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National law and policies on fee or for free – Guinea-Bissau

It matters if the state provides education for free or charges fees. Every state in the world has signed up to at least one international treaty obliging it to making primary education free and compulsory, and secondary education progressively so. But education cannot be compulsory if it is not also free and this contradiction is too often ignored. Furthermore, what does free actually mean in a world with numerous overt and hidden costs, to learners, parents, local communities? In a 2006 survey by Katarina Tomasevski education was found not to be genuinely free in the vast majority of countries in the world. The quote below on your country (if information was available) is from this very important survey.

 

The national laws and policies are the applications of the constitution, yet may actually be more advanced than this, as they are generally redrawn or updated more frequently than constitutions are. Laws are made by the government, the parliamentarians, and the bureaucrats, often in consultation with civil society. However, this also leaves them open to vulnerability and retrogression as they can become instruments of short-term politics and priorities. Laws and policies are open to change and influence through the routes of the democratic process and civil society campaigns. And where possible their violations should be challenged, either through the courts or through judicial review.

 

The state is the central actor in any claim to the right to education: it is the prime duty-bearer and the prime implementer; it is the guarantor; and it is the state´s signature vis-à-vis the international norms and standards which binds it to respect, protect and fulfil the right to education. The state must therefore be judged or challenged on its central text on the right to education, whether this be the constitution, the laws or the policies.

The Constitution stipulates that “the State is responsible for the promotion of free and equal access of all citizens to different educational levels”. This could imply that education is free throughout public institutions at all levels of the educational pyramid but the government has admitted that 90% of education is externally funded. In consequence, creditors’ and donors’ policies shape education.

The trend of privatizing financial responsibility for education has been reflected in the law, whereby children have a right “to formal, private and cooperative schools”. Obviously, children cannot have ‘a right’ to private education because access depends on their ability to pay the required cost. ‘Formal’ schools should be free of charge but a variety of charges are levied due to insufficient public funding for education. The government has acknowledged in 2001 that “more than half of the population of school age” remain out of school. Those who enrol often get too little schooling. At least one third of rural schools offer one or two years of primary education. Moreover, it is not known how many children remain out of school because the registration of children at birth is fragmentary:

 A large number of Guinean children, especially of single mothers and in rural areas, are not registered at birth. Only when it is time to go to school, aged six or seven (for those who have access to school), are they registered.

Reasons for this educational under-performance do not revolve only around poverty but include biased budgetary allocations. While poverty is the key obstacle for much of the population, this is not the case for the government. In examining Guinea-Bissau’s PRSPs, the World Bank and IMF have noted “fiscal slippages associated with heavy defense spending”. On-going conflicts in the region have affected Guinea-Bissau and distorted budgetary allocations. The IMF and the World Bank pointed in 2004 to the financial gap of $18.3 million needed to pay the salaries of civil servants. In addition, Alex Vines reported in November 2005 that the salaries of civil servants are paid with an average delay of three months.

In such conditions, it is impossible to imagine that education would function. Indeed, overlapping political and armed conflicts have paralysed education and other basic services. Their re-starting requires shifting priorities from military expenditure to civilian investment, which is difficult even to design while the global attention focuses on conflicts. Prioritizing education as a pillar of peace-making is as difficult as it is necessary: 

If the elected leaders are unable or unwilling to shoulder their sovereign responsibilities, especially in the absence of viable and accountable State structures, neither peace nor development can emerge or endure.