Transcript: Education
Iraq Sectoral Conferences - Third Series
September 11, 2003
MS. PETERSON: Good afternoon. I am Dana Peterson with the Asia Near East Bureau here at USAID, and I'm serving as the Deputy for Iraq Management Team. It is my pleasure to welcome you today to a public sector consultation on our Iraq reconstruction efforts related to the education sector. This session is actually part of the third series of public sector consultations USAID has conducted over the past five months.
This session is intended to highlight efforts undertaken by the Coalition Provision Authority and USAID with our Iraqi partners to improve education in Iraq, and it is also an opportunity for us to receive feedback from you on our interventions. USAID has been working with Iraqis on the Coalition Provision Authority in support of a range of sectors for the past five months. We are helping to restore economic infrastructure, deliver essential services, particularly health and education, improve the efficiency and accountability of government focused at the local level, and expand economic opportunities throughout Iraq.
Despite security challenges there has been significant progress and tangible improvements in Iraqi lives. Our interventions have the primary objective of supporting Iraqis in their own efforts. USAID is part of the Coalition Provision Authority under Ambassador Paul Bremmer. We have been mobilized to provide reconstruction assistance since April, and our mission director, Lew Lucke, formerly established USAID's mission in Iraq on July 27th. USAID is presently implementing approximately $1.5 billion in reconstruction and humanitarian assistance. We work with a number of private sector NGO and United Nations partners to achieve these objectives. In light of the highly fluid situation in country, our partners have had to demonstrate considerable flexibility and adaptability.
Before turning this consultation over to colleagues, I would like to briefly provide a development context for the important work we are undertaking in the education sector. There is general consensus that the quality of education in Iraq decreased significantly over the past decade and beyond with Iraq going from one of the best educational systems in the Arab world to one of the weakest. Insufficient resources went into maintaining and repairing school buildings, upgrading and printing textbooks, purchasing and distributing school equipment and supplies, providing training for teachers, and maintaining and upgrading skills of school administrators.
Added to there systemic challenges has been the looting of educational facilities. The poor quality of education has contributed significantly to children staying out of the classroom. Statistics indicate the primary enrollment just months ago was only approximately 76 percent of all primary students and 20 to 33 percent of secondary students with twice as many girls staying out of the classroom as boys.
Nearly two million children in adolescence have dropped out of school, and those who do stay through secondary school often lack sufficient skills for the labor market. Compounding this is a shortage of buildings and teachers with approximately 35 percent of all schools on double or triple shifts and many children only having received three hours of instruction per day.
In addition to the challenges in primary and secondary schools, universities and other institutions of higher learning could greatly benefit from opportunities to cultivate intellectual diversity and innovative subject material preparing students for leadership and employment in a competitive market economy.
Then before we start on the actual consultation, I would like to highlight that this session is focused on progress to date in the education sector in Iraq. We are not addressing Iraqi construction procurements in this session. In addition, this is not a session to speak to broader administration policies on Iraq.
I would now like to introduce my colleagues. Mr. Norm Rifkin is the Senior Education Advisor for Iraq with USAID. Mr. Martin McLaughlin is an education advisor with both USAID and the Department of Education. And for my private sector partner, Creative Associates International, Mr. Frank Dall is the Senior Program Director. We also have with us Mr. Pablo Maldanado, Creative Associates, Executive Vice President. And Steve Horblitt, Director of External Relations.
So I'd now like to start the session, and we look forward to a productive exchange with you over the next hour and a half. Thank you.
MR. RIFKIN: Thank you very much, Dana. I, too, would like to welcome all of you to this third public consultation on USAID's activities in the education sector in Iraq. I would like to remind you that implementation in the education sector only began in May and that our program is less than five months old. During these few months, progress has been very impressive despite a very difficult working environment.
We've prepared a Powerpoint presentation that will provide you with a broad overview of what we've set out to do and what we have accomplished to date. Since this consultation was being webcast, I will need to ask those of you with questions or comments to please speak into the microphone and please hold questions until the brief presentation is finished. We'd like to suggest, if possible, that the press ask questions after the session is completed.
I will provide an overview and then ask Martin McLaughton, whose been working with USAID and the Department of Education to say a few words about higher education, specifically. Then followed by Dr. Frank Dall, who is the Director of the Creative Associates RISE activity--that's the Revitalization of Iraqi Schools and the Stabilization of Education--who will provide the field context.
I'd like to point out that everything that we're doing is in support of Coalition Provision Authority objectives and Ministry of Education priorities. We have three general policy approaches. The first is that everything will be Iraqi-led; the second is that in the early going that we are paying attention to urgent needs; and, secondly, that we are laying foundations for the future, as I will explain.
We have four major activities. We have a grants to UNICEF in the amount of $7 million. We have a grant to UNESCO in the amount of $10 million; a higher education and development grant that is yet to be awarded in the order of $20 million; and a contract to Creatives Associates for the RISE project for $63 million.
In terms of UNICEF's accomplishments, a needs inventory of a thousand primary schools has been conducted. This is a sampling of private schools; it has not been done country-wide, but it's a good statistically valid sampling. A 5.5 million end-of-year tests have been administered. These were very critical because these tests determine who moves forward within the system and who doesn't, and it's particularly critical at those transition years in grades 6, 9 and 12 where decisions have to be made on who will progress from elementary to secondary, and from secondary to higher and so forth.
UNICEF has provided 6,100 schools-in-a box and recreational kits for five million children. These are on order and will be delivered approximately in early October. They've also rehabilitated a teacher-training institute and curriculum reform for primary education is underway.
Our grant to UNESCO convened in Iraqi Advisory Book Review Committee, and this committee has reviewed a total of 48 Arabic and 50 Kurdish math and science textbooks. That's the science textbooks that are to be delivered to the schools during the month of October.
Under our higher education and development program--HEAD is the acronym--we're trying to develop university partnerships that will strengthen both the Iraqi universities and the American universities. Applications were requested for university partnerships in the following sectors: public health; essential infrastructure including the areas of civil engineering, communications, water power, agriculture, et cetera; education and teacher training; economic growth including areas of management, marketing economics trade, Agro industry, et cetera; the government--public administration; civil society development; and cultural including archeology and antiquities. The deadline for submissions of applications for the HEAD project was August 8th. The Agency is reviewing these applications now, and Mr. McLaughlin will speak more to this after I finish.
Under the RISE project, the Revitalization of Iraqi Schools and Stabilizations of Education which is led by Creatives Associates in partnership with the American Islamic Congress, the Iraq Foundation Research Triangle Institute, American University--Def Tech (ph) and HOM-AG (ph), we have been able to establish regional offices in Basra, Baghdad, Al Hillah and Mosul for the administration of the education program. Over 150 Iraqi personnel and 30 international staff were hired to date; 3,228 secondary schools throughout the entire country have been surveyed and provided very valuable data on student teacher ratios, gender disparities, et cetera. If anybody's curious about the results of these, we can ask Frank Dall afterwards, who is very familiar with the results of this secondary school inventory.
Unlike the UNICEF inventory, this inventory looked at all of the secondary schools, not just the sampling, so we were able to determine, you know, very precisely where repairs were needed, where additional furniture was needed, where additional classrooms were needed, where additional teachers are needed at the secondary level. And this, of course, is essential information which is being fed into an educational management information system that will cover all of the education program.
Four full-time education specialists have been placed in the Ministry of Education. By the way, this is a short presentation. There are a total of 20 slides to let you know what's coming.
Up till now, USAID has approved 89 grants under the RISE activity for a total of $1,292,000 to refurbish schools and to revitalize and re-equip education offices in each governorate. There are over 30,000 beneficiaries of these grants. There are a total of 210 grants that are in process in the amount of $4 million. Before the year is out we intend to spend approximately $8 million in the administration of these grants. It's very important to note that the refurbishment to the schools is a bi-product. What we are getting is community and parental involvement in the operations of the schools for these grants. And, in fact, that is a condition to the administration, to the award of grants, community and parental involvement in the education of their children.
The RISE activity is also mounting an accelerated learning program. This program seeks to reinsert drop-outs into formal schools at the same level as their age cohorts through accelerated learning. Children who have dropped out of school would be covering two, perhaps three or four years in one in order to be able to return to school at the appropriate age level. The accelerated learning program implementation plan has been completed. Five sites for pilot projects have been identified. An out-of-school survey has been--out-of-school student survey has been conducted in five sites, and the survey data analysis and the results have been completed.
I want to also point out that we're very concerned with replicability and sustainability of this exercise, and we intend to work very closely with the government and with the NGO sector to carry at least those successful models, the successful pilots to a much broader population to scale.
In the area of teacher training, a plan for in-service training has been developed that's going to benefit 64,000 secondary school teachers and 5,000 administrators. UNICEF is responsible for the primary school sector. RISE has developed an Iraqi-led in-service training program under the guidance of Iraq's senior education advisor, and this team will consist of six Iraqi specialists from the Iraqi Institute for Training and Development, and three Iraqi/American trainers from the Iraq Foundation, I think under the overall monitoring of American University.
This program is going to expose secondary school teachers to participatory teaching methods that focus on children. Master teacher training will be held in Baghdad from September 20th to 23rd. Twenty-one supervisors, 21 teachers, and 21 school principals will attend the training and will subsequently train teachers throughout Iraq through a cascade system.
I'd like to talk a bit about RISE's strategy for strengthening expertise within the Ministry of Education. Four major elements are currently in progress under the implementation plan: the development of management and administrative processes; improve economic, finance and budgeting procedures; rebuild the education management information system; and strengthen teacher and school leadership skills. Whereas the allocation of funding will certainly be made at the central level, at least for the foreseeable future because there is no taxation at the local level in Iraq, the management of the educational system will evolve through the governorate level and below, and the development of these management and administrative processes are extremely important and will require continued training.
Priorities being given to training national counterparts to manage and run Iraq's basic education services. A two-pronged approach is being carried out: the training of key personnel at the central Ministry of Education level, and the training of teachers and managers at the decentralized governorate and district levels.
We're not only working at the ministry level, we're also working at the community level. USAID will ensure that communities, especially parents, are engaged in all program components. The American Islamic Congress and the Iraq Foundation, both subcontractors, will be active partners in promoting and developing RISE's social mobilization strategy. Small grants for support to school rehabilitation play a pivotal role in RISE's community participation strategy. Small grants must be managed by school PTAs and community education committees. Small grants are being used to encourage community and private sector involvement in school refurbishment activities.
USAID, under the RISE project, is going to provide 1.5 million student kits. The kits will be provided to all secondary school children. Three hundred and sixty-eight thousand six hundred and forty kids from Baghdad--I hope these numbers coincide with mine--and 201,000 in Basra, in Al Hillah, and Mosul, and you'll note that there is an asterisk at the bottom because these numbers don't add up, and that is because we've order kits for areas that are not currently permissible, but when permissible they will be delivered to those areas.
USAID has also provided rapid response grants to access the internet at six libraries and a post office. We've also rehabilitated the library in An Nasiriya.
In terms of the rehabilitation of the schools, standards for school safety have been developed and approved by the Ministry of Education in consensus and in conjunction with the UN and NGOs. The standards are available in both Arabic and English. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is assisting with quality control. This is a very important item because many of the schools were not fit for use. There were munitions found there; there were dangerous armaments of various kinds in many of the schools and had to be removed. RISE inventory actually physically went through each of the secondary schools to certify, in effect, which were safe and ready for use. Nine hundred and seventy primary and secondary schools have been rehabilitated to date, and at least 1,000 schools will have been rehabilitated by the start of the school year in early October. We are very optimistic that we will exceed this figure.
I've tried to explain what USAID has set out to do and has accomplished. As you've seen, USAID's activities during this first year are targeted toward getting Iraq's school open and running, toward building the capacity of Iraqis to plan and manage a quality education--quality education system. I'd now like to state what USAID is not doing in this first year. Although 5,000 new schools are needed according to a UNICEF report, USAID is not building new schools. As Dana Peterson stated, many of the schools are two and sometimes three shifts. When those schools are built, Iraq will need up to 50,000 more teachers. Although we're doing in-service training, we're not currently doing pre-service training.
Although a new curriculum is needed, USAID is not doing curriculum development. USAID recognizes that curriculum development is a multiyear process and must be Iraqi-led. UNICEF and UNESCO are beginning to work with Iraqis in curriculum development in both primary and secondary education, and we strongly support their efforts. Textbooks. Although USAID and UNICEF have removed propaganda from textbooks, new textbooks are not yet being rewritten. Textbook development must follow curriculum development which is not yet underway.
The Department of Education has very kindly assigned for a period of three and a half months one of their employees, Martin McLaughlin, to work with the Iraq management team, and we're hoping that he will continue his involvement in our program. He's been specifically occupied with higher education, and I'd like to ask Mr. McLaughlin to say a few words, if you would.
MR. McLAUGHLIN: Thank you, Norman. As Norm mentioned, on the U.S. Department of Education employee who has been working at USAID on detail mostly in the area of higher education in Iraq, and I've been managing the higher education and development grant programs, specifically. As this activity is still in its final stage of procurement, I will not be able to give any details on the winners or other specifics like that.
What I would like to talk about is how we went about coming up with the panel members who worked on the selection of the awardees and the sectors of the awards themselves. As Norm mentioned earlier, there are six award sectors: public health, economic growth, essential infrastructure, education and teacher training, government and culture. And we assigned different panels to cover each of these sectors. And I would like to mention that the panel members included experts from USAID, the U.S. Department of Education, the Department of Defense, and the State Department. These panelists have expertise in the areas of science, information technology, higher education, and government. Each panel also had at least one member that had significant on-the-ground experience in post-war Iraq.
Furthermore, all panel members were briefed by one of our panel members, Stephen Curda, who is a Department of Defense employee and has been serving as the Deputy Minister--or Deputy Senior Advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education in Iraq. And he has been there since March of this year, and he's still there now. He came very briefly to serve on the panel, and he was able to give the panel members a very in-depth and detailed understanding of the current status of Iraqi universities, their needs, their resources, and the potential for partnerships with U.S. universities. So I'm confident and pleased to say that I feel we had excellent people, well-briefed, who have been evaluating these proposals from U.S. universities.
USAID did receive a very good response from the U.S. university community in response to its request for applications. I cannot say how many applications were received at this point, but we were able to have a good choice. And, you know, unfortunately, because this activity is still in procurement, that's about all I can say. We're moving forward with the final phases of the procurement activity, and I can't give a specific date as to when we will announce the winners, but we hope that that will be in the very near future.
Thank you.
MR. RIFKIN: Thank you very much, Martin. That's very helpful.
I'd like now to turn the lectern over to Dr. Frank Dall, who is the former USAID Education Director for the Middle East, who has spent many, many years working with Iraq and with other countries in the Middle East, and who has made several visits to Iraq over the past few months. Frank?
DR. DALL: What was covered by Norm was so comprehensive and thorough that I really don't have a great deal to add to that. I think probably the most constructive way of doing this is having you ask specific questions about missing elements that you don't know about or need more detail about. I think that that's probably the way that you will find the rest of this session more productive. I could talk in general terms, but the general terms may not always fill the gaps that you need filling, but I'm here to do that from the point of view of what's going on in the field at this point.
What I can say is that on my many trips to the field, and I've just come back from one about three weeks ago, progress has been incredible from one trip to the next, and I have a very dedicated and excellent team of people on the ground making sure that that happens. The level of dedication and your reading the news is tremendous, and my hat goes off to the people who are in the field making this work. They have not worried about personal risk in any way. They're out there. We have four officers in four regions, and we're out in schools, communities throughout the country, putting out grants, visiting schools, inventorying schools, and getting the information that we need to go the next step on this one. That's going extremely well. If there is any slowing down, it's due, I think, largely to the security situation which you all know about and I don't need to comment any more about.
There is slower progress on institutional issues like the rebuilding of the Ministry of Education. I think all ministries are being rebuilt, but it's taking longer than we assumed it would take. Part of the problem is working out who's going to work in ministries and inviting back the sorts of people who can make the level of contribution you need in ministries. Getting that right takes a little bit of time, and there are teams of people working on those sorts of issues from one ministry to the next. But it is moving, and it's moving quite well.
What we can guarantee is that by the beginning of the school year which is, unless it changes again somewhere around the first week of October the school year begins again, we should have most Iraqi children back in school at the primary and the secondary level, and we should have most schools up and going again. Schools are being refurbished as fast as we can refurbish them. There are lots of people working on the refurbishment to schools. It's not just ourselves and USAID, but there are teams of people from other organizations doing the same thing, and that's being closely coordinated by the military who are making sure that the information about which schools are being refurbished by whom is shared by all partners in this enterprise, and that's being organized quite well by the Ministry.
Materials that come in, shiploads of materials that we're going to distribute at the school level, the school kit that you saw a photograph of, they're all coming in, and they're all now in Kuwait and being distributed to safe warehouses in all of the governments. The numbers that we've established for storing in safe warehouses were established by the inventory that we did because the inventory gave us an idea of exactly how many pupils were in which schools, wherein that gave us a good handle on 1) the number of kits we had to buy, and 2) the number of kits we have to store in different places ready for distribution.
The strategy for distribution is as follows: We're going to store everything close to schools in safe warehouses because looting, stealing, destroying have--all of that is still a key issue. And then when children are in school, we'll make sure that individual student--gets it delivered to individual children while they're in the classroom in school so each child will get his or her kit. And that way we can be absolutely sure that the kits get to where they have to do, which is the end use of the child, and that uncontrolled elements, be they teachers, directors, don't hive off large numbers of kits and then sell them on the black market because that can be a tendency and has been a tendency in the past. So we're taking special precautions to make sure that that doesn't happen.
On accelerated learning things are moving very fast. Our team leader there, an Australian, Dr. Nichols (ph), she has done a really incredible job over the last two months and has gone out and surveyed a number of areas and has a very good idea of where the out-of-school children are, what sorts of children are out of school, what their needs are, and we're designing the pilot interventions to suit the needs of different groups of children. The testing goes out very briefly, and the ones that work will usually go to scale, and we'll take them to scale working with NGOs.
Norm was absolutely right, we're not going to depend on the Ministry but we're going to work with NGOs, both international and the few national NGOs that are now going on the ground, to try and get these informal, nonformal approaches to bringing children back into school-going again, because that we feel is probably the most effective way of reaching small groups of children that systems always have problems in reaching. Even in this system in this country, there are elements that we can't reach with the sort of quality educational system that we would hope all children would have access to.
In my own country in England, we have a similar problem, so in a less development setting that problem is exacerbated, and we need to use every strategy that we can muster to get to these kids, because there are large numbers of children. About 30 percent of children have dropped out of school at the primary level. At the secondary level it's much larger than that because secondary enrollment levels are lower than the primary enrollment, traditionally, in Iraq, and a lot of those are girls. Of course, we have to get to girls who are out of school, and Part 2 or 3 of our strategy is, specifically, for girls of different ages that we're trying to reach to get them back into school again.
We had a strategy that reaches unmarried mothers or young mothers who are married who have been pulled out of school because they've started raising families at a young age but want to continue with their education. We have designed a strategy to get to those. We've designed strategies to get to young girls who have been pushed out.
There's an opportunity cost in most developing countries to sending any child to school, and girls have a much higher opportunity cost because girls are used to provide the labor that is not available to poor families at the home level, either be it the raising or the helping to raise siblings, or working on farms, or in carrying water, or preparing food, or whatever. Girls tend to get the rougher end of whatever it is that is being allocated in terms of resources, certainly educational resources. So we're deliberately targeting girls who have been pulled out of school but need to catch up and perhaps get back to school again. That is another strategy that we're adopting, B.
Another interesting strategy that we're looking to put in the north--that is, in the Kurdish north, northern area--is a strategy that targets displaced children. In the north we've had a great deal of population displacement for a variety of reasons, and there are many children in camps or temporary living quarters that need to be reached who are not in school at all, and we're trying to, basically, organize ourselves so that we can get them back into school again, get them into at least bring them up to an educational level that is of a general standard that will permit them to go back into school wherever they happen to go back to school, if they're resettled from where they are temporarily, and so on and so forth.
The south has a very large unsettled population of children and families who were pushed over the border to Iran during the bad, negative days for the Shiia population in the south and are now coming over in large numbers but are not finding their homes open and available, so they are in temporary camps in the south. And these are being reached, too. I think we're trying to develop some sort of an intervention that will reach those as well.
On the teacher training, we've moved I think, systematically, very thoroughly in building an Iraqi base for change in the way teachers do whatever they do in schools. And it's taken a little time to work that way. We worked with an institute in Iraq in Baghdad that was always in charge of teacher training, or at least coordinating teacher training throughout the country, and we've selected key people who want to work with us there, and we've slowly built them into our strategy, and we have them contributing towards the materials that we're designing that will go into the short in-service training workshops that we're designing to do using a cascade method with the hope that by next April we'll be able to reach at least 75,000 secondary school teachers with new ideas, new methodologies, and a new approach. It won't change what they do completely, but it will begin the change. It will seed the seed that we need to begin change for broader, long-term reforms that have to go on at the national level.
Reforms in teacher training, all of you who are educators, and I suspect the large number of you here have something to do with education, is always a slow process. If there's one element in education that tends to be very conservative and difficult to change or difficult to convince about change it's the teaching and teacher element that's difficult to convince about change. In my seven or so years of working in the Middle East trying to bring about educational reforms in about 10 or 11 Middle Eastern countries, it was always the teachers' unions and the teachers who were ultimately the most difficult group to move in the right direction. We were doing all sorts of things right, but we had to get the teachers on board, and we had to bring them on board slowly. You have to convince them, to work with them not works against them.
It's no different in Iraq, and it's no different in post-war Iraq. If anything, the teachers are doubly suspicious in Iraq because they've been so mishandled for so many years that they don't trust anyone. You have to win that trust, and it takes time to win that trust. There's a process that you have to go through.
One of the other things that I think we all forget, all of us who have been in development for a very long time, is that education is not like health or other elements of development. It is definitely process-driven. You have to go through a process to bring about change in education. You have to be patient enough to go through that process to be able to do it. Remember, learning cycles are cycles. If you do anything in primary education, you have to wait seven years to see the results at the end of the cycle, and you have to wait for that. It can't happen in two years or three years, and donors all want things spent very quickly.
So we're there and we're doing it as fast as we can do it, and we will do it well. But there is a process here, and the process is ongoing and it's ongoing very well. Given the current situation, I think it's remarkable how well people are working on the ground.
Not more I can say unless you have lots of questions, and I suspect the questions are much more interesting than anything we can say. Thank you.
MS. PETERSON: Thank you, we'd like to open this up to questions. Because this session is being broadcast live on the web, we request that you speak into the microphone there so that those who are not physically present can at least hear the discussion. So, please, we welcome any feedback, specific questions or general thoughts you have on what's been presented so far.
MR. SHADEEN (Ph): I'm Misha Shadeen from the Kurdistan Regional Government. I represent the government here. It's a pleasure to see you, Dr. Dall, again. We worked together on the workshops in education at the Department of State for the future of Iraq.
Could you elaborate on the means of getting--we keep hearing about getting the students in to transfer from outside. One of the means is really very simple, the buses. Is there a plan for providing buses, and then is there a plan for the staff that handle buses handle students from the safety point of view? And is there anything that is specially considered for areas that are a little bit unsafe like Baghdad, compared to the others? Thank you.
MS. PETERSON: Thank you. Dr. Dall, I think you're probably in the best position to address this in light of the grants and the community efforts ongoing.
DR. DALL: They're all excellent--I mean it's an excellent question with three parts, of course, all very relevant. Transport is an issue, particularly in the rural areas. We don't have within our mandate the transport issue to address, thank God, but somebody has to address that. I think communities are addressing those things, and so it's remarkable how, now that central government has virtually collapsed and the centrist mentality is beginning to dissipate, that people are beginning to try and work these things out for themselves and are looking for local solutions.
Part of what we're doing with our local grants, that is, grants to schools which go up to about $25,000. Twenty-five thousand dollars, by the way, buys a whole lot of dinars in more sackfuls than you can carry around. Those dinars can buy quite a lot of action in school committees, and parent/teacher committees or associations want to use it for that purpose. And I think some of them will use money for that purpose.
On security, security is more of an issue that's raised in the big towns, especially Baghdad than anywhere else, Baghdad and Basra at the moment and probably Mosul and some of the bigger towns. And it's an issue that comes up all the time in our discussions with PTAs, education committees, and with the school directorates at the government level. In baghdad, at least, we've heard that under the last government, Saddam's administration was providing some of the more prestigious government schools in Baghdad that were the elite schools with sufficient resources for them to hire on security guards to look after the security on school campuses. What was not remarkable was that the poorest schools were not getting any of this, and they wanted security as well. So it was an uneven allocation of resources for security.
What we're saying now is that again, the money that we're giving people for guns can be used towards security, too, if they want to use part of the gun toward security that they should do that. And some school committees, education committees are doing that. But security, per se, again is not specifically part of our--part of what is on our list of--it is a priority, but it's not part of what is on our immediate list of priority. But it needs to be addressed.
It is being addressed, I think, by individual schools and where schools have more resources like urban schools. They're trying to address that from within the school and parents getting the few resources that they have together to try and hire on security guards, watchmen. They're building cabins at the edge of the school ground and the school entrance to have somebody posted there that can check people coming in and out of schools. So they're doing some of that, yes, but it is an important issue, but I would say it's much more of an issue in the urban areas, especially Baghdad.
On the Baghdad issue, I think it's a very good part of your question. Baghdad is a really serious problem, but it depends where in Baghdad. Some areas of Baghdad are very permissive and quiet and other areas are not so quiet.
I can't say very much except that I think everybody's aware of the security situation, and they're trying to do something about it. But it is an issue that--it is an issue that needs to--
MR. ALIYA (Ph): Good afternoon. My name is Gunmal Jamal Aliya (ph) from Life for Relief and Development, just returned from Baghdad where there I attended meetings with Creatives Associates and UNICEF and talked, discussed education. While I agree with Frank that $25,000 buy loads of dinars, it's not sufficient to rehabilitate severely damaged schools. And we've identified a large number of schools that have been severely damaged. So what is USAID going to do about severely damaged schools? Thank you.
MS. PETERSON: Thank you. As Norm had mentioned, there are a number of different mechanisms, actually, that USAID is using and supporting and with respect to rehabilitation of schools. One of those includes our infrastructure reconstruction contract with Bechtel National, and they are in the position to help educational facilities that are in severe disrepair, let's say. So they are rehabilitating up to 1,000 schools on that front.
And then we have other interventions focused at the community level, local level, to do community rehabilitation, and that includes through our local governance program, through Research Triangle Institute and partnership with Creatives Associates, through our office of transition initiatives and through some community action programs that give small grants. U.S. NGOs are helping to implement those programs. They go into impoverished communities and as communities identify what their priorities are, we provide assistance in meeting needs. And, obviously, school and the educational system is a Number 1 priority for most of the communities.
So there are different avenues. But in terms of the large-scale infrastructure reconstruction, that is through our infrastructure reconstruction contracts.
Please.
MR. ALIYA: One of the issues that we had and we discussed it with Creative is, yes, the information is there, but disseminating the information to the communities is--is not available. And I know that we've discussed this issue at the educational meeting in Baghdad, and there was no information. What you've told me now was not available to us. Even with Bechtel, they said that their grant does not include severely damaged school. That's what we've discussed at the CPA meetings.
So my suggestion is we need to get the information to the communities so that they know where to go to apply for those grants.
MS. PETERSON: Right. Thank you for that feedback. We appreciate the input, and I think there are a couple of different avenues by which we are trying to increasingly get messages out. One is through working with the director generals in each of the 18 governorates to identify the priorities in terms of school rehabilitation for those governorates and then ensure that the assistance that is provided addresses those priorities.
Also, the United Nations Humanitarian Information Center was helping to collect a lot of that data to ensure complimentarity of effort, et cetera. And in light of the tragic events from two or three weeks ago, they are looking at how they can resume that database in light of lost data and material, et cetera.
Please.
MR. DUMEE (Ph.): My name is Sean Dumee (ph). I'm a vice president with Quebec or World. We're America and the world's largest printing company and print about one billion books a year as well as a variety of other products.
My question relates to school textbooks. USAID has very clearly supported textbooks through the grant to UNESCO for five million textbooks, and the UN Security Council has approved the subsequent project for 66 million textbooks. My question, though, is, is it a USAID policy to explicitly exclude American firms from the bidding process for textbook printing? We approached UNESCO and then UNICEF with a specific offer in August to produce all 66 million books in 60 days. And UNICEF's response, quote, was, "UNICEF's policy is to contract for printing in the area where the need exists."
Now, there were still 16 million school textbooks unallocated. We repeated the offer to produce within 60 days, and Iraqi need access to education. They should have the same right to education that my girls do in Connecticut. So what is USAID's policy, and how does that relate to your partners, UNICEF and UNESCO?
MS. PETERSON: Mmm-hmm, good. Thank you for your question. No, that is not a USAID policy to exclude U.S. firms from printing. We give grants to our United Nations partners, and those institutions determine the appropriate way to meet the objectives of the grant that USAID has with them. So any questions related to procurements on the part of our UN partners are best directed to them, specifically.
Please.
MR. BEJENIKES (Ph): My name's Tony Bejenikes. I represent the Community Colleges for International Development. Perhaps you don't know that 50 percent of all post-secondary students in the United States attend technical two-year colleges. This is a driving engine for economic development. The people who support the refineries, the automobiles, the innerwork systems and all that, we didn't see anything in the current submission that addresses any of the middle-level management. Are there any plans to do that in the future?
MS. PETERSON: Would you like to address that, Norm?
MR. RIFKIN: We had a very, a very useful meeting with a delegate from, representative from Community Colleges for International Development just a couple of weeks ago, and we pointed out that in the recent procurement action for the higher education and development activity that technical schools were included and that community colleges were not at all precluded from providing bids under that activity. Unfortunately, we can't talk about, you know, the procurement action itself and whether there were community colleges who bid or not. But, certainly, CCID or any other groups or institutions could have bid.
Furthermore, we did receive a very interesting proposal from CCID which we have read and we've forwarded that to our mission.
MS. PETERSON: Please. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry about that.
MS. NIEMAN (Ph): Hi. My name is Lynn Beth Nieman, and I'm with the Washington Kurdish Institute, and we have offices in Erbil and Sulaimaniya. And I had two questions. One is that I was wondering how the systems are going to be working together. I mean there's the Ministry of Education that's taking care of the center and the south, and there's the regional governments in the north. And exactly how--well, not "exactly how"--I don't know exactly, but how are they going to be meshed together to work together?
And the second one is that I was interested in the--I think the accelerated learning. Is that for Northern Iraq and displaced children? And if you could elaborate a little more on that, how are the children identified? Are people going into the IDP camps, or are they going, actually, into, you know, villages, and how does that work? And is the point to get them up to grade level and to get them back into the system, or is there going to be sort of a parallel system going on for kids that aren't at their regular grade level? And I'd like to know a little more about that. Thank you.
MS. PETERSON: Thank you for your questions. In light of the first question, it may be a little challenging to speak specifically on some of those issues, particularly given that Iraqi ministers were just recently named by the governing council, and that will help to clarify some of the policies and relationships among the different institutions in the north and Baghdad, et cetera.
But, Dr. Dall, maybe you could address the first and then the second, too.
DR. DALL: On accelerated learning, which is a good question. We actually did surveys, including the survey in the north that went into the camps and into the villages to find out who the out-of-school kids were, what their absolute needs were, and how we could address those needs. And the analysis of that survey is giving us an idea of what it is that we ought to put in the materials, how it is that we are going to tackle this problem in terms of methodology for each area, and for especially for the displaced kids. And we are now designing those interventions and training the teachers to do those interventions.
But our initial input will be pilot projects to test out some ideas first that will take us till next April. The results of the pilot projects will tell us what methodologies and what approaches are going to work best, and then we'll go to scale with those and get a lot of people involved in doing those with us. But we did go in and take a look very carefully what was going on, on the ground through surveys.
I am waiting for the results of the surveys. I know they've just been analyzed. I haven't had that sent to me yet, but I've just been told that the surveys have been completed, and they've started setting up the groups and designing the interventions.
What are we going to teach them? Basically, the idea is to take children who have dropped out of school at critical points in their schooling, the transition points, six, nine, and twelve, and bring them back again and accelerate them through two years of learning in one year to get them back into school roughly at about the age that they've dropped out of so that they can get back into the right age group. At the end, which is Grade 12 where many haven't graduated for a variety of reasons, we're going to put them through their paces again and get them through graduation so that they can graduate with a school diploma. But that's the idea.
But we're testing out a number of ideas at the moment. If you've got more ideas, please share them with us because we'll work with anybody, on the ground especially.
MR. WHITE: I'm Charles White from SAIC, and perhaps I should first say congratulations to Creatives Associates for doing such an excellent job, and with USAID under trying circumstances in Iraq.
My question addresses the aspect of the surveys that you've done, the results of those surveys. I think you partially answered the question by saying not all surveys have been analyzed, but the question really is, is the survey--are the surveys going to be used by Creatives Associates and its partners? Or it going to be made available to the broader community so that perhaps suggestions can be made as to how to attack some of those problems?
DR. DALL: Good question on surveys. Surveys have been made and are ongoing, and more will happen. But the two major surveys that we've done were the inventory for all secondary schools. That's being analyzed--further analyzed, there's been an initial analysis done--further analyzed and will be published as a report by AU, that is American University here who are working with us on that. Once that report is out and sharable, it will be shared. Don't--we won't hesitate to share that. That is in the public domain. We're not hanging onto any of this. It's going to help us in how we proceed, of course, obviously, because we need information, but that's sharable and anybody can have that.
And, certainly, the results of our accelerated learning survey, which is something that we added to what it is that we had to do because we felt it was necessary to do surveys before we even designed the final strategies. That will certainly be sharable once I get the results, and we can put those into a form that we can share with people. Work in ongoing.
The point is it's only five months, and we're racing to do everything. We can only do so much, and we're doing it as fast as we can do it. But whatever comes out by way of a product that is presentable, all of you have access to that product. So keep in touch with us if you want that product or those products at any point. Just let me know, and we'll let you have those products once we have those products in hand. Thank you.
MS. PETERSON: Please.
MS. ZAIR (Ph): I'm Mary Ann Zair from "Educational Week" newspaper. For 10 days there's been a Minister of Education in Iraq. I'm curious what will likely be the first task for that minister.
MS. PETERSON: Maybe Norm can speak to the background of this minister. He, obviously, will define his, his first tasks, but, Norm, if you'd like to provide some information, please.
MR. RIFKIN: I think it's important. I think it's important to note that the progress that's being made in the education sector in Iraq is not only being made by USAID or United Nations partners; there are other US agencies involved. The Department of Defense, for example, has civil affairs advisors in the education sector. There are three senior advisors working within the Ministry of Education, very competent people. One was the former Commissioner of Education for the State of Texas, and the other two have equally impressive credentials. And I'm quite sure that they will be working very close, closely with the new minister in order to support him and to strengthen the capacity of the Ministry of Education to fully staff up the ministry.
In terms of the minister himself, I don't know an awful lot about him. I know that he's a medical doctor; that he's worked for the World Health Organization; he's worked with the Ministry of Higher Education in Iraq. I really can't give too much information at this point, but what I can do is try to get some more information about him and then, if you leave me your contact, I can provide you with that information.
MS. PETERSON: Thank you, Norm. What I would also recommend is there are probably a couple of websites that would be helpful to explore on this, too. One is www.cpa/Iraq.org that I understand lists the various ministers and may shed light. And also the web page of the governing council, which the exact address--well, I'll need to provide to you after this. But that may be a useful source of information as well.
MS. GRUTIOS (Ph): Hi. Sarah Grutios at Patton, Boggs. Both Frank and Norm had mentioned the school kits that are going to be distributed to 1.5 million Iraqi children. Can you tell us specifically what's in the kit? And, if not, you know, if it's too detailed, just point us to where we can find that information.
MS. PETERSON: Absolutely. Dr. Dall.
DR. DALL: Yes. The kit is basically enough learning materials to take a secondary school pupil through most of the beginning of the school year on the assumption, of course, school supplies that were regularly supplied by government were interrupted and have been interrupted by the war, and they were interrupted.
Let me give you some interesting background information before I get into what's in the school kit. Of the 13 or 14 major educational warehouses that were used to store educational materials in Baghdad alone, 11 of those were broken into, looted, and burned out. I mean items were either stolen, resold and used, or they were burned and destroyed. So that's a terrific loss. And that's just Baghdad, and that probably replicates itself throughout the country where government warehouses of various sorts were broken into and looted or destroyed.
School kids simply enough exercise books--I think you call them copy books here--enough copy books to cover the needs of each child during a normal educational curriculum, which is I think four or five copy books, pencils and dry ink pens, erasers, rulers, a small pocket calculator, a geometry set. We were going to include all sorts of extra things like dictionaries and so on, but we found that unit costs per kit would go well beyond our budget. So it's those sorts of things in the kit, and there's enough there for each child to be able to keep going for a number of months if not the whole year on a normal sort of secondary educational syllabus curriculum.
There is a very strong canvas bag that goes with that that is very attractive, has the USAID logo on it. All of it has USAID logos on it, as much as we could get the logo on. So it's very clear who's giving it. And those kits in a bag will each go to each child, a complete kit, and we will make sure that each child gets a kit and nobody else gets a kit. That's--that's why we put it in a bag, because we felt it was the best way to control it. The bag is also quite useful. Most kids ask for bags, they need bags.
Other things are coming along. There's a school kit coming along that is basically desks. Many desks were destroyed or were in poor condition. We are trying to replace desks throughout most of the secondary school system. We're putting up new chalkboards. We're buying those, bringing those in, a really good quality chalkboard. Most schools have got chalkboards, but they're very, very poor quality. They're all falling down, and they've all been repainted so many times that you can't write on them any more.
Chalk, chalk dusters, all sorts of things that teachers need to use to teach classes that are going to come in in enough quantity or in enough for a volume to be able to satisfy the needs of most teachers in most classrooms. Teachers are going to get a table and a chair which is like a teacher's desk or the equivalent of a teacher's desk, and a steel lockable cupboard. There's no way you can lock things up safely in classrooms, so we're going to provide that as well.
So those are the school kits that are going to go in, too. Those are a little more delayed because we have to go to local providers for a lot of that, and it will take a little longer to produce the quantities that we need to produce on time, but they'll all be there. And most schools--all schools, all secondary schools will have most of that, and all secondary school pupils will have all of that in hand. Thank you.
The very small print on the picture when I mentioned the school kits, to be precise, there are 12 pencils, 10 exercise books, six ballpoint pens, a geometry set, a ruler, a calculator, and all of that will be in a school bag.
MS. GRUTIOS: What about the provision for computers, and where do you see that coming in down the line?
MS. PETERSON: We have had to look at essential needs and requirements for the start of the new school year. Again, as we continue to work with communities with the directorate generals in each of the governorates with the new Minister of Education, we will be able to ascertain the degree to which that is a priority and whether USAID is, is the appropriate mechanism by which to deliver on that, if that is considered a priority in light of other issues in the sector, et cetera.
Please.
MR. SWALLOW (Ph): Yes. My name is John Swallow, and I'm with USAID, and all the activities that you mentioned that are being carried out and planned are very impressive, and you are to be congratulated as are your partners.
My question is not meant to sound picky or at all critical but objective. With such a large degree is disarray, dysfunction and disorder, I'm thinking back somewhat to a parallel with Hurricane Mitch in Honduras where there the motto was not only build back but build back better. Now, Norm Rifkin mentioned earlier in his comments, he mentioned the phrase "child-centered learning." And my question is to what degree is it possible to help the Iraqis get away from rote memorization and more into what I would call interactive teaching and learning, inquiry-based instruction, questioning, et cetera, more of a sense of quest in the educational system, more zip?
And, Frank, you've worked in the Middle East quite a bit. Is that--is that even possible to move away from rote memorization while this wholesale assistance and change are being carried out?
DR. DALL: John, as usual, excellent questions, right on the ball. I would say it's possible, but it's going to take longer than we thought. Our mandate is to have some of these idea, some of these skills, and a demonstration of a new approach, an interactive child-centered approach in most teacher's heads by the end of the contract, which is next April. And we though, now how do we do this?
So we went back to a model that I have used in the Middle East before where we're going to do a cascade approach and do short, highly focused, in-service training courses that will reach a very large number of secondary teachers with demonstration lessons around key subject areas that we've chosen that we're writing materials for that will demonstrate alternative approaches to how you can teach those specific lessons and subjects. And we'll do that if we can over a three-year--a three-day period for the 75,000 or so teachers that we need to reach by that time in the hope that some of those new ideas will--will--will wear off on some of the recipients, and we'll begin to get some change and a demand for change.
But further ongoing long-term change of the sort that you're suggesting, which is the way that we want to go and the direction that we're aiming at, will take a lot longer. And I think it will only happen when we have a duly constituted system in place again called the Ministry, Ministry of Education, whatever you want to call it, either public or a mixture of both, going well and settled. It will take a little bit of time to do that.
The few experiments I did under the label "global education" that we did in six or seven countries in the Arab world with UNICEF where we took 40 schools and changed them radically using a highly interactive syllabus to do that and retraining the teachers worked very well for the demo schools. But getting it beyond the demo schools was a little more challenging. Making that a national reform that had national impact on all schools was much more challenging.
So, yes, you can do it in a focused way on specific schools, and that's probably the way to go initially because that has a spin-off effect. People see schools suddenly doing things in a different way becomes exciting, and other schools want to then do it, that would be the way to go. But it will take a lot longer than the time we have available at the moment, and I think it's a longer-term process. But it's the way to go, and it's, I think, the way we would like to go. We're seeding it at this point only.
MR. RIFKIN: John, that's an excellent question. I think--I think it's--it really goes right to the heart of the whole thing.
It's been a bit frustrating to work on this program because what we're trying to do now is we're trying to get the schools open, we're trying to get the situation normalized. Even the title or out project, "Stabilization of Education," we realize that we have a long way to go with quality. The fact is that this school system promotes people on the basis of accumulation of knowledge. The tests are knowledge-basis. It would be--it would be doing them a disservice to children if we were to suddenly move into a student-centered approach and then have them take exams that are based upon how much knowledge they accumulated.
So what one has to do is one has to take this as a whole. You have to deal with curriculum and form; you have to deal with new textbooks being developed and in fact are student-centered; and then one has to train the teachers and help them to do student-centered--how to use this kind of curriculum and these kinds of textbooks.
I think that trying to move into a student-centered approach too quickly could be dangerous, and it could blow the whole thing. And so we're taking this very, very moderately, as Frank pointed out.
MS. PETERSON: But we welcome your inputs and again, I think this highlights that, that this effort incorporates a variety of perspectives. And again, the Iraqis will, ultimately, decide whether they want to move in this direction and how fast, et cetera. And we are there to support along the way.
Please.
MR. SHADEEN: I'm only speaking if nobody else is. Thank you, John, for your question. I, just as a follow-up, I just want to say something that the Minister of Education for the Kurdistan Regional Government was here, and he was visiting high schools that were specializing in interactive teaching because he has a plan to introduce it in Iraqi Kurdistan. So if you plan to spread it nationally, he probably would be a good person to contact. Thank you.
MS. PETERSON: Thank you very much. Is there any more? Yes, please. Please.
DR. DALL: We're actually working with the Kurds. We've decided that since you're already beginning to do what we want to do ala UNICEF, because UNICEF has seeded that in Kurdistan, and it's working very well, we're going to borrow some of the people who are part of that, and our team is going to include some of the Kurds already beginning to do that change in Kurdish schools so that we can use them to help seed the idea further south.
So there is already an attempt to bring the two together. What you've already begun quite successfully in some pilot Kurdish schools is going to be part of what we're going to try and do in our teacher training approach in the south. And I believe that at least three key Kurds who are already working on that whole approach will be joining the team that will be working in the rest of Iraq to help with the training. So the Kurdish example has not been ignored; it's been grabbed and we're running with it.
MS. PETERSON: Please.
MR. SACROVICH (Ph): My name is Ricardo Sacrovich from Energy Concepts in Chicago, and I have not heard much about vocational training and industrial, who's going to prepare the plumbers, the electricians, all those things that I think it's an important sector as well. Anything being done on that?
MS. PETERSON: Again, our focus for right now has been on the primary and secondary schools along with these university partnerships which could get out some of the work force developmental vocational training requirements. And we will see when awards are announced the degree to which some of those activities may be targeted in that area.
But as we look beyond the start of the new school year and ensuring, as Norm said, that is our priority, we will explore further opportunities in those areas and others, again with Iraqis determining their priorities in that area.
Well, we have a little under five minutes. Is there any--are there any other questions or comments?
(No response.)
Well, thank you very much for coming. We will be having another session next week on local governance, but we very much appreciate your time today and hope that it's useful. Thank you.
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