Reflections on slavery: past, present and future

This reflection[i] has three main purposes:

• to emphasise the long and diverse history of slavery across the world, and to highlight its differing historical expressions and complexities;
• to recognise that we cannot change the past nor know the future with certainty, and can only act in the immediacy of the present; and
• above all, in the light of the above, to encourage us all to do much more now to eliminate the scourge of modern slavery.

Context

It is easy to say or write that slavery is fundamentally wrong because of the loss of freedoms and violence usually[ii] associated with it.  It is far more difficult, though, actually to do something constructive about eliminating slavery at the only time over which we have any control, the present.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-blm-protesters-acquitted-over-pulling-down-slave-trader-statue-2022-01-05/

The Black Lives Matter and associated anti-slavery protests in the UK in 2020 raised many questions (see image above). I was particularly challenged, for example, by the emphasis of those protesting on the past rather than on contemporary slavery.  The majority of banners likewise seemed to highlight the wrongs of past slavery more than they did the wrongs of present slavery.  My reflections here seek to grapple with why this was, and why it remains so.[iii]  In the years since, there has been much more visible concern in Britain over reparations for past slavery, especially relating to the 18^th and 19^th centuries, than there has been real action to eliminate contemporary slavery: statues of people who had once been slave-owners have been torn down; streets have been renamed; universities, such as Manchester  and Cambridge that have benefitted from donations from people who gained from the  slave trade have undertaken enslavement inquiries; and institutions such as the National Trust have published reports on their links with historic slavery. 

In part this is because of the overlapping interests between the Black Lives Matter movement and those protesting against slavery.[iv]  However, slavery matters in its own right; it is not just a racial matter.  In this piece I therefore seek to disentangle the issues of slavery and racism.[v]  I want to focus primarily on slavery rather than race.  I fully recognise that the two are often intertwined, and there are good reasons why people feel strongly about this intersection, but here I focus on broader issues relating specifically to slavery, and how we respond to the past.  I begin with some personal reflections on the origins of my own interest in slavery, and then provide a short conceptual framework that includes a note on definitions of slavery, before highlighting what I see as some of the most difficult and problematic issues concerning slavery past, present and future.  My purpose is to encourage us to shift our focus from the past about which we can change nothing, to the present where we do have the option to do something.

My interests in slavery

I have long been interested in slavery, from my days as a boy reading the Bible about the unfairness of Joseph being sold into slavery (Genesis 37) and my difficulty in trying to reconcile my own emerging moral views about slavery with some of Paul’s comments on slaves being obedient to their masters (Ephesians 6, Colossians 3, 1 Timothy 6, and Titus 2).  However, I have taken a much more serious and academic interest in slavery since the mid-1970s.  Three factors have been particularly important in helping to shape my current understanding of these issues. 

• First, my doctoral thesis in historical geography written in the second half of the 1970s focused in large part on the changing economic and social structures of medieval Midland England.  I was fascinated to learn that slaves could sometimes have had better lifestyles than villeins within feudal society.  In this I was heavily influenced by the writings of Marc Bloch (both his seminal La Société Féodale first published in 1939, but also in essays that have recently been collated under the title Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages) and in the historical records with which I was working.
• Second, some 20 years ago I encountered modern slavery in England for the first time as I sought to support someone who was trying to rescue a person who had been forced into slavery on their arrival to work in our country.  This opened my eyes to the widespread existence of modern slavery in many parts of the UK, and it continues to haunt me as I continue to see such slavery within the country that I call home. 
• Third, my experiences working in Africa during the last 20 years have inevitably forced me to confront issues of colonial history and slavery, especially in Sierra Leone and Ghana.  Despite its fraught history both as a Crown Colony until 1961 and then as an independent state since, Freetown and Sierra Leone always cause me to think about the potential for freedom in the human mind and the abolition of slavery;[vi] it is also salutary to recall that it is the home of Fourah Bay College which was founded in 1827 as the first western style university built in Sub-Saharan Africa.[vii]  I like to think that there is a connection between freedom and knowledge.

Freetown, 2009

Likewise, I have many fond memories of working in Ghana.  A visit to Cape Coast Castle in 2008, though, remains etched in my mind because of one very specific conversation that I had there while visiting the Castle and Dungeon.  Initially the castle had been established as a small fort by the Swedish Africa Company in the middle of the 17^th century, and it later became one of the most important “slave castles” along the former Gold Coast.  Watching a group of European women who were very upset by what they saw, one of my close Ghanaian friends commented that he never quite understood why many Europeans became so emotionally distressed when visiting the castle.  I was initially perplexed, but he went on to say that, after all, it was the African people living in the surrounding areas who had sold their awkward cousins and uncles, or people captured in conflicts as slaves to the Europeans in return for guns and other items that they wanted. Slavery had long been a way of life in the region, and had most definitely not been introduced by the Europeans.  His matter of fact comments challenged much of what I had previously rather taken for granted about the Triangular trans-Atlantic slave trade.[viii]  This trade was undoubtedly coercive, violent and exploitative, but its transactional character and the collaboration of African communities who were willing to sell other Africans for a price to European slavers needs to be recognised in any discussion of this particular expression of slavery.[ix] 

Cape Coast Castle, 2008 (as rebuilt by the British in the 18^th century)

On concepts and definitions

I have long enjoyed reading Onora O’Neill’s inspirational philosophical writings (see especially the collection of essays published as Justice Across Boundaries, 2016), and have found that many of my own ideas coincide quite closely with hers, especially around obligations, rights and justice (although I have tended to focus on the notion of “responsibilities” rather than “obligations”).  In particular, she highlights the difficulties that arise in discussing the rights to compensation for actions in the distant past that are widely considered to be wrong today. Her work is well worth reading at length on this topic; I frequently return to it for clarity on these difficult issues.  What follows is in part sparked by reflections on slavery in the contexts of these wider philosophical and conceptual debates.  Three challenges seem particularly important.

• First, no individual has any effective power over what her or his distant ancestors did in the past.  If they have no power to change the past, what are their responsibilities? We might have had some influence on our own parents’ actions, and those who have known their grandparents might also have had a little influence on their lives.  However, we cannot have had any actual influence on the lives and actions of those we never knew.  If we have had no such influence, can we have any responsibility for their actions in the past?  If we have no responsibility for those actions, why should we be criticised and condemned by others for the actions of our ancestors (individually and collectively)?  These are real challenges in the context of slavery.  It is not easy to clarify the logical reasons why the descendants of slave owners (and institutions they benefitted) should have received the opprobrium that has been cast on them by many of those today condemning slavery.  This is regardless of how one might “judge” (itself a very problematic notion) those who were children of slave owners, but who argued vehemently for abolition in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, or even those who had owned slaves but then championed abolition.[x]  Even John Locke, widely seen as being one of the founders of liberal democracy, has recently been savaged by historians and others because of his role in administering the British colonies in North America in the 17^th century where slavery was widely practised.[xi]

• Second, there are profound difficulties in “judging” the past by the standards of the present.  As Hartley wrote in The Go-Between (1953), “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”.  All societies evolve and change, but they all have mechanisms through which the few rich and/or privileged extract a surplus from the many poor and exploited (Karl Marx’s modes of production remain a powerful theoretical model of such change; for Marx and Engels, slave society was the earliest form of class society).  There are, though, many conundrums within the idea of “criticising” past societies, not least because our present societies have emerged from them, and would be different if they had not existed. There is nothing we can do about changing past societies.  Hopefully our present societies have evolved positively and are better than those of the past, although this is by no means always so!  The key thing is that we need to learn the lessons of history; we need to understand the past so that we do not make the same mistakes our ancestors made then and there (at least as “judged” by our own societies).  “Now” is the only time when we can actually do anything, and the choices we make in the present need to be made in the light of the past so as to help make a better future.  As Tolstoy (1903) wrote in his short essay Three Questions, “Remember then: there is only one time that is important – now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power”.  Such reflections also force us to consider how future generations will perceive our own actions.  How, for example, will they consider our ineffectual efforts to abolish modern slavery?  Might they see our enforced addiction to digital tech as but another, les immediately brutal, form of slavery, and today’s digital barons as equivalent to the slave masters of the past?

• Third, these considerations also make it important to try to define what exactly slavery is.  It is, though, very problematic to provide a clear and all-encompassing definition of slavery, not least because of the ways in which the notion and practices have varied and evolved over time (and may continue to do so in the future).  Two key elements are central to any definition: a lack of “freedom”, and being under the absolute control of another person.  Exactly what types of freedom and control are necessary to be considered as slavery are disputed and have changed over time.  One way of addressing this is to define certain practices as being indicative of slavery, as with chattel slavery (treating someone as the personal property of another), bonded labour (where someone pledges themselves to work for another to pay off a debt), or forced labour or marriage (where someone is forced in some way to work or marry against their will).  Another approach has been to adopt legal definitions agreed by conventions.  The 1926 UN Slavery Convention, thus defines slavery as ”the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching the right of ownership are exercised”.  In practice, it may be best to consider a spectrum of characteristics that comprise slavery, recognising that different people may choose to include some or all of these in their definitions.  “Servitude” is thus considered by some to have many of the characteristics of, but to be less severe than, “slavery”. The European Court of Human Rights (2022), for example, has recently argued that servitude “is a particularly serious form of denial of freedom”, although it should be considered as an aggravated form of forced labour, and therefore although related to slavery it is not to be confused with it. “It includes, in addition to the obligation to provide certain services to another, the obligation on the “serf” to live on the other’s property and the impossibility of changing his status”.[xii]  The relationship between “slavery” and “serfdom” has, though, also evolved over time.  In origin, the words “serf” and “slave” come from the same root, namely the Latin servus (meaning slave; and from which the word servitude is also derived).  However, serfs and slaves have generally been seen, at least from medieval times onwards, to be rather different categories.  For some, the word “serfs” is a generic term to describe the group of people originally known as coloni, or tenant farmers in the late Roman period onwards, and whose status had generally become increasingly degraded.  For others, it is even broader, and is often equated with the word “peasants” to refer to the mass of people at the bottom of the emerging class system in medieval and early-modern times, but above the status of slaves.[xiii]

These three conceptual framings underlie the ensuing sections on slavery in the past, in the present and in the future.

Roman collared slaves (Ashmolean Museum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roman_collared_slaves_-_Ashmolean_Museum.jpg)

Slavery: the past

Four important observations about past slavery are all too frequently ignored or downplayed in contemporary public discourse, but I suggest should be considered in any reasoned discussion of slavery:

• First, slavery was a normal and accepted aspect of society in many parts of the world for well over six millennia, whereas the abolitionist movement in Europe only really began in the mid-18^th century, less than three centuries ago.[xiv]  It must have been as unthinkable for the majority of people for most of history (and indeed pre-history) to have challenged slavery as it is now for someone to try to promote slavery.

• Second, slavery was practised at some time in the past in most parts of the world.  Slavery existed in most ancient civilizations as in the Babylonian and Persian Empires.  It was common throughout the Roman world; slaves from what is now the UK were paraded in Rome.  In the early Islamic states in West and North Africa it has been estimated that about one-third of the population were slaves; in East Africa, Zanzibar was the main port for slave trading to the Arabian peninsula.  Slavery was widely practised in the Pre-Columbian cultures of Middle and South America.  It formed a crucial element of the Ottoman Empire; in the 17^th century it is estimated that a fifth of the population of Constantinople was probably slaves. Slaves remained fundamentally important throughout the Ottoman Empire until the 19^th century, notably as the much feared Janissaries (elite infantry soldiers). Slavery was widespread for centuries in China, and was only abolished in 1909.  The Triangular trade between Europe, Western Africa and North America, which features so prominently in current popular discourse on slavery was thus only one example of the very widespread pattern of global slavery.  It is often forgotten that between the 15^th and 18^th centuries white Europeans from Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and England had also been sold into slavery by North Africans. Frequently slaves were captured as a result of warfare, sometimes there were regular expeditions to capture slaves, and often people sold themselves into slavery to pay off debts.  This ubiquitous character of slavery raises interesting questions about the payment of reparations.  Should Italy pay England for taking slaves during the period of Roman occupation?  Should Turkey pay countries in the Balkans for the devşirme (blood tax) through which Christian boys were taken to become Janissaires? Should the rulers of states in the Arabian peninsula pay reparations to the countries of eastern Africa?  Should Israel pay reparations to the surrounding countries from whence their ancestors took Canaanite slaves?  The usual response to such questions is “No”, on the grounds that such reparations only apply to the recent past.  But when is the past recent?[xv] 

• Third, it must be recognised that everyone in societies where slave ownership was practised benefitted to some extent from slavery, and it is not possible just to attribute blame to slave owners or traders and their descendants.[xvi]  The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker all benefitted from the wealth gained by those who invested in estates that used slave labour.  All societies, past and present, have mechanisms and legitimation systems through which the rich can exploit the poor, and can thereby afford to live “better” lives and purchase luxuries.  Slavery is just one mechanism through which such surplus extraction and exploitation occurs. Indeed, life for the poor in 18^th and 19^th century Britain was unbelievably harsh by modern standards.  However, everyone (apart from the slaves) takes a share of the trickle-down financial benefit.  The elite pay architects, artists and jewellers to produce what many societies now cherish as their cultural heritage, but this enabled these craftsmen to afford to buy paints, or beer, or clothing, which in turn benefitted the brewers, merchants and clothiers.  Ultimately, almost everyone in the past, and not just slave owners or institutions that received gifts derived from slave ownership, benefitted in some way from slavery.  It therefore seems highly problematic to pick out certain slave owners or institutions (and their descendants) in certain societies for retribution.

• Fourth, it is likely that in most cases slavery did not generally collapse purely for moral grounds, but rather also for economic ones. The ultimate reason that slavery collapsed was often because it became too expensive to obtain and maintain slaves.  We like to think that it resulted exclusively from some kind of enlightened belief, or a rise of moral virtue in the 19^th century, and this may indeed have helped in some cases (as with the abolitionist movement in Britain), but there is little evidence to support the argument that a sudden rise in moral concern was usually the primary reason that slavery ended.   As conflicts and wars reduced in frequency, it became less easy to capture people and enslave them.  Moreover, the costs of feeding slaves could become prohibitive, especially at times of rising basic staple prices. Forcing slaves to cultivate land to feed themselves was also problematic since it took land and labour away from other forms of production, and yields were in any case often not high.  Most importantly, new more efficient forms of labour exploitation (such as the factory system in the 19^th century) and the mechanisation of agriculture, reduced the economic benefits of slave production.

Slavery: the present

As noted in the quotation from Tolstoy cited above, the present is a very special time, because it is the only time when we have any power.   How we act in the present, though, depends very much on our understanding of the past.  Four problematic issues seem worthy of reflection here about how we are acting in the present with respect to slavery.

• First, it must be recognised and acknowledged that slavery still exists.  It was not eliminated by the abolutionist movement in the 19^th century.  According to the latest Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, there are about 49.6 million people living in modern slavery, mostly in forced labour and forced marriage.[xvii]  Roughly a quarter of these are children.  To be sure, definitions of slavery have changed over time, but these figures compare with best estimates for the number of slaves transported from Africa to the Americas of around 12.5 million.[xviii]  Modern slavery is real and present at a very large scale.  We can choose to do something real and practical about it.  It is as violent and horrendous as are most forms of past slavery.  While much current media attention and political activity focuses on black slavery, colonialism and issues around restitution and reparations, we also need to focus on the reality of modern slavery across the world and do something to bring it to an end.

• Second, the timing of the sudden upswelling of interest in slavery, the recent actions taken by many people and organisations to try to atone for the past, and the vehemence of commitment of many of those campaigning for reparations and against past slavery seem in part to represent a collective failure to understand and appreciate the impact of slavery, both in the past and at present.  Having learnt about slavery as a child, and written and taught about slavery through much of my career,[xix] I find it hard to believe that so many people in Britain seem to have been unaware of the impact of slavery on our economy.[xx]  Why did they not protest before 2020? The apparent sudden discovery of our role in the Triangular Trade, seems in part to reflect a failure in our education system to address the complexity of history, and especially to consider slavery in a global and holistic framework.  In a society increasingly dominated by scientism (science’s belief in itself) it becomes more and more important for young people to study the disciplines of history and geography which play such a crucial role in shaping their sense of time and place.  A good historical understanding of slavery throughout history and across the world would also help people have a much more nuanced and sensitive approach to understanding its complexities, and the reasons why we need to respond urgently to the continued existence of modern slavery. 

• Third, it is always easier to criticise people who cannot respond, especially in the past, than it is to act wisely in the present.  As any political leader knows, it is much easier to criticise others, than it is actually to deliver policies that have positive outcomes.  In the context of slavery, it is easy to stand up and protest, it is easy to adopt slick slogans, it is easy to blame people in the past, and it is easy to post critical comments on social media.  This is especially so when those who lived through those times are completely unable to respond or tell their side of the story.  It is very much more difficult to change existing practices, such as modern slavery, because that takes considerable time and effort, it is tough to do, it is expensive, and it is not easy to understand what really needs to be done.  However, given now is the only time when we can influence things for the better, we should surely concentrate on what we can actually do something about, rather than spend so much time bemoaning something that we can never change.  We can learn from the past to change the present.

• Fourth, it is difficult to justify criticising people in the past, because we were not there and have no way of knowing how we would have behaved ourselves at that time.  We might like to think that we would have acted in the past in accordance with our present moral compasses (if we recognise that we have such things), but the reality is that it is highly unlikely that we would have done so.  We simply have no real way of knowing what we would have done if we had been living during past epochs when slavery was rife.  Perhaps our biggest fear would have been the chance of being captured and sold into slavery ourselves.  If we cannot guarantee that we would have opposed slavery then, it seems difficult to justify the opprobrium that we cast on those who benefitted from slavery in the past, especially if we are doing little to prevent it in the present.

In short, the logic of the above comments seems to point to a conclusion that we should focus our attention more on trying to stop modern slavery, because we can indeed do something about this, rather than spending most of our time criticising the actions of people in the past about which we can do nothing.

Slavery: the future

Such arguments have interesting implications when slavery in the future is considered.  Again, four comments seem appropriate.

• First, we might be able to reduce the extent of slavery in the future if we take action to do so now, and at the very least those who do indeed believe that slavery is wrong would then be acting according to their moral principles.  This in itself raises many further difficult issues.  Given that slavery still exists, and has therefore probably done so ever since human “civilizations” first emerged, is it somehow a “natural” human condition?  Will slavery always exist?  Even if this is the case, though, those of us who believe it is wrong can nevertheless still seek to take action now to reduce its extent in the hope that this will happen in the future. 
• Second, how will those in the future look back and see our actions today with respect to slavery?  Just as we cannot influence the past, we will not be living when those in the future think about us. At one level, this question will not really matter, because we will be long dead and the thoughts of people in the distant future can have no real influence over us.  Nevertheless, many people do wish to be remembered kindly. For those who do care how history will see them, if only the near history of their children and grandchildren, taking action now at a time over which we do have some control or power, would seem to be wise (although of course many people may not wish to be wise). How will our offspring and descendants judge us most positively: for acting to reduce the slavery that does exist and we can do something about, or for merely protesting about a past over which we could never do anything to change.
• Third, if we do nothing about slavery today, there is a chance that those nearest and dearest to us might be forced into slavery in the future.  This may be an unlikely scenario for many reading this post, but it is at least a logical possibility.  Every one of the nearly 50 million people currently in slavery has parents, and possibly grandparents who may still be alive and know them.  At least some, perhaps most, of these relatives will grieve that their offspring are enslaved.  By acting today, we can reduce the chances of our children and further descendants becoming enslaved.
• Finally, it is worth asking what future generations may consider about the nature of freedom and slavery in our societies today?  I have recently spent much time pondering this question, and writing and speaking about digital enslavement as a new mode of production.  Put simply, if we cannot live without using digital tech, have we become enslaved by the owners of the companies and governments who force us to use such technologies?  If we cannot spend a day, let alone a week, without using digital tech, have we not become enslaved by those who make it?[xxi]  Have we not willingly become “unfree”?  The new slave masters expropriate a vast surplus from our data and everything that they know about us, and we seem unable to escape from giving this to them at no charge.  Indeed, we have to pay significant amounts to be connected to the internet, just so as to enable them to exploit us further.   What will future generations think?  Will the likes of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos also have the work of their foundations and donations castigated, their virtual statues torn down, their reputations smashed, and their children’s children hated for the actions of their ancestors?[xxii]

In conclusion

It is difficult to draw firm conclusions from the above reflections, and everyone will have somewhat differing views about them.  They are intended to raise difficult questions and encourage open debate on them.  I have tried to focus on slavery alone, although clearly this intersects, especially at this time in history, with other categories of contemporary interest such as race and colonialism.  However, these reflections are explicitly not intended to address either of these other two categories in any detail.  Slavery has existed between and within many different races; it has transcended most modes of socio-economic, political and cultural formation.  It is not unique to the Triangular Trans-Atlantic slave trade. There has been a considerable amount of research done on the history of slavery and very much more that needs to be done.  However, history alone is not enough.  It is the moral questions that we ask, and how we use them to shape the futures of the societies in which we live that, to me, matter most.

The above arguments suggest to me that it is more important to focus on trying to reduce contemporary slavery (and its possible variants in the future) than it is only to protest about the horrors and injustices of past slavery.  Both are important, and this is not to belittle the value of highlighting the undoubted injustices of slavery in the past.  However, we cannot change what has happened in the past, and it is surely therefore our responsibility to past slaves that we act now, when we can, to prevent slavery continuing into the future.   Protesting is the easy bit; changing the future is when the going gets really tough. Others may well feel differently, and I certainly accept that we need a sound understanding of the past if we are to act wisely in the present.  I began by reflecting on my surprise at how few of the anti-slavery and anti-racism protests that I saw in 2020 and 2021 focused on modern slavery. My hope is that those who read and engage with what I have written here may turn their anger at what they cannot change into energy to reduce the extent of slavery that remains all about us today.  I also hope that they will strive to maintain the perceived freedoms that so many now cherish and take for granted, and yet are in very real danger of being taken away from us through the increasingly all-pervasiveness of digital enslavement. 

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[i] I am immensely grateful to several friends and colleagues who took time to comment on an earlier version of this draft and have undoubtedly helped me to improve it.  I know that the issues it addresses are sensitive, but I hope that this final version strikes an appropriate balance as I seek to encourage us all to refocus our attention on how we eliminate the modern slavery (and especially violence against women) that continues to exist across the world.

[ii] I have deliberately used this word here because I remain struck by the reality that the lives of some slaves in the past were in many ways better than the lives of the poorest agricultural labourers.

[iii] There were indeed some banners relating to modern slavery, but from the protests and images that I saw these were in a minority.

[iv] This was also associated with transfers of ideology and practice from the US to the rather different context of the UK. 

[v] This is not in any way to downplay the horrors of the slave trade between Africa and the Americas between the 17^th and 19^th centuries, but it is to try to explore fundamental principles associated with slavery per se rather than racism.

[vi] See for example, Abraham Farfán and María del Pilar López-Uribe (2020) The British founding of Sierra Leone was never a ‘Province of Freedom, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2020/06/27/british-founding-sierra-leone-slave-trade/. It is also important to note here that it was actually in the UK, a colonial and later imperial power, where the abolutionist movement first gained considerable traction, initially in the late 18th century and then especially from the 1830s onwards.

[vii] The Province of Freedom in what became Sierra Leone was first settled in 1787 by formerly enslaved black people, but this early settlement collapsed, and it was not until 1792 with an influx of more than a thousand former slaves from North America that the settlement of Freetown was firmly established through the agency of the Sierra Leone Company.

[viii] See also Trevor Phillips’ important essay in The Times (18 September 2020 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trevor-phillips-when-you-erase-a-nations-past-you-threaten-its-future-xx9rqzqh9) entitled “When you erase a nation’s past, you threaten its future”, in which he suggests that “Those who have African heritage might do well, before they denounce long-dead British slave owners, to find out which side of the vile transactions in West Africa’s slave ports their own ancestors stood”.  See also his review “Colonialism by Nigel Biggar: don’t be ashamed of empire”, in The Sunday Times, 5^th February 2023, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/colonialism-by-nigel-biggar-dont-be-ashamed-of-empire-lp83ptqtd. More research needs to be done on the origins of slaves from West Africa in the Caribbean and North America, and how they were enslaved.

[ix] This also reminds me of the continuing African slave trade across the Sahara today.  See for example https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/07/africa/un-sanctions-migrant-traffickers-intl/index.html, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/29/african-refugees-bought-sold-and-murdered-in-libya/, and https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/29/african-refugees-bought-sold-and-murdered-in-libya/.

[x] See for example the life of John Newton who had been a slave, a captain of slave ships, and then championed abolitionism, as well as writing the famous hymns Amazing Grace and Glorious things of Thee are spoken. 

[xi] See Brewer, 2018.

[xii] https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/guide_art_4_eng.pdf, p.8.

[xiii] In my own work on medieval society, I found it helpful to avoid the generic word “serf” and stick to the terms actually in use at the time, such as villeins, cottars and bordars.  In very general terms, in 11^th century England there were two broad groups of rural people beneath the level of knights and lords: the free peasantry (freemen and sokemen) who comprised about 12% of the population recorded in Domesday Book of 1066; and the unfree (villeins representing about 40% of the population, alongside the poorer cottars and bordars) who worked the land in return for onerous obligations and services to the Lord.  Beneath them all were the slaves, comprising perhaps 10% of the population, who had no property rights and could be bought and sold.

[xiv] Although Louis X of France published a decree in 1315 declaring that any slave arriving on French soil should be declared free, the widespread rise of abolitionism is usually dated to the emergence of The Enlightenment in the mid-18th century, and the activities of the Quakers in England and North America in the latter part of that century.  Interestingly, although slavery was abolished during the French revolution, Napoleon restored it in 1802 as one means to try to retain sovereignty over France’s colonies.

[xv] Complex legal debates around statutes of limitations are one way on which attempts have been made to answer this question.  See for example the UN’s OHCHR “Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law” https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/basic-principles-and-guidelines-right-remedy-and-reparation.  See also Shelton, D. (2002) Reparations for human rights violations: how far back?, Amicus Curiae, 44, 3-7

[xvi] I have deliberately concentrated here on slavery in a global context, and not just on the current emphasis in European and North American societies on the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  The horrors, misery and death associated with slavery in the context of European colonialism should not be trivialised, but at the same time their needs to be open and honest discussion about the existence of slavery in Africa long before the arrival of white Europeans.

[xvii] See ILO, Walk Free and IOM (2022) Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage, Geneva: ILO, Walk Free and IOM. See also https://www.antislavery.org/slavery-today/modern-slavery/.

[xviii] See https://www.slavevoyages.org/, as well as extensive other research by Franz Binder, Ernst van den Boogart, Henk den Heijer and Johannes Postma, James Pritchard, Andrea Weindl, Antonio de Almeida Mendes, Manuel Barcia Paz, Alexandre Ribeiro, David Wheat and José Capela.

[xix] especially in the context of my teaching of Marxist theory between the mid-1970s and the end of the 1990s.  See also the work of the UCL Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery.

[xx] There has been very substantial research on slavery in the past, and the extent to which British society and the economy were shaped by it in the 18^th and 19^th centuries has long been well known.  See for example the work of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at UCL https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ which emerged from earlier funded research projects in the 2000s and 2010s, and also the useful short  note by John Oldfield (2021) on abolition of the slave trade and slavery in Britain, https://www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/articles/abolition-of-the-slave-trade-and-slavery-in-britain, which draws heavily on research dating back to the 1930s.

[xxi] Do consider using #1in7offline to promote the practice of having a day a week offline.

[xxii] See my 2022 piece on Freedom, enslavement and the digital barons: a thought experiment.

Thoughts on “Education and digitisation in development cooperation”

Recently I was asked by the GFA Consulting Group to provide some short comments and reflections (just a few sentences) in response to four questions, the answers to which will be incorporated as part of a final chapter in an important new Toolkit on Education and Digitisation in Development Cooperation being developed by them together with GIZ (Sector Programme Education) and BMZ (Division 402, Education), and due to be published in April 2020 [as: BMZ, Toolkit – Education and Digitalization in Development Cooperation, to be published in 04/2020].  It is always interesting to try constructively to answer questions that contain inbuilt assumptions with which I don’t necessarily agree!  They have kindly agreed that I can share them here for wider commentary and feedback.  This is how I responded:

1)   How can digitalization contribute to achieving the educational objectives of the Agenda 2030?

“Digitalization by itself contributes little to enhancing education, and can often actually cause more harm than good.  The introduction of digital technologies into educational systems must be undertaken in a holistic and carefully planned way.  It needs to be designed and implemented “at scale”, beginning in the poorest and most marginalised contexts: in isolated rural areas, for people with disabilities, for out of school children, and for girls in patriarchal societies.  Only then will it begin to reduce the inequalities in learning provision, and help to provide children and adults alike with the skills they need to empower themselves”.

2)   Which digital technologies will bring about revolutionary changes in the education sector in the future?

“Digital technologies by themselves cannot bring about any changes, let alone revolutionary ones!  To claim otherwise propagates the damaging reductionist myth of technological determinism.  Technologies are designed by people who have specific interests and for particular purposes.  We need to begin with the education and not the technology.  Hence, people with exciting ideas about how to improve education – particularly in the most challenging circumstances – should be encouraged to develop new technological solutions to the most pressing problems that they identify.  These challenges include enabling teachers to have the right skills and understanding to help children learn, ensuring that relevant content is available in the optimal formats to enable children to live fulfilled lives, and creating systems to ensure efficient resource use in educational systems”.

3)   What will be the most pressing challenge in the educational development cooperation sector in the future and how can the use of digital technologies help to overcome it?

“The most important challenge in educational systems is to ensure that there are sufficient well-trained and committed teachers and facilitators employed to inspire new generations of learners.  It is estimated that around 69 million new teachers are needed if the educational objectives of Agenda 2030 are to be reached.  We must ensure therefore that digital technologies are used efficiently and effectively to support in-service and pre-service training for educators, to provide effective learning resources for them to use with learners, and to enable them to be supported by efficient administrative and assessment schemes.  This is without doubt the most pressing challenge”.

4)   What needs to happen in order to utilize the potential of these digital innovations for education in partner countries?

“Four simple things are needed:

• Partner countries (and indeed donors) must give education the highest priority in their development programmes. Many people talk about the importance of education, but it is only rarely given sufficient emphasis and resources.  We need to reiterate over and over again that ignorance is far more expensive than education!
• We need to put in place effective mechanisms through which good practices in the use of digital technologies in education can be shared and implemented. We must stop reinventing the wheel and repeating the mistakes made with digital technologies in the past.  Far too many resources are wasted in developing pilot projects that will never go to scale and will not enhance learning opportunities for the most marginalised.
• We must begin by implementing effective systems of using digital technologies in teacher training. Only once teachers and learning facilitators have been effectively trained should digital systems be rolled out across schools.
• Finally, we need to ensure that we also minimise the harm that digital technologies can be used for in education and learning. The benefits of digital technologies can only be achieved if systems are put in place to mitigate the harm that they can be used for”.

I think it is likely that these were not the sort of answers that they were expecting, but I very much hope that they provoke discussion that may lead to changes in the way that governments, companies and civil society organisations seek to implement the use of digital technologies in education.  Not surprisingly, they are very much in line with the work that I had the privilege of helping 21 UN agencies develop for the UN’s Chief Executive Board last year entitled Towards a United Nations system-wide strategic approach for achieving inclusive, equitable and innovative education and learning for all.  It is so important that we all work together to develop sound policies and practices that do not reinvent the wheel or duplicate other onoging initiatives.  Above all, we must begin with the education and learning, and not with the technology!

The running shoes, girls’ learning in Africa and the gecko: a fable

Once there was a brilliant young entrepreneur living in Africa.  Let us call him Alfred.  He wanted to make loads of money, but was also very committed to trying to improve the quality of girls’ learning and education.  One evening, drinking probably too much Tusker, Alfred had a stroke of inspiration.  What if he could persuade the government that giving girls high quality new running shoes would transform the quality of their learning experience, and thus their future job prospects.  This was an absolute no brainer.  The government would have to buy his trainers for every girl in the school system!

Schoolgirls in Ghana

But how was he to start? Many international donors are eager to support such schemes that might contribute to achievements of SDGs4 (education) and 5 (gender).  So, he set about getting to know the heads of country office of some of the leading European donors, and learnt that at the heart of getting funding was the need to have a theory of change (well, really not a comprehensive “theory”, but just a basic description of how running shoes would improve girls’ learning).  This was easy: good quality running shoes would enable the girls to get fitter, and it is well known that a fit body creates a fit mind; then, if they ran to and from school each day they would have more time to do their homework; and with good shoes on their feet they would not suffer as many injuries or catch diseases that might impair their learning.  Alfred had to think of an inspiring name for these shoes, so that everyone would want a pair.  How about “Jepkosgei” after the great young Kenyan runner who had just won the New York Marathon?  She was very happy to lend her name to this incredibly exciting initiative that could transform girls’ learning.

A school classroom in Malawi

The stage was set.  His friends among the donors recommended a great European university research team who would do the baseline survey as part of one of their research grants, and then they would do a follow-up evaluation at the end of the first term.  The shoes would be randomly allocated to girls in classrooms in a small set of pilot schools, and the purpose was to show that giving girls smart new running shoes would indeed improve their results when compared with those in the classrooms that were not given the shoes.  At the end of term, the researchers returned.  Everyone was on best behaviour.  What would they discover?

The results were extraordinary.  In just one term, the girls had improved their scores by 20% in Mathematics and English.  The researchers checked and re-checked their resuts, but there was absolutely no doubt.  The President got to hear of Alfred’s great success, and eager to do well in the next elections he ordered all schools immediately to supply girls with Jepkosgei running shoes. Demand outstripped supply, but Alfred set up new factories to produce them, providing much needed employment and contributing to the country’s economic growth.  Soon neighbouring countries got to hear about the impact of running shoes on girls’ learning, and they too sent in orders for tens of thousands of shoes.  Alfred became a superstar.  He won numerous awards at prestigious international events, and was fêted by the likes of Bill Gates and António Guterres.  Alfred was an African hero transforming African girls’ learning.  Why hadn’t anyone thought of this before.  It was so simple.

A friendly and wise gecko

Back at the school where this all began there was a wise old gecko.  He had watched and listened as the changes took place.  He knew why learning had changed.  When the girls had first been given their runing shoes they were so proud!  They were going to be like Joyciline Jepkosgei!  People were paying attention to them.  For the first time in their lives they had felt appreciated at school.  They wanted to respond positively.  But it wasn’t just this.  Other children in the school knew that if the pilot was a success, they too would be given smart new running shoes.  So, they did everything they could to help ensure that their peers with the shoes would learn especially well that term.  They did extra chores for them so they could concentrate on their work.  They provided advice and help when something wasn’t understood.  They gave them quizzes and checked they knew the right answers.  The teachers also wanted to ensure that these girls did really well as a result of the running shoes, and so they put extra effort into preparing their classes, and ensuring that the girls had the best opportunities to learn, despite the limited resources.  Some even helped them with the answers in the tests when the researchers came to evaluate the scheme.

It was all a wonderful success.  Alfred was happy and rich, the President was happy and re-elected, the donors were happy because they could show how they delivered on the SDGs.  But the girls weren’t happy, and their exam results gradually declined over the next few years.  Girls’ feet grow, and their lovely bright shoes were soon too small for them.  There was no way to hand them on or recycle them, and in any case after a couple of years continual use by their younger sisters they were wearing out.  The government couldn’t afford to buy new shoes for all the girls.  Once everyone had them, those who had been in the pilot no longer felt special, and no-one helped each other to try to improve results.  In any case, the government was now more interested in the 4th Industrial Revolution, and how they could use it to control their people and further advantage those who were already rich and powerful and living in the burgeoning constantly surveilled smart cities…

The gecko, though, continued to enjoy catching insects, and watching the children play.  Occasionally, he wistfully wondered why no-one had asked him how to improve girls education and learning.

A school in rural Malawi

Short guides to literature on technology use in education: both the positives and the negatives…

Infant school in Cocody, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

Far too many initiatives using technology in education fail to learn from the experiences of others as they seek to be innovative and novel.  Consequently, the same mistakes tend to be replicated over and over again.  Far too many researchers likewise fail to read but a fraction of the vast literature that has been published on technology and education, and bibliographies in PhD theses in the field are increasingly often only sketchy at best.

In 2017 and 2018 I had the privilege of being asked to write a report for UNICEF on how the organisation might respond to the future interface between technology and learning.  This involved reading hundreds of reports, interviewing numerous people, and drawing on my experiences across the world over the last quarter of a century.  It made me realise how little I know, and how much still needs to be done.

However, in order to help others on this journey of discovery and learning, I thought it might be helpful to share a shortened version of the footnotes (34 sides) and a short summary bibliography (10 sides) that I included in that report.  Many of the links to the original literature or examples are included (please let me know if any are broken so that I can try to update them!).  Not least, I hope that this might reduce the flow of questions I receive from people beginning to get interested in the field, either for research or because they have a great idea that they would like to introduce in practice on the ground – most of whom have never actually read much before asking me the question!  These are but starting points on a lifetime of learning and discovery, but I hope that people may find them useful.

• References and links for understanding the use of technology in education, especially in deprived contexts
• A short bibliography of important literature on ICTs and education

I have previously posted summaries of some of the content of my UNICEF report elsewhere on my Blog as follows:

• Why we don’t really know very much about the influence of ICTs on learning and education
• Interesting practices in the use of ICTs for education
• The dark side of using ICTs in education

I must stress that these are very much my own views, and in no way represent the opinions of UNICEF or those with whom I have previosuly worked.  They are offered here, though, to get us all to ask some of the difficult questions about ways through which some of the poorest and most marginalised can benefit from the use of technology in education, if indeed that will ever truly be possible (at least in a relative sense).

Failures and corruption in DFID’s education programme in Pakistan

DFID’s much-vaunted education programme in Pakistan has been beset by problems since its very beginning.  Many of these issues could have been avoided if people responsible had listened to the voices of those on the ground who were working in the education systems and schools in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.  Those responsible for designing and implementing the flawed programme need to be identified, and take responsibility for their actions.  Many are still in highly paid and “respected” roles in private consultancy companies that are at risk of delivering such failed projects over and over again unless they are stopped.

A recent report in the Financial Times (by Bethan Staton and Farhan Bokhari, 24th August 2019) has gone largely unreported elsewhere, as a coalition of silence continues over this failure and corruption in a prestigious DFID programme.  As their report begins, “Buildings in more than nine in 10 schools in Pakistan delivered under a £107m project funded by the UK’s Department for International Development are not fit for purpose, leaving 115,000 children learning in makeshift classrooms as a new academic year begins”.  Some 1,277 out of the 1,389 schools that were meant to have been built or renovated are potentially at risk from structural design flaws, which put them at risk of collapse in earthquakes.  Pakistan is one of the most seismically active countries in the world and has had six major earthquakes over 6 Mw in the last decade.  The earthquake in October 2005 killed over 86,000 people, and set in train various initiatives to try to ensure that schools were indeed built to protect children in earthquakes.

The UK government has responded quickly to the FT’s report, with the new Secretary of State, Alok Sharma, saying that this is unacceptable and the contracting company would be retrofitting all affected classrooms at no extra cost to the taxpayer.  Stephen Twigg, the chair of the House of Commons International Development Select Committee, has also pledged to investigate this as part of an inquiry into the impact and delivery of aid in Pakistan.

However, all of this could have been avoided if earlier warnings had been heeded, especially from people in Pakistan on the ground who really knew what was going on.  The suspicion is that those who designed and benefitted from the programme thought that they could get away with benefitting personally from these contracts.  Yet again, suspicion falls on the probity of “international development consultants” and “implementing agencies”.  As a very good Pakistani friend said to me, “follow the money”.  So I have!

I first warned about problems with DFID funded education projects in Pakistan following a visit there in 2016.  I raised my concerns in a post in May of that year entitled Education reform in Pakistan: rhetoric and reality, and shared these with colleagues in DFID, but was assured that this was a prestigious DFID programme that was above reproach and was delivering good work.  My comments were, I was told, mere heresay.

That post ended with the following words:

“The main thing that persuaded me to write this piece was a Facebook message I received this morning, that then suddenly disappeared.  It read:

“It is true though Tim Unwin.  What is really pathetic is that neither Dfid nor Sindh/Punjab government are made accountable for those children whose education will discontinue after this debacle. Education Fund for Sindh boasted enrolling 100 thousand out of school kids. Overnight the project and project management has vanished, website dysfunctional…Poof and all is gone. There is no way to track those children and see what’s happening to their education”

This is so very sad.  We need to know the truth about educational reform in Pakistan – and indeed the role of donors, the private sector and richly paid consultants – in helping to shape this.   I cannot claim that what I have been told is actually happening on the ground, but I can claim that this is a faithful record of what I was told”.

I wish I knew why the words were taken down; perhaps the author did not want to be identified.  More importantly, I wish that people in DFID had listened to them.

My earlier post alluded to the coalition of interests in international development between individual consultants, global corporations, local companies, and government officials.  Let me now expand on this.

• McKinsey, Pearson, Delivery Associates and Sir Michael Barber.  Barber is curently chairman and founder of Delivery Associates (among other roles) and was in many ways the mind behind DFID’s recent educational work in Pakistan.  From 2011-2015 he was DFID’s Special Representative on Education in Pakistan (as well as Chief Education Advisor at Pearson, 2011-2017), and in 2013 he wrote an enthusastic report entitled The Good News from Pakistan: How a revolutionary new approach to education reform shows the way forward for Pakistan and development aid everywhere, which explored in particular ways through which expansion in low-cost private sector educational delivery might spur the government to reform itself (pp.49-50).  However, as the Mail Online pointed out Barber was paid £4,404 a day for his advice.  As this source goes on to point out, “Sir Michael was handed the deal 18 months ago as part of a wider contract with management consultants McKinsey.  Originally McKinsey was planning to charge £7,340 a day for Sir Michael’s advice on improving Pakistan’s education system over 45 days, making a total of £330,300.  Overall, four consultants were to be paid £910,000 for 250 days’ work, although this was reduced to £676,720 after the firm agreed a ‘social sector discount’, which took Sir Michael’s daily rate to £5,505. A fellow director was paid the same rate while two ‘senior consultants’ were paid £2,350 a day”.  There is no doubt that Barber played a key role in shaping DFID’s educational policies in Pakistan and was paid “handsomely” for it.  The 2016 review of the PESP (II) (Punjab Education Support Programme) clearly describes his involement: “More formally, the bi-monthly stocktake of the Roadmap provides a high-level forum to discuss a range of key education indicators (such as student attendance and missing facilities) with the CM, Secretary Education and Sir Michael Barber, as the UK Special Representative for Education in Pakistan”.
• IMC Worldwide, the main contractor.  The British Company IMC Worldwide won the main contract for delivering much of DFID’s school building programme in Pakistan, and continues to claim on its website that the project is a great success (as noted on a screenshot of its home page earlier today, shown below).

This goes on to highlight their success in improving up to 1500 classrooms, with videoclips emphasising in particular their use of reinforced foundations, innovative use of Chinese Brick Bond, preserving history through innovations, and building community engagement.  It is, though, worth remembering that the Punjab Education Support Programme PESP (II) January 2016 review commented that “The school infrastructure component has been slow to perform. This was due in part to a delay in legal registration of IMC Worldwide (the international private sector implementing partner) in Pakistan. Unit costs have also risen dramatically since the last Annual Review and work is behind the original schedule. The quality of construction in the classrooms that have been completed is encouraging”.  In hindsight, the quality of work would appear to have been anything but encouraging!

• Humqadan-SCRP, the local initiative.  IMC needed to implement the programme through local contractors, and this led to the creation of Humqadan-SCRP.  The implementation phase started in May 2015 as a five year programme funded by DFID and the Australian government, and managed by IMC Worldwide.  It is very difficult to find out details about exactly who is involved in delivering the construction work on the ground (closed tenders are listed here).  Its newsletters in 2017 and 2018 mentioned that Herman Bergsma was the team leader, although he has now been replaced (his predecessor was Roger Bonner).

As with the IMC site, Humqadan’s media centre page above indicates great success for the initiative.  However, local media in Pakistan has occasionally reported problems and challenges with the work.  In December 2017, Dawn thus highlighted the case of a school building being demolished in 2015, but still remaining to be reconstructed.  More worrying, though, are suggestions that IMC may have failed sufficiently to do quality checks, and had challenges in ensuring that local contractors were paid appropriately and on time; there are even claims that IMC may have sought to keep much of the money for themselves.  DFID’s July 2016 annual report for the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Education Sector Programme (KESP) perhaps gives some credence to such rumours, noting that “Just before the finalisation of last year’s KESP annual review, Humqadam flagged to DFID an expected increase in their costs for construction and rehabilitation, but the detail was not clear at the time of publication. Humqadam subsequently confirmed that after going out to the market for the construction work, several cost drivers were significantly higher than in their original estimates. This had the effect of approximately doubling average classroom construction costs from PKR 450,000 (£2,813) to PKR 950,000 (£5,938)”.  The Pakistani construction sector is notoriously problematic and anyone the least bit familiar with the country should know the importance of good and rigorous management processes to ensure that appropriate standards are maintained.  A doubling of costs, though, seems remarkable; even more remarkable is DFID’s apparent acceptance of this.

• The donor’s role, DFID.  DFID’s regular reports on progress with the project are mixed.  Ever since the beginning, they have tended to over-emphasise the successes, while underestimating the failures. That having been said, it is important to emphasise that some attempts have been made by DFID to grapple with these issues.  As I noted in my earlier post relating to the Punjab Education Support Programme (PESP II): “DFID’s Development Tracker page suggests that there was a substantial over-spend in 2013/14, and a slight underspend in 2015/16, with 2014/15 being just about on budget.  Moreover, DFID’s most recent review of the project dated January 2016 had provided an overall very positive account of the work done so far, although it did note that “The school infrastructure component has been slow to perform” (p.2)“.  The July 2016 KESP report likewise noted that “Over the 12 months since the last KESP review, DFID has responded by strengthening its management of the Humqadam contract to increase scrutiny and oversight. The team produced an enhanced monitoring strategy and commissioned a Third Party Verification (TPV) contract to verify that this intervention still represented value for money.”  It is nevertheless remarkable that the programme score for this programme increased from C in 2012, to B in 2013 and 2014, and then A from 2015 to 2016.  As far as DFID is concerned it was indeed therefore being successful.  Not insignificantly, though, the risk rating rose from High from 2012-2015 to Major in 2016.  Unfortunately there is no mention of Humqadan in the first Performance Evaluation of DFID’s Punjab Education Sector Programme (PESP2), published in 2019.  On balance, some aspects of the overall programme would indeed appear to be going well, but DFID’s monitoring processes would seem to have failed to pick up a potentially catastrophic failure in actual delivery on the ground.

This is clearly a complex and difficult situation, but above all two things stand out as being extremely sad:

• Children on the ground in desperate need of good learning opportunities seem to have been failed, since so many new school buildings appear not to have been built to the appropriate standards; and
• DFID’s reputation as one of the world’s leading bilateral donors has been seriously tarnished, whether or not the scale of construction failure is as high as the FT article suggests.

All of these problems could have been resolved if:

• greater care had been taken in the design of the programme in the first place;
• greater attention had been focused on the problems picked up in the annual reporting process;
• greater scrutiny had been paid to the work of the consultancy companies and local contractors; and
• greater efffort had been expended on monitoring local progress and quality delivery on the ground.

Above all, if senior DFID staff had listened more to concerns from Pakistanis working on the ground in rural areas of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and had been less concerned about portraying its success as a donor agency, then these problems might never have arisen in the first place.  Yet again the coalition of interests of donor governments, international consultants and their companies and corporations, seem to have dominated the views and lives of those that they purport to serve.

If the Financial Times report is true, and the scale of incompetence and possible corruption is indeed as high as is claimed, I hope that DFID will take a very serious look at its processes, and ensure that those who have taken British taxpayers’ money for their own personal gain are never permitted to do so again.

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Additional insights, August 2022

The above post was written some three years ago, but I have recently discovered additional materials that would indeed support some of my conjectures. Those interested might like to see the following by Matt Benson on LinkedIn about his resignation from what was then DFID:

• Resignation part one
• Resignation part deux
• Resignation part three
• Resignation continued
• Resignation part who knows…

These provide much more detail from the inside, and it would be good to know what the FCDO might have to say in response.

It strikes me that there are at least five fundamental issues that need to be addressed:

• The implications that these issues have for the provision of education in Pakistan, especially for some of the poorest and most marginalised children;
• The role of very highly paid individual consultants and international contractors in development initiatives across the world;
• The ways through which the UK funds its international development programmes, especially now that these are delivered through the FCDO;
• Mechanisms for assessing the impact of aid interventions openly and transparently, esecially where these are funded through taxpayer’s money; and
• The accountability of individuals within development interventions.

Hopefully, there can be an open and constructive discussion around all of these important issues, because it is surely time to stop the exploitation of the international aid system by companies and individual consultants as appears to have happened on a significat scale in Pakistan.

Updated 22 August 2022

Participating in the DFID-funded technology for education Hub Inception Phase consultation retreat

It was great to be part of the DFID-funded technology for education EdTech Hub three-day Inception Phase consultation retreat from the evening of  29th July through to 1st August held at Royal Holloway, University of London.  This brought together some 30 members of the core team, funders and partners from the Overseas Development Institute, the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the University of Cambridge, Brink, Jigsaw Consult, Results for Development, Open Development and Education, AfriLabs, BRAC and eLearning Africa, and the World Bank, as well as members of the Intellectual Leadership Team from across the world, and representation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The meeting was designed to set in motion all of the activities and processes for the Inception Phase of the eight-year Hub, focusing especially on

• The Hub’s overall vision
• The work of the three main spheres of activity
  • Research
  • Innovation, and
  • Engagement
• The governance structure
• The theory of change
• The ethical and safeguarding frameworks
• The communication strategy, and
• The use of Agile and adaptive approaches

The Hub aims to work in partnership to “galvanise a global community in pursuit of catalytic impact, focusing on evidence so we can collectively abandon what does not work and reallocate funding and effort to what does”.  Moreover, it is “committed to using rigorous evidence and innovation to improve the lives of the most marginalised”.

Above all, as the pictures below indicate, this meeting formed an essential part in helping to build the trust and good working relationships that are so essential in ensuring that this initiative, launched in June 2019, will achieve the ambitious goals that it has set.

[A similr version of this post was first published on the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D site, 1st August 2019]

The dark side of using ICTs in education

Much evidence has been adduced to suggest that ICTs enhance not only the quantity but also the quality of education and learning; those selling such technologies have skilfully created an atmosphere where it is usually unquestioningly assumed that ICTs do indeed have a beneficial impact.  However, the opportunity to undertake research recently for UNICEF on the future of ICT use in education provided me with the chance to explore some of the darker aspects of such use, and I summarise my thoughts here to encourage a more balanced approach to discussions about ICTs and education.

In recent years there has been an increasing amount of evidence that sheds doubt on the claimed benefits of ICTs for education, and also highlights their limitations and dangers (see for example UNICEF’s recent report on Children in a Digital World).  Four themes are particularly pertinent:

• doubts about the overall efficacy of ICTs in enhancing learning;
• the distractions that they provide;
• their use for behaviours intended to harm children; and
• the increasingly blurred interface that they create between humans and machines

Do ICTs necessarily improve learning outcomes?

One of the first major studies to examine the overall impact of ICTs on learning outcomes was an OECD report in 2012 that concluded that “Overall, the results of the estimates presented in this report point to a generalized negative correlation between the use of ICT (in terms of either intensity or deviations from the mean) and PISA test scores”. The authors were very cautious about their findings, and PISA scores are only one measure of learning, albeit a one that many governments treat very seriously.

More recently, the OECD has produced a comprehensive report on Students, Computers and Learning, that also questions the overall impact that ICTs have on learning.  This shows that the exposure of children to computers in schools varies considerably between countries and within countries.  Most significantly, though, it concludes that the use of computers does not seem to be an important factor in explaining the variation in student performance in mathematics, reading or science as reflected in the PISA scores.  The report concludes (p.15) cautiously that “the connections among students, computers and learning are neither simple nor hard-wired; and the real contributions ICT can make to teaching and learning have yet to be fully realised and exploited”.

One important conclusion from this and associated research is that if poorer countries outside the OECD invest substantially in the use of ICTs in schools there is no guarantee that it will improve traditionally defined learning outcomes.  Moreover, it seems evident that ICTs by themselves do not necessarily have a clear and positive impact on learning outcomes.

Other research has gone further and shown that many educational skills, especially relating to memory, are not as good when using ICTs as when using more traditional methods.  Kirschner and Neelan have thus reported that handwritten notes are much more effective for learning than those made using a digital device, and Mangen et al. have also shown that students who read texts in print score significantly better in reading comprehension than do those who read them digitally.  Much more research is needed about the impact of different methods, particularly with and without ICTs, on the learning achievements of children.

Mobiles as distractions

A decade ago, in the early days of mobile devices, it was often argued that bring-your-own devices could be a means of enabling schools to introduce ICTs without having to expend large amounts on hardware. Such schemes have been widely criticised because of the inequalities that they can perpetuate, but an increasing amount of evidence is available to suggest that the use of mobile devices in classrooms also has a negative impact on children’s learning, especially because of the distractions that they cause.  Much of the opposition to mobiles in classrooms comes from frustrated teachers and parents, and finds its expression in popular news media.  Headlines in mainstream media such as “Schools ponder classroom ban on ‘distracting’ mobile phones” (The Times) are increasingly common. This is closely related to concerns about the digital distractions that are now seen as harming labour productivity later in life.

There is a growing body of research that supports such general concerns.  In a ground-breaking study, Kuznekoff and Titsworth, for example, have shown in a small-scale study that university “Students who were not using their mobile phones wrote down 62% more information in their notes, took more detailed notes, were able to recall more detailed information from the lecture, and scored a full letter grade and a half higher on a multiple choice test than those students who were actively using their mobile phones”. Likewise, in a survey of schools in four English cities, Beland and Murphy have shown convincingly that student performance in high stakes exams significantly increases after mobile ‘phones have been banned, and the these increases in performance are generally driven by the lowest-achieving pupils.  As a result, they suggest that restricting mobile phone use in schools can be a low-cost way to reduce overall educational inequalities.

In the light of such general concerns, several countries have sought to prohibit the use of mobiles in schools.  In much of China, secondary pupils in boarding schools are only permitted to use their ‘phones for short periods each day, and they are not allowed to use them in classes.  Likewise, a decision by the French government to ban mobile ‘phones in school from September 2018 has received widespread publicity.  Reasons for the ban include a general concern about the health implications of children regularly using ‘phones before the age of 7, about the desirability of them physically playing in breaks rather than just being on their devices, and the perception that they cause distraction during lessons.  It is salient to note that attempts to introduce a similar ban in New York City in 2006 largely failed, and it was lifted in 2015.

The dark side of digital devices: addiction, bullying and harassment

UNICEF’s important review Children in a Digital World, highlights three forms of digital risk to children: content, contact, and conduct.  In particular, it emphasises the threats of cyberbullying, online child sex abuse and exploitation.

In most instances, when children use ICTs in schools they are usually subject to some kind of control or supervision.  However, when they are outside school, they are very much freer to use such technologies, despite the potential control measures that some parents seek to impose.  Hence, it is very easy for children to be subject to abuse or harassment from their peers and others once they have left the confines of their schools.  This raises important questions about the relative balance of responsibility between schools and parents in helping children grow up safely in a digital world.

In all uses of ICTs in education, it is essential that the highest priority should be given by schools to:

• The secure management of children’s data;
• Digital relationships between teachers and pupils, especially on social media;
• Behaviours of children online, especially to one another; and
• The potential for external individuals or organisations to influence children in their care.

Above all, though, it is essential that schools provide extensive training for children in the wise use of digital technologies, covering not only the above  requirements but also issues around critical thinking relating to information on the internet, the use of search engines, social media, privacy, and all aspects of their interface with ICTs.  These need to be balanced, and stress both the positive potential of ICTs alongside their dangers and threats.  Schools cannot do this alone, and there needs to be extensive collaboration between governments, companies, civil society, and parents, but schools are very well-placed to be the central point through which such education and training are provided.

Increasingly, national governments are providing regulations as well as guidance for schools about keeping children safe online at schools and at home.  The UK, for example, announced new measures to tackle this in 2015, requiring all schools to have in place filters and monitoring systems to prevent access to potential harmful material, and to ensure that children are taught about online safeguarding.  Many poorer countries, though, do not have such systematic regulations in place, and there is an urgent need for all governments to create systems of support for schools to help them share good practices relating to child online protection.  It is also important that examples of good practice are widely shared, and sources such as those provided by the European Commission’s Better Internet for Kids service platform, and the ITU’s guidelines on child online protection should be more widely known and acted upon.

Globally, there is insufficient awareness of the significance of many of these issues (see for example the work of the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation).  Whilst overt bullying, harassment and exploitation are becoming increasingly discussed, insufficient attention has been paid until recently on the rising impact of digital addiction on children.  South Korea, for example, sees Internet addiction as a national health crisis, with there being an estimated 2 million addicts, most of whom are children or young adults.  It is estimated that one in ten South Korean children is a digital addict and there is increasing evidence that excessive screen time is damaging developing brains.

Recent warnings in the UK likewise highlight the addictive dangers of giving children smartphones, with a third of children between 12 and 15 admitting that they have difficulty balancing their use of smartphones with other aspects of their life. A particularly worrying aspect of this addiction is the normalisation of sexting, whereby young children are convinced into believing that sending nude pictures of themselves us completely normal.  One survey reported in 2017 has suggested that around two-thirds of primary teachers said they were aware of pupils sharing inappropriate sexual material.

Responsibility for this addiction, and how best to deal with it, are topics that require detailed consideration by all those interested in education.  The design of social media platforms is thus increasingly being seen as problematic, and gives rise to considerable debate.  It has, for example, been claimed that Facebook was explicitly designed as an addictive form of social media, which exploits a vulnerability in human psychology through its social-validation feedback loop.  Others, though, see the value that such social media platforms offer, and suggest that only a relatively few people become seriously addicted to it.  Most recently, following the launch of Messenger Kids for children under 13, a group of 100 leading academics, practitioners and organisations have written an open letter to Facebook claiming that young children are not ready to have social media accounts, that it will increase the amount of time young children spend with digital devices, and that the app’s overall impact on families will be negative.

Moreover, there is also growing evidence that the recent rise in depression amongst people born after 1995 in the richer countries of the world, and especially the USA, can be directly linked to the dramatic increase in smartphone use since 2012.  Twenge, for example, has found that teens who spent more than 5 hours a day online were 761% more likely to have at least one suicide risk factor than were those who spent only an hour a day online.

Another general issue that requires further discussion is the use of children’s data by companies providing educational services.  All data are potentially hackable, and school generated data are often seen as being particularly vulnerable because of lax cybersecurity.  In 2017, high profile hacks in school systems across the USA brought the ease of this, as well as the damage that it could cause, to public awareness. UK school systems have also been targeted with relatively simple scams that defraud them of large sums of money. More worrying is the vast amount of data that governments and companies, such as ClassDojo, gather on a regular basis through digital educational systems and platforms, especially relating to examination performance and children’s personal backgrounds.

Cyborgs and transhumanism

A final, and much deeper, ethical question that also needs to be considered is the ways through which the use of ICTs in schools may be influencing the long-term relationships between humans and machines.  The notion of cyborgs, organisms that combine organic and biomechatronic parts and have enhanced abilities through the integration of components that rely on feedback systems, has been discussed heatedly since the 1960s. However, the rapidity of recent technological development has meant that some now see all human life as inevitably becoming more entwined with that of machines.  Elon Musk, the serial scientific inventor and business magnate, has thus argued that humans must indeed become cyborgs if they are to stay relevant in a future dominated by artificial intelligence, and he is not alone in his thoughts.  Such life-changing rhetoric requires vociferous challenging by those who do not wish to see such a future, and it is important that there is a balanced and open debate about transhumanism and the desirability of humans becoming cyborgs.

Those with pacemakers, artificial limbs and cochlear implants, are already combinations of machine and humans, and companies such as Calico, a business within the Alphabet group that also owns Google, are already undertaking research that will use technology to enable people to lead much longer and healthier lives.  Those who wear “fitbits” that transmit their bodies’ physical data to companies that then use it to generate revenue from marketing or insurance are already virtually cyborgs.  It will not be long before more people start arguing for humans to be chipped with their digital identities just like their pets, so that they no longer have to have physical biometric identity cards. Transhumanism (also known as H+) is an extreme form of such thinking that seeks to transform humans by using technology to enhance human intellect and physiology.  Companies such as Kernel are seeking to develop a wave of new technologies that will be able to access, read and write from the human brain.  Even if most people reject the extremes of H+, the general argument that ICTs should be used to enhance humans is now becoming much more widely accepted than it was previously.

This has very significant implications for education systems, especially in terms of the ways that humans store and process memory.  Children are increasingly relying on digital memories, especially access to the Internet or the memories on their digital devices.  They are also being encouraged to use their brains for skills other than merely acquiring knowledge, although good traditional education systems were never merely about simple knowledge acquisition as is often claimed.  We know that brains adapt remarkably quickly to their environments, but insufficient research has yet been done on the systematic way through which ICTs are changing brain function.

 

This is the third in a series of short summaries of aspects of the use of ICTs in children’s education across the world based on my work for UNICEF (the first was on Interesting practices in the use of ICTs for education, and the second was on Why we don’t really know very much about the influence of ICTs on learning and education).  I must stress that these contain my own opinions, and do not in any way reflect official UNICEF policy or practice.  I very much hope that they will be of use and interest to practitioners in the field.  The original report for UNICEF contains a wealth of references upon which the above arguments were based, and will be available should the report be published in full.

 

Why we don’t really know very much about the influence of ICTs on learning and education

Exploring the future of the interface between ICTs and education for UNICEF recently provided a valuable opportunity to reflect on the conflicting evidence about the influence of ICTs on education.  Despite all of the research and evidence gathering about the use of ICTs in education, it still remains extremely difficult to know what their real impact is, and how best to deliver on the potential that they offer, especially among the poorest and most marginalised.  There are at least seven main reasons for this.

1. The time for educational change to have an outcome

Learning and education are cumulative; they take a lifetime.  Measuring the impact of education interventions is therefore fundamentally different from measuring, for example, most health-related impacts.  It is possible to inoculate populations with a vaccine, and to measure its impact almost immediately in terms of the health outcomes.  However, it is impossible to inoculate against ignorance; there is no vaccine that can guarantee successful learning.

It is therefore extremely difficult to measure the long-term significant outcome of a relatively short and novel educational intervention, such as the introduction of tablets into schools for a couple of years, without there being a consistent and long-term method of actually measuring those outcomes.  Some things can certainly be measured in the short-term, but these may not actually be the most important and significant long-term learning outcomes.  Moreover, it is extremely difficult over a long period of time to assess the precise impacts of any one intervention.  Many factors influence educational change over time, and it may be that observed learning outcomes are not necessarily caused by the specific technological intervention being studied.  Determining real causality in education is extremely difficult, especially in longitudinal studies.

Linked with this, many ICT for education interventions are specifically initially planned for a relatively short periods of 3-5 years.  This is usually the sort of duration of research grants and donor-funded projects, but it is far too short a term to enable real impacts fully to be grasped.  The pressure of reporting, and the need to show success within a short time, to seek to guarantee further funding, also has a significant impact on the types of evidence used and the ways through which it is gained.

2. Diversity of research methods: you can show almost anything that you want to

Different kinds of research lead to different types of conclusion.  Research results also depend fundamentally on what the aims of the research are.  Two pieces of perfectly good research, that are well designed within their own fields and published in peer-reviewed journals, can thus show very different results. Three particular challenges are relevant.

First, there are often very different results from short-term quantitative and long-term qualitative research.  It is relatively easy to go into a number of schools for a short period, gather quantitative data about inputs and outputs, and find the evidence to write a glowing report about the positive outcomes of an ICT for education intervention.  However, most such accounts are based on self-reporting, schools can prepare to show off their best attributes for the day of the visit, and researchers can be beguiled into believing what they hear.  In contrast, long term qualitative immersion in a small group of schools for several months can show much more clearly exactly what is going on in them, and usually leads to very differing types of conclusions with respect to ICT in education. Moreover, there is a systemic bias in much evidence-based policy making, especially by governments and international organisations, whereby they prefer large scale quantitative studies, which have apparently representative samples, to the insights gained from in-depth hermeneutic and qualitative approaches.  This tends to lead to a focus on inputs rather than outcomes.

Second, biases are introduced because of the interests of the people doing the research or monitoring and evaluation.  Many ICT for education initiatives have begun as pilot projects, either by companies eager to show the success of their technologies, or by researchers eager to prove that their innovation works.  It is perfectly natural that the ways through which they design their research, and the indicators that they choose to assess will seek to highlight the intended positive outcomes.  All too often, though, unintended consequences are ignored or simply not looked for, despite the fact that these frequently provide the most interesting insights.  Very little research on the use of ICTs in schools to date, for example, has explored the impact that this might have on online child sexual abuse, or other forms of harassment and bullying.

Third, much depends on the aims of the research.  Tightly constrained experimental design to explore, for example, how the use of a particular device influences activity in certain parts of the brain, can indeed show apparent causality.  Linking that, though, to wider conclusions about children’s learning and the desirability of incorporating a specific technology into schools is much more difficult. Much of the good quality research to date has tended to focus on relatively closed systems, where it is indeed possible to undertake more rigorous experimental design.  Much less research has been undertaken on the more holistic and systemic interventions that are required to ensure the successful adoption of new technologies.  In part, this is because of the different approaches that exist in the academic community between the physical sciences and the social sciences.  The aims of research in computer science or mathematics are, for example, often very different from those in sociology or the humanities.  This reinforces the need for there to be much more emphasis on multi-disciplinary research for there to be clearer conclusions drawn about the overall impact of ICTs in education.  Moreover, much of the experimental research, for example using Randomised Control Trials, has been undertaken in the richer countries of the world, and all too often conclusions from this are then also applied to poorer contexts where they may well not be appropriate.

3. Transferability and context

There is considerable pressure to identify solutions that can work universally, and it is a natural tendency for people to hear of something that has appeared to work in one context and then try to apply it to another.  All too often, though, they do not realise that it may have been something very specific about the original context of the intervention that made it successful.  The pressure for universal solutions has in large part been driven by the interests of the private sector in wishing to manufacture products for a global market, and also by donors and international organisations eager to find universal solutions that work and can be applied globally.  All too often the reality is that they cannot be applied in this way.

4. The diversity of technologies

Many contrasting ICTs are being used in education and learning in different contexts, and it is therefore not easy to make generalisations about the overall effectiveness of such technologies.  The use of an assistive technology mobile app, for example, is very different from using a tablet to access the internet.  Determining exactly what the critical intervention is that can benefit, or indeed harm, learning is thus far from easy.  Indeed, because of this diversity, it is actually rather meaningless to talk about the overall impact of technology on learning.

5. The focus on inputs

Inputs are much easier to measure than are real learning outcomes.  Indeed, performance in examinations or tests, which is the most widespread measure of educational success, is only one measure of the learning achievements of children, and may often not be a particularly good one.  Most studies of the application of ICTs in education therefore focus mainly on the inputs, such as numbers of computers or tablets, hours of connectivity, amount of content, and hours of access to the resources, that have been implemented.   They show what the funding has been spent on, and they are relatively easy to measure.  Using such data, it is possible to write convincing reports on how resources are being used on “improving” schools and other learning environments.  This is one reason why governments often prefer quantitative studies that measure and represent such expenditure, since it reflects well on what they have done in their term of office.

However, it is extremely difficult to link this directly and exclusively to the actual learning achievements of the children, not least because of the multiple factors influencing learning, and the great difficulty in actually proving causality.  All too often a dangerous assumption is made.  This is that just because something is new, and indeed modern, it will be of benefit to education.  There have been far too few studies that seek to explore what might have happened if the large amounts of money spent by governments on new ICTs had actually been spent on some other kind of novel intervention, such as improving the quality of teachers, redesigning school classrooms, or event putting toilets in schools.  What evidence that does exist suggests that almost any well-intentioned intervention can improve the learning experiences of teachers and pupils, primarily because they feel that attention is being given to them, and they therefore want to respond enthusiastically and positively.

6. Success motives

One advantage that ICTs have in this context is that they are seen by most people as being new, modern, and an essential part of life in the 21^st century.  Parents and children across the world are therefore increasingly viewing them as an integral and “natural” part of any good education system, regardless of whether they actually are or not. The myth of modernity has been carefully constructed.  The motives for success of those advocating their adoption in education, may not, though, be strictly to do with enhancing education.  The need to show that ICTs contribute positively to education, and thus the results achieved, may not actually be driven primarily by educational objectives.  Politicians who give laptops with their party’s logos on to schoolchildren are often more interested in getting re-elected than in actually making an educational impact; technology companies involved in educational partnerships are at least as likely to be involved because of the opportunity they offer to network with government officials and donors as they are because of any educational outcomes.  The key point to emphasise here is that monitoring and evaluation studies in such instances may not actually be primarily concerned with the educational outcomes, but rather with the success anticipated by those with powerful interests, and should therefore be treated with considerable caution.

7. Monitoring and evaluation: a failure of funding, and reinventing the wheel

A final reason why it is so difficult to interpret the evidence about the impact of ICTs on education concerns the general process of monitoring and evaluation of such initiatives.  All too often, insufficient funding is given to monitoring and evaluation, regular self-enhancing monitoring is not undertaken, and any thinking about evaluation is left until the very end of a project.    A general rule of thumb is that the amount spent on monitoring and evaluation should be around 10% of total project costs, but those seeking to use ICTs for education, particularly civil society organisations, often argue that this is far too high a figure, and that they want to spend as much as possible of their limited resources on delivering better education to the most needy.  All too often, monitoring and evaluation is left as an afterthought near the end of a project at the time when reports are necessary to convince funding agencies to continue their support. If good baseline data were not gathered at the beginning of a project, particularly about learning attainment levels, then it is not possible to obtain accurate evidence about the real impact of a specific piece of technology.

A second main challenge with monitoring and evaluation is that practitioners and researchers often seem to reinvent the wheel and develop their own approaches to identifying successes and failures of a particular intervention, rather than drawing on tried and tested good practices.  As a result, they frequently miss important aspects of the rather different processes of monitoring and of evaluation, and their work may also not be directly comparable to the evidence from other studies.

Implications

One obvious implication of the above is that we need more independent, multi-disciplinary, cross-sectoral and longitudinal research on the use of technology in education.  However, all research will represent the interests of those involved in its commissioning and implementation, and needs to be treated with the circumspection that it deserves.

A second important conclusion is to question the validity of much so-called evidence-based policy making in the field of technology and education.  If research evidence is based upon a particular set of interests, then it is logical to suggest that any policy based on it will in turn also reflect those interests.  Such policies can never be purely “objective” or “right”, just because they claim to be based on evidence.  Indeed, a strong argument can be made that policies should be based upon visions of what should be (the normative) and not just what is (the positive).

 

This is the second of a series of short summaries of aspects of the use of ICTs in children’s education across the world based on my work for UNICEF (the first was on Interesting practices in the use of ICTs for education).  I must stress that these contain my own opinions, and do not in any way reflect official UNICEF policy or practice.  I very much hope that they will be of use and interest to practitioners in the field.  The original report for UNICEF contains a wealth of references upon which the above arguments were based, and will be available should the report be published in full.

 

Interesting practices in the use of ICTs for education

I have all too frequently been asked to suggest examples of “best practice” in the use of ICTs for education, and have always so far resisted.  “Best practices” tend to be promoted by those who wish to assert their pre-eminence in a field, or make considerable sums of money by selling their “solutions”!  I strongly believe that there is no such thing as “one-size-fits-all” in education, and instead I argue that there are numerous good practices from which people can learn and develop their own local and contextualised educational activities using ICTs.

The opportunity recently to do some forward thinking with colleagues in UNICEF about the future use of ICTs in education, especially amongst some of the poorest and most marginalised children in the world, nevertheless provided the chance to reflect on the diversity of different dimensions of education in which ICTs are used, and also to identify examples of each from which we can all learn. The list below is a very attenuated summary of these case studies, drawing explicitly from different parts of the world and in different languages (although English dominates).  They were chosen in part based on the recommendations of colleagues with a wealth of experience working in the field, but the final choice of examples is my own.  Readers might like to add their own favourites as comments!

Educational content and skills development

The development of different ICTs over the last two decades has led to an explosion of new types of content, and new ways of delivering it, increasingly through the plethora of apps on mobile devices.  Such content varies hugely in quality, in cost, and in the level of learning for which it is intended.

• The power of multimedia One of the greatest strengths of ICTs is to bring learning to life through a diversity of multimedia resources.  In particular, games, videos and audio can enliven learning, and provide real world examples of how things work that cannot be experienced in schools.  Examples of multimedia include:
  • Khan Academy
• Re-versioning and localising content One of the benefits of open content is the opportunity that it provides for re-versioning existing content into local contexts.  Examples include:
  • Nafham
• Local content development Demand for local content in schools can also provide the basis for local economic growth in poorer countries of the world.  Examples include
  • Ubongo
  • Mediae
• Learning platforms for content and skills Content needs to be delivered in an appropriate and appealing format, that is also flexible and easily searchable.  Numerous such platforms have been developed, both for students and teachers.  Examples include:
  • Kolibri – although not without its critics, lessons can be learnt from this
  • EkStep
  • The Global Digital Library
• Open and Proprietary Content  Many of the above initiatives are Open, but there are many Proprietary solution also available, especially for richer children.  One example where a government has chosen to purchase licences for proprietary content and make it available for free to its citizens is:
  • The Egyptian Knowledge Bank
• Teaching the skills of critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity  Some ICT-based initiatives have focused on new ways to develop the basic skills such as literacy and numeracy that are required building blocks for the more advanced skills of communication and creativity.  Examples include:
  • Onebillion
  • The Connected Learning Initiative (CLIx)
• Assistive technologies enabling children with disabilities and special needs to access content About half of the world’s children with disabilities are out of school.  These are some of the most marginalised and disadvantaged children in the world, and yet have the most to gain from assistive technologies.  Examples include:
  • Enuma

Pedagogy and the practice of teaching

The role of the private sector has been substantial in disseminating new ICT-based teaching practices. For many years, ICT corporations such as Microsoft and Intel have provided basic courses and training for teachers in how to use digital skills in the classroom.  These have traditionally tended to emphasise training in basic “Office” skills software that can be applied to an educational context.  There are few convincing examples of successful teaching training initiatives that have really inculcated a comprehensive understanding of how the balanced use of ICTs can enhance the delivery of education in the poorest countries of the world.

• Interesting examples of the use of ICTs in teacher training include:
  • the Enlaces programme in Chile.
  • The Egyptian Teachers First Professional Development Program
  • The Queen Rania Teacher Academy (QRTA)
  • China’s support for teacher training

Digital skills

In a world increasingly dominated by technology, the successful acquisition of digital skills by young people has become a high priority for many governments and companies.  It is important to differentiate between three broad types of digital skills: the basic skills necessary to use digital technologies; advanced skills specifically in areas such as coding and programming, often linked to an emphasis on the perceived importance of increasing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education; and the skills associated with knowing how to live in an increasingly digital world and to negotiate the challenges of digital technologies as well as their benefits.

• Skills in using digital technologies  Basic digital skills are an essential pre-requisite for people to gain an interest in STEM subjects, and it is important that they are introduced in ways that encourage both girls and boys to gain an interest in the sciences.  Examples include:
  • Malaysian Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) in association with the Ministry of Education (MoE).
  • The ITU and ILO Digital Skills for Decent Jobs for Youth Campaign.
• Coding and programming  In many countries, especially those in the richer parts of the world, there is increasingly strong advocacy from the private sector, government and some academics for all children to be taught coding and advanced computer skills from an early age.  Interesting examples include:
  • The French foundation La main à la pâte.
  • iamtheCODE.
  • Laboratoria in Peru.
• The skills to live in a world increasingly shaped through ICTs  The most important digital skills that young people need to acquire are those concerned with living fulfilled lives in a world that is increasingly shaped by, and through, the use of ICTs.  Interesting examples include:
  • Best Footprint Forward.
  • World Vision’s Keeping Children Safe Online.

Monitoring and evaluation

Unless high quality and appropriate monitoring and evaluation is undertaken on the impact of ICTs on educational outcomes, existing systems will not improve, and the real effects of new interventions will not be known.

• Examples include:
  • The work of the Fundacíon Omar Dengo in Costa Rica.
  • The Mohammed Bin Rashid Smart Learning Program (MBRSLP).

Administration

It is widely recognised that the successful use of ICTs in education programmes is heavily dependent on the enthusiasm of head teachers, principals and school administrators.  An integral part of the success of such initiatives has been the design and use of appropriate Educational Management Information Systems (EMISs) that provide for digital collection, processing, analysis and reporting of school data.

• Examples include:
  • The largely World Bank and Reconstruction Trust Fund funded Education Quality Improvement Package in Afghanistan.
  • Bernbaum and Moses’s (2011) overview of lessons learnt from the use of EMISs in Malawi, Uganda and Zambia.

Assessment

It is important to differentiate between the use of ICTs for formative and summative assessment

• ICTs in formative assessment Many of the platforms and content delivery mechanisms through ICTs described above also contain quizzes and tests that can provide an important element of formative assessment for children.  Examples include:
  • Software developed by the Beijing WeTrans Technology Company.
  • Literator
• ICTS in summative assessment ICTs are also increasingly being used for summative assessment, especially since more sophisticated systems are now available that enable securer communications and reduce the ability of students to cheat.

Access to the potential benefits of ICTs in education in low-resource environments

Providing ICT for education connectivity and content in low-resource environments remains challenging.  The following examples illustrate some of the ways in which infrastructure, devices and content have been made available in these circumstances.

• Access to digital learning materials in low-resource environments The availability of reliable electricity and Internet connectivity are essential pre-requisites for any comprehensive national ICT in education programme.  Examples include:
  • M-KOPA Solar.
  • Malaysian government provision of solar electricity in Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak.
  • High-speed satellite broadband for schools in the iMlango project in Kenya.
• Hardware and devices enabling children to access content Children also need to have robust hardware through which they can access content and skills training.  Examples include:
  • BRCK server and Kio Kit used in Solomon Islands
  • Literacy Bridge.
  • The pi-top.
• Out of school youths Children out of school are some of the most vulnerable and marginalised people in the world.  Examples include:
  • The eSkwela initiative in the Philippines.
• Children with disabilities  Children with disabilities are amongst the most marginalised people in the world, and in many countries there remains substantial prejudice against them.  However, those with greater disabilities have far more to gain from ICTs and other assistive technologies than do those with fewer disabilities. Examples include:
  • The Mada Assistive Technology Centre in Qatar.
  • The USAID funded work of the institute for Disabilities Research and Training in Morocco.
  • Action on Disability Rights and Development in Nepal.
  • Young Power in Social Action (YPSA) in Bangladesh.
• Refugees and displaced children  The appropriate use of ICTs has considerable potential to enable refugee children, wherever they are, to be educated and to learn.   Examples include:
  • Xavier Project.
  • Refugees on Rails.
  • UNRWA’s interactive learning programme (ILP), and its overall Education in Emergencies (EiE) programme.
• Girls’ education and ICTs ICTs can both unite and divide.  One of the most striking observations about the use of new technologies in education and across societies is that gender digital divides are actually increasing. Interesting examples include:
  • The Government of Pakistan in supporting girls’ use of ICTs in education.

 

This is the first of a series of short summaries of aspects of the use of ICTs in children’s education across the world based on my work for UNICEF (the second is on Why we don’t really know very much about the influence of ICTs on learning and education).  I must stress that these contain my own opinions, and do not in any way reflect official UNICEF policy or practice.  I very much hope that they will be of use and interest to practitioners in the field.

“The future of learning and technology in deprived contexts”: a report for Save the Children International

It was an enormous privilege to work with David Hollow, Meghan Brugha and Mark Weber last year on a report for Save the Children International about the future of learning and technology in deprived contexts.  I am delighted that this has now been published in a slightly abridged version (available online here), and this post provides a short overview of our approach and our main findings.  The report looks forward to 2020 and 2025, and addresses three main issues;

• the future of basic education,
• ICT use in deprived locations, and
• the use of ICTs in primary school learning, especially in deprived contexts

Method and approach

The report was based on: a detailed review of the literature; interviews with 32 leading authorities with direct experience of the use of technology in education, especially in low-income and crisis affected areas; a workshop that brought together 29 practitioners and academics from 9 countries working at the interface between technology and education to seek consensus as to the most likely scenarios that will emerge over the next decade; consultations with 22 Save the Children staff from 12 countries to ensure that their experiences were included in the report, and to validate our emergent findings; and our experiences of implementing and reviewing ICT for education activities across the world over the last 20 years.

Nine likely observations about basic education by 2025

We concluded that nine broad changes in basic education are likely to be apparent by 2025:

• The pace of change in education is likely to remain slow in most countries
• There will be increased diversity and inequality in learning practices and opportunities
• Advocacy about the importance of qualified teachers will increase
• There will also be increased advocacy about the need for fundamental curriculum and pedagogical change
• The diversity of content provision will increase
• There will be greater emphasis on non-formal and life-long learning
• Holistic approaches to learning will become increasingly common
• The private sector will play an increasing role in the delivery of education
• The use of technology will be all-pervasive.

Eight generalisations about ICTs in 2025

Predicting the future of technology is always challenging, but there was general agreement amongst those we consulted that the following eight things are likely:

• ICTs will become increasingly all-pervasive in human life
• ICTs and their benefits will be increasingly unequally distributed
• Digital technologies will become increasingly mobile, and newer types of mobile digital communication will be created
• The costs of devices and connectivity will continue to decline
• There will be a dramatic expansion in the production and use of large amounts of data, especially with the advent of the Internet of Things
• There will be considerable increase in the personalisation of ICTs
• Major global corporations, both in China and the USA, will play an ever more controlling role

ICT use in basic education in deprived locations

Drawing on both of the above sets of conclusions the main part of our report explores the implications for how ICTs will be used in basic education in deprived locations in the future.

ICTs in education in 2025

• Our most important prediction is that the use of ICTs in education will become very much more diverse by 2025
• There will be changes to the school systems of many countries that will encourage greater use of technology in education
• In 2025 teachers will remain fundamentally important in education systems still dominated by schools.  However, in the best systems their role will have changed from being that of providers of knowledge to being guides to help children learn to navigate the world of digital information
• There will be a new mix of digital content and device provision. Existing trends suggest that there will be much more digital educational content available, but it seems likely that much less of it will actually be used effectively by learners
• Advances in the range of AI and IoT technologies combined with the increased power of big data analytics will enable much more personalised and refined assessment of pupils
• There will be important changes in the role of parents and communities enabled through new online resources. It seems possible that the increasing failure of education systems across the world by 2025 will lead to a greater emphasis on learning outside school and in informal contexts

Implications for ICT deployment in education in low-income and peripheral areas

Five likely trends for ICT deployment in education in low-income and peripheral areas are:

• There will be an increase in innovative solutions for ICT use in deprived locations; the use of ICTs will  become much more widespread in remote communities
• Device sharing is already widespread in locations where access to them is expensive or difficult, and it is likely that this will continue to be the case in 2025
• In areas that remain without much digital connectivity or electricity in 2025, it is likely that multi-purpose learning hubs, especially if they are co-located with schools, could remain a valuable addition to the array of options for delivering effective education and learning
• Downloading and caching of key educational content, especially bandwidth heavy video, in locations where there is good connectivity, and its subsequent use in a distant unconnected school is likely to remain an excellent way through which content, and indeed management of administrative processes, can be undertaken cheaply and effectively
• Learning will be increasingly mobile, and more of it will occur outside schools.  Parents who occasionally visit distant towns will be able automatically to download relevant learning content on their devices, including educational games and videos for their children, and everyone in their households could then benefit from accessing such content back at home.

ICTs for education in crisis affected areas

We identified a further set of likely roles of ICTs for education specifically in short-term acute crises, and also in long term protracted crises

Short-term acute crises

• Mobile technologies will increasingly enable children fleeing such crises to continue to participate in both formal and informal learning
• Much more extensive use will be made of online resources  to provide counseling for many different groups of people, including children traumatised by disasters and war
• Online resources will be available specifically to provide children in acute crises with additional information about any crisis in which they are caught up so that they will be better able to survive
• It is likely that by 2025 numerous different ICT-enhanced school-in-a-box solutions, combining connectivity, electricity, devices and content, will be available that can be set up quickly and effectively wherever in the world there is a need.
• There will be much greater use of mobile phones by refugees to find out information about entering other countries, and what they need to know about the different cultures and ways of life there in order to survive

Long-term protracted crises

• Many more digital community and learning centres will be created to provide online resources in refugee camps, where the ICT connectivity can also be used for a wide range of other purposes, including delivery of telemedicine and health training
• Digital content, especially the use of video in multiple languages, accessible through robust child-friendly devices, can prove to be very valuable in such contexts to help create hybrid cultures of learning even where there is not Internet connectivity

Risks associated with digital learning in low-income and crisis-affected locations

While ICTs offer enormous potential for enhancing the delivery of appropriate learning for deprived children in marginalised areas, there are important risks that also need to be considered. These include

• There is  an urgent need for all ICT initiatives, both in schools and more widely in community learning initiatives, to prioritise the safeguarding of children and the secure management of all information about children
• A second concern that many have about children using ICTs, and especially the internet, is that of Internet addiction, whereby lives are ruined by causing neurological complications, psychological disturbances, and social problems
• Third, many schools across the world, in both economically rich and poor countries alike, prohibit the use of mobile devices in school classrooms because they are seen as being disruptive, although other concerns over cheating, health and bullying are also often cited

These problems, though, do not mean that children should be prevented from accessing the Internet or using ICTs.  As discussed above, ICTs can provide very valuable learning experiences and indeed enjoyment for children, and any risks need to be weighed up against the overwhelming benefits that can accrue from using digital technologies.  The critical need is to ensure that children, parents and communities are indeed all aware of the threats that exist, and that action is taken by governments (both national and local), companies, schools and individuals to address them.

Our report concluded with a series of specific recommendations for Save the Children at both the policy and programme levels.