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II. BOOK PROVISION IN 1990 |
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EFA
objectives |
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Both the
World Declaration on Education for All and its accompanying
Framework for Action are concerned with broad policy goals and
targets, in only some of which the provision of school books
and learning materials play a part. With respect to that
provision, the Framework for Action sets out the following
principles:
Addressing the basic learning needs of all means
capitalizing on the use of traditional and modern
information media and technologies, both of which should be
designed to ensure equitable access, sustained
participation, and effective learning
achievement.
National
and subnational planning should cover, among other subjects,
the basic learning needs to be met, the languages to be used
in education, ways of mobilizing family and local community
support, requirements for capital and recurrent resources,
possible measures for cost effectiveness, targets and
specific objectives, and indicators and procedures for
monitoring progress towards those targets.
Attention should be paid to reduction of inefficiency
in the public sector and exploitative practices in the
private sector; provision of improved training for public
administrators and of incentives to retain qualified women
and men in public service; and provision of measures to
encourage wider participation in the design and
implementation of basic education programs
Efficiency in basic education does not mean providing
education at the lowest cost, but rather the most effective
use of all resources (human, organizational, and financial)
to produce the desired levels of access and of necessary
learning achievement.
Pre- and
in-service training programs for key personnel should be
initiated, or strengthened where they do exist. [In this
context, curriculum developers are mentioned, but not
publishing professionalism.]
The
quality and delivery of basic education can be enhanced
through the judicious use of instructional technologies,
such as educational radio and television, computers, and
audio-visual instructional devices), which over time will
become less expensive and more adaptable to a range of
environments.
Existing
regional partnerships will need to be strengthened and
provided with the resources necessary for their effective
functioning in helping countries meet the basic learning
needs of their populations. |
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Textbook availability |
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Most
governments, and most educators, would like to provide every
student with a complete set of school books in every subject,
free of charge. That, at least, is the ideal target - a
textbook:pupil ratio of 1:1. In fact, it is a target imported
from the industrialized nations that may be unnecessarily
expensive. An often-quoted experiment in the Philippines
suggests that when school books are the property of the school
and are not taken home, there is only a marginal difference
between ratios of 1:1 and 1:2, and some experts have suggested
that a ratio of 1:3 should be regarded as satisfactory
(Brunswic and Hajjar 1992, 19). Very few countries outside the
industrialized North could afford to reach even the lowest of
these targets in 1990. Instead, as a result of global
recession and rising enrolments, the standard of textbook
provision deteriorated during the late 1970s and the 1980s
throughout Africa and in much of Latin America and Asia. It
was well below the ideal as the decade came to a close (Table
1).
A survey
in 1990-1 of Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Peru,
and Venezuela (members of SECAB, la Secretería de Educación
del Convenio Andés Bello) found that only 32% of pupils
between grades 1 and 5 had textbooks; variations between
countries ranged from 64% in Chile to 20% or less in Ecuador,
Peru, and Venezuela. In Mexico, the figure rose to 75% thanks
to a national textbook program; in Brazil, it was estimated at
about 33% (Lizarzaburu 1995). The national averages mask
serious variations, as the comments in Table 1 and the data in
Tables 2 and 3 demonstrate. In general, book provision was
much better in the cities and towns than in rural areas, and
areas that were difficult to reach had the fewest books -
sometimes none. The pattern of rural deprivation has been most
clearly documented in Africa. A summary of book sector studies
in eight African countries found satisfactory to good ratios
in the elite schools in important urban areas, but generally
low levels of textbook provision at the primary level. Angola,
Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania recorded primary-level
textbook:pupil ratios of 2:3 or better in urban areas, but
1:20 or worse elsewhere. In Nigeria, the situation grew
notably worse as one travelled northwards; in the majority of
schools visited during a book sector study the textbook:pupil
ratio was 1:10 and sometimes 1:100. In Tanzania, a
primary-level mathematics book that was available at a 1:3
ratio in the Southern Highlands plummeted to 1:700 in the Lake
zone. Only Sierra Leone had achieved a broad equity of supply
between rural and urban areas, at a ratio of 1:3, as a result
of an externally funded textbook project that paid particular
attention to distribution networks. (Before the project, the
ratio in Sierra Leone was close to 1:1,000.) At the secondary
level, few books were available in Angola, Tanzania, and
Zambia; in Kenya, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone the ratios were
between 1:10 and 1:28, implying only one or two textbooks per
class. Elite secondary schools, once again, were likely to
have more textbooks. Most of the textbooks in the secondary
schools had been repaired and maintained for 15 to 20 years
(Buchan et al. 1991, 13, 15, 98, 118). |
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Table
1. Availability of Textbooks in Selected Countries, Various
Years (not available) |
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Table
2. Textbook availability in first-level education, 1991 survey
(not available) |
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Table
3. Textbook availability in primary schools (not
available) |
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Variations
between subjects and grades have also been noted. In Burundi,
books were available only for language arts subjects in French
and Kirundi (Eisemon 1993, 133). The SECAB survey of grades 1
to 5 in six South American countries found that while 70% of
the students had textbooks in Spanish language, only 30% had
textbooks in mathematics and fewer than 10% had them in
science and social science (Lizarzaburu 1995).
Where
books were provided free of charge, those for a particular
subject or grade were often unavailable when needed because of
delays in printing and distribution. Where books were sold,
variations reflected parental priorities and incomes. Parents
were more likely to buy books in subjects that would
contribute to their child's future financial success. In
provinces of China where rural schools had little in the way
of state-provided learning resources and parents bought books,
teachers in the poorest areas sometimes bought books for
children from their own salaries (Colclough and Lewin 1993,
92).
At the
tertiary level, textbooks in Africa and many other countries
were in chronically short supply. A great majority were
imported, and had become prohibitively expensive, despite
schemes sponsored by the British and French governments to
supply special low-cost editions. Shortages were more serious
in teacher training and vocational institutes than in
universities (Buchan et al. 1991, 16). |
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Quality of textbooks |
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The
translation of broad curriculum outlines to a concrete book is
no simple task. The book must be written at a level of
concept, content, and vocabulary that is appropriate for the
majority of pupils at the grade level and in a way that,
ideally, will interest and motivate them. It must be
consistent in approach, method, and explanation. It should be
of use to the less qualified teacher but allow the good
teacher to expand upon its content. Writing a good textbook
requires the skills of a subject specialist, a curriculum
expert, a good teacher with classroom experience, and an
imaginative author, and as a result the writing of such books
is increasingly a team effort.
In 1990
there was ample evidence that the books used in schools in
many parts of the world fell below these standards. They
suffered from poor instructional design, particularly in the
scope and sequence of material. A study of textbooks for
grades 1, 3, and 5 in 15 countries (cited in Lockheed 1993,
22) found that for the earlier grades the material in
mathematics and reading was too difficult; in grade 5, the
mathematics books were also too difficult but the reading
books would have been more suitable for students in grades 2
and 3. Textbooks in Pakistan were characterized by poor
language grading from one level to another and even between
subjects at the same level; teachers said the books were
overly difficult for their students. Difficult books in the
early grades were seen as contributing to the high early
drop-out rate in many countries.
A study of
textbooks in Mozambique found that, while they followed the
established curriculum, they were generally too theoretical
and lacked sufficient linkages to the everyday experiences of
the target users (Sida 1996, 11). Neumann (1980, 63) quoted a
deputy minister of education in the Philippines as saying that
textbooks in his country should be aimed towards the schools
in poor villages; nevertheless, most of the officially
approved school books in the 1980s catered for the urban
elite.
Textbooks
also suffered from errors in fact and grammar, inappropriate
illustrations, and a poor choice of language or script. In
many of the African countries, books were written in English,
French, or Portuguese, even though in any one country fewer
than 20% of the population was likely to be literate in any
one of these metropolitan languages (Altbach 1995, 289; Bgoya
1997, 34). Textbooks in the republics of the USSR were in
Russian, ignoring local languages such as Azeri, Turkmen,
Kazakh, Uzbek, and Kyrgyz. In Pakistan (Lockheed 1993, 22),
children could not read fluently the Arabic style Nasakh
script favoured by the curriculum developers and textbook
writers, and as a result depended on their teachers to read
the books for them and summarize the lessons.
In text
and illustration, the books tended to reinforce traditional
views of men and women. Lockheed and Verspoor (1991, 149-50)
cite various studies showing girls or women in passive roles.
A primary book in Swaziland depicted a boy happily playing
ball and a girl shying away from a snake. In the 29 most
widely used primary textbooks in Peru, three-quarters of all
references to and illustrations of people were of men. Similar
discrepancies characterized the representation of men and
women in school books from Costa Rica, Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Yemen, and Zambia. There were
signs of change. In Costa Rica, after new books were produced
with USAID support, the proportion of women and girls in
illustrations rose from 25% to 31%; female figures no longer
were shown as less dependent and more often in stereotypically
male roles; males were sometimes shown as caring for children
or undertaking domestic tasks.
To an
increasing extent, even in former colonial countries,
textbooks were being written by local experts. European books
were no longer being adapted, and even transnational
publishers were using local authors with local teaching
experience. If the books were less perfect pedagogically than
their Northern counterparts, they were less eurocentric and
thus more related to the experience of pupils (Rathgeber 1992,
82).
In most
countries, the physical quality of the books was well below
Northern standards (Buchan et al. 1991,36-7, Lockheed 1993,
24). Imported paper was expensive, binding facilities limited,
and machinery old and in need of repair. As a result, books
were too often poorly printed on low-grade paper, inadequately
bound by the adhesive ("perfect") method, and used only black
and white illustrations of varying quality. Such books could
not stand up to the rigours of rainy climates, when pupils
often had to walk long distances between home and school.
Everywhere, the perfect-bound books were apt to fall apart.
Externally funded textbook projects often used better paper
and their products could be expected to last three years or
more. Some incorporated four-colour printing, a feature that
might be difficult to retain after the project
closed.
The number
of subjects, and therefore the number of textbooks, was
increasing in some countries. This trend was evident in Africa
(Buchan 1991, 6; Brunswic and Hajjar 1992, 9), where it was
increasing strains on budgets and teachers. In most cases,
however, only core subjects were actually available, and some
countries were reversing the trend. Mozambique, for example,
had decided to concentrate on six core subjects for Grade 5 as
opposed to the 11 subjects then taught in Tanzania. Ethiopia
had decided to teach three subjects (natural and exact
sciences and geography) as environmental studies, with a
single textbook. |
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Use of
textbooks |
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Statistics
of textbook provision are notoriously unreliable. Books that
are reported to have been produced do not always reach the
schools. They may be damaged in transit, pilfered, or, more
commonly, held up in district storehouses for lack of
resources to carry them further. Those that reach the schools,
moreover, may not be used in the classroom. This was
apparently often the case in 1990.
The
reasons for non-use varied. In some countries, government
regulations made ill-paid teachers responsible for replacing
lost and damaged books, and as a result teachers kept the
books locked up. Teachers were not trained in the methods of
new textbooks, and therefore hesitated to use them, or were
reluctant to use them because their interests and experiences,
and those of their students, were not reflected in the
content. Some teachers felt threatened by new textbooks, and
there was some evidence (cited in Psacharopoulos and Woodhall
1985, 221) that less experienced teachers, who might be
expected to benefit most from a carefully prepared textbook,
were less likely to use them than their more experienced
colleagues. |
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Teachers' guides and supplementary
materials |
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Teachers'
guides were seldom available in developing countries. Lockheed
and Verspoor (1991, 53) cite various studies: schools in
Guinea-Bissau had guides only for grade 1; in Malawi, fewer
than 15% of teachers had received a guide for a subject other
than English; in rural Brazil, only 44% of teachers had
received teachers' guides. Where textbooks were bought by
parents rather than provided by the state, teachers' guides
were apt to be in particularly short supply. Moreover, many
guides were unrelated to the ability of the average classroom
teacher and were often designed without consideration of the
teacher's reading fluency or the conditions under which the
guides would be read; small type, for example, was ill-suited
to be read in the poor lighting of rural communities (Buchan
et al. 1991, 7).
Where
textbooks were in short supply, supplementary materials might
be expected to be even more scarce. In many countries school
libraries either did not exist or had fallen into disrepair at
the primary and secondary levels, except in elite public or
private schools. Book stocks were outdated, and very often
eurocentric. At the tertiary level, textbooks and reference
works were so scarce that students resorted to wholesale
photocopying of library titles, if not to theft or mutilation.
Even university libraries that had been well stocked in the
past had been unable to buy many new books or journals for
some years. Public libraries, a resource for school children,
also deteriorated, although Mexico (Magaloni 1993, 81) was
remarkable in creating some 3,500 new public libraries in the
period 1982-92 in a national system that served 71 million
readers stretching from the capital to remote villages
isolated by mountains, river, and jungle.
In nine
African countries surveyed in book sector studies, libraries
and supplementary materials were seriously underfunded as
governments channelled scarce resources primarily into
textbooks. The majority of primary and secondary
schoolchildren had no access to books or other reading
materials apart from textbooks. Most books that were available
were European in origin and inappropriate in content. There
were not enough books about African history, geography,
literature, or cultures. Teachers and principals were not
trained in the maintenance and use of school libraries. At the
secondary level, school libraries were disintegrating in
stock, buildings, furniture, and trained staff. In some
countries, governments distributed supplementary reading
materials to the schools but did not develop the
infrastructure to store and use them. Sierra Leone, however,
did take that important basic step and, as a result,
supplementary materials it had distributed to the schools five
years earlier were still in place (Buchan et al. 1991, 53-6;
British Council 1992, 17-20).
Schools
that did have supplementary materials performed better than
those that did not. The Escuela Nueva program in Colombia used
a variety of instructional materials, including school
libraries, to great effect. High achieving schools in Thailand
benefited from community support for the purchase of
supplementary text materials. Supplementary materials were
also reported to have been used successfully at the Gonakelle
school in Sri Lanka and in adult literacy programs in Nepal
(Lockheed and Levin 1993, 9). |
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Methods of textbook provision |
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Pupils in
public systems of education received textbooks in one of three
ways:
1
Provided free of charge by the state This was the method
followed in many countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and
the socialist republics of eastern Europe and western Asia.
Free provision was more common in primary schools than at the
secondary level. Books might be produced cheaply and given to
the pupils each year for them to keep (as in the soviet
republics), or given to the schools and lent to the pupils for
their use during the school year on the understanding that
they would be returned.
The
provision of free books was intended to ensure equity in
availability (although it did not) and responded to a
viewpoint expressed by one Mexican expert (quoted in Neumann
1980, 54) that "if a government says that elementary education
becomes an obligation for every citizen, then the government
should provide the facilities for such education." Remarkably,
in some African countries university students were given free
tuition and free books but primary students were expected to
pay for books, thus reinforcing an elite at the expense of the
broader population (Psacharopoulos and Woodhall 1985, 187).
2 Sold
through commercial channels Parents or students bought
books, usually through retail outlets. The price of books
might be subsidized by the state, sometimes with external
assistance. Textbooks were sold at the primary level in some
countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
In the newly industrialized countries of Asia, textbooks were
generally published by privately owned companies that worked
closely with the educational authorities but usually received
only limited assistance or subsidy from the government.
Practices could vary within a single country: in Nigeria,
primary-level textbooks were free in the Northern states but
sold in the Southern and Eastern states (Altbach 1985, 290;
Buchan et al. 1991, 20-1).
Selling
the book inevitably led to inequities. First, bookstores were
located primarily in the urban centres, although textbooks (a
short-term investment with rapid turnover) might be sold at
the beginning of the school year in stationery shops and other
small retail outlets elsewhere. In the primarily rural
Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, for example,
textbooks produced by the provincial textbook board were sold
through a network of wholesale distributors and retailers that
stretched from the provincial capital into the villages.
Second, not all parents could afford to buy textbooks for
their children. In Côte d'Ivoire, a textbook cost about
one-tenth of the monthly salary of the head of an average
family (Newton 1995, 378). Where books were in particularly
short supply, as in Angola, a black market operated with high
markups. Third, textbooks might not be available when needed
because of inefficient ordering by the retailers or delays in
shipping, which could be especially serious in a country or
region with many islands, such as the Philippines or eastern
Caribbean.
3 Book
rental Under this method, a school bought or was given
class sets or part class sets of books and issued the books to
the pupils in return for an annual fee. The books would be
returned at the end of the year for re-use. The fee was set to
recover part or all of the cost of replacing the books, and to
that end the rental income was placed in a revolving fund.
This method allowed educational authorities to amortize the
cost of books over a three- to five-year period, depending on
the anticipated life of the textbook, and thus reduce the
annual cost to the pupils or their parents. Such a system had
been operating successfully in Lesotho for eight years,
despite some problems, including delinquency in payments and
inaccurate projections of needs. The government was planning,
however, to supplement rental fees with an annual allocation
to cover the costs of distribution and administration (Buchan
et al 1991, 20; British Council 1992, 14-15). Rental schemes
were seen as particularly desirable at the secondary level,
but could operate in primary and tertiary institutions. In a
variation on such schemes, parents might be required to
supplement government allocations. In Fiji, for example,
because a flat grant from the Ministry of Education for each
enrolled pupil was not large enough to cover full operating
costs, some school committees charged parents a small sum for
the purchase of textbooks, library books, and other materials
(UNESCO 1986, 11). In private schools, students would normally
be expected to buy textbooks, which might or might not be the
same as those used in the public system. |
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Production of textbooks |
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Historically, the provision of textbooks in developing
countries followed three stages. Initially, the countries
imported existing books from the North, usually from the
colonial or former colonial power. Next, they began using
adapted versions of foreign books, modified to meet local
needs and experience, and often published by transnational
companies based in the former colonial power. In the third
stage, books were written and produced locally, often by the
state.
By 1990
most countries had achieved local production, at least of
primary texts, although specialized secondary textbooks were
more likely to be adapted and tertiary texts often were
imported. Typically, each country sought to produce its own
books, sometimes without taking advantage of possible
adaptations that would benefit from investments already made
by other publishers in developing instructional methods.
International trade in textbooks, either as licensing of
adaptations or as imports of finished books, generally
followed the path of North to South from the metropolitan
countries of Europe and North America . To support local
production, some countries imposed regulatory barriers.
Zimbabwe, which secured its books entirely from the private
sector, required local reprinting of foreign-originated books
that sold more than 5,000 copies, and indeed had begun
exporting textbooks to neighbouring countries (Rathgeber 1992,
87-8; Brunswic and Hajjar 1992, 12).
Local
production was common even in sub-Saharan Africa, where
large-scale book production was still relatively new and where
the shortage of books was so acute that Hans Zell, the
principal chronicler of African publishing, could exclaim
(Zell 1990, 21) that "The picture of Africa at the end of the
1980s is largely that of a bookless society."
In
anglophone sub-Saharan Africa, British transnationals (notably
Macmillan, Heinemann, Oxford, Longman) had established sales
offices which, in the more populated countries, functioned as
regional publishers. As a result of the economic recession of
the 1980s, many of these transnational branches closed,
leaving behind trained editors and other staff who were ready
to begin their own enterprises. By 1990 several branches had
passed to private local ownership or control (for example, in
Kenya and Nigeria). Elsewhere, foreign publishers entered into
joint ventures with locally owned publishers of textbooks,
which were often parastatal organizations in which the state
retained a controlling share. Namibia, unlike other anglophone
countries of Africa, still depended primarily on imports, in
its case from South Africa.
The
countries of francophone Africa still imported large
quantities of textbooks from France. In 1987, francophone
Africa, excluding the Magreb, represented 13% of the export
market for French books, even though prices there averaged 44%
more than those in other French export markets that benefited
from cheaper insurance and shipping and lower risk (Prillaman
1992, 199). In 1990, 10 countries of francophone Africa
imported FF 163.7 million worth of books from France; in six
of the 10, textbooks accounted for almost two-thirds of the
total book imports; in the other four, where Arabic was a
significant language, the textbook proportion shrank to 36%
(Newton 1995, 376). French publishers also had stakes in
locally controlled textbook publishing houses. Local print
runs could be substantial: le Centre d'édition et distribution
africain (CEDA), owned jointly by the government of Côte
d'Ivoire and the French publisher Hatier, printed 250,000
copies of one textbook.
Regional
cooperation in publishing was rare. The ministries of
education of eight francophone countries of sub-Saharan
Africa, however, began the process in 1988 by identifying core
subjects, such as French, mathematics, and science, in which
they could develop common curricula and textbooks. By 1990
they were well under way to producing the first books in
mathematics (British Council 1992, 23).
In both
anglophone and francophone Africa, state-owned and parastatal
publishers benefited from hidden subsidies (for example, rent
and staff costs that did not need to be recovered from sales,
tax exemptions on supplies, subsidized state-owned or
parastatal printing). Locally owned private publishers
occasionally ventured into the school market, but for the most
part they were marginalized by the much larger transnational,
foreign, state-owned, or parastatal textbook publishing
operations. |
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The
role of the state in school book provision |
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In
virtually every country of the world, the state is involved to
some extent in the provision of learning materials - at the
very least by establishing the curricula on which school books
are based and, even in the freest of markets, by buying some
or all of the materials used in the public system. In most of
the world outside Western Europe and North America, the state
played a much greater role than that in 1990. In many
countries, the same Ministry of Education unit that defined
the curriculum was also responsible for writing the books to
support it. School books were printed in plants that were
owned by governments or parastatals. Books were published by
the Ministry or by parastatals under its control. Distribution
also was often the responsibility of the Ministry or a
parastatal. In some countries, particularly those with
communist or strongly socialist governments, the entire
process - from writing to use in the schools - was carried out
by government ministries or agencies. In the USSR, for
example, all curricular materials were designed, controlled,
manufactured, and distributed free of charge, in sufficient
quantities, by the state; the republics all had a uniform
supply of such materials and followed the same curricula. In
other countries the private sector might be involved in one
stage or more of textbook provision. However, even in some
countries with large commercial publishing industries, such as
India, the state might retain responsibility for publishing
textbooks for the public system.
Searle
(1985, 9) listed possible combinations of private and state
engagement and showed how functional responsibilities were
divided in 25 countries where the World Bank had financed
projects that had textbook provision as a component (Table 4).
Almost all the projects were in four regions: Eastern Africa,
Western Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and East Asia
and the Pacific. The diversity of patterns was remarkable. For
the 25 countries examined there were 19 different patterns or
arrangements of the four aspects of textbook provision
considered. Only two patterns recurred.
State
predominance was more evident in the ten African countries
surveyed by Brunswic and Hajjar (Table 5). In most of the
countries of francophone Africa, a specialized institution
(commonly called l'Institut pédagogique national) was
responsible for developing editorial guidelines, preparing
manuscripts, and commissioning, publishing, printing, and/or
approving textbooks. In Sénégal and Togo, the Ministry of
Education had direct responsibility (Newton 1995,
374).
In some
countries, state involvement in the provision of learning
materials, as in other parts of the economy, was a matter of
ideology. In others it began as a response to perceived
necessity. With independence, former colonies had no
indigenous source of school books. Foreign publishers who had
supplied textbooks in the past were suspect as agents of
colonialism, and were themselves wary of investing in or
extending credit to the newly independent countries. Yet there
was an immediate need, not only in the former colonies but
everywhere in the developing world, for cheap books to educate
growing populations in curricula that had been revised to meet
new national conditions and aspirations, and at the higher
level to meet the demand for trained professionals and public
servants. The private sector of most countries did not have
the infrastructure or the capital to meet this challenge, and
most families did not have the money to |
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Table
4. Alternatives for implementing textbook provision (not
available) |
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Table
5. Functional responsibilities in 10 African countries with
respect to textbooks (number of countries under each function)
not availble |
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buy
commercially produced books at full cost. Very small
countries, such as the island states of the South Pacific, had
no alternative to state responsibility. The task was taken on
by government, if not from political belief, by default.
State
involvement was seen as a means of controlling the use of
scarce resources and subsidies. It was believed to be
economical because it eliminated the markups and profit of
commercial printing, publishing, and bookselling. The Ministry
could determine quantities and schedules and ensure they were
met. Those transnational publishers who continued to do
business in developing countries were not averse to working
with governments, particularly if in that way they could
secure a monopoly or dominant position in providing textbooks
(Altbach 1996, 4). The World Bank and other major bilateral
donors also worked with governments as a matter of policy, and
in two early large projects in the Philippines and Indonesia
(and in others later) encouraged the development of a central
agency to develop, produce, and distribute textbooks. A study
sponsored by the World Bank (Lockheed and Verspoor 1991, 128)
concluded that:
Developing sustainable capacity for creating,
testing, producing, and distributing student learning
materials - as well as teacher guides and in-service
training materials - requires a significant commitment of
the central ministry's resources. Experience in Bangladesh,
China, Ethiopia, and the Philippines suggests that textbook
agencies, whether autonomous or divisions of the (national
or federal) education ministry, are essential to
establishing and sustaining a program of materials
development ... Even small countries, where publishing
industries are relatively weak because the market for
textbooks is small, may have to set up a clearly defined
unit for developing instructional materials, carrying out
the design, development, and testing necessary to achieve
high quality, and managing the storage and distribution of
materials.
The
dominance of the state impeded the development of
private-sector educational publishing, and thus perpetuated
the need for state involvement in countries where it existed.
It also nurtured a "state provider" mentality (Brickhill et
al. 1996, 11) that proved difficult to dislodge.
Problems
commonly ascribed to government bureaucracies arose. Policies
changed and so did ministers. One major textbook project dealt
with eight ministers of education in four years, each with a
new approach to policy (Read 1992, 207). Civil servants were
often poorly motivated to seek economies and usually
inexperienced in publishing practices. In many countries they
were posted in and out of positions without regard to
continuity, at the sacrifice of institutional memory. There
was wastage and inefficiency, and some corruption -
unsurprising when civil service wages fell far behind the cost
of living. There was inadequate coordination among the various
functions of writing, production, and distribution. An adviser
to the World Bank (Neumann 1980) warned that when government
agencies produced textbook manuscripts for publication, the
procedure was fraught with political implications and conflict
of interest. Some of these problems bedeviled similar
experiments everywhere. In Sweden, for example (Gedin 1991,
137), a huge state-owned publishing house had collapsed under
the weight of a large bureaucracy and great financial
losses.
Separate
state-owned companies, or parastatals, were created in an
effort to retain government control without some of the
constraints of government personnel policies. They were given
considerable managerial and financial autonomy but received
funds and sometimes direction from the government. It was
expected that they would be managed more in line with
commercial publishing practices. Some parastatals were joint
ventures between the government and one or more foreign
commercial publishers. CEDA, previously mentioned, in which
the Ivorian government held 51%, was one such venture, as was
les Nouvelles éditions africaines, which, before its breakup
into three national companies in 1988, was owned jointly by
the governments of Sénégal, Côte d'Ivoire, and Togo (60%) and
a consortium of French firms and became a major force in
publishing with a long list of titles (Prillaman 1992, 200-1;
Zell 1990, 20). In anglophone Africa British publishers
entered into joint ventures with parastatals in Ghana,
Tanzania, and Uganda, experiments which Buchan (1992, 353)
characterized as "interesting and desirable ... but too often
the interests of overseas commercial publisher and local state
enterprise were too divergent for them to stay
together."
In
countries where the government dominated the writing and
publishing of learning materials, there was normally only one
textbook for each subject/level. This was the case in
countries that required a massive effort simply to produce the
single text in sufficient numbers, such as the Philippines and
Indonesia, in the socialist countries of Asia and eastern
Europe, in the USSR, and in many countries of Africa. In
countries that permitted private-sector educational
publishing, there might be a choice among competing textbooks,
although in some cases the market was dominated by a single
publishing house, local or foreign-owned. Zimbabwe and Nigeria
were among the few African nations that permitted multiple
choice in an open market in which schools chose the texts they
would use from a list of government-approved titles (Rathgeber
1992, British Council 1992, 8). |
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Constraints in provision |
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Educational publishers, whether state-controlled or
privately owned, faced serious constraints in 1990. The most
important were in financing, production, distribution,
information, and human resources.
Financing
Book publishing of any kind, but especially the publishing of
textbooks, is a capital-intensive business. It typically takes
three years to identify authors, plan, and write a textbook,
edit it, pre-test it in classrooms, prepare it for printing,
print and bind it, and deliver it to the schools. With luck,
the process may take less time, but more often it takes
longer. During this time staff and office expenses must be
paid, paper and other materials bought, printers paid. A
competitive textbook market involves additional expenses for
marketing and promotion. If the books are to be sold, it may
take two to three years more to recoup the capital investment.
The global
recession of the 1980s and the policies of structural
adjustment had a devastating effect on government budgets for
education, especially on non-salary items such as books.
Between 1985 and 1990, real public expenditure per student
fell at the primary level in seven of nine Latin American
countries for which data were available and in 13 of 20 in
Africa; it also fell at the secondary level in Africa (World
Bank 1995, 69). Budgets for classroom resources (books,
teaching aids, furniture, and other equipment) were already
low. When industrial countries were allocating 14% of
primary-school recurrent costs to classroom resources and 86%
to salaries, Asian countries were allocating 9% to classroom
resources and African countries only 4% (Psacharopoulos and
Woodhall 1985, 224). Expenditures on learning materials and
other non-salary recurrent expenses fell in countries
suffering from recession, sometimes to close to zero.
Supplementary materials were first to be affected, then
textbooks. The reduction in learning material procurement may
have slowed after the middle of the decade, but only because
by then salaries accounted for almost all recurrent
expenditures. The trend was felt most strongly in sub-Saharan
Africa. There, expenditure on educational materials
represented about 1% of the recurrent primary school budget in
1983, the equivalent of about US$0.60 per pupil. Given the
unequal distribution of books, rural areas suffered
disproportionately (Colclough and Lewin 1993, 168).
Within
this restricted market, educational publishers in the private
sector faced an additional hurdle: finding credit to
capitalize textbook projects. Interest rates rose under
structural adjustment, in some countries to 40% or more.
Banks, moreover, were reluctant to lend money to entrepreneurs
in a high-risk, low-profit industry, or to recognize books in
the warehouse or work in progress as collateral. Paper ceases
to be collateral as soon as it is printed upon.
Under the
stringency of falling export revenues, devaluation, inflation,
and structural adjustment, African governments increased
efforts to achieve partial or full recovery of costs in
textbooks. Lesotho's success has already been mentioned.
Ethiopia began charging for textbooks lent for the school
year, with 45% of the revenue being retained for printing more
books and the balance shared between the schools and the
regional offices; the latter was expected to use its share for
expanding school library facilities. Angola and Mozambique
sold textbooks but subsidized the price substantially. Uganda
experimented with a subsidized rental fee (Brunswick and
Hajjar 1992, ii; Buchan et al. 1991, 20).
Partial
cost recovery, of course, did no more than reduce the problem
of budget shortages. It did not make a nation's educational
publishing program financially self-sustaining. In Ghana, for
example, a long-established system of partial cost recovery
collapsed because revenue was insufficient to maintain supply.
Under new guidelines issued in 1987, textbooks were to be
rented for a fee that was based on the cost of production and
the expected life span of the books. (British Council 1992,
13-14).
For many
countries, cost recovery was a new approach beset with
problems. In Paraguay, for example, a government scheme to
sell textbooks for profit through its Internal Revenue Service
offices foundered, and 90% of the books were unsold (Searle
1985, 18). More commonly, books were unknowingly sold below
true cost because of inadequate bookkeeping in Ministry or
parastatal offices. In 1986 a World Bank publication suggested
a radically different approach - one that would be relatively
easy to administer if politically difficult - for cost
recovery in one sector to benefit another. The authors
proposed that governments eliminate the free tuition and
living allowances then commonly paid to African university
students (a practice that reinforced an already existing
elite) and invest the money thus saved in primary education.
They calculated that if 12 African countries were to eliminate
living allowances, the public resources thus freed would
allow, on average, an 18% expansion in the yearly budget for
primary education. Nationally, the figure ranged from just
under 3% in Sudan to more than 40% in Togo. If fees were
introduced to cover all the operating costs of higher
education, an additional expansion of 22.5% in primary
education would be possible (World Bank 1986, 21).
Production Paper was the single most expensive
item in book production costs, representing between 45% and
70% of the cost of manufacture. Most of the paper suitable for
books was produced in the North, and prices were set by demand
from the prime user, the United States. Countries which had
developed their own paper-making capacity often protected it
with high tariffs, even for educational purposes, and locally
produced paper was sometimes more expensive than superior
stock produced overseas. (In the North, in contrast, paper
represented about 30% of total manufacturing costs, reflecting
relatively higher costs of labour.)
Book
printing is specialized work, different in its requirements
from printing newspapers, magazines, or commercial products.
Capacity was limited by the number of book printers in most
countries and by the quality of their equipment. Costs were
driven up when presses and other machinery were old and
ill-maintained, occasioning frequent need for repairs and
consequent down time. Paper was misappropriated, damaged in
transit, or used inefficiently because of mismatches between
available sheet sizes and the printer's press size. A
publisher in one developing country suggested that paper
wastage from mismatching could reach as high as 50% (Priestley
forthcoming). Books were also delayed by mismatches in
equipment - most commonly between new high-speed presses and
outdated binding technology. The shortage of thread-binding
equipment forced dependence on adhesive binding and resulted
in books that fell apart. Printing and binding machinery,
spare parts, and materials were subject to high duties and
sales taxes. Under such conditions, quality suffered, as did
prices and schedules.
Local
control of publishing does not require local printing.
Commercial publishers in the North commonly crossed oceans in
search of the most cost-effective printing. Many governments
in the South, however, insisted that books be printed at home,
often in state-owned or parastatal plants, regardless of
efficiency or cost. In three of nine African countries
surveyed in book sector studies, local printing prices were
higher than could be obtained outside the country (Buchan et
al. 1991, 35). Donated printing equipment not infrequently sat
gathering dust for lack of trained operators or because there
was no local service agency to repair it. Some equipment stood
idle for much of the year because its capacity was far greater
than needed.
Distribution Geography impedes distribution in
much of the global South. Some countries are archipelagos -
there are 10,000 islands in Indonesia, and 7,000 in the
Philippines - or are themselves islands separated by ocean
from their neighbours. Transport is impeded by rivers,
mountains, deserts, jungles. Roads are poor, and trucking
often inadequate. Tens of thousands of schools are hours from
the nearest road, and books for them must be delivered by
canoe, head porterage, or pack animal. State-supported
distribution systems generally depended on teachers, parents,
or the community to carry learning materials from district
depots to isolated schools. Even that system was seen to be
breaking down as teachers' salaries dropped in real terms and
were paid less reliably.
Where the
state was responsible for distribution, books typically were
gathered in a central warehouse and shipped to district
depots, whence they were directed to schools. In some
countries there was an additional step, books going first to
regional depots, to be divided there for transshipment to
districts and thence to schools. At each stage, there was the
possibility of failure. District offices often lacked the
funds to pay forwarders, sometimes because the money had not
been provided, sometimes because they had never accounted
properly for the previous year's advance for that purpose.
Packaging and storage were often inadequate to protect the
books against water, insects, mould, and vermin. In one
instance during the rainy season in 1984, new books were
delivered to a regional store in Ghana that had no roof;
within days the books were soaked and useless (Read 1992,
314).
Books
could be delayed by erratic shipping schedules or by the
pursuit of economies. In order to ship books efficiently
orders were often consolidated, in which case the total order
could be held up until the last title was delivered by the
printer or publisher. Sometimes distribution costs were
unnecessarily high: in the scattered islands of the eastern
Caribbean, for example, textbooks were sometimes delivered by
freighter or even more expensive air freight, despite the
presence of a regular, reliable, and inexpensive domestic
service that provided baking flour to the islands by boat
(Clare 1993, 32).
Efficient,
economical distribution was further impeded by a lack of
adequate information from the schools. Depot storekeepers were
untrained in inventory control and maintenance. Books were
damaged, lost, or stolen. A combination of delays, from
development through to distribution, could result in books
being delivered a year, or even three years, behind schedule
(Searle 1985, 23). |
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In most
countries where books were sold through retail outlets,
bookstores were scarce in the urban centres and almost unknown
outside the cities. Distribution depended on an informal
network of suppliers.
Information Efficient provision requires
accurate and timely information on which to project
enrolments, and therefore textbook needs, by school, grade and
subject. Central planners need data on the number, size, and
type of schools; current enrolments by grade, school, sex, and
age; historical and projected rates of change in enrolment;
numbers of teachers; numbers of school libraries, and so on.
This kind of information was difficult to accumulate in
countries where communication by telephone or mail was
unreliable. Data were incomplete, sometimes false, more often
outdated, and pitted with errors created during collation at
several steps up the ladder to the central office.
Human
resources Ministry of Education staff were rarely familiar
with printing and publishing practices. Curriculum developers
were often expected to make major decisions with little or no
idea about the implications in cost or time involved. Costs
were inflated by ill-informed decisions about book length,
illustrations, colours, and format. Government, parastatal,
and private-sector publishers all suffered from a lack of
trained personnel - authors, editors, evaluators, designers,
production coordinators, distribution and warehouse
supervisors, financial and publishing managers. Some
publishing institutions obtained training through partnership
with overseas commercial publishers. Others sent staff to
short-term training courses within Africa or for long-term
training abroad, but these resources in 1990 were still
relatively limited. |
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The
role of funding agencies and donors |
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To fund
the growing needs of education, governments looked for
international help. The World Bank expanded its mandate from
project-related vocational training to provide support for
school buildings, textbooks, curriculum development, and
institutional development. The proportion of education
projects with textbook components grew steadily, from about 6%
before 1974 to 32% in 1979-83 to almost 65% by 1990 (Read
1992, 308). In northeast Brazil, a Bank project tripled the
number of students receiving textbooks; in the Philippines, a
massive effort was funded to reduce the textbook:pupil ratio
from 1:10 to 1:2 (Lockheed 1993, 24). In three projects alone,
in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Ethiopia, more than 350
million textbooks were produced. The process was not without
growing pains, however, as Barbara Searle (1985, 25)
recognized in a review of the Bank's educational projects over
the previous 10 years. She identified serious shortcomings:
This
review makes it clear that at least some of the projects
approved early in this decade recognized that textbook
publishing is complex and highly technical; that it requires
professional competence in many specialties; and that
developing a good textbook takes time, three years at a
minimum. Yet, even with this recognition, projects
underestimated the difficulties. Of the nine projects
surveyed, only three ... left behind functioning textbook
provision schemes. Beyond this, the completed projects
provide evidence for shortfalls in every aspect of textbook
provision: poor quality books, inadequate distribution
systems, inability to establish and maintain production
schedules, inadequate procedures for handling paper
procurement, teacher training activities out of phase with
book publication, poor coordination between curriculum and
manuscript development, and, above all, failure to establish
institutions that can continue to provide good quality books
after project completion.
Ninety per
cent of the 48 projects she reviewed financed the purchase or
printing of textbooks, but fewer than half included teacher
training, monitoring and evaluation, or dealt with policy
changes. Only half the projects that provided books also
financed manuscript development and book distribution, and
only half of those (11 projects) also financed teacher
training. Only 10 projects explicitly dealt with the
institutional structure of the textbook provision system and
modified it in some way. She concluded that
the
likelihood of a textbook component attaining its objectives
is directly related to the extent to which the project
design addresses all aspects of the textbook provision
system. It is not crucial that a project finance every
component. However, the analysis of the system that is
undertaken during preparation and appraisal must include all
aspects to make sure that the entire supporting system is in
place and functioning well (Searle 1985,
18).
The World
Bank was the leading, but not the only international, agency
supporting textbook provision. The British Overseas
Development Administration had textbook programs in Sierra,
Leone, Jamaica, and Jordan. Its three-year project in Sierra
Leone, where there was no publishing capacity when financing
began in 1984, extended beyond book provision to creation of
school storage and a school management system, teacher
training in a new curriculum and use of textbooks, warehouse
improvement, and training of publishing staff (Buchan 1992,
360-1). In francophone Africa, l'Agence de coopération
culturelle et technique, supported by France, Canada, and
Belgium, distributed dictionaries and reading materials to
schools, and in 1990 was organizing a training program in
printing, publishing, book distribution and bookstore
management (Prillaman 1992, 205-6). Scandinavian governments
were notable for their support of book development. The
Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida)
was active in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau,
Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia; the Finnish International
Development Agency (FINNIDA), in Namibia and Zambia; and
Danish International Development Assistance (Danida), in
Burkina Faso, Nepal, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.
Non-governmental organizations, often with funding from their
national government's aid agency, played a small but
increasing role as well. The Canadian Organization for
Development through Education (CODE), for example, supplied
paper and distributed supplementary materials, and several
book-related organizations in Europe organized short training
courses.
The
smaller contributions were generally ad hoc, uncoordinated,
and short-term. Individual agencies had their own agendas,
political or altruistic. Several projects involved the supply
of paper, a short-term solution to immediate needs that could
have the longer-term effect of distorting the market. (Unless
the equivalent cost of the donated paper was recognized when
it was used, book prices would rise abruptly when the supply
ended and paper had again to be bought on the market. Then
fiscal allocations for textbooks would have to be increased
or, more often, textbook provision sharply reduced.) Equipment
was too often supplied without spare parts or technical
support for maintenance and repair. One-time seminars and
workshops were held for writers, editors, publishers,
printers, and booksellers, but with little or no follow-up,
and funding agencies were sometimes disappointed to find that
people, once trained, moved from school book publishing to
better paying jobs. Funders complained that they had
difficulty in identifying all the links in the publishing
chain and in understanding the broad concerns that underlay
what might seem a simple project. The impact of much of the
effort was short-lived and local (Priestley 1993, 215;
Priestley forthcoming).
One major
exception was a loan guarantee scheme started in Kenya by the
Dag Hammarskjøld Foundation, with support from the Ford
Foundation of US$300,000. The Foundation negotiated with local
banks to guarantee credit extended to local publishers in a
normal way. Kenya was chosen because it had a well developed
book market, but one then dominated by transnational
publishers. Eleven applications for loans were accepted under
the scheme. There were problems in communication - the banks
initially expected to be repaid as soon as books were
published, not understanding that it takes time to recover
publishing costs through sales - and some of the borrowers ran
into difficulty because of financial or marketing
inexperience. Nevertheless, only three publishers failed to
repay their loans and had to be rescued by the guarantee. The
scheme was significant in assisting the indigenization of
Heinemann Kenya which now, as East African Educational
Publishers Limited, is one of the strongest publishing houses
on the continent. The project showed that small publishers who
are able to gain access to commercial credit and who manage
their finances carefully can succeed, even with interest rates
as high as 30% to 40% (Priestley 1993, 216; Davies 1997,
86-9). |
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Table
6. Different types of aid to primary education, 1981-1986 (%
of total) not availble |
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Major
funders generally were more interested in institutional
development than in supplying learning materials. They
believed that direct support to pupils and teachers would be
less efficient than funding central units for teacher
training, curriculum development, and educational planning
that could increase the effectiveness of the entire system
(Colclough and Lewin 1993, 251). Books and instructional
materials received only a small percentage of total donor aid
to education (Table 6).
Major
textbook projects, moreover, were directed to short-term gains
to overcome immediate and urgent shortages. Typically, they
lasted three to five years and gave little attention to
building local publishing capacity. The size, urgency, and
complexity of the projects precluded local publishers from
participating. That responsibility devolved on ministries and
parastatals which were themselves ill-prepared and which,
outside the project's funding, were at the mercy of
legislative budget allocations and government policy changes.
There was no long-term approach, among funders or governments,
to the sustainable provision of learning materials.
There was,
however, a growing interest in cooperation among donors and
funding agencies. They met together, formally or informally,
to discuss possible joint projects or to exchange information.
Some donors preferred that these meetings be held only at the
invitation of, and with full participation by, the potential
recipients of aid; others were satisfied to meet as a donor
group and offer a package of assistance. Some recipients saw
the second approach as unfair "ganging up" on recipients
(Priestley 1993). Donors for African Education, which had been
started during the 1980s as a donors' club to promote
collaboration in educational projects and programs in Africa
and thereby avoid competition and duplication, eventually
expanded its membership in response to such concerns and, to
emphasize partnership over assistance, changed its name to the
Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA).
Its Working Group on Books and Learning Materials, established
in 1989, included African ministries of education as well as
development agencies concerned with book development and
procurement (Treffgarne 1999, 20). |
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