Page 49 - EW FEB 2022

goals. It has churned through four education ministers in
three years. There is one consolation, says Priscila Cruz of
All for Education, a charity based in São Paulo. She thinks
the vacuum in the federal government is making municipal
and state officials keener to seek lessons from each other.
In the classroom, Sobral has focused obsessively on mak-
ing sure small children can read. The city determined that
every pupil would master basic literacy before entering third
grade (when they are aged eight or nine). Examiners began
listening to all children in their first years of school read
aloud. These days local professionals run city-wide tests in
maths and Portuguese for all grades. Teachers earn bonuses
if their pupils hit minimum targets. Lesson plans pumped
out by the city ensure that no teacher need start a class un- Secondary class in Sobral: rebooting model
prepared. Every teacher spends a day a month in training.
What makes Sobral’s story most compelling is that it Before the Taliban takeover last August, the country had
has touched off improvements all across Ceara. In 2006 low educational attainment, with roughly 10.6 percent of
bigwigs from the city were elected to run the state govern- Afghans completing tertiary education in 2020, according
ment. They, in turn, gave cities more power to run their to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
own schools. They also introduced a statewide literacy test Organisation (Unesco).
for eight-year-olds, and increased the amount of training Although UoPeople does not charge for tuition, the
and flow of materials to teachers. Most notably, they made scholarships pay for the exam fees required, which cost
a bit of the money each city gets from the state dependent $2,400 (Rs.1.77 lakh) for an associate degree, $4,800 for a
on improving school results. bachelor’s degree and roughly $3,000 for a graduate degree.
New frontiers beckon. In 2018 Veveu Arruda, who served Reshef is hopeful that things will improve. “It’s really
as Sobral’s mayor (2011-2016), set up an organisation — hard to tell how Afghanistan will look in a few years,” he
supported by the Lemann Foundation, a big charity, among says, adding that the Taliban regime was overthrown be-
others — that aims to help governments elsewhere in Brazil fore — something that could happen again. “If and when it
mimic some of the region’s reforms. happens, we will have a cadre of educated people who will
be able to move their society forward.”
AFGHANISTAN
Online lifeline AUSTRALIA

THOUSANDS OF WOMEN WERE FORCED TO Food poverty
leave their classrooms after the Taliban took over COVID-19 HAS ELICITED CREATIVE SOLU-
Afghanistan — and now, months later, they have TIONS to food poverty on Australian campuses,
little hope of resuming studies under the extremist regime. as students — particularly from overseas — find
But the president of the University of the People (UoPeople) inventive ways to beat hunger.
believes online courses may offer means of reaching them. Foreign students are now reserving refrigerator racks
This non-profit university offers online degrees, and it in shared kitchens to deposit leftover food for friends in
has already had more than 4,000 applicants to its schol- need. Other stratagems include “clubbing together” to cov-
arships launched specifically for Afghans. “Following the er membership costs at bulk food retailers such as Costco
Taliban takeover, we announced 1,000 scholarships for Af- warehouse stores. “You could buy a 100-kilo bag of rice and
ghans with priority for women,” says Shai Reshef, founder share it out,” says Craig Jeffrey, professor of human geog-
and president of the university. “We were surprised that in raphy at the University of Melbourne. “Or just put stuff out
mere days we were flooded with applications.” on social media — I’ve got a kilo of rice that I don’t need;
Roughly 600 of the applicants have started their studies that sort of thing,” he says.
at UoPeople, and Reshef is working on raising the money According to Jeffrey, the pandemic has fostered a uni-
to offer scholarships to all applicants. “We cannot fathom fied front, as media coverage put the spotlight on privations
a world in which the right to education is stripped from endured disproportionately by international students. “Be-
Afghans, especially women,” he says. Although Reshef con- cause the issue became more public, and people are talking
ceded that not all the applicants will graduate — on average, about it, they became more aware of other people suffering
roughly 85 percent of UoPeople students earn diplomas — the same problem. So there are more coordinated efforts,”
even a couple of thousand graduates would be significant adds Jeffrey
for Afghanistan. Foreign students have long struggled to meet the ex-

FEBRUARY 2022 EDUCATIONWORLD 49