In my second blog I wrote about the ‘education poverty cycle’ in Tanzania and how the problem of ensuring ‘access to quality education’ is growing, as improvements are not keeping pace with population growth. The nature and scale of the challenge (captured in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 4.1) is clear. How I approach the issue as a researcher, is less so.

Much of Year 1 of a PhD is spent reviewing the existing research literature in your chosen area.  This is to ensure that your own specific research focus is necessary and relevant – that there is a ‘gap’ that you are attempting to fill. A PhD is judged against the criteria of ‘an original and substantial contribution to knowledge’. No pressure there then…

My initial intention was to carry out mainly ethnographic, grassroots research into a few schools and communities, working with teachers, parents and students to try and understand in depth the issues around ‘access to quality education’. In the course of my literature review and my recent ‘approaching the field’ visit to Tanzania, my ideas for the research have changed.

There are two reasons for this.

Firstly, as I visited schools and communities, especially those in the more remote, rural areas, I started to question my own capacity to work effectively in this context, to overcome the barriers of language and culture and to establish sufficient trust and depth of understanding, to be sure of my ‘findings’ or indeed, to find anything new at all.

Secondly, it has become increasingly clear to me that the Tanzanian research community, whose works I have been reading, already has a pretty good idea of what the issues are. It’s really not that complicated –  

1. Capacity: There are not enough schools or qualified teachers and the infrastructure in rural areas is such that it takes too long or is too unsafe for many children to go to school.
2. Context (economic, social, cultural): Despite there being no school fees in Tanzania, the cost of uniform, books and travel is still prohibitive for many. In addition,  in many poor families, children are needed to help in the field, with childcare, or to go fishing so there is enough to eat. Other families rely on the pitiful income their kids can earn from domestic labour, or more perilous work in the mines, industrial agriculture, or on the streets. Many girls from poor families are also forced into child marriage, to generate income and off-load an extra mouth to feed. 
3. Provision: Even when there is a school near enough to go to and the family can afford it, some will still choose not to go, because  – with under-paid and under-trained teachers, inadequate basic facilities, lack of nutrition (at times even a lack of water and electricity)  and classes of 60+ – the quality of provision can be so low as to make it not worthwhile and / or a pretty miserable experience.

The research already carried out (mostly by Tanzanians, who were better placed to do it than I would have been) means that issue by issue, there is no obvious ‘gap’ in the literature. It’s quite clear why so many kids in Tanzania don’t go to school. 

So – the challenge for me is to find a focus on the broad issue, through which I can make a useful contribution as a researcher from the outside, given what is already known. Even better – to find an approach that others from within the Tanzanian education sector would be less well placed to take on. Even better still, if it was something that I felt confident about actually being able to do!  

My review of the literature has recently brought me to a relatively new area of research in development education – known as ‘systems thinking’. What I like about this approach is that it starts by acknowledging the scale of the crisis in education in the global south and our failure to deal with it (over 100 million ‘out of school children’ today, despite the SDG4.1 commitment made in 2015). 

The current top-down, linear approach of parachuting in centrally planned ‘solutions’ and then scaling them up, whether from INGO’s, government initiatives, or the major institutional funders such as the World Bank, is not working. Or at least not at a rate, or to a degree that is bringing about sustainable progress.

By contrast, ‘systems thinking’ recognises that the underlying causes behind many of the issues restricting ‘access to quality education’ lie deeply within the prevalent systematic structures. Fault lines often exist between researchers, influencers, central policy makers and front-line practitioners. Systems thinkers seek to make sustainable progress through exploring how policy can be better generated, how it can be more effectively implemented and what can be learnt from the process.    

Very little literature on Tanzania deals with the issue of ‘access to quality education’ holistically, or looks into the workings of the education system itself. I think this is my ‘gap’. I’ll research it by conducting interviews and workshops with researchers, policy makers and senior practitioners. Together we will talk and we will explore the unobservable, the power relations throughout the system, the distribution of responsibility, authority, capacity and accountability. My ‘position’ as an outsider, could even be an advantage.  Tanzanian research colleagues are steeped within the system, whereas I can take a detached view of the ‘whole’, without baggage, petty politics or perceived vested interests. By identifying systems wide constraints and the means to overcome them, perhaps I can make a valid contribution in this way. 

Or is this PhD business starting to get to me and the only gap I’ve really found is in my own brain, rapidly filling up with wishful thinking?  We shall see.