Leading The World Into The Next Decade With Quality Education

Quality Education (SDG-4)

Introduction:

Education and, more importantly, quality education is very crucial for all of us. The means of achieving skills, beliefs, moral habits, and values, is vital for every person to enhance their knowledge base, social and economic status, and way of living. It transforms us by expanding our limits and improving our confidence levels. An educated person grows into a responsible citizen of the society. The fourth goal of SDG, i.e., Quality Education, is one of the most influential and proven carriers for sustainable development. There has been massive worldwide progress in achieving the target of universal primary education since 2000, with 91 % being the enrolment rate, and the number of children out of school has reduced by almost half with more girls going to school than ever before by 2015.

In contrast, in developing countries, this progress has been harder due to high poverty levels and other emergencies. Socio-economic inequality continues to be very high, and it is seen that children of most deprived families are four times more likely to be out of school than those of the affluent homes. The fourth SDG goal assures that all girls and boys get access to entirely free, equal, and quality primary and secondary education that would lead to relevant effective learning outcomes by 2030. It also intends to provide fair access to affordable vocational training, eliminate gender and wealth disparities, and achieve universal access to a quality higher education.

The relevance of the SDG to India:

India has been progressing in the context of inclusive and equitable education, but one important concerning aspect that warrants attention is ‘quality education.’ As a consequence, Niti Aayog adopted a three-year action agenda (2017-18 to 2019-20) that focuses on improving the quality of education. Several targets have been identified for realizing the same such as creating an outcome-oriented school education system, bettering the existing governance practices, establishing premier educational institutes for higher learning, providing autonomy to the existing top universities, increasing vocational and technical-training institutions et al.

The ‘quality education’ SDG has primarily ten targets which can be categorized into five different groups as specified below:

● Gender equality at all levels of education.

● Technical and vocational education; youth and adult literacy.

● Educating vulnerable groups and fostering their inclusion into the fold.

● Ensuring life-skill learning for sustainable development.

● Improvement of educational infrastructure.

In the present context, India still needs to take lots of robust steps to tackle the gender gap in higher education. Of the estimated 120+million students in the country, less than 24 million (one-fifth) of them are enrolled in Higher Educational Institutes (HEI), which is way below the world average of 26 percent (Tripathy 2015). Based on the suggestions of the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), for India to achieve the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) of 30 percent by 2020, an additional 10,510 technical institutions, 15530 colleges, and 521 universities would be required (Suneja 2012).

Even when we think about the learning outcomes of children and the youth, a major impediment is the teaching scenario in the country. Talking about the shortfall of teachers in government elementary schools, the number was a massive 9.08 lakh teachers against a sanctioned strength of 51.8 lakh posts. (as on 31.03.2016, ref. MHRD report ESAG-2018) The highest vacancies were recorded in the state of Jharkhand. To counter the shortage mentioned above, ad-hoc recruitments (temporary staff) are made, which deteriorates the quality of education further.

To put it in clear terms, India has a long way to go in ensuring the availability of quality and affordable education to every deserving individual in the country. By realizing the relevance of commitment toward the SDG-4, a decade long effort of achieving the envisioned targets until 2030 for education would do great benefit to not only the nation but to the entire world.

Business Implications and Responses:

Businesses that commit to the fulfilment of Sustainable Development Goals not just benefit from positive brand image and its associated increase in unit sales but also from increased corporate security and resilience. The involvement of corporates in achieving quality education has created a synergistic partnership between the companies involved and the communities benefiting from access to education. Study into the following initiatives show how different companies approach their work towards the fulfilment of the goals very differently.

Shiksha by Procter & Gamble

P&G Shiksha is an initiative and one of the strong pillars of P&G’s CSR strategy that provides children from underprivileged backgrounds with access to holistic education. P&G Shiksha till date has supported 1800 (+300 since last year) schools across the nation that has impacted the lives of over 1.4 million (+200,000 since last year) children, in partnership with a lot of NGOs/organisations like Round Table India, Pratham, Education Initiatives, etc.

By empowering its customers to make conscious brand choices by informing them that a certain percentage of their spending on the P&G products is going towards Shiksha makes purchase of every P&G product more desirable to the customers.

Citizymes by Novozymes

Biotech innovator company Novozymes has built on achieving sustainable development goals to gain strategic advantage and has hence aggressively worked on multiple SDGs with a keen interest in quality education. Their Citizymes initiative was started in 2011 and has since reached 123000 learners across the globe. They have committed to producing interactive digital books and other tools for educating students on the subject of biology, biotechnology and sustainability.

They had organised the “Voice for Biotech” competition on public-speaking for university students where they were given a platform to present on the role of biotechnology in food security, health care, biofuels, etc. and the winners were given an opportunity to intern at the R&D facility of Novozymes in Bangalore.

The Bridge International Academies

The Bridge International group of academies is an organisation that has not just strategised incorporation of SDG but has built a whole business model capitalising on SDG 4. They provide low-cost education to children in regions that lack access to quality education. They have over 1,00,000 students studying in over 500 kindergarten and primary schools operated by them in Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria and India.

They standardised the provision of education to the students by the use of technology and streamlined lessons, which are delivered on many occasions by unqualified teachers. Though they are a for-profit organisation, they have enjoyed the support of organisations like the World Bank and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This has brought a lot of criticism for these organisations as their contributions would be better served when directed to the provision of free universal education.

Analysis and suggested path

On analyzing the recent data we can see that in the last 6 years, there has been an almost 10% increase in enrolment in primary education. However, there has been a stagnation among the training to primary school teachers since 2015 which has remained about 85%.

One of the earliest steps taken in this direction was of OLPC - One Laptop per child which did not achieve a lot of success overall. This was done after the original MDG, Millennium Development Goals were set up in 2000. The technology was getting obsolete very fast and there were many difficulties in repairing if any part got broken or damaged. Therefore we should bring manufacturing to developing countries too to increase the spread.They should also be enabled by cloud based services as finally it's the content which actually goes into educating children. This content should also be raised by the local personnel in respective countries to make it more relevant to the existing scenario at those places.

According to UNESCO reports for SDG-4 for INDIA,

Minimum Proficiency in Reading

Minimum Proficiency in Mathematics

Other Indicators:

Scholarships [in USD]:

State Rankings in SDG 4

Kerala is the best performer while Bihar is the worst. We can see that the south and west regions have performed way better than the mid and eastern regions.

The Indian Government has also taken steps in this direction as can be seen by the below approaches:

Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat

This is to ensure quality education at classes 1 & 2.

National Reading Initiative Programme

This is to promote habit of reading till class 8th students

Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao

To ensure survival, protection and education of the girl child.

The Rashtriya Avishkar Abhiyan

To strengthen Math and science in secondary classes.

Saransh

Self review tool primarily for class 11 & 12 to compare with other schools and take decisions accordingly.

Companies have also taken many steps in this direction especially in their CSR initiatives.

We can take the case of TATA Motors. Under its initiative Vidyadhanam, around 9000+ scholarships have been given It also has an initiative Kaushalya under which it tries to impart skills to people addressing high unemployment primarily targeting the automobile and agriculture sectors.

In the coming two decades, about 140 million college-goers are going to graduate, and the huge figure speaks for itself on how important it is to bring a reform in our education system. From the areas covered above, it can be observed that the Government has made some serious progress in terms of enrolment, creating facilities, trying to integrate technology into learning, as well as administrative concerns like absenteeism and involvement of parents in the way schools function.

However, there are still grave issues that need to be dealt with concerning the dilapidated state of education in our country. In the following points, the steps to correct the system have been listed in the respective areas:

Primary and Secondary Education:

Coming up a yardstick to measure learning outcomes: The most serious challenge can be dealt with a complete overhaul of the government school system. A suggestion would be to come up with a metric to measure an instructor’s performance, which focuses on how successfully a teacher has transferred knowledge onto the student instead of achieving 100% pass rates. Standardized tests at each level which test application of concepts may push teachers towards performance improvement.

Administrative issues of absenteeism, lack of teachers, and lack of infrastructure: Recruitment of teachers is the absolute first step since the quality of teaching is deteriorating because of the use of substitute teachers. Absenteeism can be dealt with swiftly using technology and peer-parent reporting mechanisms. Infrastructure is a major issue that not only concerns the construction but also the usage of schools since migration patterns render schools useless in many cases. As observed everywhere, it is the environment of school that propagates learning, and having high school in one village and primary school in the other encourages dropouts and dilutes the learning. Hence, merging of schools and providing transport service can be one of the solutions to this problem

Use of existing resources: this can be done on two fronts, private institutions, and government. Till the time government recruitment takes place, teachers from private schools can be deputed to rural areas for two years with appropriate incentives. A similar ask can be made from businesses operating in the vicinity of rural areas for technology, infrastructure or personnel. On the government front, compulsory deputation of one year to achieve the degree can be proposed.

Higher Education:

Autonomy: The arrival of ‘Institutes of Eminence’ is a major step towards this goal. Partnerships with or adoption of government colleges by private businesses can lead to a healthy mix of learning by practice for future professionals. The autonomy should not be limited to only funding and education practices but also the culture and curriculum.

Capacity expansion of government institutions: Each year a large chunk of students are unable to pursue higher education and the main contributors to these are affordability and capacity. Though capacity expansion is a slow process it can be dealt with in a phased-out manner as it is being done for IITs, IIMs, and NITs.

References:

https://www.borgenmagazine.com/sustainable-development-goals-benefit-business/

https://www.pg.com/en_IN/sustainability/social_responsibility/social-responsibility-programs-in-india.shtml

https://www.2030spotlight.org/en/book/1165/chapter/4-cashing-sdg-4

http://www.businessfor2030.org/goal-4-ensure-education

https://www.borgenmagazine.com/sustainable-development-goals-benefit-business/

https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals/goal-4-quality-education.html#targets

Sustainability Report JSW: https://www.jsw.in/sites/default/files/assets/downloads/steel/Corporate%20Governance%20and%20Regulatory%20Information/Sustainability%20CSR%20reports/JSW-Steel-CSR-Sustainability%20Reports-Corporate%20Sustainability%20Report%202014-15.pdf

https://www.jsw.in/groups/sustainability

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327721156_Will_India_Achieve_SDG_4_by_2030

https://www.teachforindia.org/education-crisis/