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The DECS’ Bureau of Non-formal Education believes that the rate of acceleration in literacy will further increase as a result implementation of the Literacy Service Contracting Scheme (LSCS). Before this, the Government had started implementation in 1994 of the Non-formal Education Project funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB-NFE) and the literacy projects funded by the UNICEF under the Country Programme for Children (CPC) III. These directly support and incorporate the EOI objectives of EFA.
Many NGOs have increased the tempo of their literacy programs, often in partnership with the government; thus accelerating the meeting of the EFA targets.. The Government’s own effort to improve the literacy situation is accelerated by the sustained partnership in advocacy by the LCC, the PIA and the AIJ among LGU officials, literacy workers and literacy-oriented NGOs primarily through the Annual Literacy Awards. The impact of these initiatives will hopefully be reflected in next literacy census that will be conducted towards the end of the decade.
In the regions and divisional offices of the DECS, many forms of simple and functional literacy programmes were implemented between 1990 and the present. The most widely adopted, however, are the Magbassa Kita (Let’s Read) Project and the Functional Education and Literacy Project that is now a component of the ADB Non-Formal Education Project. The former is a long-running project that was already in place even before the start of EFA. It aims to reduce basic illiteracy through regular funds provided by some DECS regional offices, but has been discontinued in some. There still are Magbassa Kita classes that are conducted, especially in the National Capital Region (NCR), where there is a regular influx of illiterates from the provinces. These basic literacy efforts continue through books and materials provided by the Magbassa Kita Foundation using regular DECS teachers. There is a clamor from some regions for the revival of this programme with increased funding in their localities.
The FELP, which aims to raise both simple and functional literacy rates has been in existence for more than two decades and has now been incorporated as a component of the ADB-NFE Project. It targets mostly out-of-school youths, illiterate adults and women of the poorest households and gives them training not only in literacy but also in livelihood skills such as food preservation, baking, cosmetology and hair science. A crucial component of this initiative concerns the need to provide capitalisation funds for the graduates so that they could employ their new capabilities immediately. Since FELP is now project-based, its future sustainability is a problem that must be faced at this early stage.
Scattered around the various regions are literacy training programmes that cater to specific groups. There are functional literacy classes for females in Regions IX and VIII. for prisoners in NCR (the Education behind Bars Project), for ethnic communities in Region II, and even a functional literacy programme for cultural communities affected by the Casecnan Dam Project , also in Region II, to name a few.
Clearly, the number and variety of literacy programmes in place should partly explain the high literacy rates in the country. However, the task of making people literate is progressively becoming more difficult as the ones bound to be left out repeatedly are either those who steadfastly refuse to join literacy classes or those who are simply unreachable by virtue of geography. To push literacy rates further to near-universal levels would require bringing the classes to the unreachables, as what is being done under the Army Literacy Patrol Scheme (ALPS), which, as the project’s title states, is conducted by Army personnel in the hinterlands and the mountain areas. There are drawbacks to this modality, especially since Army personnel are not trained to be literacy providers. This can be remedied nonetheless by providing them with proper orientation and training.
The regional offices have observed that people become more critical and analytical with respect to issues affecting their lives and are able to meaningfully participate in group and community affairs. A study conducted by the BNFE stated that one of the perceived impacts of the female functional literacy programme was the increased utilisation of available social services in the community, including schooling opportunities. Providing literacy training therefore gives immediate satisfaction to both the givers and the receivers because of the relatively short programme period and the ease of measuring outcomes. Nevertheless, the implementation of literacy programmes are fraught with problems and difficulties that must be overcome to ensure efficiency in the total Philippine effort. Feedback sessions with field operatives have yielded the following observations and suggestions:
1) Lack of teachers in the field; there is therefore a dearth of NFE district coordinators to assist the district supervisor in his capacity as district NFE manager. Full-time NFE coordinators are needed.
2) Small budget allocation from central office; LGUs and NGOs could not provide or promise definite financial assistance. Inadequacy in literacy materials is felt; regional offices cannot finance all the literacy materials required due to lack of MOOE funds.
3) Lack of practice in using reading and writing skills make literacy graduates revert to their former state. Community learning centres should be established where literacy materials are provided for completers to enrich their new skills.
4) Many target clienteles are reluctant to participate in literacy learning groups because of the stigma associated with the term "illiterate." Perhaps a different terminology such as "reading and writing impaired" should be adopted.
5) Most hardcore Illiterates are that way because they are perpetually busy working to feed their families.
6) Distance between residence and venue of literacy classes discourage potential trainees from participating.
7) Facilities were sometimes not conducive to learning. The absence of furniture and dark rooms make it doubly difficult for the elderly and sickly among the trainees to learn.
8) Completers of basic literacy programmes seem to be contented with the skills they have acquired. They only continue on to functional literacy programmes if livelihood training is integrated.
EFA Management Policies and Structures
The National Machinery
The National Committee on Education for All (NCEFA) created through Presidential Proclamation No. 480 as the apex of the EFA programme hierarchy, was EFA’s policy-making body. It was to have been assisted by a National Technical Secretariat (NTS) as its technical and administrative arm. The NTS was to have been subsequently expanded to include representatives from agencies involved in early childhood care and development, primary education, literacy and continuing education as well as selected representatives of some member agencies of the National Committee. While the NCEFA was immediately constituted after the approval of the PPA in 1991, it was nonetheless never convened after 1993 at the DECS. The administration that followed (1994-95) believed that education is the responsibility of the DECS solely and therefore did not push through with the concept of the "Grand Alliance" among the agencies involved in EFA. Interestingly, the NCEFA was never revived even after another regime followed the previous short-lived one (1995-98). So far, no moves have been taken to reconvene the committee. With this, all the other elements of the EFA management and implementation plan were consequentially made non-operational. Thus, by mid-decade, no mechanism dedicated to EFA was in place. In fact, this organisational restructuring affecting EFA implementation was one another momentous change in the country’s EFA programme. It seemed to be the natural consequence of the mainstreaming of the EFA programme and was conceivably premised on the belief that extraneous and ad hoc organisational overlays are superfluous and duplicative, more of a hindrance than an aid. Instead, long-established and permanent mechanisms and structures were relied on to avoid the paralysis normally associated with temporary committees. Subsequent EFA-related actions were thus coursed through the Social Development Committee of the NEDA and the Regional Development Councils, which carry membership rosters very similar to the NCEFA and the RCEFAs.
For instance, the EFA PPA called for the operation of a National Committee for EFA (NCEFA) and Regional EFA Committees (RCEFAs) for purposes of inter-sectoral and inter-agency co-ordination. However, subsequent EFA-related actions, being subsumed as they already were starting in 1995 under the MPBE, were instead coursed through the Social Development Committee of the NEDA and the Regional Development Councils, which carry membership rosters very similar to the NCEFA and the RCEFAs. Other specialised units established as called for by the PPA, such as the National Technical Secretariat (NTS) and the central and local project management teams, were likewise rendered unnecessary because EFA ceased to be a mere project like the myriad ones previously and currently implemented by the DECS.
Foremost among the organisational and structural concerns of the PPA are the goals to: 1) maintain the National Committee on Education for All (NCEFA) as the apex of EFA program hierarchy and policy-making body; 2) continue the operation of the National Technical Secretariat (NTS) backstopped by a full-time Program Management Team (PMT); 3) assign a technical group to each cluster, e.g. ECCD/UQPE; EOI/CED; Integrated Program and Program Support; 4) institutionalise the functions of the Program Management Team (PMT) within the Office of Planning Service of the DECS; and 5) replicate policy and operational set-up through the RCEFAs as specialised bodies of the RDCs and local development councils to complement the NCEFA in policy making and program review. Subsequently, as everybody then believed in the efficacy of the encompassing role of the NCEFA, it was even decided that this should also have been the authoritative body to steer and provide policy directions to all future programs and projects in basic education.
From the beginning, such organisational structures were deemed necessary in order to undertake a medium-term review and updating of the EFA-PPA and pursue new policies, programs and projects that would close the gaps that were not met by the initial set of projects. The national and regional bodies of the Alliance with the NTS/PMT orchestrating are the same ones that were supposed to update or revise the national and region-based projects and be the prime movers in the inter-related and interdependent tasks of: 1) installing a monitoring and evaluation system that would support regular review of EFA policies and guidelines and periodic assessment of the project implementation; 2) formulating and implementing advocacy plans needed to generate resources and legislative support; and 3) devising various strategies to provide financial resources and formulating policies on programming and public investment in basic education, especially the EFA programs and projects.
Programme Implementation
The National Technical Secretariat (NTS) and the Project Management Team (PMT) operated only until 1993. Lack of funding was the apparent reason, but the demise of these two units seems to have been the natural consequence of the neglect of the NCEFA and the discontinuation of its organised activities.
As originally envisioned, the internal structure of the PMT was patterned after the four major clusters of projects of the PPA. A technical group was to be assigned to each cluster, namely: ECCD/UQPE, EOI/CED; INTPRO (for integrated programmes); and Programme Support. In addition to overseeing the project implementation in each cluster, the technical group would have also overseen the overall implementation of the projects in the Regional Action Plans, as well as the co-ordination with a number of regions. Those who were involved in the formulation of the National and Regional Action Plans were to be initially tasked to man the PMT. The main purpose for this action was to sustain the momentum generated during the formulation of the National and Regional Action Plans and to prepare for the institutionalisation of EFA concerns within the DECS. Thereafter, the PMT functions were to be institutionalised within the Office of Planning Service (OPS) of the DECS. Interagency support was supposed to have been maintained through the NTS. However, because of the sidelining of the formal EFA structure, the assignment of technical groups to each of the component clusters did not materialise. True enough, it was expected that the OPS would fill in the void, but the subsequent arrangements made in this regard within the OPS did not approximate the extent of responsibility of the envisioned PMT.
The formal structures of the "Grand Alliance" which were planned to last for the EFA Decade or otherwise to be institutionalised within existing bodies like the DECS were in operation only for a limited period of time, not beyond two years. The crucial role was to be played by the full-time PMT, which was to provide the continuing technical backstop to both the NTS and the NCEFA. These two latter organisations in turn, should have been the key towards sustaining all other organisational units in the regions and those that would oversee or implement the identified projects.
A review of events during the past nine years and some validation made during the First National EFA Assessment Workshop held on April 6, 1999 attended by representatives of the original member-agencies of the Alliance reveal interrelated circumstances and events that prevented the sustained roles of these entities. The first and fundamental of these barriers was the lack of needed funding to support the full-time and permanent PMT. This unit was supposed to sustain the work of the previous Project Team that oversaw the formulation of the PPA and the predecessor PMT that supervised the initial activities after the launching of the PPA. Unfortunately, the planned integration and institutionalisation of the PMT function in the OPS did not work out. It was simply not possible for the OPS to approximate and perform functions of the experienced well-experienced PMT as they were simply too numerous and complicated to be absorbed by the personnel of OPS which have limited technical capability. This is coupled by another factor that complicated the situation -- distractions and new set of priorities were created by the frequent changes in the DECS administration. Concentration was on the mainstream activities of the Department and the re-direction and development of its work in basic education were re-cast from the EFA to the Master Plan for Basic Education (MPBE). This posture left many partners of the Alliance in the regional and local bodies in the dark on the future of the creative EFA projects that are based on the "expanded vision of education. Many months after, there was an apparent waning of interest and work towards grassroots building of the Alliance and the further development of the Level 2 projects eventually stopped because of lack of encouraging signal from NCEFA and follow-up from the PMT and the NTS which was also not convened as per the PPA specification.
The Regional Machinery
Regional Committees on Education for All (RCEFAs) were to complement the NCEFA in policy-making and programme review. These regional/sub-regional committees were to have been strengthened as specialised bodies of the Regional Development Councils (RDCs) and the local development councils. Although 15 RCEFAs and 90% of the 134 of the targeted P/C/MCEFAs had been organised by January 1993, these entities were likewise rendered non-operational because of the sidelining of the NCEFA.
Programme Monitoring
The EFA monitoring and evaluation (M & E) plans were not put into operation, since the bodies that were supposed to make use of them had their lives cut short by the policy changes at the DECS. Critical activities and outputs needed for M & E such as the establishment of the EFA data bank, the preparation of the M & E Manual of Operations and the development of standard forms meant to guide the monitors at both the national and regional levels did not materialise. Thus, the conduct of monitoring of the status of EFA implementation stopped taking place after 1993, as were the evaluation of project results and the conduct of research and policy studies.
Plan Revisions
The PPA further provided for the conduct of a midterm review and updating of the PPA, in which new policies, strategies, programmes and projects in response to gaps not met by the initial set of projects would have been considered. This activity was also supposed to have included deliberations on the possibility of upgrading lower priority projects to high priority levels. As the NCEFA and other subordinate operating units of the EFA programme effectively ceased to exist as early as 1993, the projected mid-term review was not undertaken. With this development, the planned updating or revision of projects that should have been done in consultation with the NTS suffered the same fate.
Social Mobilisation & Advocacy
The Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication (AIJC) served as the lead agency and technical secretariat for the EFA advocacy and social mobilisation movement. The Institute’s social mobilisation and advocacy (SAM) activities were supported by the UNICEF and the UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines. The Institute organised a project team to plan and manage the activities. The EFA Social Mobilisation and Advocacy Project was named the Most Outstanding Information Programme by an NGO in support of a Development Programme in the 1994 Gawad Oscar Florendo sponsored by the Public Relations Organisation of the Philippines. Meanwhile, AIJC’s partnership with UNICEF continues to date with focus on the ASM needs of EFA-Country Programme for Children (CPC).
AIJC’s EFA activities consisted of (1) planning and production of information, education and communication (IEC) materials; (2) policy advocacy, (3) conduct of media relations, (4) networking with various sectors and professional organisations; (5) capability building and (6) resource mobilisation. During the EFA decade, the SAM component accomplished the following: (1) preparation of quality IEC materials on EFA in general and in specific matters such as literacy, early childhood, school enrolment; (2) greater awareness and acceptance of the newsworthiness of basic education and literacy by tri-media; (3) training of public information officers in SAM strategies; (4) institutionalisation of the National Literacy Awards; and (5) integration of the SAM component in succeeding education-related programmes and projects.
The EFA experience has succeeded in emphasising among policy and decision makers the important role of SAM in planning and managing developing programmes. A number of on-going internationally-assisted major educational programmes now include a SAM component. These include the Third Elementary Education Project (TEEP) of the World Bank and OECF, the Philippine Non-Formal Education Project funded by the ADB, and the Integrated Early Childhood Development Programme of the World Bank, among others.
ECCD Efforts
During the period under review, significant strides were made in the survival and development of Filipino children six years old and below. However, much of what is documented in this assessment relates only to day-care centres and pre-schools. The other important and critical aspects of ECCD such as health care and nutrition are not covered because of the absence of information. The devolution of basic social services in 1992 as mandated under the Local Government Code may have brought the management of the above-mentioned programs closer to the communities but it also spawned the problem of effective monitoring and reporting. Only a number of LGUs feed information to the DSWD and the DOH on the status of various ECCD-services such that to date, no complete and updated statistics exist regarding actual program coverage and impact.
Overall, the DECS had indeed implemented useful measures to enlarge participation in pre-schools and to enhance pre-schoolers’ capabilities to survive the rigours of formal schooling, through educational, nutritional and health inputs. However, participation is still so painfully inadequate such that all such efforts have benefited only a small proportion of pre-school age children. Unless concrete and effective steps are taken to change the situation, the early childhood education initiatives of the DECS, DOH, DSWD and their partner agencies would fail to yield an appreciable impact on the training of the children that would ultimately be fed into the higher grades of the educational process. As the main market for the products of the early childhood development system, it is therefore to the DECS’ interest to assume a strong and at the same time active presence in the formulation and implementation of policies leading to the quantitative and qualitative improvement of ECCD.
As stated earlier, there is serious doubt about the Philippines’ ability to meet the targets on (1) the number and intake of public day care centres and (2) the number and intake of pre-schools. The high and unrealistic targets are in question, but in spite of this, the consideration of the absolute magnitudes still shows inadequate levels of accomplishment particularly in the intakes. Low rates of participation in day care centres and in pre-schools supported by corroborative findings on the gross enrolment ratio clearly show the close interactions between and among these indicators. The following argument may be appropriate for this situation: intake is low in the day care centres because mothers have no need for them since most of them do not work; and because they do not work, they do not derive extra income to send their children to pre-schools, resulting in the low GER. Thus, the creation of work or livelihood especially for mothers is a key to more day care centres, or at the very least, to the fuller use of such centres. Then again, pre-school attendance requires some cash outlay on the part of parents, which can be ensured if they have adequate incomes. Livelihood opportunities among parents would not only allow them to send their children to pre-schools; it would also free their children from working to help augment family finances. Moreover, working would by necessity force parents to seek the services of the day care centres whether they send their children to pre-schools or not. Certainly GOs and NGOs responsible for the creation of jobs and the provision of livelihood skills must go into action, and the DECS has to exert greater efforts to enhance the drawing capacity of extant pre-schools or to cause the establishment of additional and more affordable pre-schools particularly in the rural areas, or both.
The success of ECCD is thus definitely hinged on a close collaboration and coordination even among long-standing and independently functioning programmes of the DECS, DOH, DSWD, other support agencies, and now the LGUs. Whatever new programmes or projects are initiated to support the ECCD goals of EFA for the next decade must be focussed undertakings that make full use of interagency or intersectoral cooperation. Thus, even ECCD programme components that are implementable on an agency basis must be brought in under the umbrella so that their individual contributions, once collected, would form a unified impact. This in itself is a problem since the Philippines has not yet achieved the goal of having a single agency that has the mandate to oversee the separate efforts of the participating agencies. Greater progress could have been achieved if at any one time there had been a total picture of the direction of ECCD to serve as a guide and more importantly as a motivator for the implementers. Actually, the Council for the Welfare of Children (CWC) created in 1974 and headed by the DSWD Secretary, is the government’s premier agency for children’s protection, welfare and development. CWC is responsible for co-ordinating and monitoring the implementation of all laws and programs for children, including the Philippine Plan for Action for Children in the 90s (PPAC), although its influence is hardly felt. Hopefully, this situation can be altered once the pending Philippine Senate bill on ECCD that aims to strengthen the CWC and make it function as the National ECCD Co-ordinating Council is passed into law.
UQPE Efforts
In brief, significant concrete steps have been made in support of the EFA policies and strategies on UQPE. Nonetheless, these have not made much impact in terms of the expected outcomes, i.e. reduced dropout rates and improved cohort survival and achievement rates. While it is widely recognised that a convergence of education, health and nutrition interventions would be effective in achieving these outcomes, the devolution of the basic health and social welfare services which occurred early during the EFA decade posed difficulties in establishing inter-sectoral collaboration particularly at the field level. A major constraint in this aspect is the very limited capacity of the LGUs, especially in the more depressed provinces, to implement the desired interventions.
The fact that the dropout rate for elementary level tended to worsen for the past six years and that the repetition and cohort survival rates had hardly improved suggests that there are weaknesses and constraints in the implementation of the above-mentioned strategies.
But more significantly, the programmes initiated or otherwise used as vehicles for attaining EFA UPQE goals were mainly school and educational-system based that, moreover, were founded on a policy of attraction rather than of retention. Immense resources have been expended to bring children to schools, to provide access and increase participation, but not much had been done to keep them there. The many factors that influence drop-out and cohort-survival rates ultimately lead to poverty or insufficient private economic resources, but the usual approach looks to improving the holding power of schools (which is not really the case, as from the structure of programmes, what is being attended to is the schools’ magnetic power). It would perhaps be a worthwhile alternative to look at strengthening the students’ staying power instead. And if poverty is the root cause, then all efforts should be expended to combating this, even if artificial means such as providing for the indirect costs of schooling is resorted to. Direct fund transfers to the students or to their families may prove less costly in the long-run.
Attacking the dilemma of poor survival, worsening drop-outs, and lacklustre school achievement from the demand side rather than from the supply side implies all-out efforts that are not confined within the education department itself. Of course, scholarships, service contracting and even subsidisation of indirect costs plus a little extra for the parents or families to answer for the opportunity costs of child labour (whether inside or outside the home) would do a lot. However, the consequence of dependency would be harmful for the long-term. Clearly, the country would do well to adopt measures that improve livelihood and income opportunities especially for families with school-age children. This requires an interagency and intersectoral effort that seems to have been neglected by the DECS during the course of implementing EFA.
Alternative Learning Systems
Despite the number and variety of literacy programmes in place, the mainline strategy still employs static training venues that do not maximise these programmes’ reach among the hardcore illiterates. Moreover, the prevailing negative attitudes and perceptions among the members of this segment prevent their being efficiently co-opted into the literacy programme. If this situation continues, both simple and functional literacy levels in the country would never really reach 100 percent.
The extent to which the Literacy Coordinating Council, an interagency body within the DECS and the BNFE, which supports the Council in its role as implementing organisation for alternative learning systems, have addressed the concerns for eradicating illiteracy and providing opportunities for continuing education must be examined.
Management of EFA
The Master Plan for Basic Education as Foundation
The DECS implements EFA responsibilities using the MPBE as its guiding framework, but the present MPBE largely focuses on the UQPE component of the EFA Programme. Hence, it is timely for DECS to review and expand the MPBE by incorporating the rest of EFA thrusts and objectives. In particular, the MPBE is weak on policies and programmes concerning eradication of illiteracy and continuing education development. Thus, the DECS should accept the fact that the EFA for the next decade cannot be implemented through the extant MPBE without the injection of the necessary changes. To do otherwise would be to accord MPBE with features it was not designed to address in the first place and would therefore be unfair to DECS itself as an institution and misleading to EFA as a goal.
During the April 6, 1999 EFA Workshop, the EFA partners compared and contrasted the EFA-PPA, 1991-2000 and the MPBE and those who have heard about the latter were of the opinion that the two plan documents are not essentially the same in envisioning and operationalising the EFA Declaration’s "expanded vision of education." They also thought that the most important objectives of EFA, e.g. as "blueprint of innovations" in the provision of the basic learning needs will not be completely accomplished as planned before the end of the Decade, hence, there might be a need to really revise the PPA by learning from what has happened in the past. It was also pointed out that as EFA partners, they have not been formally informed by DECS about the transition from the EFA-PPA to the MPBE nor have they been made fully aware of the implications of the transition during the past five years. This did not enable them to do something for the continued existence and operation of the Grand Alliance as planned.
While the very nature and scope of EFA necessitated the full efforts of a grand alliance of agencies, the DECS, through a perception and policy change that coincided with the formulation of the MPBE, substantially implemented EFA through the many existing inter-agency and inter-sectoral committees within the DECS structure in addition to the DECS organisation itself. NEDA in particular believes that the resuscitation of the "Grand Alliance" through the reconstitution and invigoration of the N/RCEFAs is not the answer. Thus, NEDA opines that the existing structures should instead be strengthened to address EFA concerns as well. However, the experience of the past several years has shown that implementing EFA internally through DECS had the effect of melding EFA into the routine activities, bereft of the special attention and minding EFA deserved especially during its designated decade. Thus, without a rallying point and an organisation of peers to which DECS should have been accountable, EFA was simply accorded the routinary attention given to other programmes. At the very least, a functioning NCEFA would have ensured the constant monitoring of progress towards EFA goals and objectives through regular assessment meetings. Critical EFA concerns that were not exclusively within the purview of the DECS would have been acted upon in concert with the agencies responsible for them. The enactment of the 1991 Local Government Code and its implications on the devolution of EFA-related inputs, such as the operation of day care centres and the provisions of maternal and child health care should have raised warning signals and the needed coordination with LGUs duly effected through the RCEFAs.
Despite these setbacks, the participants still believed that the "Grand Alliance for EFA" through NCEFA and the RCEFA are useful bodies in co-ordinating, promoting and operationalising the expanded vision of education and greater accessibility of basic education. For this reason, they all agreed on the need to revive these bodies in order to catch up with the task of completing the attainment of EFA objectives and the extension of the EFA Decade for purposes of filling the gaps and addressing current problems and needs. However, considering that many of the activities built in the submitted EFA projects form part of the regular activities of both the government agencies and its private sector/NGO partners, the participants also believe that many of them can yet be implemented even without relying on massive foreign grants and loans.
The current state of the primary education system may then be traced to a number of interconnected factors. First, the management of EFA was inadequate, since its co-optation by the MPBE and the sidelining of the EFA implementation structures left it without an effective monitoring and assessment system. Second, the interventions within UQPE that were meant to address the simmering problems of internal efficiency and learning outcomes had the following drawbacks: (1) most of the projects were experimental or pilot ones that were not translated into institutionalised nationwide activities due to funding problems, (2) they were too limited in geographical scope to be able to have had an impact regardless of regional reports that there had been encouraging results on a project-by-project basis, (3) the programme implementation periods were too short to permit the observation of significant impacts; (4) projects were hampered by inadequate competence in implementation management, and lastly (5) there were no serious efforts to gather necessary data to evaluate the programs in terms of changes in the relevant indicators.
It should also be noted that the programmes initiated or otherwise used as vehicles for attaining EFA UPQE goals were mainly school and educational-system based that, moreover, were founded on a policy of attraction rather than of retention. Immense resources have been expended to bring children to schools, to provide access and increase participation, but not much had been done to keep them there. The many factors that influence drop-out and cohort-survival rates ultimately lead to poverty or insufficient private economic resources, but the usual approach looks to improving the holding power of schools (which is not really the case, as from the structure of programmes, what is being strengthened is the schools’ magnetic power). It would perhaps be a worthwhile alternative to look at strengthening the students’ staying power also.
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