New Advocacy Initiative

For those of you who do not know, I was a kindergarten teacher in the inner city of Washington, D.C. before coming to Zambia. During that time, I began to understand the importance of early childhood education especially in the life of a child from a low-income background. When I started reading the education policy for Zambia, I was appalled at the lack of vision and understanding of early childhood education that was demonstrated in the policies. It is my firm belief that if we want to close the achievement gap between high-income and low-income students, one of our focusses must be on providing high quality early childhood education to low-income students.

As much as I criticize the Zambian education policy and personally want to rewrite it every day, they did get something right in my opinion. They stated in the Education Sector Nation Implementation Framework that the Minister of Education would “provide subsidy (for early childhood education) to all OVC from needy families, as well as to children with physical and/or mental disability.” They stated that they would develop and operationalize a targeting mechanism by the beginning of 2009.

Now I don’t know if they have actually developed a targeting mechanism yet, but I do know that the Jubilee Centre, through our network of churches, helps coordinate the care of 3000 Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC). Imagine if we could get these children into early childhood facilities on the government’s dime. We have already written our first letter to the Minister of Education inquiring about the mechanism they were planning to set up and how we can help our coordinators apply for these subsidies.

To show you how messed up the system is consider this scenario. We, as a network, have 3000 OVC, and we want to get these subsidies and to place these children in early childhood centers. But the problem is that the only ECE centers are run for upper and middle class families. The system can not support this influx of children in this sector yet the Zambian government has made it very clear that they will not build or manage any ECE centers. While we may get subsidies from the government, it is going to be just as challenging to get these children in these centers and to convince the families of the importance of this education. In my opinion, this is just another case of the Zambian government writing something in their education policy to make the Americans and Europeans happy. The Zambians don’t really value this form of education. If they did, they would make sure to develop a system that fully supports this form of education for all children.

Right now Jubilee Centre’s policy is to push for things that the government has already guaranteed in their policies. Soon, we must push for reformed policies because the system is again going to prove to us that it does not work for the disadvantaged.