Bridge schools: Lessons in state-business cooperation

Last week, the results of the annual Primary Leaving Examinations for 2017 were released.
As usual there was the flurry of activity, excited parents and proud teachers posing for photos with the best-performing candidates and the print media making the most of the moment to sell as many newspaper copies as possible.
In late 2016, my attention was drawn to one primary school in particular that was making the news for a different reason.
It was the Bridge International Schools in Uganda, a pilot project by Americans and funded in part by such people as Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of the giant social network Facebook.
The school was at the heart of controversy, with the government threatening to shut down its branches over the quality of their buildings and vague, unsubstantiated allegations that it taught homosexuality to its pupils.
It didn’t seem likely that the latter allegation was possible, given how traditional the teachers and parents of the school are. The first people to withdraw their children from the school would have been the parents themselves, had it been teaching homosexuality.
When the schools were closed in November 2016, parents protested and some even tried to lobby Parliament to have the government reverse the decision, an indication that they saw the school’s merits better than the government and the public did.
But it was the Zuckerberg involvement that attracted my interest.
On first visiting one of the schools at Nsuubi near Nansana, outside Kampala, like most people I was taken aback at the sight of the buildings.
They were basic, low-quality material, and looked every inch a village school. I wondered why a school with World Bank, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg funding should look this basic.
Andrew White, the-then country manager for Uganda, explained the model.
The schools had the twin objective of providing affordable education to low-income families and at the same time had to be run as a commercial enterprise. To achieve the first goal, the fees had to be so low that low-income families could afford to enrol their children.
But to achieve the second goal, that of profitability, required overheads be kept as low as possible.
This is why the schools looked like this. If the buildings were to be modern and upscale, that would require much higher fees that, in turn, would price out the low-income families.
It occurred to me that right here was a school based on the realities of a third world economy and society.
When I recall the controversy my old school Namasagali College constantly got entangled in and how it influenced the Ugandan public through its performing arts, I developed an affinity with Bridge.
Bridge, to me, reflected Uganda as it really is when run on a purely commercial basis without foreign aid or grants. Bridge, meantime, had gained some note as a school whose pupils did well at primary school chess tournaments, a surprise considering that chess tends to be a mentally-challenging game and usually perceived as an elite sport.
The next bit was to see how Bridge would perform in actual Ugandan national exams.
Bridge performed well above the national average in the 2017 PLE results. This, for a school whose administrators, teachers and pupils had to work under immense stress and uncertainty since late 2016.
What would their performance have been like had they been free to focus on the teaching, I wondered.
The story in this is, given how badly we need an educated population, the better-than-average performance at PLE by Bridge shows the authorities need to move with a little more caution and understanding before they clamp down on schools, traders and other small businesses.
Encourage your start-ups, not crush them with arbitrary policy directives.

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