32 Asia South Pacific Association for Basic and Adult Education
Poornima Chikarmane
Content Outline
1. Learning Objectives
2. Introduction
3. Educational Challenges in the Asia Pacific Region
4. ASPBAE perspective on the role of civil society organisations
5. Structure and functioning of ASPBAE
6. Achievements of ASPBAE
7. Conclusion
1. Learning Objectives:
After completion of this module the learner will be able to:
1. Understand the value framework, structure and functioning of ASPBAE
2. Describe the activities of a regional membership based civil society network in promoting adult education
2. Introduction
The Asia South Pacific Association for Basic and Adult Education (ASPBAE) is a regional membership based civil society network that was established in 1964 in Sydney Australia. In order to remain a relevant civil society network, the organization has reshaped itself to champion the cause of basic and adult education. In its present incarnation, ASPBAE has a membership base of more than 130 member organizations and more than 100 individual members operating in over 30 countries all over the Asia Pacific region.
The membership of ASPBAE is bound by a common commitment to promote the equal rights of all, to quality basic and adult education. The member organisations share the following common beliefs:
§ government states are the duty bearers in ensuring that quality education is available for all children, youth and adults throughout their lives and at different stages of their lives
§ education is dedicated towards the full development of a human being so that they are able to participate well in society contribute well to society and transform the conditions of their communities and of the world as well in ensuring peace in ensuring equitable sustainable development for all.
§ civil society has a very strong role to play in holding governments to account to fulfil the right of their citizens to adult education and basic education
The module has been constructed out of a transcribed interview with Ms. Maria Khan, the Secretary-General of the Asia South Pacific Association for Basic and Adult Education, who has been with the organization since 1995.
3. Educational Challenges in the Asia Pacific Region
After the Education for All process, access to education was no longer an issue and the focus shifted to education quality. Access and quality are actually two sides of the same coin. The problem of access still persists. There have been improvements in terms of participation in the formal system especially in primary schools but the target of universal access to primary education has not been achieved by any measure.
The current promise of the new agenda is access to secondary education. The UNESCO Institute of Statistics estimates that there would be as many as 269 million children and young people who will be out of school. So access remains an outstanding issue. Obviously these are children who have never been in the system and those who are pushed out of the system. With limitations in the public education system, efforts to get them back may not be encouraging, leaving them without access to literacy skills. For the most part, the figures for adult illiteracy have remained the same after several international commitments to eradicate as they call it or to end adult illiteracy. UNESCO quotes as many as seven hundred and fifty eight million adults without literacy skills. Of course two thirds of them would be women and a majority of them would be in South Asia. The highest concentration of those denied literacy skills would be in our sub region in South Asia. At one point the 2014 UNESCO pointed to India specifically being a large country with the highest number of adults who are denied access to adult literacy. Access remains an outstanding issue but quality education in the formal and non formal stream is also important. There is one trend which looks at education quality education largely through performance and tests that are easier to measure. There is also a whole economy around testing which promotes why testing should be the greatest measure of quality. There are alternative voices and equally strong voices that look at quality in a far more holistic way. They try to make sure that the education that people receive is oriented towards their full human development. Quality in this case is seen not only in terms of the performance and tests but in terms of quality content of education. Quality education fosters critical thinking, curiosity, and ability to relate with others and how to communicate and work with other people. The values of tolerance are engendered in people.
The continuing neglect of adult literacy and adult education in education policy and financing is a matter of concern. The fact that the new Sustainable Development Goals agenda talks about the promotion of lifelong learning opportunities means that there is a recognition that education policy and provisioning should go beyond the formal system. It and that it should not only be about children but should encompass the learning needs of youth and adults. The UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning in their last global report on adult learning and education indicates that national budgets allocate less than 1 per cent to adult education. If very few resources are put into the sector then the results are also likely to be indifferent and the cycle of poor resources poor quality continues.
4. ASPBAE perspective on the role of civil society organisations
Civil society organizations are important stakeholders in education especially in the field of non-formal education and adult education. They are also very strong providers of adult education, especially with the steep decline in state provisioning for adult non-formal education over the last couple of decades. NGOs and the community education and adult education provisioning that they offer has in many instances, been the only recourse of many of vulnerable poor and marginalized communities to learning opportunities to help them survive cope and change their conditions. So in that sense civil society organizations are very important players in the field of adult education. They therefore have a stake in policies which define adult education and the direction and priorities in education.
5. Structure and functioning of ASPBAE
ASPBAE is membership based, having both institutional as well as individual members. In terms of the governance structure ASPBAE is organized or structured in a way that reflects the different perspectives of the members because it very directly informs the way the organization operates and also determines its priorities. The organisation is structured such that it is able to reach out to and listen to a wide wider or a broader variety of views and perspectives. Since it is a regional organisation, it helps to draw in the diversity of contexts of the Asia-Pacific region and the expertise and volunteer time of a lot of the members. Had that not been the case, ASPBAE would have had to rely on paid technical expertise. A membership-based organization by definition is an in house resource and can rely heavily on contributions of members in making the organization work. The membership based structure upholds democratic values. To sustain as a network, members need to feel a strong sense of ownership with the organization because that’s the only way the organization can survive.
ASPBAE have attempted to craft their work so that they add value to the work of the members and likewise to contribute as a regional organization to the common goals and objectives of promoting the right to basic and adult education. Over the years, the work of the organisation has generally been organized around four main strategies:
1. Leadership and Capacity Building
ASPBAEs work around leadership and capacity building is oriented into two streams, and to a large extent, speaks to the needs of the two general types of memberships, adult education practitioners and policy advocates.
a. Adult education practice
Those in the practice sphere of adult education run adult education programmes and constitute one group. There is a rich and dynamic tradition of adult education practice in the region, especially in attending to the needs of marginalised communities. The regional network provides the space for exchange through workshops, conferences, training of trainers, documentation of good practices and research studies that provide the opportunity for participants to learn from each other. They pick up how organizations do things differently in different contexts and apply that to identify new ways of doing things in their own work in the quest for improvement. National level civil society organizations have rare opportunities to operate cross country or regionally or in sub regions as well so opportunities are provided for that, and thereby strengthening civil society and infrastructure for education in the Asia-pacific region.
b. Advocacy and lobbying for adult education
The second group consists of organisations that are engaged in policy advocacy and lobbying. ASPBAE, having regional scope, have been able to provide space for the sharing and assisted in terms of building a layer of leaders in the field of education and adult education who are able to operate at cross country levels. In terms of capacity building for advocacy, they lend a technical support to groups who are attempting to do policy advocacy especially at the national and sub-national levels. The efforts take expression as trainings around budget tracking support, in policy research being undertaken by groups and also in terms of institutional strengthening because you need a different type of civil society formation to be able to gain credibility and to have a powerful voice in ways that can attempt to shape policy. Mostly these are formations that are broad-based. They bring together a wide variety of groups with different perspectives to come together under a common platform and speak in a common voice to shape policy. Capacities to shape policy have to be built by strengthening those types of organizations, it doesn’t happen by accident.
2. Policy Advocacy
Policy advocacy is also directly undertaken by ASPBAE. Being a regional organization most of the advocacy efforts are oriented to regional and global policy spaces in education. In order to operate effectively, the organisation has to have credibility in these regional and global spaces. The organisation should be able to demonstrate that it is grounded and linked at the national level. It is also important for the organisation to represent a voice which does not only come from credible persons, but is actually based on and gives voice to a wider constituency that the organisation is accountable to. For example, in the South Pacific, ASPBAE has members in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Samoa, where commitments to adult education were tracked. Official adult education statistics come from self declaration and it is not a very reliable way of counting how many actually have access to literacy and numeracy. ASPBAE worked with the education campaign coalition in Papua New Guinea Samoa and Solomon Islands, first developing what would be a simple test that could be undertaken at the village level and community levels (it was not a national survey) to get the sense of the proficiency for adult literacy and numeracy. Community researchers were trained to administer the test and it did obviously reveal that the adult literacy competencies were actually much lower than what was conveyed in official statistics. The governments particularly in Vanuatu and Solomon Islands decided that they should actually have a rethink of their adult literacy policy based on this alternative data. Workshops in regional spaces offer secure opportunities to listen to alternatives, and for dialogue and discussion. So it’s within this approach, understanding and ethos that they have taken on representative spaces for civil society in UNESCO technical committees, during the last fifteen years around Education for All and the follow up processes.
ASPBAE have also played very active roles in the processes which define the new education agenda globally, which is very much linked to what are now known as the sustainable development goals. There is now a goal within the sustainable development goals, dedicated to education and there was a fairly broad based and expensive set of consultations which were launched to shape this. ASPBAE actually played a very strong role representing civil society in this processes.
3. Building strategic partnerships
It is not possible for ASPBAE to do everything that it does, by itself. ASPBAE believe that they need to align with like-minded civil society networks especially, when they attempt to operate and influence policy discourses at a global level. There is an emphasis on building strategic partnerships with other civil society networks and other counterparts, in other regions into their work. That is why they have aligned with several global formations on education, notably the International Council for Adult Education and the Global Campaign for Education, the two major education networks that have been very active in advocacy work.
4. Institutional strengthening
Policy advocacy requires organisational credibility. In order to be institutionally robust, the organisation has to remain credible to the constituents. Governance structures have to be representative and strong such that the membership continues to believe in the effectiveness of the organisational practice and leadership.
6. Achievements of ASPBAE
ASPBAE recently completed fifty years of its existence. Asked to reflect on their achievements, Ms Khan said, “For any organisation to survive for fifty years is an achievement in itself. ASPBAE are a fragile community. As a civil society organisation we’re noisy, we’re dynamic and of course and we can claim we’re very effective but we’re fragile. There a lot of things going against continued survival of most organizations so the fact that we’ve been able to sustain ourselves at this point beyond 50 years is an achievement on its own. Through the years we believe that we’ve been able to train and mobilize hundreds and perhaps thousands of leaders in adult education who are rooted in the practice at the national level and therefore contribute to the promotion of adult education at regional level.
Towards ensuring that ensuring that quality adult education is well survives and thrives we’ve had impacts as far as policy change is concerned. In our view shaping policy is complex process and you can probably look at how you’re impacting on policy change at different in different ways. You can look at it in terms of shaping public opinion on certain issues through awareness-raising campaigns. It could be in terms of changing processes. For example, if we make sure that there’s a seat around the table dedicated for civil society that could then lead to actual policy change because you have access to direct access to decision making processes. Of course the change towards more progressive policy itself would be the object.
For a regional body, it is not so easy to attribute directly to our impacts, some of the changes that we have seen in adult education policy. Certainly, we think that we have opened a lot of doors for institutionalizing civil society participation in many regional and global platforms. It has been a struggle even to just get a presence in conferences to talk about the direction of education for all. After sustained efforts by different groups including ASPBAE, there is now for all education processes, a dedicated space for civil society. Originally, it was intended only for international NGOs. Organizations from the so called global South, from Africa from Latin America the Arab region and Asia, worked hard to establish ourselves as credible players. Southern voices are now actually part of these processes related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In a space crowded with Northern international organisations, it is important that we as a regional network were able to participate and make a significant contribution to Agenda 30.We used the opportunity of our 50thanniversary to give strong inputs to influence this process. We could have just partied through 2014 which was our anniversary year but we thought it was a very good moment given the historical significance of that year to the organization. We organised wide-scale consultations among our membership to review what we had been doing and to chart the direction that we should take in the future to shape the new education agenda post 2015. We were able to construct a broad-based process of consultation. Therefore our contributions to the global processes defining the new education agenda were rich and robust and well grounded in the realities of our region”.
- Conclusion
ASPBAE argues that education related data must not be viewed in terms of averages. Rather it should be gender disaggregated, multi-locational, and look at both access to education, performance of marginalized groups and minority communities and indigenous groups. Attention to equity will come with higher costs because it will cost more to bring into the mainstream those who have been left out by the system. Financing remains a major consideration.Far more resources have to be invested in education and with a more ambitious agenda than has been committed to.
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Web resources:
Adventures in Advocacy: Real World Strategies for Education in Asia Vanuatu Literacy Assessment – Shefa Province Gain or Drain: Understanding Public Private Partnerships in Education at Persuading Powers: Stories from Education Coalitions in the Asia Pacific.