The rise and attenuation of the basic education programme (BEP) in Botswana: A global–local dialectic approach

Abstract

Using a global–local dialectic approach, this paper traces the rise of the basic education programme in the 1980s and 1990s in Botswana and its subsequent attenuation in the 2000s. Amongst the local forces that led to the rise of BEP were Botswana's political project of nation-building; the country's dire human resources situation in the decades following Independence in 1966; and its propitious economic climate in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Global forces included the global circulation of the World Bank's educational discourse on the primacy of primary education as a public ‘investment’ option and Botswana's desire to be a member of the influential transnational social structure. BEP's attenuation can similarly be traced back to both local and global forces. Local forces included the growth of youth unemployment, and a sluggish economy. Global forces included the globalization of neo-liberalism which called for cost-sharing/recovery measures, and, ironically, Botswana's ‘promotion’ to a ‘middle income status’ country. While conceptually the attenuation represents a case of policy reversal and in some ways a sense of ‘loss’, empirically, the attenuation has not been of material consequence to access to ‘basic’ education. This is attributed to the ambiguous position (best captured by the term ‘doublethink’) the Botswana government¹ has adopted in relation to the issue of school fees.

Introduction

In the 1980s Botswana crafted the nine years basic education programme (BEP) which was implemented fully in 1987. In 1994 a decision was made to increase the programme's duration to 10 years. The programme required two basic conditions for it to be implemented, namely (a) abolishment of school fees or any prohibitive user-fees and (b) enough places in the schools for all children who wanted to partake of schooling. To meet the first condition school fees were abolished at the primary education level in 1980 thus ushering in the era of universal primary education (UPE) and in 1987 at the junior secondary education level, paving the way for universal junior secondary education (UJSE). To meet the second condition, the country embarked upon two massive projects (i.e. the Primary Education Improvement Project (PEIP) and the Junior Secondary Education Improvement Project (JSEIP)) in the 1980s to improve access and education quality at the two levels of primary education and junior secondary education. With the two conditions satisfied the nine years BEP was introduced in 1987. However, in 2006 the Ministry of Education re-introduced (targeted) school fees at the junior secondary education level of the BEP, violating the first condition since by their very nature school fees and universal education contradict each other. Logic suggests that re-introduction of school fees would negatively impact on access and participation, thus attenuating the basic education programme. At a conceptual level, there can be little doubt that school fees have attenuated the programme. At a practical level, however, the move does not seem to have had any notable impact on, for example, student enrolments. This poses a conundrum—how can violation of (a) condition(s) for a programme such as the BEP have no impact on the programme?

To respond to this broad question I break it into three more specific questions: (a) how do we account for the rise of BEP in Botswana in the 1980s, (b) how do we account for its attenuation in the 2000s and (c) why does the attenuation appear not to have had practical impact on the programme? To answer these questions, I adopt a global–local dialectic approach (Arnove and Torres, 1999, Rhoten, 2000, Deem, 2001). The approach seeks to account for national policies/programmes in terms of globally circulating discourses which are mediated by local concerns to yield a policy response which reflects both global and local concerns. To account for the fate of BEP, I carry out two processes: I analyze education policy documents, isolating their central tenets in the process, and scanning the global environment obtaining at the time of the formulation of the national polices. Then I seek a correspondence between the central tenets of the policies and globally circulating discourses at that time that could have impacted national policy.² In short, this case study involves basically a juxtaposition of readings of Botswana's policy texts with those of international organizations, while highlighting key aspects of the global economic dynamics. A limitation of this methodology is that it does not explore in detail the pathways by which external forces influenced the evolution of the BEP (Samoff and Carrol, 2003). The latter is the subject of an on-going study by the writer.

The first section of the paper explicates the concept of ‘basic education’. I observe that ‘basic education’ is a concept whose definition is contested and contextual. The second section of the paper advances the global–local dialectic approach as the conceptual framework within which the rise of basic education in Botswana in the 1980s and its attenuation in the 2000s could be explicated. This is followed by a rendition on the evolution of the basic education programme (BEP) in Botswana, which rendition accounts for the history of the programme in terms of the interplay of local and global forces. In the fourth section I give an account of the attenuation of the BEP that took place in the 2000s when Botswana decided to re-introduce school fees (as a specific aspect of a broader public sector reform initiative) at the universal junior secondary education level of the programme. As in the case of its rise, I account for the decline of the BEP in terms of the global–local dialectic. Conceptually, this means that Botswana has abandoned the 10 years basic education programme since school fees are in conflict with the concept of universal education. Empirically, however, the decline of BEP has been inconsequential insofar as access to 10 years of ‘basic’ education is concerned. I attribute these incongruous positions to the ‘doublethink’ that has characterized the Ministry of Education and Skills Development's position on school fees and universal access to junior secondary education—that school fees do not conflict with universal access.