Access to a quality education should be a basic right for children everywhere.
In Canada, we take education for granted. When the Back to School sale signs start to appear, most kids bemoan the fast-approaching end of summer vacation. But these kids are in fact quite privileged to have access to a quality education here in Canada.
Globally 263 million children are not in school – that’s one in five. This is because there are not enough schools and school rooms to meet the demand. But simply attending school is not enough if the quality of education is lacking. Globally over 600 million kids that are in school are not receiving a quality education. This is due to poor teacher training, and a lack of curriculum and other teaching resources. These are serious problems that have a direct impact on global poverty.
Obtaining quality education is the foundation for creating sustainable development.
– UN Sustainable Development Goals
You may be wondering, how does Opportunity International, a microfinance organization, intersect with education?
There are tens of thousands of low-cost private schools attempting to fill the gap caused by the budget limitations of public schools. Many of these are small and struggling but led by Directors with a passion to address the education needs in their communities.
A small private school is not much different from a microenterprise – it has costs (teachers’ salaries, curriculum, etc.) and revenues (school fees). Opportunity International recognized that it could leverage the power of microfinance that has helped millions of microentrepreneurs build sustainable livelihoods to help school Directors build strong and sustainable schools.
In 2009 Opportunity International began lending to schools to help improve infrastructure, and to parents with sustainable but irregular income to help with school fees. It also provided training to school Directors, as part of a cluster of schools in a given region.
This was very empowering at the local small low-cost private school level. These passionate school Directors now had access to previously unavailable capital to improve the infrastructure and create more space for kids. Loans would be used to build new classrooms and hire more teachers, thus increasing the student body and the revenue from fees.
School improvement funds were also used to build gender separate bathrooms, which had the particular impact of making it easier for girls to stay in school once they reached puberty.
Parents, for the most part, are very committed to keeping their kids in school and will make great sacrifices to make that happen. The short-term school fee loan funds were a form of bridge financing that made it possible for parents with irregular income, such as seasonal agriculture sales, to keep their kids in school for the whole school year.
This had the obvious benefit of providing better education of the kids, while also improving the sustainable revenue of the school – imagine the challenge of paying teaching staff if half the school fees dry up partway through the school year…
Training in school quality was also critical, as school Directors and teaching staff focused on a range of quality improvement initiatives in a cluster format with other schools.
Since the first loans in 2009, this has evolved into a sophisticated and holistic Opportunity International program addressing Education Finance and Education Quality.
To leverage the amount of capital needed, Opportunity International now provides technical assistance to lending institutions to help them provide financial services to schools.
And we have developed a comprehensive Education Quality program called Pathways to Excellence – a self-diagnostic tool that covers 42 domains of education.
With these efforts multiplied over thousands of schools, the impact in addressing the global education gap is significant.
As of July 2019, over four million kids have been provided access to quality education, with over US$240 million in loans to almost 10,000 schools in 20 countries. And we’re just getting started.
In January of 2019, I visited a little school called Rayito del Sol in the Pedro Brand neighbourhood of Santo Domingo. The neighbourhood is poor and lacking access to quality education. Esmayron, the Director, had just opened the school, having worked the previous eight years as a teacher at another school that was part of the Opportunity International Education Finance program.
One of the key elements of the Education Quality training program is Inclusion. Thanks to funding from Canadian donors, our partner in the DR has been able to implement a significant inclusion focused program called Through Inclusion We Grow.
This brings up another troubling issue. In developing countries, kids with cognitive and physical disabilities have significantly larger barriers to education. Often both parents need to work or in the case of a single mom, there is no one to look after the kids and childcare is unaffordable. This can result in kids being locked alone in rooms for entire days, receiving little developmental stimulus.
Rayito del Dol is committed to reaching a 20-25% inclusion rate. They had only been in operation for five months, and had 61 kids – ten with special needs, seven teachers and two special needs assistants.
It was simply inspiring to see the students and staff embrace the special needs kids in much of the regular programming, with some amazing stories already emerging of great development progress being made in a short time.
The Opportunity International Education Finance and Education Quality programs have brought the power of microfinance to thousands of schools and created quality educational opportunities for millions of kids – one of the most significant poverty reduction strategies.
Dan