Introduction
The neoliberal view of globalisation with its emphasis on an integrated and stable global market economy contributed to the rise of the Washington Consensus. The related implementation of controversial neoliberal priorities and policies – for example, fiscal discipline, privatisation and deregulation – in the name of boosting economic growth have brought about dire consequences, including social and education inequalities (Hill, Greaves, and Maisuria 2012). Consequently, new inclusions to augment the Washington Consensus have been suggested, with interventions to alleviate the observed failures of the neoliberal ideology in closing the inequality gap and reducing poverty, which has rather been on the increase (Carroll 2010).
The Nigerian government and development partners, since the introduction of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), have invested in preventing the intergenerational transfer of poverty through conditional cash transfer (CCT) as a social safety-net programme, with one of the ‘conditionalities’ to include school enrolment of children from poor households. However, there is inadequate effort to improve the poor conditions and quality of learning in the state-owned public schools where beneficiaries of this programme attend, as opposed to the conditions in the private schools (Matthew 2013). Against this background, this briefing explores the extent to which CCT expands the choices and potential of children from poor households, and contributes to closing the inequality gap that exists around basic education. It examines neoliberalism in education, as well as the context and rationale for CCT, and its place in the education system. It also discusses possible solutions to the ongoing crisis in the sector.
Neoliberal globalisation and the education sector in Nigeria
As Nigeria is fast transforming from a mixed economy into a strongly market-driven economy, it has witnessed the concession and privatisation of the social services sector, including education. According to the mainstream view, globalisation has placed demands on nations to ensure quality education that will help citizens compete and participate efficiently and effectively in the global marketplace (Tarabini 2010). However, due to poor funding and shortage of workforce and infrastructure, the education system is unable to face the challenges of globalisation (Matthew 2013). Neoliberal policies have not positively influenced the acquisition of quality education, especially by poor households, among other existing inequality gaps (Aiyede et al. 2015).
The government admits to the failure, neglect and low quality of public schools and has approved increased private-sector participation in the education system. This has resulted in a rise in enrolment in private schools and a widespread belief among students, parents, employers and even the government that they offer better learning conditions, experience and outcomes than the public schools (Eldon and Gunby 2009; Feda et al. 2015). As of 2005, 9019 private primary schools served only 1,578,635 children (as against 22 million children in about 55,000 government schools), representing 16.3% of schools nationwide, while having about 7.2% of the children enrolled (NERP 2005). This is significant, judging by the ratio of children per school in private and public schools, which are 1:175 and 1:400, respectively, highlighting the existing funding gap and lack of support for public schools and the inability of a significant number of households to afford private schools (Udofia and Umoh 2016).
CCT in education: context and rationale
Social safety-net programmes became prominent in the mid 1990s in Latin American countries where neoliberal policies were pioneered over three decades ago. Today, they are widely adopted by most developing countries around the world, including Nigeria. The most widely implemented social safety intervention is the CCT, which is a form of a grant aimed at improving the living conditions of the poor in the society (Fiszbein et al. 2009). The CCT scheme in Nigeria is provided to eligible poor households based on a major conditionality to participate, with their children, in government education and health care services. CCT, being a multi-faceted programme implemented in the run-up to meeting the development goals and Education for All (EFA) goals, has not gone without challenges. Evidence suggests that the increase in demand for social services (e.g. education and health care) has not been matched by a commensurate increase in service providers and infrastructure, thereby resulting in a crisis of overcrowding (Adesina 2009; Aiyede et al. 2015).
The government introduced the CCT as a strategy for achieving EFA goals, informed by studies linking education attainment to poverty depth and severity in households, and CCT’s flexibility to integrate social services in education, health and nutrition (e.g. Fiszbein et al. 2009; Baba-Ari, Eboreime, and Hossain 2018). The CCT programme in meeting education goals is also traceable to the World Declaration on Education for All (Jomtien 1990), and the Sub-Saharan Conference on Education for All (Johannesburg, South Africa, 1999), in line with the second strategy of the Dakar Framework for Action: to ‘promote EFA policies within a sustainable and well-integrated sector framework clearly linked to poverty elimination and development strategies’ and sub-strategy 2.1 (UNESCO 2000, 17).
Some reports have shown that CCT programmes can be effective in improving certain educational achievements, such as access, enrolment and participation, with regard to girls’ early marriage, child labour and child nutrition, survival and protection (e.g. Holmes et al. 2012; Mishra and Battistin 2018). Nevertheless, in Nigeria, CCT has only reached 0.001% of the poor. Despite the interventions, many vulnerable households and groups are thus still excluded, with the estimated number of out-of-school children rising from 7.3 million in 2008 to 10.5 million in 2010 and 13.2 million in 2013, while poor attendance rates and poor-quality education service provision in schools continue for many (Holmes et al. 2012, 10; UNICEF 2012, 11; Feda et al. 2015, 53). Although CCT has recorded some achievements, it has yet to tackle the challenge of unequal educational attainment amongst different social classes considering the demand and expectations at the heart of EFA.
Some studies on the impact of CCT have revealed that while the programmes helped reduce extreme poverty rates, and led to an increase in school enrolment and attendance, they did not necessarily result in better learning outcomes, given the weak policy environment, inadequate teachers and classrooms, poor quality of services and other factors affecting education outcomes (e.g. Silva 2015; Ayala 2017). This is relevant, as findings show a realisation and demand for better services by CCT beneficiaries from service providers (Merrien 2013).
Hence, in a neoliberal setting characterised by minimal state control in the economic activities of a nation, social inclusion and economic assistance programmes like CCT are not enough to address the problem of inequality and deprivation (Veltmeyer and Petras 2011). There is, therefore, an indication of the need to explore and debate more generally government’s emphasis on the marketisation of education, the ongoing neglect in public funding and improvements of public schools attended by the children from poor households who receive CCT, and the contribution of the education sector to (new) social inequalities and social reproduction of class.
Marketisation of education and CCT nuances
Neoliberal policies are measures that generally consider a shift away from state ownership, with an emphasis on free markets (privatisation and deregulation) and minimal consideration of a public good perspective regarding the provision of social services like education. Most principles of globalisation have been associated with the neoliberal ideology, although interpretations on this differ (Yeldan 2001). In the dominant neoliberal discourse of globalisation, choice and free markets, individuals have been ‘responsibilised’ to assume social tasks which used to be the responsibilities of government and to transcend their environments in ensuring the economic well-being of themselves and their households. The withdrawal of government responsibilities for providing social welfare and services in areas such as health and education has created a ‘democratic deficit’, a situation where elected representatives in government are becoming less responsible for dysfunctions in the systems of social service like education. The World Bank argues that the potential solution for accessing social services like basic education is to allow the private sector to enter the market to give the poor greater choice, but advocates for social safety nets to enable them to purchase such services (World Bank Group 2001; Abdul-Hamid et al. 2017). Hence, the education sector is seen as a marketplace (Mamdani 2007), with the education system taking the model of a business where parents are the consumers, and teaching and learning become competitive among schools, targeted at refining the pupils for best skills relevant to perform in the global economy (Jickling and Wals 2008). This has also led to government neglect and reduction in spending on public schools, and privatisation or marketisation of education services, leaving the schools in disorder in terms of resources and infrastructure (Adebayo 2009).
In advancing neoliberalism in education, competition between schools is also stressed by promoting choice as a way of improving school quality and outcomes and ensuring that parents and children get a good deal for their investment in education (Bagley 2006). It is claimed that competition creates a demand for better performance of learners, teachers and schools, proven by exam results and ranks in tables. Despite the overall declining trend in performance in Nigerian education (e.g. in terms of assessment outcomes), public schools appear to be most commonly affected going by the poor results from national exams such as the National Examination Council (NECO) and West African Examination Council (WAEC) (Mohammed 2018; Oluwasegun and Ekomaye 2018). There is a significant discrepancy in performance, where the public schools perform below private schools, consequently undermining the competitiveness of the state schools in the system. It is observed that even the public schools with intervention from the Department for International Development (DFID) through the Education Sector Support Programme in Nigeria (ESSPIN) still perform below the private schools (Gibson et al. 2011). The above result poses some threat to the socio-economic prospects of children in public schools since education affects the two tails of income distribution in society, with school performance determining the level of individual earning in the income bracket (Abdullah, Doucouliagos, and Manning 2015). This brings up the issue of standardisation and content, another crucial aspect of neoliberal education. This approach is concerned not only with ways to provide the enrolled students with the minimum cognitive, practical and social skills to prepare them to compete in the labour market and advance to further training in the future, but also with the minimal resources and infrastructural and environmental requisites for meeting quality education. What has been witnessed over the years is that the neoliberal policies in education have created low-quality public education by reducing government funding and support, thereby depriving citizens, especially the poor, of the right to quality education and subsequent socio-economic opportunities (Adebayo 2009; Holmes et al. 2012; UNICEF 2012; Feda et al. 2015). This is predictable, considering the existence of a unified national curriculum for teaching, learning and assessment, with assessment scores as the number one determinant of achievement.
Evidently, the situation of public schools attended by the poor children who receive CCT has resembled what Kozol (1992) referred to as ‘savage inequalities’, portraying a class system of segregation with the poor children relegated to the very low-quality public schools, while the rich privileged children take positions in the private and high-performing schools. Although, understandably, the government is using the CCT programme to promote the EFA and other development goals, nevertheless the neoliberal system under which it operates has succeeded in categorising the school system and differentiating children based on social class. Owing to the decline in public spending in the education sector and radical promotion of privatisation, leading to increased private-sector provision of education, the children from poor households who mostly attend public schools, therefore, can only achieve what can be termed their ‘constricted performance’, as a result of the limited resources and poor-quality services available in the public education system.
Beyond CCT: a case for the capabilities of poor children
The capability approach (CA) has been described as a framework for the evaluation and assessment of individual well-being and social arrangements, with the notion that the goal of development should be to expand people’s opportunities to achieve functions such as being healthy, educated, employed and earning a living, to enjoy ‘ways of being’ and a larger set of activities which they have reason to value (Robeyns 2005). CA in education focuses on the capabilities of children to expand their choices and learning opportunities and on the way inequality dimensions interact with these capabilities (Ogamba 2019). In examining CCT, for instance, CA looks beyond the mere provision of incentives to encourage schooling of children from poor households to assess the availability and their freedoms to choose and operate amid various opportunity sets that will allow them to function fully to their potential in being and doing what they value. The choice of schools and their condition, quality of teaching and versatile subject areas become important determinants in measuring the satisfaction of children and parents with education services. Moreover, choice could be ‘a mere wish’ if not backed by the ability to act on it. For example, children may choose to attend a school beyond their locality to benefit from a subject which the local school lacks a teacher for, but may be forced or frustrated to drop out along the way due to their parents’ inability to pay school fees or provide their fare for transport.
Hence, the question is: to what extent does CCT expand the capabilities and functioning of children from poor households in their education? Addressing this question is important, as access that is not matched with quality, and the persistent inequalities between private and public schools in some sub-Saharan African countries, may deter mobility out of poverty and constitute a deprivation of desired freedom and opportunities (Unterhalter 2012; Ogamba 2019).
The CA emphasises the freedom of an individual to select from a ‘capability set’ (a wide range of opportunities) that exists both formally and legally and is effectively available (Robeyns 2011). This entails freedom of choice in the type of school, subjects and educational activities for parents and children to choose from. However, most poor households who receive the CCT are restricted by their purchasing power to choose the school their children will attend and are inadvertently consigned to only easily accessible public schools. This means that their freedom to choose a school, private or public, is limited and thereby limits their agency, freedom and choice.
Baez and Camacho (2011) and Lewin and Akyeampong (2009) suggest that some of the reasons why CCT has limited effects on school attainment and performance is because it is targeted in the poor areas, which have relatively lower teaching and school quality due to rapid expansion in enrolments, and low teacher-to-pupil ratios with overcrowded classrooms. This means that CCT, in the meantime, is counter-productive and disparity-creating due to obvious limitations to the pursuit and attainment of education by children from poor households, as against their counterparts in the private schools. The World Bank Group recognises that service standards should be responsive to beneficiaries by empowering them to choose (Binswanger-Mkhize and de Regt 2010). However, this is not the case in reality, as CCT-benefiting parents and children are not empowered with the freedom to choose beyond what is obtainable in the public education system.
Notwithstanding the fulfilment of the ‘conditionalities’ of CCT, the ‘social’ and ‘environmental’ conversion factors that emerge as a result of lack of quality teachers, poor learning conditions and infrastructure, among other weaknesses of public schools caused by government neglect, affect the attainment and educational prospects of beneficiaries, hence undermining their capabilities. School type indeed makes a difference in student academic performance, as it affects their ability to convert the opportunity of schooling into valuable functioning, like being able to read and write and being able to advance in education. Accordingly, only about 55% of children from the poorest 20% (quintile) of the household wealth index in Nigeria make it to secondary school while, based on the higher education participation rate (HEPR), only 8.1% of students between 18 and 35 years old participate in tertiary level education, the majority of whom are from the private-school sector (Adebayo 2009; Agboola and Ofoegbu 2010). This is an indication that public schools do not deliver sufficient capabilities for the children of the poor to actualise their educational aspirations in completing and transiting beyond basic education and to satisfactorily compete with the rich private-educated children, as receiving CCT does not guarantee that.
When freedom of choice is compromised, the learner/household settles for an obtainable option or unfavourable situation; consequently, what is termed ‘adaptive preference’ in CA sets in. CA discerns that when people have persistently suffered deprivation of the ability to play their agency roles, they may still subjectively claim well-being and satisfaction, resorting to other functioning (Nussbaum 1999; Sen 1999). Using CCT and the choice of schooling and career to illustrate the tenets of adaptive preferences, a child whose household receives CCT and attends a disadvantaged public junior secondary school may aspire to study medicine and become a doctor, but because of a lack of science teachers, laboratory facilities and equipment in his local school to encourage and foster that ambition, the child may end up having to enrol in arts classes in senior secondary school as the only available option. This will lead to another career path if the child makes it beyond the junior or senior secondary school level. This may lead to a situation that can be described as ‘sour grapes’, where an alternative option becomes a rational choice, as poor children may lack a strong will and have their freedom of agency restricted by their adaptive preferences.
Some studies (e.g. Haushofer and Shapiro 2013) have suggested some level of positive impact of cash transfer on the educational outcome, socio-economic indicators and overall well-being of beneficiaries, thereby promoting CCT as useful in improving participation in basic education (school enrolment, attendance, retention, and possible completion) among learners from poor benefiting households. However, it is argued that in certain cases, ‘CCTs can produce myriad and seemingly contradictory effects’ (Garmany 2016, 68); hence, the introduction of CCT is not doing enough in closing the gaps in educational achievement and attainment between the rich and the poor considering the lack of commensurate effort to improve service delivery in the education sector. Access to poor- or low-quality education such as that provided through the CCT ‘mask[s] exclusion (children enrolled but learning little), and conceal[s] very unequal patterns of participation related to household income, location, gender, and other forms of disadvantage’ (Lewin and Akyeampong 2009, 143).
Clearly, public schools lack the necessary resources and infrastructure for expanding the capabilities of children from poor households through basic education, including those who receive CCT to attend them. It has also been established that access to higher education among poor households is important to advance the opportunity needed to give poor households better chances for higher-income employment (Lewin 2009). Nonetheless, it is still a mirage with the current trend of marketisation of education in Nigeria, which the poor children and their household cannot afford even if they manage to pass through the basic education with CCT in subsidised poor-quality public schools. An evaluation of cash transfers and children’s education and labour among Malawi’s poor suggests that
to build the human capital that will effectively interrupt the intergenerational cycle of poverty, supply-side improvements in the educational system are an essential accompaniment to cash transfers so that students acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to pull their families out of poverty. (Miller and Tsoka 2012, 520)
Conclusions
This briefing contributes to the discourse on the effectiveness of social protection (safety-net) programmes in addressing inequalities under neoliberal policies that affect the social services sector, with a focus on conditional cash transfer (CCT) and the education sector. The analysis shows that CCT under neoliberal education policy created gaps and unequal access to quality education which are caused by privatisation and marketisation (commercialisation) of the school sector. Available evidence shows that it is incorrect to evaluate the CCT-prompted enrolment in schools as a good predictor of its instrumental value for children to reach their potential and eliminate intergenerational poverty. Moreover, there are more equitable and cost-effective alternatives to neoliberal education policies, which require more government spending in public schools and investment in the education system. In other words, if basic education is conceived as a basic human capability and right, government and other stakeholders must go beyond lip service to prioritising education in the development agenda. Also, promoting access and enrolment and providing incentives for the demand side cannot be effective in driving real impact; rather, they must attend to the alarming need to fix the supply-side constraints to the public schools sector.
Furthermore, greater restriction and regulation of commercialisation in the school sector are imminent, since education is a public good and has instrumental value for securing individual capabilities (freedom and opportunities), reducing inequality and achieving sustainable development. There is, thus, an urgent need for change in policy direction, especially in developing economies, to make provision for adequate funding and support for public education to advance the availability of diverse educational opportunities and choices, and to improve the capabilities of children from poor households via quality education for all.