Participatory operations in education can achieve many objectives, including increasing the relevance and quality of education, improving ownership, reaching disadvantaged groups, mobilising additional resources and building institutional capacity1. A number of participatory projects across the developing regions of Africa, Latin America and Asia have been initiated to improve the quality of education through the provision of local schooling improvement funding mechanisms. In Latin America and some parts of Africa, these mechanisms have been teacher focused. In Ghana and the majority of other cases in Africa, they have been community focused.
1 N Colletta and G Perkins, 1995, Participation in Education. World Bank Environment Department Papers Participation Series Paper No 001.
This paper analyses recent attempts to expand the depth and scope of community involvement in basic education in Ghana, with the aim of improving the quality of teaching and learning. It focuses on the experiences of the pilot phase of the Schooling Improvement Fund (SIF) project, while drawing upon other examples of community and social fund-type projects in education. It also explores the links between quality of education and access to education.
Baku and Agyeman (1997) claim that parents must be made to have a clearer understanding of quality education, because this in itself provides an incentive for them to participate in supporting their school. "In soliciting community participation, it is important to keep parents and the communities fully informed about the aims and methods of primary education. They need to be assisted to understand what their children will derive from their participation as well as the harm that may be done to the children by lack of parental and community active involvement."2 Thus, the social development concern is not limited to whether the following relationship holds true:
2 Baku and Agyeman, op. Cit. p. 17.
but if and how a more complex relationship is valid:
The factors affecting community participation, quality and access are many and complex, and involve very real problems of measurement. From the social development perspective, improving the quality of education is important insofar as it offers the potential for helping to increase access to education. This linkage is highlighted in the UK Government White Paper on Development3: "The quality of education is a crucial factor in encouraging parents to enrol their children (particularly girls) and in ensuring they attend school throughout the year."
3 Ibid., p. 23.
Much of the literature on participatory approaches to development focuses on how community participation enhances sustainable development, what it is and how it should be done. While acknowledging that it can involve risks and costs, there are relatively few discussions based on detailed case studies which examine why it can be problematic to achieve in practice. Social development practitioners and advisers are aware and concerned that community participation happens more in theory than in practice4. The UK Government White Paper on International Development also urges that with limited resources: "We need to know what will work and what will not work." And: "Getting it right means not only investing in effective relationships but in pushing back the boundaries of shared knowledge, understanding the problems which constrain sustainable development and working with national and international partners to develop appropriate, often innovative, solutions which will help to eliminate poverty."5 The approach adopted in this paper has therefore been to enter into the details of the SIF case study, but at the same time to draw upon the broad social development and education literature, with the aim of making practical recommendations for how community participation in Ghana can more successfully contribute to improving quality of education and increasing access6.
4 Rosalind Eyben and Sarah Ladbury, 1992, 'Popular participation in aid assisted projects: why more in theory than practice?', paper presented at GAPP Conference on Participatory Development.5 Department for International Development, 1997, Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge for the 21st Century. London, p.48.
6 Combining the details of a case study with a more general discussion of community participation and quality makes for slightly dense reading. However, I would argue that it is only by examining the detailed and complex relationship between the various factors -of a practical, technical, design and institutional nature - in a case study that we can work out exactly how and where a project needs modifying to achieve the expected objectives and impact.
The paper makes three main points. The first refers to the SIF's focus on fostering community participation. Despite some early signs of progress in increasing community commitment to school ownership, there are design shortcomings in the scope of participatory activities undertaken and in an appreciation of the practical and institutional barriers to achieving more extensive community empowerment. Secondly, it is argued that increasing community participation in education is not a sufficient condition for improving the quality of teaching and learning; the teachers themselves must be involved as key players in attempts to improve teaching methods and techniques. Thirdly, although increasing community participation and improving the quality of teaching and learning may ultimately impact on access, the relationship is not a given. In some regions of Ghana, education can be made more accessible through improving the quality of teaching and learning but in others a focus on poverty reduction will be an essential pre-requisite.
It may seem paradoxical for a social development practitioner to argue that we should recognise the limits of community participation. But if later evaluations of education projects in Ghana judge the impact of community participation to have been negligible in terms of increasing the quality of education, there is a risk that the proverbial baby will be thrown out with the bath water. The history of education reform in Ghana is fairly rich with 'condemned' as opposed to modified experiments, for instance in distance education and the use of untrained teachers in primary education. The frequent underlying problem has been that not enough attention is paid to the complexity of factors influencing community participation, quality and access in the design of the projects.
The rest of this paper is organised in sections which cover the following areas: The first section examines the SIF project design process in Ghana and the extent to which this facilitated community participation. The second examines the concrete achievements and limitations of the SIF in terms of community empowerment and ownership. In the third section, the limits to community empowerment as a means of improving the quality of teaching and learning are discussed. The fourth section examines the relationship between the facilitating NGO, local education authorities and key local institutions (school management committees, parent teacher associations and district education oversight committees) in terms of mainstreaming approaches and principles of community involvement and governance to improve the quality of teaching and learning. The fifth section examines the broader links between community participation and teaching quality, and access to schooling. The conclusion outlines the main practical and institutional recommendations reviewed to increase community participation in education, improve the quality of teaching and learning, and to ensure that both the former have an impact on improving access to education.
