South Asia. One of the factors was because the girls married very early and early pregnancy, frequent pregnancy was the main cause of morbidity.

Secondary education - her job prospects will be better, but also it delays the marriage.

RUNA: I’m going to be in year 10 and it’s up to my parents how much long I stay at school.

COMM: To persuade more parents to let their daughters attend secondary school, the Bangladeshi government set up a scheme with the World Bank in 1993. The project covers the costs of secondary school education for all girls who apply - and qualify:

Dr M. OSMAN FARRUK, Minister of Education: We also impose some quality restrictions, in order to get the stipend and the benefit you have to obtain at least 45 per cent marks in a regime where 33 per cent is the passing mark and you have to attend 75 per cent of the classes. That’s the way we try to make sure that it’s simply not a question of attending school you see in lieu of stipend and other things… we are trying to more rigorously impose this.

Dr MUSHTAQ KHAN, Economist, University of London: These kinds of basic stipend programmes where you give people an incentive to go and get an education by giving them a subsidy, is in a sense, bribing people to get an education on the assumption that the policy-maker knows what is good for the people, the people are stupid can’t see the benefits of education therefore need an incentive, or there is some short-term hurdle which can be overcome by the stipend or the subsidy.

COMM: In 1980, 600,000 girls enrolled in secondary school. Twenty years later in 2000 the figure had risen to 4 million. But the enrolment figures don’t tell the full story because not everyone completes the course - there’s a high drop-out rate:

In 1999, just over half the year’s girls dropped out before taking their final exam. It’s a situation Dulalli’s currently facing. She has received government funding, and wants to finish her education, but she won’t be able to.

DULALLI: I can’t take the exam because we don’t have enough money and somebody is ill in my family. It’s mostly because of money - that’s why I can’t take the exam. My father has realised he can’t pay - that’s why I have to stop going to school.

Chief Education Minister: I’m very surprised to hear this because this has never come to our notice - because we pay also for the exam fees and others. Maybe these girls are just planning to go and they still don’t know.. But this is a point we should look at very carefully.

COMM: Even participants in the scheme are confused about what the stipends cover. World Bank staff when visiting Shilmondi village were surprised to hear about Dulalli’s case.

SUBRATA KHAN, Author of WB Implementation Report on Stipends for Girls in Secondary Education: Many of the girls can’t appear in their SSA exams because this of exorbitant fee that is charged for the exams, The Stipend programme supports until the 10th grade and the exam fee is so exorbitant which is not covered by the stipend programme.

FATEMA ROSALYNN KHAN, WB research Assistant: I’m not sure if all stipend programmes go up to 10th grade, there maybe certain programmes, I mean, it might cover they cover 11th and 12th grade as well, in fact some of them do, but I’ve never heard this one before.

SUBRATA: There maybe differences…

FATEMA: I just heard it might be thousand twenty, and thousand fifteen, fifteen hundred taka…

SUBRATA: Fifteen hundred taka…

FATEMA: I don’t think any of the stipend programmes provide that much.

COMM: Given the confusion, what impact has the project had on girls’ education in Bangladesh?

CHRISTINE WALLICH, World Bank: There’s now 54 per cent of all girls are in school at the secondary level at the primary level or course there is very close to gender parity. So it’s been very very successful in that sense.

Dr MUSHTAQ KHAN Simple observation suggests more girls are going to school, but this could be for many different types of reasons it could be because of a relaxation of social norms, it could be because there are more jobs for women in all parts of Bangladesh as job opportunities improve.

COMM: The quality of teaching is another issue for parents.

MINARA: I don’t think the schools around here are very good. I do want to send my children to those schools that they show on the TV, good schools, but we can’t afford it.

CHRISTINE WALLICH, World Bank: I think it’s fair to say that the quality of education in the country has declined as it’s broadened. So you have more people exposed to education but perhaps exposed to a lower level of education than 20 years ago.

Dr M. OSMAN FARRUK, Minister of Education: If you look at the resource requirements, if you look at the schools at the secondary and primary level you wont be able to conceive of any facilities like this, it is so far backward. I don’t want to call it poor, compared to any school in the West which you have gone to. The basic materials for education, the basic facilities are far lower than expected. It’s also expensive.

One of the things someone told me – at the elementary level and also the secondary level - the school has to be an attractive place so that first thing in the morning he feels like going to school.

Dr MASHTUQ KHAN, Economist: A country like Bangladesh must have a strategy for industrialisation, it must have identified what are the new areas it wants to expand into, where investments will happen, where jobs will be created, and it needs to tie in skills training and skills expansion for those sectors. That is the most direct way in which education, skills and poverty are connected.

COMM: For the women of Shilmondi it is possibly not whether their children go to school, but just what they learn there, which in the end will determine whether they have a better future in line with the promises of the Millennium Development Goals.

PART TWO

COMM: Indonesia – a country whose population of 280 million is a diverse ethnic mix living on more than 6,000 islands. Since 1998 the country has been through economic and political turmoil – with the Asian financial crisis followed by the fall of President Suharto after 32 years in power, inter-ethnic and religious conflict and repeated corruption scandals.

In the four years between 1996 and 2000 the number of Indonesians below the poverty line nearly doubled, with one in three people estimated to be living on less than one US dollar a day.

Dr JONATHAN PINCUS, Author, ‘Reinventing the World Bank’: The tremendous shock of the financial crisis was that what everybody considered to be a very strong economy with very sound fundamentals could disintegrate so rapidly and with such serious implications for the poor, for political stability and the future of Indonesia’s development prospects.

COMM: The Kecamatan Development Project - or KDP as it’s known - was set up in 1999 to address the need for infrastructure development. Scott Guggenheim who designed it:

SCOTT GUGGENHEIM, World Bank: The core idea behind KDP is that villagers can make smart decisions. Everything else you see about it is to facilitate that process. So the whole development infrastructure on verifications, on fiscal transfer, was too clumsy for this kind of work. So everything you see in KDP was to simplify this planning process. That’s the core idea.

COMM: KDP hinges on groups of villages holding meetings where the villagers themselves decide what needs to be done in their district. All decisions on how much money to spend, what to spend it on and the best way to manage projects are made at inter-village meetings like this one in the village of Sukoanyar in Eastern Java.

SAIAPAH: For many many years, with the older generations, my grandma and my mother, we used to come to the river for washing.

When you got up in the morning if you wanted to take a bath, you came down here. After that, on the way back you brought clean water for cooking and drinking. If you wanted to wash your body, you could do it in the river but you could also do it here.

COMM: Saiapah was one of the villagers who thought it would be a good idea to pump water direct to people’s houses.

SAIAPAH: We — the villagers — decided to have a meeting and proposed the idea. Then the idea was sent to the inter-village meeting.

PAINAH: Of course I am very happy. Because before I had to carry the water a long way but now not anymore. This water is very good.

SCOTT GUGGENHEIM, World Bank: Within villages there are groups of people who normally wouldn’t be involved even in village decision-making. So the first step is to get decision making down to the bottom and the second step is to maximise people’s involvement in these things even if they wouldn’t normally be involved at a village level.

COMM: Even though KDP aims to involve everyone in the community. It’s feared the process can never be truly democratic:

Dr JONATHAN PINCUS, Author, ‘Reinventing the World Bank’: All of these people have different kinds of interests and they need different kinds of projects. Part of the problem in saying this one particular project is more locally responsive and has a greater degree of ownership than another project is which people, who owns it, why do they own it and exactly which part of the community are you serving?

COMM: Rahayu’s a student. Her family comes from Sukoanyar and like many people here, she’s employed part time on the scheme. She’s come to meet Saiapah to discuss the latest ideas.

RAHAYU (on bike): For now the problem that the community is facing is the road. For example, there are still lots of roads in Mendalawangi which are still in a bad condition.

BENTOT, Head of Roadbuilding Project: One thing for sure, this macadam road between Darungan village and Mendalawangi must be built because it’s very muddy during rainy season. The soil is very loose. The road as it is, is unusable by vehicles or even human beings.

COMM: Even if it isn’t tarmacked yet the new road is already making a difference - Rahayu’s uncle supplies snacks to roadside stalls in the area.

SUDARTO: Before, this road was very slippery. At that time I only had five customers. I could only go a short way down it. But now it’s fairly good after they’ve surfaced it.

COMM: Down the new road another generation of Rahayu’s family: her grandmother, Satuni, has been trading in nearby Mandalangi market for fifty years.

SATUNI: 1954. Things were very bad and not too busy. There were not many people like now… very few people. Now there are more people here and more stalls and shops. Before they were not as crowded as now. Now it’s busy.

COMM: The community development project funded and organised a new roof for the market. Since then, business has improved for both traders and their customers.

BENTOT WINOTO: The process started when the villagers came up with their idea of building the market. Not only that, the traders also suggested rebuilding the market.

COMM: The community is responsible for financial reporting on all work and the accounts are publicly displayed. In addition, project funds are paid direct to the villages, bypassing government departments. The aim is to avoid any possibility of funds going missing - the kind of practices that have undermined development in Indonesia in the past.

ELA HASANAH, KDP: When village representatives come to repay money they always ask how much money is here so they check the bookkeeping and status of money in the books, so they know when they can get money from the fund process.

COMM: So – does the KDP community driven development approach work, and can it be copied elsewhere successfully?

Dr JONATHAN PINCUS: It’s a very big, complex project and it’s spread over a very wide geographical area and as you would expect there’re some places where it works better and some places where it works less well. What we really need in order to answer the question of whether this is a model for Indonesia in the future or for other places is very rigorous evaluation of exactly what’s been achieved and where. And that evaluation should be independent of the people obviously who are implementing the project and it should be independent of the people who are financing the project.

SCOTT GUGGENHEIM, World Bank: KDP comes out of a particular moment in Indonesian history, and it fits into a changing institutional environment. Some of the principles you can copy elsewhere. You’ll see that Afghanistan has taken a fair amount from KDP. So has the Philippines.

The idea that people can make smart choices is true everywhere. Whether you do it through a KDP funding and planning mechanism. I don’t think you have to copy that. .Much better approach is to figure out those same basic principals and say if I wanted to try this in Mexico. Mexico’s a very similar country in many ways to Indonesia. How would I reinvent those same principles in a Mexican context? I’d be really against the idea that we take the KDP manuals and translate them into Spanish and say do that.

JAMIL UD DIN KASSUM, World Bank East Asia Pacific: Although these infrastructure projects, these small ones, have such a high return, they are not the only thing that communities need. They need health, they need education. How do you in fact provide access to service delivery because without that you can’t improve health outcomes? You can’t actually achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Dr JONATHAN PINCUS, Author, ‘Reinventing the World Bank’: If Indonesia is going to achieve its Millennium Development Goals - and the history of Indonesia during the Suharto regime is indicative of this - that if you can achieve a rapid rate of economic growth then poverty will decline.

It needs to encourage its domestic entrepreneurs and capitalists who begin reinvesting into export and so forth. That is what will reduce poverty in Indonesia. It doesn’t mean that there’s no role for Kecamatan Development Project or other projects of that sort, but the role is very tightly circumscribed and that’s more about addressing persistent poverty or persistent lack of facilities in certain specific regions rather than an overall solution to the problem of poverty.

END

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