Education Centers

Accountability

Consider the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These lofty goals lack individual accountability for particular outcomes and necessities. They lack independent agencies with the authority to hold individual agents responsible for the efforts and outcomes of particular interventions. Collective responsibility for goals doesn't work for the same reason that collective ownership of farmland in China didn't work. Xiaogang 1978 - individual farming - 1982 Communist reform - 1984 there were no communes left; "tragedy of the commons." Collective Responsibility for many goals draws from the weight of pride in doing a good job and weakens the incentive, as well as competence, to accomplish particular objectives or projects.


It is good to have a noble goal in mind when engaging in the solution of any problem. However, if the problem is not your own, then the goal, based on your values and experience, is irrelevant and the solution unlikely to resonate. We must place our goals in the background and understand what the problem is before attempting to provide a solution. We must admit that doing everything is a fantasy. Instead, we should be making poor people's lives better in the few concrete ways that aid agencies can actually accomplish. Aid agencies must specialize more in solving particular problems, rather than having each agency responsible for everything.


Education Centers should treat foreign aid and philanthropy like a marketplace. Individual and institutional donors could contribute anywhere from a few dollars to thousands of dollars to the project(s) they find most worthy. Donors should have access to work orders and project proposals. This transparent bookkeeping permits donors to choose the means of their contribution as well as to monitor the development and to observe the benefits of their effort. Individual and institutional donors must assume responsibility for particular necessities and operational expenses of Education Centers. To be clear, not all donor’s assume responsibility. However, for sustainable development, someone must be accountable for the integral parts of the project. The donors who wish to limit their involvement to the contribution of funds can either contribute to a collective fund or select to fund something on the work order that is void of future responsibility.


Individual donors find a country, community, or cause to support. They read the work order to understand how much each project/development will cost. They contribute funds and/or assume a certain responsibility (to pay the teacher's salary, sponsor a single scholarship, the cost of facility maintenance, etc.) Also, donors should have the opportunity to permanently fund certain operational costs and maintenance. In order to have a sustainable model for international aid and development, individual donors, companies, or agencies must be made responsible for the integral parts of Education Centers. To improve the outcomes of our effort, we must rely on willing contributors and hold them accountable for their actions.

The ‘integral parts of Education Centers’ include, for example:

• Teachers
• Other Employees
• Supplies and Maintenance

• Facility
• Educational Material (everything except digital education material)
• Educational Tools (hardware and software)

• Food (Education for food incentive has proven to be a very cost-effective project)
• Electricity/Power (Power Companies)??
• Water (Jay-Z)??
• Connectivity (AMD 50x15)??
• Medical Supplies / Health Care Information and Instructional Material
• Datacenter (Sun Microsystems)??
• Translator (to translate the educational material made available to all Education Centers)
• Lead Partners / The Board (Four year commitment)

• Manage grant funds on behalf of the school
• Accounting and funding allocation
• Work with schools in budget development
• Participate in school planning and implementation
• Share in the accountability of school outcomes
• To seek and allocate scholarships
• Matching grants to locals who put their own money at stake to start a new business

Donor Incentives

International agencies analyze local capacity but aim to achieve global utopian goals. This strange organization persists because the poor are not the real customer -- the rich-country politicians and voters are. Just think about how aid agencies advertise their effort: emphasizing input - the pool of money donated - not the output - the outcome of particular interventions and projects. Politicians and aid bureaucrats react passively to dramatic headlines, utopian ideals, and ambitious global-objectives as opposed to reacting according to how the scarce aid budget could benefit the most people. We must reward agents for reaching goals, not for setting them.

Making donors responsible for project outcomes and contributions marks one incentive. Establishing a marketplace for international aid, as described above, will enable donors to choose the means of their contribution as well as monitor the progress and outcomes, it raises the level of their involvement and result in another incentive. The third incentive could be brought about if the UN was to establish a prestigious award for those donors involved in the education-based initiative whose effort and achievement stand out. This award, in combination with individual accountability and the visibility of progress, will increase the weight of pride in one‘s work as well as the incentive for one to reach positive outcomes.

Transparency

It is important that the UN and other international agencies funded with public money operate transparently, both in its finances and its hiring and promotion practices. The illegitimate use of public money cannot be tolerated. In fact, it is my belief that foreign aid and intervention is too important and delicate to be handled by politicians. That is why I am suggesting that donations and initiatives remain apolitical. The finances of Education Centers must be transparent. Expenditures must be described within the work order. Donations must correspond to particular work orders, expenditures, or responsibilities.

Visibility

The transparent bookkeeping will provide one perspective. Another should be provided by the means of pictures and live video. The pictures can be of selected sceneries, but the purpose of the live video is to increase awareness of local conditions and protect property rights. Many have argued that people behave better when they assume that they are being observed. A video camera could be a part of the datacenter. Non-local storage and analysis of the feed would be a deterrent because it would allow us to accrue evidence against the unjust. The visibility of individual efforts will give donors the opportunity to enjoy the rewarding experience of helping others. It exposes donor contribution and outcome, driving them to achieve positive results. It displays the condition as well as the lifestyle the recipients lead.

Monitoring

Once the books on particular projects are transparent and visible, the monitoring of agents and development progress may leapfrog years of improvement. The progress being monitored would not be on a scale with global objectives, but particular and localized. Monitoring of performance and outcomes is crucial if we want to hold individual donors and agencies accountable.


The information needed for this purpose is a form of resource. The information available to those who monitor agents and projects could, and should, be used for academic purposes. The data offers many potential research hypotheses and could be used as subject matter for classroom instruction. Academic researchers must play more of a fruitful role and serve as the unofficial independent evaluators. Academics could do public service by applying their techniques to evaluate the projects, programs, and approaches take by aid agencies.


When faced with this necessary involvement of quality academics in the education-based initiative, I came to realize that there is a missing link between institutions of higher education and the education that international aid systems try to bring to needy communities. The education-based initiative must establish a mutually beneficial relationship between the best education and the effort to spread it. The mechanisms for monitoring, research, and feedback should be integral parts of the curriculum because any information collected will be more relevant if locals work to obtain that information from other locals. In return, the subject matter for educational material incorporates local values and circumstances resulting in greater interest and significance.

Independent Evaluation

The evaluators for the World Bank, IMF, and UNDP would serve this role well as long as they‘re not somewhat accountable for the projects being evaluated. I probably would have given myself A's for all my assignments in school, but that wouldn't have helped me improve. Unfortunately this form of self-evaluation is well apparent in today's international aid. If it is not self-evaluation, it is that of a co-worker whom they don't want to discredit.


We need independent scientific evaluation of particular interventions from which agencies can learn. It's also important to the education-based initiative that academic research and evaluation will be made visible and credited. There will always be more students and professors looking to improve and impress, so the resource will never deplete. Other agencies should be encouraged to analyze, share, and criticize the data available to all. As long as individual efforts are visible and the books transparent, evaluation of outcomes and performance will be dramatically improved.

Educational Material

In recent years, the quantity of education has gone up, but the quality remains low. This incoherency has made the available resources less efficient at the cost of leaving aside necessary components of the whole. This is where poor feedback, invisibility, and collective responsibility is to blame. People mean well, but the job is poorly done.


For example, World Bank researchers Deon Filmer and Lant Pritchett estimate that the return on spending on instructional materials in education is up to fourteen times higher than the return on spending on physical facilities, yet donors continue to favor more observable buildings over less observable educational material.


I would argue that improving the availability and quality of educational material is the single most important effort needed today! Many of the undeveloped communities will have access to the technology that has an incredible power to educate, but the same technology can also have the sole purpose to entertain. It is important that we focus our effort on developing quality educational material and make it available to those who may not have quality educators. Children often are, and should be, able to learn independently. Without quality educational material and proper instruction most of Negroponte's computers will be used to play bloody games and watch porn on the internet.


Again, the academic community must bridge higher levels of education with the development efforts around the world to improve the results of education-based initiatives. Students who go to teachers’ training have to learn how to develop educational material as well as how to instruct students learning from that material. While learning how to teach, these students and their professors generate a rich source of material. If we employ the real-world data accumulated by this education-based initiative in the analysis and education of teachers, then the by-product of these studies, generated year after year, becomes an applicable resource for international aid and development.


These resources should serve as the basis for creation of educational material tailor-maid to address local needs and interest. It will also function as a positive incentive for those students and professors who wish to see their work published and applied. Note that it is important to have translators responsible for certain languages and Education Centers.

Feedback

UNDP's Capacity Assessment states that it is "a tool, not a solution. It requires a prior understanding of the political context within which capacity is deployed and a clear rationale for why certain capacities are desired in the future." Quite obviously the assessment depends on local understanding of the politics, institutions, and societal capacity as well as constant feedback from these particular communities. In fact, it seems to be the very grounds on which everything else depends, a sort of precondition, and yet the lack of feedback is one of the most critical flaws in today's international aid and interventions


The poor are but orphans that have no money or political voice to communicate their needs or to motivate others to meet those needs. Better feedback from the poor means better informed development initiatives and interventions, which, obviously, translates to higher success rate. Feedback guides democratic governments toward supplying services that the market cannot supply, and toward providing institutions for the markets to work. In fact, the technology employed in these proposed Education Centers will improve the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. By incorporating democratic processes in the education and by creating several topics that both students and the community may vote on, each Center may be thought of as a democracy-seed that will grow from within the community.


Education Centers should, of course, make it easy for locals to propose particular projects and developments. They should be able to express themselves and be heard. However, the feedback that we analyze should not all be voluntary submission. The most valuable information could be collected by means of interactive educational material made available to all Education Centers. Simple games, questionaires, or the simple freedom to create and express one's opinion has the potential to yield a tremendous amount of quality information from the bottom. Simple choices made by a child that experiences interacting education can yield information about local values, interests, traditions, rule, etc; this is a precondition for any future development.


I would like to end this proposal with the words of John Dewey: “Every care would be taken to surround the young with the physical and social conditions which best conduce, as far as freed knowledge extends, to release of personal potentialities. The habits thus formed would have entrusted to them the meeting of future social requirements and the development of the future state of society. Then and then only would all social agencies that are available operate as resources in behalf of a bettered community life.”

Thank you for taking the time to listen to what I had to say.