Earlier this year, Andy Brock travelled back to western China to review the Gansu Basic Education Project (GBEP), a UK aid-funded pilot project that ran from 1999-2006. Here, he reflects on the project’s long-term successes and disappointments – and the lessons for achieving systematic sustainability.
When I returned to Gansu with my fellow programme leaders Hu Wenbin and Zhao Jing, I was largely optimistic about what we’d find. After all, the project was ‘A’ rated throughout its life with numerous achievements including over 14,000 scholarships given to poor children in remote schools (of which 70% went to girls). We had built 197 schools, and trained 6,200 teachers and 700 head teachers multiple times.
As it turned out, the overwhelming feedback we received from people was positive. I was pleasantly surprised how many people were genuinely enthusiastic about the legacy of the project. Ten years on, many educators and officials recalled the way the project impacted them personally. “I would not be the me you see before you,” we were told a number of times.
Equity was another lasting success. People we met said they have since taken a different approach on how to address the needs of the poorest in their communities. One teacher explained that if they wanted to build a new school in the past, it was always a political decision. Now, the plot was chosen to ensure those in greatest need could participate. We did not lead the witness. There was no courtesy bias. This was heartfelt – and heart-warming.
We met with six of the scholars, including four girls who travelled to Beijing to meet with Tony and Cherie Blair in 2003. In almost all cases we found that the lives of these six young adults is now considerably better as a result of the financial support from GBEP. It is a fair assumption that these six stories can be multiplied hundreds, even thousands of times, so disrupting the inter-generational transmission of poverty to their own children. This legacy on its own would be justification for the project to claim to have created a sustainable impact.
Frustration or opportunity?
As pedagogists, we were especially excited to see whether our training on participatory teaching had embedded and endured. The approach centres on the child, encouraging them to ask questions and to explore answers themselves. The classroom scenes were still unrecognisable from 2000, when children learnt by rote, chanting from books in serried rows. However, the good examples of interactive teaching were in the minority. The teacher was usually still dominant: walking and reading from the textbook, occasionally asking a child or the class a question. Our training was largely used superficially – as a number of handy techniques – rather than a deeply held philosophy for engaging children. I won’t deny being extremely disappointed.
Yet, this discovery also raises the question of what defines sustainability. If a teacher tells you they feel they have changed, within their own culture, and that their practices have developed – is that more important than outsiders saying we don’t think they’re applying it as well as they could do?
To take this a step further, should we start to find different ways of measuring the impact of a project? International education so often focuses on results that are measurable: schools, books, desks and exam results. Of course, this ‘hardware’ is important, but success can also be seen in the less intangible ‘software’. For example, if a child gets a C grade instead of a B, but has the social skills to make a presentation in front of their peers – which is better? We spoke to a number of schools that admitted their results lagged behind others, yet they were proud that a more inclusive approach made their children more eloquent and articulate.
When you throw several stones into a pond, the ripples get bigger, but also overlap with each other in unusual and unexpected ways. Many of our teachings had indeed evolved and adapted to modern culture. These “multiplier effects” are rarely defined or captured in project logframes, but they are perhaps one of the most sustainable legacies of GBEP – a lesson for donors and designers of future projects.
Majority report
Although this was not rigorous research, I feel confident that our return revealed other valuable insights – especially around embedding and then protecting gains. While we encountered numerous instances of individual change - even without support, an individual can tread a single path - this isn’t enough to successfully and sustainably transform a cultural institution. You need critical mass. It was clear that within whole schools, the participatory approach was not well understood.
We were able to achieve a lot in our six years, but there then followed a complete cut off. We could have avoided some of the slippage with additional support in the following years. I’m not saying we need longer timeframes and twice the investment. But we do need to re-think the way we design projects so we achieve continuation in the immediate years after the project ends.
This reaffirmed something I have thought for a while: That the “big bang” nature of projects doesn’t lend itself naturally to sustainability. Real change – particularly in education with its annual cycles of terms and holidays – takes place over a longer period than the development world cares to admit.
I left with another sobering thought. We were in Gansu at the right time and the right place: just before the Chinese economic miracle took hold. The people were receptive to external catalysts. Ultimately, they made the changes, not us. Yet, if a country developing as fast as China cannot sustain some of these gains, what does this tell us about other, more dysfunctional education systems? Are our ambitions for sustainability largely rhetoric and wishful thinking?
No. That is going too far. But I do think we should be more realistic in our targets, especially within the traditional four or five year timeframes. I absolutely appreciate that donors are under immense pressure to demonstrate immediate, quantifiable gains to taxpayers. Longer project times, greater recipient control, more qualitative measurements – these aren’t the recommendations they want to hear. Therefore, it’s up to us as project designers to take these lessons on board from the start. Sustainable results are surely better value for money than quick wins that don’t last. Let’s be ambitious, but ambitious at the right level.
As a trio, we found it both moving and rewarding to go back and see that we had helped. That’s why we’re in development. We want to help other countries, governments and ministries of education to improve their systems. We should never forget that those systems have individual faces, and it was a unique experience to meet with them again. We were all proud to be part of a project that made such an impact on people’s lives.