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By Christina MacCulloch After Hurricane Mitch tore apart thousands of dwellings in Honduras last October, homeless families took refuge in the first solid public building they could find.More often than not, that building was the local schoolhouse. By the time the storm had passed, hundreds of schools, from the northern industrial city of San Pedro Sula to the southern agricultural town of Choluteca, had become de facto refugee centers. During the first few weeks following the disaster, people were grateful to simply have somewhere to stay, and little thought was given to the impact this development would have on the education of Honduran children. Soon, however, it became clear that refugees whose homes had vanished entirely would remain in some schools for months, forcing an indefinite suspension of classes for tens of thousands of children. Anecdotal reports indicate that this prolonged occupation of buildings that were never designed for such a purpose has hastened the deterioration of already decrepit facilities and resulted in the loss of scarce school supplies. This would be a serious crisis in any country, but in Honduras, where the education system already suffers from numerous deficiencies, it was devastating. Instead of despairing, however, Hondurans are hoping that the disaster will create the momentum necessary to bring about a fundamental reform of the education system. The need for such reform has been apparent for years. Nearly 30 percent of all Hondurans cannot read, only 43 percent of all students complete primary school and a third of those who do will have repeated at least one grade. Unfortunately, there tend to be as many different proposals for reform as there are interest groups in Honduran society, and the difficulty of reconciling these proposals has paralyzed reform efforts in the past. "The key is to overcome these differences and arrive at basic agreements about what everyone wants to see accomplished -then you can go on to determine what is actually doable," says Patricio Aylwin, Chile's former president. Aylwin heads an IDB-sponsored initiative known as "Diálogo de Política Social" that promotes broad, multi-sector dialogue on social policy issues in Latin American and Caribbean countries. He says the idea behind the initiative, which is active in several Latin American countries, is to help people get past "the natural tendency to present issues in black and white. Once you get below the surface, you start to find that there are many more agreements than disagreements. During this process of searching for understanding, ideological barriers and suspicions gradually fade away." Accompanied by the Diálogo project team, Aylwin traveled throughout Honduras after Hurricane Mitch, talking with a wide range of government and community leaders and representatives from all kinds of civil organizations, the media and the private sector. During those meetings Aylwin found that education consistently emerged as a primary concern among Hondurans. He also found "a strong willingness to enter dialogue" on the issue among interest groups who have not been able to agree in the past. In additional meetings with Honduran president Carlos Roberto Flores and leaders from the country's educational institutions, an agreement was reached to support the drafting of a formal educational reform plan within the framework of the Foro Nacional de Convergencia (FONAC). This permanent forum was specifically designed to help broker broad agreements on policy issues among various stakeholders. At the invitation of the IDB, key players in the Honduran education sector met at the Bank's Washington, D.C., headquarters last May to translate this emerging consensus into a concrete reform plan with specific mechanisms and timelines. Miguel Martínez, the IDB's most senior manager for Central America, told participants at the meeting that Honduras has a unique opportunity to improve the quality, efficiency and coverage of its school system, and he assured them that theIDB would support the country's efforts. The resulting proposals focus on these challenges and urge greater administrative and pedagogical autonomy for schools, while also calling on parents to exercise increased control over local school issues. Change is particularly needed in rural areas that now receive a disproportionately small share of federal education resources. Meeting participants decided to organize public consultations on the reform initiative that will take place at the municipal and departmental level throughout Honduras. This process will conclude with a National Education Congress that will issue a final reform blueprint later this year. In the meantime, the current education proposal was included in the master plan for national reconstruction that Honduras presented to the Consultative Group for the Reconstruction and Transformation of Central America in Stockholm, Sweden, last May (see our story "The means to build it better"). For more information, contact Ada Piazze-McMahon at (202) 623-2049 or E-mail adam@iadb.org. |
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