Prepared by

Jack L. Davies

15 December 1991

Davies Consulting GmbH 1991

© Jack L. Davies 1991

Table of Contents

1 Executive Summary

The main goal of EAfEdI is to provide coordination of regional educational goals and standards on the Horn of Africa.

One desired consequence from regional educational standards will be to facilitate easy transfers of students, teachers, and administrators both internally and across national borders in this region.

A multi-national organization offers unique opportunities for contributing to higher quality of education at lower costs in this region. Following are a few examples of the advantages of this multi-national approach:

1. The creation of one single reference library is less expensive than creating separate reference libraries for each nation. These cost savings will also allow the creation of a larger and more complete single reference library than would have been feasible with many national reference libraries.
2. Modern computer technology offers many technical opportunities for reducing the costs of producing high-quality textbooks when they are produced as multi-lingual editions of individual textbooks, rather than as separate unrelated textbooks in each language. The centralization of such computer resources is also more cost-effective than creating many separate smaller systems.
3. Strong synergetic effects can be developed when many very similar projects are conducted within close physical proximity, allowing the different project teams to interact with each other. There are also better opportunities for developing a strong local infrastructure of specialist advisors to assist these individual teams when these activities are consolidated at one physical location.

Another reason for proposing this particular multi-national approach is our evolving concept for a "Common Market of East Africa". We hope that such a common market will evolve gradually and completely voluntarily in this region over the next few years, to the mutual advantage of all participants. A coordinated educational system for the same region provides a very useful starting point and basis for the evolution of such a regional common market.

The geographical scope of this common market is focused upon the similarities in the agricultural economies of the following countries (from North to South):

• the Sudan,
• Eritrea,
• Ethiopia,
• Djibouti,
• the Republic of Somaliland (the former British Somaliland), and
• Southern Somalia (the former Italian Somaliland).

Due to the massive destruction in recent civil wars, as well as the transitions from socialist centrally-planned economies to democracies with free-market economies, the immediate educational problems and goals are very similar in

• Eritrea,
• Ethiopia,
• the Republic of Somaliland, and
• Southern Somalia

at the moment. These educational problems are also very urgent, because it is necessary to develop completely new curricula and educational materials (textbooks, audio-visual aids, etc.) in order to restart the school systems in these 3 countries.

We propose that the initial activities of EAfEdI be focused upon meeting the urgent educational needs of these 3 countries while gradually expanding to meet the more stable needs of the Sudan and Djibouti. Activities will not be possible specifically for the former Italian Somaliland until peace and a stable government is established there, but much of the work in developing curricula and textbooks for the Republic of Somaliland will also be applicable for the former Italian Somaliland later.

Due to the extreme urgency of obtaining educational materials quickly, the temptation is very large to simply buy textbooks from a variety of different external sources. However, it is important for this region that it quickly develop its own unique curricula and textbooks, that effectively integrate

• modern teaching methods from the Western World,
• Islamic influence from neighboring countries, and
• local traditions and history.

2 Scope of Interest

The educational scope of interest for EAfEdI will be focused upon

• general education
  • primary level (immediately)
  • secondary level (immediately)
  • university level (later)
• vocational education
  • secondary level (covering various trades and professions)
• the education of primary, secondary, and vocational teachers as well as educational administrators.

With its focus upon developing regional goals, standards, and curricula, it will work in close coordination with the ministries of education in the countries that it serves. With its infrastructure and symbiotic opportunities, EAfEdI will assist individual ministries of education to perform their goals and objectives -- without becoming a competitor to them. Each ministry of education will have options for sending their personnel to EAfEdI for a variety of different kinds of projects whenever the infrastructure offered by EAfEdI is better-suited for these projects than the infrastructures available locally within these ministries of education. The degree of standardization for curricula and educational materials between different countries will always be voluntary.

3 External Structures

The relationships of EAfEdI to its environment can be defined in the following areas:

• legal form,
• ownership,
• symbiosis with local partners, and
• financial.

Legally, EAfEdI could be created as

• an international organization,
• a local non-profit limited-liability company, or
• a local profit-making limited-liability company.

It will be necessary to evaluate each of these options and to select the best option before actually founding EAfEdI. Negotiations with regional governments will play a major role in these decisions.

The owners of EAfEdI could be

• regional governments (ministries of education),
• international organizations, and/or
• private (such as individual educators, publishers, etc.).

Again, it will be necessary to evaluate each of these options and to select the best option before seeking financing for EAfEdI. Negotiations with the regional governments will play a major role in these decisions.

Symbiosis with local partners will play a major role in the effectiveness of EAfEdI and therefore the selection of an appropriate site for the office facilities of EAfEdI. As one example, it would be very desirable if EAfEdI could be sited next to a good general-purpose library, so as to minimize the need of its own library to contain a large number of books that are only marginally related to its own activities. Likewise, it would be very desirable for EAfEdI to be sited next to a university, particularly a university that has a school of education for training teachers. It would also be helpful if EAfEdI could be sited near several private publishing companies for cooperating in printing, binding, and marketing educational materials.

Financially, the costs of operating EAfEdI will be offset by

• capital provided by owners,
• grants provided by
  • regional governments (ministries of education)
  • other governments (foreign aid)
  • international organizations
  • private donors and foundations
• sales of services and products to
  • ministries of education and
  • the general public.

4 Internal Structures

Internally, EAfEdI will be structured with the following 7 departments and sections:

• library
• curriculum development
• development of textbooks, AV materials, etc.
  • writing, editing, translating
  • graphics
  • DTP (Desk-Top Publishing) for typesetting
  • printing and binding
  • distribution
• training teachers and administrators
  • seminars and workshops
  • curricula for training teachers
  • correspondence courses
  • testing and certification of teachers and administrators
• regional educational journal
• correspondence courses for students (later)
• administrative services
  • accounting
  • personnel
  • computer services
  • public relations

For the coordination and development of curricula, EAfEdI will have a small staff of experts on a full-time basis. However, most actual development of curricula will be performed by teams of experts sent to EAfEdI from individual ministries of education. These teams will be responsible to their respective ministries of education and will do major parts of the curricular development for their ministries at EAfEdI, where they have access to the consolidated library facilities, regional curricular experts, and the opportunities for coordinating their own curricula with the curricula of other countries to the extent that they wish.

The availability of several quite different examples of complete curricula from different nations will serve as a strong basis for developing integrated curricula for this region. However, it will be important to integrate local considerations into any new curricula for this region. As one example, most curricula and educational systems are based upon very rigid policies for starting only in the first grade and leaving with a diploma or certificate only at the end of 1 or 2 specific grades. It will be essential to develop a more flexible policy for this region, that allows "easy in and easy out"; i.e., allowing students to enter the system at any age and date as well as to leave the system with concrete results at any time. As another example, it will be necessary to develop different approaches to teaching reading skills in a multi-lingual, multi-alphabet environment than in a single-language environment.

For the development of textbooks, AV materials, etc., EAfEdI will provide primarily a modern infrastructure and environment for these activities. This infrastructure will include offices, seminar rooms, computers for word processing in local languages, computers for generating graphics, computers for typesetting with DTP, offset-printing capabilities, binding capabilities, etc. It will include dictionaries, thesauri, and translators for the various regional languages. It will also include professional editors and other specialists to assist individual teams in creating high-quality textbooks and AV materials.

Individual ministries of education will be able to send teams to EAfEdI for individual projects of creating individual textbooks and AV materials. Whenever appropriate agreements exist, such as based upon common curricula for at least some subjects and class levels, it would be very effective to define multi-national projects to create one single standard textbook for this region and then to produce multi-lingual editions of such standard textbooks. In this case, each ministry of education could provide team members or the ministries of education could give contracts to EAfEdI to produce such textbooks for them. EAfEdI will have internal capabilities for actually printing, binding, and distributing such textbooks and AV materials. However, there will be options for allowing individual ministries of education or private publishing companies to perform these functions that follow definition of curricula.

5 Library

Particularly if a general-purpose library is available nearby, the library of EAfEdI will be specialized for meeting its primary objectives. It will contain reference materials in the following categories:

• Individual sets of complete curricula, including all textbooks and covering all primary and secondary grades, from
  • each participating country of this region,
  • the Arabian Peninsula,
  • selected African and Asian countries,
  • the USA,
  • Great Britain,
  • France,
  • Italy, and
  • Germany.
• Languages (Arabic, English, French, Italian, German, and all local languages)
  • dictionaries
  • thesauri
  • language textbooks
  • research materials on languages
• Education
  • international and regional journals
  • international and regional textbooks
  • international and regional reference documents
• History
  • reference works on regional and local history
  • international textbooks and reference works
  • regional and local textbooks
• Literature
  • regional
  • international
• Technology
  • reference works
  • textbooks
• Cultural
  • regional documents and textbooks
  • international reference works
    

6 Production of Textbooks

For the production of textbooks, as well as AV materials, it is important to start with the curricula and goals, before designing or selecting individual textbooks. 

Once the curriculum for a particular subject and grade level is defined and published, individual authors (such as experienced teachers) and private publishing companies will be free to develop textbooks and market them privately. EAfEdI will also have the internal capabilities for developing textbooks to meet the requirements of such curricula itself. In the simplest form, EAfEdI would develop camera-ready copy for textbooks and either subcontract the printing and binding to private printing companies or sell the rights to private publishing companies for the commercial printing, binding, and marketing of such textbooks. EAfEdI could also simply provide the camera-ready copy to individual ministries of education to use as they desire. Or, EAfEdI could continue to print and bind these textbooks itself, selling the resulting products both to ministries of education and/or on the public markets.

7 Phase Model for Implementation

The implementation for EAfEdI can be divided into the following three phases:

• Phase 1: Conception
  • Development of concept by DACO
  • Coordination with regional ministries of education
  • Coordination with UNESCO
  • Development of budget and financial plan by DACO
  • Selection of location by regional ministries of education
• Phase 2: Startup
  • Buildings, Furniture, Equipment
  • Infrastructure
  • Staff
  • Library
  • Liaison with regional ministries of education
• Phase 3: Initial Operations
  • Launch normal operations
  • Expansion of scope
  • Expansion of partners
    

DACO could provide the initial management, on a contractual basis, until the staff are able to take over the management themselves in Phase 3.

8 Next Steps

The next step is to obtain financing for Phase 1 above.

DACO will approach the following organizations with requests for funding:

• the GTZ,
• US AID,
• the Ford Foundation, and
• the Carnegie Foundation.

© Jack L. Davies 1991

[Note for writers: Bookmarks are installed at the beginning of each chapter, i.e. #1, #2, ... #8]