Presented in 3rd
NGO Forum on International Environmental Cooperation in China
Dale Wen, Ph.D.
Abstract:
The
best people to protect the environment are often the local villagers, but to do
so, they need the chance to get basic education. As board/staff member, I am
familiar with the operation of three US-based NGOs whose mission is to improve
education opportunities for poor children in rural China: EDF, Enlightening
Education Project (EEP), and Overseas China Education Foundation (OCEF). While
fund raising is the major challenge in US, other challenges arise in China: How
to effectively use donors’ money, how to collaborate with the local people and
local government to facilitate the building of civil society, etc..
Some common mistakes, which I will illustrate
by case studies, are:
1. Assigning funds to a specific project
without first negotiating with the local authorities about whether the funds
can be matched.
2. Starting a project, such as building a school,
without involving the local villagers, who can provide their own share of labor
and material.
3. Building a project, like a library,
without first deciding who will pay for maintenance.
Some well-known challenges, which are not
easily solved, are:
4. Success often depends on good contacts
with high-ranking Chinese officials.
5. Local officials tend to spend too much
money treating visiting inspectors well, diverting funds from their real
purpose.
6. Competent inspectors are needed in China,
who will control the projects on a volunteer basis.
As I will argue, the EEP has been very
successful at recruiting local support (problems 1 and 2), building more than
300 schools for as little as $2,500-$3,800 each. Because the local people's
money and sweat went into these schools, this motivates them to keep these
schools up and running (problem 3). The EDF has very good high-ranking contacts
(problem 4). The OCEF has the best network of volunteers in China (problem 6)
and established collaborations with other NGOs in China. By sharing their
experiences or contacts, these organizations may become more efficient. The
same lessons may also be valuable to environmental NGOs.
Acting together,
these organizations may also exert some influence on what is being taught at
schools. Most of the pupils that apply for assistance come from poor rural
families with several children. Resource pressure, environmental degradation,
women’s rights, and overpopulation are topics that should be taught to these
pupils, especially to girls, as they will have to deal with these issues in
their daily life.
To
protect their environment, people in rural China need some education, but it is
often hard for them to get it. Annually, more than 3 million children in China
drop out of elementary or middle school due to poverty [1]. Without proper
education, these people will probably be trapped in the vicious cycle of
poverty and they will be ill equipped to protect their natural environment. As board member/staff member, I am involved
with three US-based NGOs, which are trying to improve education opportunities
for poor children in rural China, and which are all entirely run by volunteers:
While fund raising is the major challenge in US, there are much more challenges in their China operation: How to effectively use the donor's money, how to collaborate with the local people and local government to facilitate the building of civil society in China, etc.. In the first section, I will discuss lessons learned from the operations of these organizations and suggest how they could become more efficient by collaborating and learning from each other. In the second section, I will argue that bringing kids back to school is not enough; it is also important what these kids are taught there. The current education system in rural area is ill suited for poverty alleviation and empowerment of the local people. Reform is urgently needed for rural education.
Section I: Successes and mistakes of educational NGOs
There are successes and mistakes to be told about the journey of these NGOs and lessons to be learned from it:
1.
A well-designed project should have maintenance and
usage planning in advance, and it should involve the local people at an early
stage.
After EDF spent
more than $10,000 to help a school build a library and computerize it, the
school refused to provide maintenance cost for the library and asked EDF for
continuing support. Though the school finally agreed to pay for the maintenance
themselves, this event cast doubt on whether they can maintain and use the
library properly and wisely.
2.
A good
project should provide the local people the right incentive to maximize project
benefit, instead of some perverse incentive to milk maximum resource out of the
NGO.
EDF once sponsored a school library to buy several computers and monitors, mainly for students to query book catalog and use the Internet. Upon auditing, they found the school bought the most expensive flat screen LCD monitors, which were totally unnecessary. By saying, “You said you need 2 computer s and 5 monitors. We are paying for them”, it provided the local people wrong incentives to buy the most expensive equipments; instead, one should say, “we are providing this fixed amount. If it is not enough, you have to pitch in yourself; if there is any money left, you can use it for other library improvement. Do your best to use the money wisely.”
3. A
good project should also get the local government involved and seek their
support at an early stage.
OCEF started a library-building project in 2003. Only after allocating funds to a specific library, they asked the local government to match these funds. The request was turned down. Though OCEF realized that local government’s support is important, they only tried to negotiate with the local authorities after they decided and allocated fund for the project. By that time, they already lost their leverage and negotiation power.
In contrast, EEP
has established a very efficient business model by doing all the above things
right. For the more than 300 schools built by EEP, the cost is $2,500 to $3,800
per school. By comparison, Hope Project (an NGO organized by the Chinese
government) has paid $20,000-$25,000 per school and Xin-xin (an NGO based in
the US) has paid $10,000 per school. For each school, EEP asks the local
government to match the fund, and asks the villagers to donate labor and
material. All these local resources and efforts have to come in first, before
the EEP provide the promised aid. This maximizes benefits for the donor’s
money. And more importantly, because the local people’s money and sweat goes
into the schools as well, this provides them strong incentives to keep the
schools up and running. EEP’s model is so successful that Overseas Chinese
Association (another NGO organized by the Chinese government) copied it and
built more than 100 schools in this way.
Fortunately, EDF
and OCEF are learning from their mistakes and the successful practice of EEP.
Take OCEF library-building project as an example: at the beginning their
standpoint was like this: “Library is such a foreign thing for these people in
the poorest areas, and it does not need labor or building material, what kind
of local involvement can it be? Absolutely nothing. We just donate lots of
books, and it should be beneficial to them.” However, now they realize that
without local involvement, the library might be closed most of the time, with
donated books staying on shelves gathering dust. Once they realize this
problem, lots of creative ideas were suggested, like: 1) Teachers, students and
villagers are consulted what kind of books they need; 2) Future continuing
support will be depending on the usage of the library; 3) With the donated
books and videos, teachers are asked to organize monthly book club or movie
night, and follow-up discussions. Some of these ideas have already been
implemented. OCEF also successfully get more leverage and support from the
local government for their later libraries as well.
4.
Success
often depends on good contacts with high-ranking Chinese officials.
EDF has very good high-ranking contacts, which helped it to register its China branch quite easily. In contrast, OCEF and EEP do not have officially registered China branches, because the process is too complicated. Several Chinese NGOs, with which they are collaborating, also could not officially register as NGO, even though one of them was so successful that it was reported by CCTV (China’s Central TV station).
5. Local
officials tend to spend too much money treating visiting inspectors well or
other showcases, diverting funds from their real purpose.
All three organizations are struggling with this issue: trying to pressure the local officials to spend less on banquets while maintaining a good working relationship. EEP is even going one step further: by acquiring government matching for all the schools they built, they make sure these limited educational budgets are spent on projects these poor people desperately need, instead of some showcase projects. Other organizations can learn from them about how to leverage their resources to push the government to better allocate its educational budgets.
6. Competent
inspectors and volunteers are needed in China, who can control the projects on
a volunteer basis.
EDF and EEP depend
heavily on US volunteers for scholarship delivery and inspection work. This
poses a big challenge when they try to scale up their operation. OCEF has
developed a volunteer network within China for this purpose. They also opened
an online forum for discussion, which has attracted people and organizations
inside China. Through these online discussions OCEF has also forged informal or
formal collaborations with several Chinese NGOs. Right now, OCEF has 150
volunteers in China and the number is growing very fast. Recently OCEF added
two key volunteers in Beijing to the board of trustees. Eventually, real change has to be brought by
Chinese people themselves, while overseas NGOs can best serve as catalyst in
the process. By cultivating its volunteer team in China, OCEF is making a big
contribution to the growth of civil society in China.
However, while volunteer activities are now growing in China, most volunteers are concentrated in more developed coastal areas or big cities, instead of the poorest regions these NGOs trying to help. Finding trustworthy and competent local volunteers remains a challenge.
By sharing their contacts and experiences,
these NGOs could improve their efficiency or expand their operation.
Section II:
What should be the purpose of rural education?
So far, a major part of these NGO’s
work is to bring kids back to school. However, this is not enough. In order to bring
effective education to rural areas, we should ask the deeper question: what is
the major purpose of rural education?
What should be taught in the classrooms?
Though Chinese people are famous for
their traditional emphasis on education, we should not forget that the purpose
of such education is often quite different from modern day public education.
Ever since the examination system was introduced more than one thousand years
ago, the main purpose of education is to achieve upward mobility instead of
giving everyone the knowledge and ability to improve his daily life. Such
relics still play an important role in today’s rural China. The dominant
purpose of the education system is to prepare the children for the national
college entrance exam: once they pass the exam, they are guaranteed a pass to
the cities, thus climbing up the social ladder for good. However, only a small
percentage of kids in the countryside can achieve this kind of upward mobility;
for the majority, the effect can be quite demoralizing: because they are not
good enough to pass the college entrance exam, the education system often
damages their self-confidence and capability, instead of building it. Also, as
the standard textbooks and the entire education system are largely controlled
by the urban elites, what is taught in the schools has little or no relevance
to the daily life of rural kids. This kind of education ensures a continuing
supply of cheap labor to the cities, however, it does not help much to improve
the livelihood of rural area; on the contrary, it may perpetuate the inferior
status of the countryside.
Also due to the disconnection
between education and daily life, local people are taught to blindly believe or
even worship modern technology. This often leads to misallocation of limited
resource. Two extreme cases:
1.
When an inspector went to visit a dropout kid, he found that
the family was indeed extremely poor: the house was so shabby that one could
see holes in the ceiling, the father was blind in one eye because of untreated
cataract, yet the father had a brand new up-scale cell phone on his belt.
2.
Many rural high schools use a big portion of their limited
budget to purchase expensive computers. But because they are unwilling to pay
the monthly fee for Internet connection, and because they are concerned that
too much usage may damage the expensive computers, plus lack of technical
support, many of these computers are being locked up and stay unused.
In these examples, modern equipments
like cell phones and computers were not purchased for their usefulness, but as
status symbols. While these extreme cases are ridiculous, we should notice its
connection with the dysfunctional education system.
Several other observations highlight the
inter-connected problems of rural areas, and the need for an integrated
solution:
1.
Most
children who apply for assistance are from multi-kids family.
This is a clear
failure of the population control and the related education. Though lots of
government effort is put into enforcing the one-child policy, educational
effort on population control is almost exclusively focused on adults (by then
it is often too late), instead of being integrated into school education. The
correlation between poverty and too many kids is quite obvious based on the data
collected by these NGO. However, most villagers and even schoolteachers are not
aware of this simple fact.
2.
Dropout
rates and illiteracy rates for girls are much higher than for boys.
Discrimination against girls is quite obvious in many families’ decision
regarding their kids’ education.
Education of girls and young women is the most cost-effective way to break the cycle of poverty [2]. While we may blame the poor villagers for sticking to the traditional gender role and discriminatory practice, there are still fair amount of discrimination against women throughout the whole society, from local regulations to national policy. From poor villagers to policy makers, the entire population needs to be educated about the importance of giving girls equal educational rights.
3.
Many
families' extreme poverty is due to illness of some family member.
After the bare-foot doctor system was torn down 20 years ago, hospitals have become prohibitively expensive for rural families. A single illness can send a family from relative poverty to absolute destitute. This highlights the need for cost-effective community based health-care.
4. Resource
pressure and environmental degradation is a key problem for many poor areas.
In many places, trees are being cut down; air and waterways are being polluted in exchange for quick cash. While this may allow somebody to get rich quickly, it also deprives the whole community of hope for long-term sustainable development. Environmental education and environmental justice is urgently needed. As an example, EDF once held an exhibition called “My hometown” as a cultural exchange program: rural children were asked to use literature, paintings etc. to describe the beauty of their hometown. Such kind of program can educate and empower the local people to protect the natural environment.
In order to address above problems, these NGOs and their volunteers first have to educate themselves. Most volunteers are from the US or from big cities in China, and they often benefit from the existing education system. Even though these people are well-intentioned and enthusiastic, many of them have their own share of ignorance: like the proud white men one hundred years ago, they think it is their obligation to bring civilization to the hinterland; once urban values were brought and implemented in the rural areas, all problems could be solved automatically. This kind of attitude can be very counter-productive or even destructive, as we have learned in last 50 years of international development. Especially as the western industrialization and urbanization model is neither scalable nor sustainable, the urban value system is certainly not suited for most rural areas. If these NGOs wants to bring more positive changes to the rural areas instead of causing harm unintentionally, their volunteers need to learn these lessons quickly: instead of being arrogant and self-centered, they need more training about cultural diversity and cultural sensitivity. They are there not only to help, but also to communicate and learn from the local people; they need to keep an open mind, and willing to challenge their own presumptions and prejudices if necessary.
Conclusion:
How can one break the vicious circle of
poverty, ignorance, environmental degradation, and injustice? Most Chinese believe
that economic development should come first: Once the country is rich enough,
they argue, all other problems can be solved. But the reality is more complex.
Today's China would already be rich enough to solve some of its problems. It
spends billions of dollars on prestige projects, such as the opera house in
Beijing, the magnetic levitation line in Shanghai, the drive to builds some of
the worlds tallest skyscrapers, or the 2008 Olympics. Even a small fraction of
this money would be enough to send all the dropout kids back to elementary or
middle school. But as things are standing now, many of these children will,
once they grow up, contribute to the problems mentioned in section 2: The
failing one-child policy, the prevalence of preventable diseases, discrimination
against women, short-sighted exploitation of the environment, etc. Fortunately,
China has always valued education high. The examples of section 1 show that
good results can be achieved with little money, if local villagers, the
regional administration, and NGOs work together, and if they overcome their
elitist tendencies, which treats education more like a competition for social
status than a tool to solve daily problems. Bringing education back to all
children in the countryside may well be one of the best investments that China
can make for its future.
1. http://www.chinaedu.edu.cn/jytd/tongji/, official statistics on China’s education, accessed on Oct 2, 2003
2. Lawrence Summers, “The Most Influential Investment”, reprinted in People and the Planet, vol.2, no. 1(1993), p.10.