The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2020

58 JULY-AUGUST 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Putting Learning on the Air in South Sudan Jeremiah Carew ■ Juba On March 23, South Sudan’s school children joined a billion others around the world when the coun- try’s ministry closed schools indefinitely to slow the spread of coronavirus. South Sudan already had one of the weakest education systems in the world, with 72 percent of its children and youth not in school, according to a 2018 UNESCO report. Many obstacles explain that figure—from poverty and conflict, distance to school, untrained teachers and poor-quality educa- tion, to some parents’ beliefs that girls are more valu- able for the cattle dowry they bring at marriage. As USAID’s education officer in Juba and co-chair of the education donors group, I have been working with the ministry and donors to craft a response to COVID-19. While my USAID counterparts in many other countries are working on distance education using TV, smartphones or the internet, here the discussion is solely about radio distance learning. Even with radio, only 60 percent of the country is within range of an FM transmitter or has a radio in their home. At the outset we wondered, what do we have to work with? We rediscovered a widely loved USAID-funded program from the early 2000s called “South Sudan Interactive Radio Instruc- tion,” which many South Sudanese remembered from before independence in 2011. We pulled apart an old radio for the memory card contain- ing the audio files used in that program. We shared the files with another donor’s project that seemed ready to put the programs on the air, and then presented our plan to the ministry. The ministry and a new minister were excited—about their own plan. Last year, they had launched a new curriculum and accompanying textbooks. They were concerned that children would be confused hearing lessons from the old radio program. They wanted teachers to record lessons from the new curricu- lum, yet they were starting from zero to develop their plan. It was going to be challenging, especially with all the restrictions on work and movement imposed by the pandemic. This was the development professional’s classic dilemma: Does one support the direction of local actors or take a less risky, more technically sound approach? The question goes to the heart of our business and how we do our work. In an April 2020 interview on NPR, then USAID Administrator Mark Green expressed strong opinions about USAID’s approach to development: “It’s listening carefully to our partner country leaders on the ways that we can respond to the needs that they identify. …We’re not transactional. We build relationships. We strengthen leadership, and we respond to those with identified needs.” The donor community is highly aware of the cycle of aid dependency in South Sudan, and a frequently cited analysis shows that after each shock (e.g., drought, flood, locusts), the amount of assistance households required has increased. If our mission as an agency is “ending the need for foreign assistance” and facilitat- ing a country’s “journey to self-reliance,” how do we do that in our day-to-day jobs? I wrestled with this dilemma and consultedmy managers and other donors in figuring out our response. As I write this, we have agreed to tightly coordinate with the ministry’s direction, offering ancillary assistance such as provid- ing radios and taking surveys to see howmany are listening and whether they are learning. We are nudging them to turn their ideas into implementation: workplans, budgets, task assignments. In normal times, class sizes, especially in lower grades, number over 100 because students are eager to learn, and schools and teachers are scarce. This is a first-grade classroom at a school USAID is assisting in Rumbek, South Sudan, in October 2019. The adult to the right is the author’s counterpart at UNICEF who accompanied him on the trip. JEREMIAHCAREW