National Public Primary Schools Strategic Planning: A Key Factor to Ensure Quality Education Enrollment in Developing Countries

The lack of proper, adequate, and accessible school facilities represents one of the main reasons of student dropout in most developing countries (UNICEF and MDG-F 2011). Indeed, if a school is easily accessible and is able to provide an inclusive, safe, healthy, and stimulating environment, students will more easily attend and learn. If not, sooner, or later, they will give up. This is true especially in rural areas, where today still more than 30% of the children do not attend primary school, mostly because they would have to walk for hours to reach a remote, overcrowded, inadequate, or unhealthy learning environment. Because of the utmost importance of this issue, humanitarian organizations (HOs) normally invest vast parts of their resources to tackle this problem. HOs aim at expanding and reinforcing education infrastructure networks either directly or jointly with local governments. UNICEF alone invested more than three hundred million dollars per year in school construction only (UNICEF 2016). Nevertheless, school construction is usually among the most unsuccessful and controversial sectors, with very low impact on the enrollment rates and high costs for involved agencies and NGOs. This is caused mainly, as it will be explained in following paragraphs, by the overall lack of adequate policies able to tackle the issue from a strategic point of view. In other words, national school construction programs are still very much focused on the stand-alone outcome, the school itself. To this date, national plans do not appear to tackle the processes and tools necessary to ensure that the school network as a whole is properly designed and functional. This article will explore the issue of lack of strategic planning, starting from the current state of the art to analyze current common practices along with their limitations. Finally, this contribution will attempt to highlight some of the core matters that, in the author’s opinion and experience, should be the key steps in a new, more strategic, and efficient approach for primary education infrastructure development.