This masterclass offered by Dr Murisa, looks to create a framework in which participants can develop their advocacy goals and plans as they relate to access to education.
Transcript
All right guys, good afternoon and welcome. I will not take too much of your time but I have a proposal for all of you so you indicate through the chat if my proposal works. I want us to consider a final face-to-face meeting where we finalise the lab and then celebrate people who’ve been in this process, give certificates, the best, what is it, the most consistent participants, the most disruptive participant certificates, you know, I mean for since we started the journey and again so grateful that you’ve been with us on this journey.
So indicate availability in the chat for that. The team will organise a date, it will probably be a December date, it will be our closeout meeting because I think November is crazy. So I think we went through two parallel or two related processes, organisations, how to make organisations stronger, fundraising, now we’re looking at the subject matter but organisations have to be deep and so this is about advocacy.
So I believe you’ve already done the first stage which is about naming the problem. So I hope that you have gone through the naming process properly but just to say, yeah, you can keep it here, don’t move beyond it, just to say the naming of the problem, what I saw the team at Sevio shared with me their sort of their collection of what you did. Yeah, I think it’s a good, it’s a great start in terms of the names you give to problems but just to remind you that the names you give to problems have to be very, very accessible.
You know, it has to be a name that a community can use. At times we get so caught up in technical things and we miss out on saying that. If we’re going to say we’re working with communities, we need to make sure that the language is as easily understood as possible.
So the name of the problem that you give will either bring people to work with you or sort of make a distance because people will be struggling, what are we discussing now, sounds so technical, et cetera. So please don’t forget to keep on, writing in the chart your availability in December or end of November around a face-to-face meeting here in Harare so that we finalise this. So after naming the problem, you’re going to gather in concerns, why is this a problem, how does it affect you, et cetera.
Then all those are now put into different what we may call clusters. So we now create a framework of action. We look at the different areas because when people talk, they don’t realise that they’re actually talking maybe about the same things.
So we try to put these things in a theme to say, look, we’re getting this that is emerging, we’re getting this that is emerging, and how does it look like in terms of resolving problems? I believe you have come up with a problem called education. There’s a problem with our education in Zimbabwe.
You have seen education inequalities. I don’t know, it could be the inequalities to do with access or inequalities to do with the quality. But I just thought for the purposes of this discussion, I’ll name the problem as access to education.
Access to education. You may add to say access to affordable and quality education because I think those are terms that many people understand. So once you’ve done that, now we are at stage number 2A, which is creating a framework.
Matron, is it possible to get out and come back with the framework? What’s your next slide like? The next slide. Okay. So all right.
So I’ve explained this. Oh, you’re rushing. You’re rushing.
You’re rushing. Can you go back to the slide that was before that? Okay. Stay there.
Okay. At this stage, as I said, when you’re framing options and actions, you’ve already got the name of the problem and you’ve already discussed on the one hand what you think are the causes of the problem. What are the problems behind the problem? So you have said maybe it’s the cost, maybe it’s the distance to do with education or it’s the quality to do with the teachers or distances to do with the schools, et cetera.
And also you can talk about maybe the the relevance of the curriculum, all those big issues that you would have picked up. And they will be all over. You know, they are in different… At times they’re in your head, but we ask you to say, no, look, if you’re working with communities, put that on a board, make sure that the community can see what they’ve been saying.
As you’re facilitating these discussions around gathering the concerns of the community, you are doing it in such a way that everything that a member of the community says, you are writing down because the community member needs to see that what they think is important. At times we think, ah, what does this woman say? It’s not important. Then we don’t put it up there.
That becomes a problem because you are, instead of validating their participation, you’re making them look like they’re not valuable. So you need to make sure that everyone is in the room, they understand. So I’ll keep on saying, number one, use language that is accessible.
Number two, as you speak to the community, whatever they’re saying, make sure you are capturing it one way or the other on the board. You can capture keywords or you can capture the whole statement. Then you begin to ask certain questions, how does this problem affect you? Because we’re trying to understand how they’re implicated in the problem.
Then when you have all those things, you come back with that clustering and understanding of how this community is affected by the problem of maybe limited access to education. But because you’re an advocacy group, you now want to carry out advocacy. You’re going to try to cross-check this issue that you’re getting from community X with what is going on in the country.
So we then recommend that you carry out broader research. You begin to research to say, to what extent is this a problem in other communities? And if it is a problem, how big is it in other communities? So this is when we’re discussing the origins of the problem and its nature in different communities. We try to understand to say, is community X, let’s say Mutare or Mutorashanga, are they different from across Zimbabwe? So when you come to a place where you say, okay, from the data that we have, it looks like this is a common problem.
Because the moment it’s a common problem spanning different communities, then that’s when it qualifies to be discussed at a policy level, at the national level. But if it’s just unique to a community in Ward 17 of Mutare, maybe all it needs is local authority intervention. It does not need you to worry about making sure that you take it to the government, you come up with an advocacy campaign that is nationwide.
But you just understand that this problem is affecting this community. So there are local problems. It could be the problem to do with the quality of water.
It could be a problem to do with increased crime in that area. It could be a problem to do with having no electricity within that area. So when you think of all those things, you begin to say, okay, so now that we have seen this, and we have understood based on the data we have, that there are many other communities challenged by this issue around education inequalities.
So then that requires us to come up with a national advocacy programme. But then you need to go further. You have to create these alternative ways of resolving the problem through framing of solutions.
So a framing of solutions is to look at what kind of actions can be taken to resolve this problem. So as you are dealing with that, you begin to ask the community to say, okay, what do you think should be done to fix this problem? So as they are giving you answers, you are again clustering them around. It could be to say, oh, we need increased government expenditure.
And it may not come out that way. Well, that’s a very technical way. It may come this way.
So you’re looking at it and you’re saying, okay, you’re putting it there. There’s a need for more teachers. There’s a need for more schools.
Then somebody else may say, ah, maybe this also actually is not relevant. So you understand it. Ah, here we’re now talking of curriculum.
So you already have your what? Your three clusters. The one is on the curriculum. The other one is on the quality of teachers.
The other availability of teachers. The other one is on the number of schools within that community. Yeah.
So you’ve understood by reading wider in the origins of the problem. You now know how schools are spread in Zimbabwe. You know the ratio between schools, the number of pupils and the distance, the average distance that people walk to get to a school.
So you begin to say, okay, these are issues to do with access. So you solve that by just making sure that you have that. Then you begin to say, so when you’re saying, then people say, ah, you know, if they increase allocations towards the minister of education, et cetera.
But you keep on asking questions to say, but how can you also contribute? So as you’re looking at solutions, there are certain solutions that you look at and maybe cluster in a different colour and begin to say, these are solutions that the community is willing to take responsibility over and do. So those are not your advocacy actions. Those are your community actions.
So you leave those and say, these do not require advocacy. So for instance, it could be that, let’s say one of the problems you may have had is to say, these kids spend a lot of time drinking. They don’t go to school.
Then you ask, so what needs to be done? Then they can tell you, ah, the police need to do this. Then you keep on asking, but as a community, what is it that they can do? Then they begin to say, you know what, we can also make sure that our kids go to school. We can walk our kids to school.
We can do this. Then you can begin to put those under action that the community can do. Then there are certain things that you feel like, oh, police can play a role to say, can police make sure that all the liquor selling points in the community are not open during school hours? Yeah.
So that’s now an advocacy action directed at the police. So you’re beginning to say, okay, who is implicated here when you’re looking at stakeholders? The Minister of Home Affairs, where the police are housed, is implicated. Then you can also begin to say local businesses are implicated.
They need to be part of this discussion because they are the ones who are opening their beer halls or whatever to coincide with school opening hours. So you already put those aside. Then you begin to say, so what are the actions that we need to direct to the Minister of Education? Then you see this one around, oh, we need to see an increase in the number of teachers.
Then you begin to say, okay, so how do we create a campaign around the increase in the number of teachers? You’re just framing options. These are options. Then you begin to say, this is an action that should be taken by the Ministry of Government, so the Minister of Higher Education at a national level.
So you’re beginning to try to understand how the ministry deploys teachers to different communities. Then you may begin, further research may show you that the challenge is actually not the shortage of teachers. The challenge is that maybe there are not adequate incentives for teachers to come and work in rural schools or low-income schools, et cetera. Then you put that up.
Then you begin to weigh three or four actions. But the actions that you have seen, the options that you have seen, for now for advocacy, what we recommend is you can do all of them. I don’t know, Edda, if you can go in and out of the other clustering that we had, the one that I said, this is correct.
I just want to show them something. Okay, let me bring it up. Okay, thanks.
Alpha. Two seconds. Here we go.
Share screen. Okay, so this is the one, right? Okay, thanks. So this is coming from the work that you did.
So this is about the causes of education inequality in Zimbabwe. You have identified one, two, three, four, five, six clusters. So this is just a cluster that the team has put together.
So they found one big cluster that we call an underfunded public education system. So there’s an issue around funding. So some of the comments you made, there’s underfunding of education.
The education sector is significantly underfunded, receiving only 14% of the total budget expenditure in 2023, which is below the recommended 20% threshold. Then you’ve gone to uneven resource allocation distribution between rural and urban schools. I think here, I’ll come back to this, but there are similarities with the first one.
Social and cultural inequalities. Now you’re going deeper and you’re looking and saying the causes of education inequality is social and cultural inequalities. Child marriage rates remain high, driven by poverty.
Then you go to political and economic constraints, weak policy implementation, poverty, then corruption, corruption, corruption, corruption, weak, poor infrastructure development and human capital, the digital divide, etc. With more time, if we had time and to develop this, we could actually come up with three columns. We collapse this further because the first two columns for me speak about resources, public resources.
Then within the public resource issue, there’s also the issue of how those resources are allocated unevenly between rural and urban. Then there’s the issue around what you may call governance. So you have this political and economic constraint and corruption being a big issue around governance.
Then social and cultural inequalities. If you want to deal with education, you need to go to another ministry. So if you want to deal with education, you keep them for now, because you’re looking at them and saying, so how are they really sort of driving education inequalities? Because remember, you’re thinking about advocacy, because this is where we may begin to say, a social and cultural inequality is meant to be dealt with by the Minister of Education, or we’re trying to then maybe educate communities to do things differently, etc.
So you keep it there, you can just give it another colour to say, you’re not yet certain about what to do with this sort of thought. Then you look at weak and or poor infrastructure development and human capital. Exactly.
You’re looking at that to say there’s a divide, etc, etc. Expensive data tariffs, etc. Then you realise to say, I’m just showing how you work with your framing, you’ve been framing this, you’re not creating a framework eventually have to choose one action that you think will move the needle.
Yeah. So it’s important to come up with a framework a framing that works for you. So when you look at column, the first column and the last column, they stuff there, please don’t move, they stuff the way we talk about the underfunded public education system.
And when you come to the infrastructure, those are the manifestations of the underfunding. Yeah. Because if you have said is underfunded, we understand when then the next set of problems you have to do with infrastructure, because you said there’s no money, so they can not be so infrastructure has to be affected as well.
So you begin to say, okay, is weak or poor infrastructure, a primary problem, or a symptom, or a result of the problem? Because what you have said in cluster one is, is a root problem to say, there’s no way education can thrive when it’s underfunded. So you begin to say, maybe we should combine this and call weak or poor infrastructure, part of this underfunded public education, that’s the manifestation. So first of all, in the underfunded public education system, you have spoken to the budget norms, the African norm is that education should receive 20%.
But this time, it’s only receiving 14%. Then we begin to say, but that may not mean anything, because 14% may be enough. But then you begin to tell us about that, the country’s poor information and communication technology infrastructure, then we do okay.
So because of underfunding, communities are not schools in other communities are not getting infrastructure development, especially as we talk about the move towards digital technology, whatever, whatever. So you move that, but within the weak or poor infrastructure development and human capital, there are also issues to do with data, data tariffs, etc. Then you give that another colour code to say, okay, maybe this is not something that can be directly responded to by the Minister of Education, because the Minister of Education, Minister of Education, from what we understand, is not responsible for data tariffs.
There’s another ministry that is responsible for data tariffs. But you put it there to say, it could be something that we can pursue. But for now, we want to focus on how we can influence the Minister of Education.
Yeah, then you put all that. So look, if you look at other things that you have raised, you have raised issues to do with poor infrastructure, poor teacher training, all of them related to an underfunded public education system, because you can have a good education system if you’re funding it well, there won’t be poor teacher training, there won’t be poor infrastructure, that’s an assumption. But that’s the sort of the brainstorming you keep on doing by yourself and with others until you come up with saying, guys, so the real problem here that we want to fix because we think that if we fix this problem, we’ll fix the majority of the problems in education.
So for me, when I look at your framework, I’ll go with the first column, the underfunded public education system, to say there’s limited funding. That’s the problem. Now there’s limited funding towards inclusive education in Zimbabwe, then the problem statement could be that for the past five years, the government has been allocating less than 20% towards education, while it’s the sector has to deal with, then you give us the numbers, schools need so many teachers, but we’re only training so many, and others live through migration, infrastructure is collapsing.
Because of this, we need to be moving towards a new curriculum, you’re now adding flesh to your problem statement, and now it begins to make sense. So around the framework, that’s the sort of your advocacy framing to say, if we move, if we see improved funding towards education, from the 14% towards 20%, we can begin to see this. Yeah.
So that’s now your policy ask the government, you’re beginning to say, this is what we’re going to ask of the government. But you don’t stay there, because if you just say, oh, we’re here to demand that you improve funding towards education, it is okay, but it’s not enough. Then you begin to say improved funding towards public education will contribute towards, then you explain to us those other boxes you have this issue around infrastructure, this issue around you have around poor teacher training, this issue around you have around poor planning.
So once you begin to say, we believe that improved funding will lead to this. But then the most important thing when you do that, is you raise this feather when we discuss advocacy. But what you have done is you have put the Minister of Education into your corner, they are not going to oppose that policy ask remember, they’re not the ones responsible for allocating money from the budget.
That means your advocacy is now going to the Minister of Finance. Yeah, that’s where the money comes from. Because like right now, we’re in, we’re in the midst of budget consultations.
So now as an education-concerned grouping of advocacy organisations, you have a policy brief that you have written. And that is saying, oh, yes, we want to see improvements in access to education. But we believe that for us to see that improvement, we expect the government to increase allocation.
Because if they increase the allocation, that money should then go to these three or four priority areas. That’s your framework done based on the concerns. So when you come back to say, communities may say, oh, but the man was a man in the funding.
Then you begin to explain to them to say, there was no way we’re going to discuss weak or poor infrastructure in the absence of funding. There was no way we were going to discuss this uneven resource allocation or distribution between rural and urban schools in the absence of adequate funding. Also, I believe that there was no way we were going to discuss issues to do with poor teacher training if the resources were not there.
So you begin to say, we have done this, but we’re now beginning to say once this is available, and the second level of advocacy is now directed at the Minister of Higher Education, where we want to now talk about improved teacher training, improved infrastructure, improved allocation between rural and urban schools. So that’s your second level of advocacy. So first, you do this advocacy around making sure that the government is consistently allocating at least 20% or above towards education.
I hope this has made sense because I want to end here and just ask you to look at this. But I will redo this when we meet face to face, just to clarify so that you can come up with a more actionable framework from where you are going to understand. Because what you are now doing is to envisage your advocacy campaign over one year or two years, but saying, we start here, we deal with this problem when we’re here, we pivot towards now focussing on these issues.
But understanding again, that advocacy is not an overnight issue, because when we’re now doing with stage three, I believe, we’re now dealing with actually creating effective advocacy strategies, where we’re looking at all that. But you cannot create an advocacy strategy when you have not effectively done stage one, where you are naming the problem, and you are discussing its different manifestations, its symptoms and its causes. And you’re understanding if this problem is actually deserving of national attention as a policy problem, or just unique to that community.
And when you have not separated solutions between that which the community can do, and that which governments have to do. Once you have done that, then you move on to the next stage to say, of the framing of the actions we have proposed four or five broad clusters of actions that we have proposed, what is the one that is most likely to move the needle towards the desired result? Because I can assure you, you cannot carry out advocacy on the number of things that you have raised, because you just sound like, these people don’t know what they’re doing. But you look at what we may call the hook, the one that connects with all the other issues you have raised, that’s your hook.
Then when you’ve done that, you’re good to go in terms of developing your advocacy campaign, which we can cover in the face-to-face meeting. If the face-to-face meeting is not possible, we can have another Zoom meeting like this one, where we clarify all this. But for now, I think I’ve just sort of helped you to frame, so you can spend time between now and the next meeting, whether face to face or online, to clarify your actions, to say what is the best possible move forward, then you work around that.
Are there any questions? No questions from this end, Doc. Thanks for that. It’s putting things more in perspective.
Sure. Thanks, Julie. Eddah, back to you.
All right. Thank you. Thank you so much for that, Tenae.
And thanks to everyone who joined. So, you know, I see a comment from Tinashe, who’s just saying, I agree with Doc, a lot of movements, a lot of movements are centred around addressing the symptoms of the problem, which is why some issues linger on, linger on. So addressing the limited funding for education will be the best strategy to tackle the issue.
Yeah, and she also said none at the moment, I think you’ve unpacked it well. So we need to focus on the hook. And underfunding of the education sector is really the main issue.
So, yeah, thank you so much for that. I think it’s helped to bring, you know, helped the group just know they’re now way too narrow, focus the energies. But, you know, all the information and insights that they’ve developed so far, you know, I think provide a strong grounding background for them to continue with this process and this stage of naming, of framing possible actions.
That they can address. So, you know, we’ll be sharing the recording, plus we’ll also do a transcript as well, just to make it easier for people to follow in case they can’t listen to the recording again. And as Doc has highlighted that, you know, we’ll be just sending out a quick email to everybody just to check on your availability for the face-to-face meeting.
Either the end of November or the beginning of December. So we’ll just ask you in terms of options around those dates, what your availability looks like for us to then have a face-to-face meeting. To bring this process to a close, but, you know, to then help finalise and bring out a tangible output from this process that we’re undertaking that, you know, as a group or even individually in your organisations, you can look to run with in terms of, you know, advocacy work in 2025 and beyond.
So if there are no further questions or comments, thank you so much for your time. We’ve gone slightly over the 30 minutes that we had allocated, but thank you for allowing us for just the extra 13 minutes that we’ve had. If there are any questions, please feel free to reach out to Matron or me.
You know, if they want specific also for Dr. Mirza, just share it with us and we’ll make sure that we get his insights or inputs concerning any questions. So thank you guys. And I think we’ll call it a day here.
And yeah, we’ll be chatting online and, you know, we look forward to meeting and engaging with you soon. Let’s finish. Let’s finish strong colleagues.
I know these things have been protracted. It’s like that learning, et cetera, but let’s finish strong. We’ll celebrate or create a little Christmas party.
Let’s all come and meet in Harare. I’m sure Edda and Maitre can organise this. And yeah, we need to finish strong what we’ve started.
And so very, very, very humbled by just your consistent colleagues. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
All right. Thank you so much, everyone. Take care and enjoy the rest of your day.
Thank you. Goodbye. All right.
Bye.