Education in Developing Countries
Joel E. Cohen, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Populations, Rockefeller University; Professor of Populations, Columbia University; Head of the Laboratory of Populations, The Earth Institute at Columbia University and Rockefeller University

Roberta Balstad: …session we're addressing various aspects of the issue of human behavior, social behavior, religious, cultural, institutional behavior, and trying to understand how we reconcile the individual and the society in the course of implementing sustainable development. I'm very pleased to introduce our first speaker today. Professor Joel Cohen is Professor of Populations at both the Rockefeller University and Columbia University. And he is the Director of the Laboratory of Populations which also exists in both places. Joel combines opposites in his work and in his life. He is the recipient of two Ph.D.s, he holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and a Ph.D. in population and public health, both from Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and he has written hundreds of articles and a dozen books, most of which were prize winning books. He will be speaking today on Education in Developing Countries. Joel.

Joel Cohen: Thank you, Roberta. I'd like to thank Jeff Sachs and John Mutter and the organizing committee for inviting me, and I'd like to thank you for sticking around to converse with us.

There are two parts to my talk. One is I'd like to set the context, and the second is I'd like to explain how the context makes education in developing countries and elsewhere very important. We live on our world, one planet but two different worlds. There's a rich world and a poor world. The rich world has an average income of about 26,000, the poor world about 4,500. Less than one in five on the planet live in the rich world, more than four or five out of six live in the poor world. The rich world is increasing a tenth of a percent per year in population, the poor world fifteen times faster. The poor world has three times the rate of HIV/AIDS. An infant born in the poor world has ten times the chance of dying within the first year of life compared with an infant born in the rich world. The total fertility rate, the average number of children, born per lifetime of a woman in the poor world is twice that in the rich world. A newborn baby lives ten years shorter on average in the poor world, has half a chance compared with the rich world of living in a city, and something not widely recognized is that the population density is about two and a half times greater, the number of people per square kilometer. You might not think that here in New York City, but in fact the wide open spaces are in the rich world, not the poor world.

So I want to tell you a summary of where we're going in the next fifty years with population, and the details are in the article in Scientific American called “Human Population Grows Up,” which everybody got with your packet, the first article.

It's projected that we'll go to 9.1 billion people, but if women have half a child more than anticipated in this continuing fall of fertility we'll go to one and a half billion more. If women have half a child less, we'll go to almost one and a half billion less. In other words, a one child difference in behavior per woman means a three people billion difference by 2050, which emphasizes the importance of what we do right now. That increase of three billion will not be uniformly distributed over the Earth. It will be entirely concentrated, except for a few percent, in the poor countries. And here is an illustrative comparison. On the left we take twenty-five countries of the extended EU, on the right twenty-five countries of what would be imprecisely called the Middle East, north Africa and western Asia. In 1950 Europe had twice the population of north Africa, 350 million versus 163 million. By 2000 the Middle East had more population than Europe. By 2050 the Middle East will have three times the population of Europe. That's a colossal change in one century. That change is reflected in an enormous difference in age structures. These things are called age pyramids. The width of the bar is the number of people, like that's, I don't know, 35 million people wide, and the lowest bar is people age zero to four, the next bar is age five to nine, fifteen [he meant to say “ten”] to fourteen, up to ninety-five to a hundred. When the pyramid, this is today's pyramid in the Middle East, when the bottom bar is wider than the bar just above it, it means that more people are being born in the last five years than in the five to ten years before that, and that's more than the people who were born ten to fourteen years before that, because everybody gets one year older each year among those who survive. And what you see is a middle aged bulge here in Europe, most people in the middle age groups, and a very wide bottomed pyramid here, meaning extremely rapid growth. If you go to 2050 this bulge will have aged up to the top, continuing contraction in Europe, Europe will in fact be decreasing in total population size, while the Middle East has an enormous youth bulge down here. So there will be a shift not only in numbers, but a shift in age composition. These are the people of school age, compare, and these are the people of military age, compare.

This decade is the end of the youth of humanity. From here on out there will be more old people than young people. The percentage of world population age zero to four fell to 10% in the year 2000, and will continue to fall. The percentage of world population age sixty plus rose to 10% and will be about three times, three and a half times, something like that, the percent age zero to four by 2050. So people with grandchildren will be a lucky minority by 2050. This is also the end of the urban life for humanity. Around the year 2007 the urban population of the world will surpass the rural population of the world. The rural population will peak around 2030 and will drop. So from here on out most people are going to be older, living in cities.

This is the end of my summary of the status. To summarize, by 2050 the population will be bigger by two to four billion more people, more slowly growing, older and more urban. Major uncertainties concern the extent of international migration and families. Population is only one aspect of our situation. I've spent a lot of time talking about that. Very briefly now I want to talk about the economy, the environmental and culture, because to talk about population in isolation is nonsense, they are all interactive.

So I'm going to start with the economy. In 1900 the average per capita income was about twelve hundred dollars. It's more or less quadrupled over the century. The size of the world economy went up sixteen-fold from two to thirty-two trillion in 1990 dollars. However, there are more poor people on the planet today than there were in 1900 because in 1900 there were only 1.6 billion people. There are certainly a couple of billion poor people on the planet today. So we've made progress in the average income, but there are more people who are hungry chronically, and more people who are desperately poor as a result of rapid population growth and the unequal sharing of this increased wealth. What has driven that wealth is in large part the consumption of energy. And this is a plot of world primary energy production. And you can see that coal, oil and gas drives the lion's share of this increase. So now I've talked about population and the economy.

And now I want to talk about the consequences for the environment. The carbon emitted to the atmosphere by humans went from half a billion tons to 7.3 billion tons, a fifteen-fold increase, whereas the population increased by a factor of less than four, so our environmental impact is not driven exclusively by population growth, it's driven substantially by economic change. Our water withdrawals increased by a factor of eight, while population grew by less than four. Our nitrogen input from fossil fuels increased by a factor of twenty, and as has been said before, we are now the major contributor to the global nitrogen cycle.

Let me now turn from the environment and the economy and the population to culture. The major cultural event, not Michael Jackson, the major cultural event of the 20th Century was the spread of primary education around the world. In northwest Europe and northern America the primary gross enrollment ratio, that's the number enrolled in primary schools divided by the number of children of legal primary school age. And that includes people who start late, over the legal age, repeaters, and early entrance. It says nothing about attendance, quality, completion or achievement, like whether they can read when they get out of school. Anyway, the PGER went from 72 to 100 in the rich countries. Latin America went from 30 to 100. That's an amazing achievement. East Asia 20 to 110, southeast Asia 4 to 100. The laggard is sub-Saharan Africa where we've reached 85. That's an amazing achievement.

Okay, so here we get to education. If you review all the panaceas that have been proposed, including those presented those in this meeting, they are falling into three categories, bigger pie, fewer forks, better manners. Bigger pie means increased productive capacity through technology. Fewer forks means slow population growth through voluntary reductions in fertility and reduce unwanted material byproducts of consumption and production. Better manners means reduce violence, corruption, inequities between men and women, inequities between young and old, inequities between rich and poor, and barriers to efficiency.

I wrote a book called “How Many People Can the Earth Support?” You should go buy two copies because it's so cheap. In that book I put this list of panaceas but without making a recommendation. About two years after publishing the book it occurred to me that educating all children well for ten to twelve years could support all three of these approaches, and I want to describe a project which was founded in 1998 on universal basic and secondary education, which I co-direct with David Bloom. It's supported by Martin Malin, it's housed at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. You can find out reports on the web. We published an article called “Cultivated Minds” in the Journal of the International Monetary Fund called Finance and Development, June 2005, and there's a book of essays that will be published soon by MIT Press.

We asked a simple question, “What would the world be like if all children had ten to twelve years of high quality education?” and “What would it take to achieve such a world by 2050 or sooner?” At the moment about 100 to 115 million children of primary school age are not enrolled in school. That's about 20% of the children in that age category. And about 250 to 300 million children of secondary school age are not enrolled in school, roughly half the population. Of those who are in school most of them are getting a lousy education, very poor quality. And among the youth if you look at the performance of youth who have recently been of school age, about 137 can not read or write at all, and most of those are female. The problem has been recognized at the highest level, and I want to read this to you, “Then you wake up at the high school level and find out that the illiteracy level of our children are appalling.” And in case you're wondering, I actually went to the web site of the White House myself and I actually downloaded this, so I can verify that this is exact from the web site. So he understands us in a deep sense. Well countries have been aware that there's a problem here for a very long time. In 1990 155 countries meeting in Junti [?] and Thailand pledged to achieve universal primary education by 2000. That didn't happen. So the countries met again in Jakarta and also for the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, and they aimed to achieve gender equity in education by 2005, that has not happened, and universal primary education by 2015. That's also not likely to happen. Goals are not likely to be achieved in all countries.

Let me show you some data. Now we're talking about the primary net enrollment rate. What's the difference? The net is the number enrolled who are of legal primary school age, before we didn't have this constraint in the numerator, divided by the number of children of primary school age. The primary net can not go over 100%. So the world in fact did make progress between 1990 and 2001. It went from 82% to 84% PNER, and the out of school children fell from maybe 110 to 103 million. It's really spurious precision. Our instruments of statistics are not good enough to justify these small changes. But at least it didn't get much worse. However, there are three areas that account for 85% of the children who are out of school. And in east Asia and Pacific the PNER actually fell instead of getting better, and in sub-Saharan Africa and east Asia because of rapid population growth during this decade the number of out of school children actually rose. Few children are actually completing primary school and the average number of years of schooling is low.

Well, education affects and is affected by population. How does education affect population? More educated people live longer, they marry later, they migrate more, they have fewer children, know more about contraception, and more educated women want more education for their children. I give you these data because this is the area of the world with the highest remaining total fertility rates, and so the data would be more scattered if I selected a non-Arab section of the world. On the horizontal axis we plot the overall total fertility rate of various Arab countries. And that's the solid black line repeating exactly those data. Now if you look at the total fertility rate among women in those same countries who have no years of education, these are black diamonds, and they fall above the line. Then you look at the total fertility rate of the women with ten plus years of education and they fall below the line. For each level of overall total fertility there's a gap of couple of children in that difference. And you can see how big the difference is by looking at this which is ten plus years of education minus zero years of education down here. So you see that ten years of education gets you somewhere between and two and five fewer children per woman.

In the other direction, population affects education. The size and the age structure of population affects the size of the school age population, that seems pretty obvious. The density and geographic distribution of people affects the size and location of schools, if you're educating people through schools.

So what's going to happen is that the number of children of school age, five to fourteen, let's say, that's just an approximation, will fall by 13% in the more developed regions by 2025, so this is not a growth area for teachers in the developed countries. But in the developing countries the number is going to increase by 7%, so there's going to be a substantial shift in where young people are. Rapid population growth makes schooling all children more difficult. Some countries have expanded access to school in spite of high population growth in the ‘90s. And so these are case studies that deserve attention. How did they do that? Malawi, Laos, Uganda, Kenya, they did it in large part by political will, but their successes have not received the attention that they certainly deserve.

Even if you're in the finance ministry rather than in the education or health ministry education is associated with economic growth in middle income countries. And this says that in more words. A part of education that is greatly neglected is population education. UNESCO originally adopted this before it became politically impossible to support because of politics in the United States. The aim of population education is to help families and communities understand how their demographic characteristics affect every aspect of their daily lives. It empowers the individual to make rational and well thought out decisions on population issues. Combines microlevel analyses and macrolevel analyses, including environmental education, family life education, and sex education. We need to give this to our children. If you think about cost effective ways of reducing carbon input into the atmosphere, a difference that could affect three billion more or less of this kind is probably a cost effective investment.

How much would it cost to educate all the world's children? Well first of all this is a hard question. The cost per child who is not in school now probably differs from the cost per child who is already in school because the ones who aren't in school are more remote, poorer, and in minority and disadvantaged, and it'll be harder to educate them. Access to schooling at the present level of quality may not suffice to induce parents to send children. There are schools in some places where parents don't want to send their children because their teacher never shows up or because there are no latrines for the girls, or because they've better things for the girls to do like go get water. So we need to have the incentives that make schooling attractive, and that costs money. And finally we don't whether their means of education in the developing world will be modeled on the school system of the West with schools and teachers, or on some other alternative system.

Nevertheless, here are the numbers. At the moment the developing countries spend 82 billion dollars a year, they spend, for all primary schools. 82 billion, $151 per student per year. So now we can do the back of the envelope estimate. $151 is the average cost per child per year. Let's say there are 100 to 115 million children. We're going to do the dumb calculation. 151 times 100 million. It's 15.1 billion. 151 times 115 million. 17 billion. Assuming education will occur in schools, to achieve primary schooling by 2015 the high falutin' economists come up with numbers in the range from 6½ to 35 billion dollars a year on top of the 82 billion already spent in developing countries. This 6.5 billion is very optimistic.

What about secondary school? Well, the developing countries currently spend 93 billion dollars a year for secondary schools. And, the added cost for secondary schooling would be between 27 and 62 billion dollars a year, depending on which particular assumptions you make. This is a pioneering calculation by Melissa Binder at the University of New Mexico.

So, universal basic and secondary education, putting those two numbers together, could cost between 34 and 69 billion more dollars a year. Can the world afford it? Well, the answer depends on who's paying for it. In 2000 34 billion to 69 billion dollars a year is 3 to 7% of their gross national income, so that's expensive. The low and middle income countries could afford that incremental cost with .6 to 1.2% of their GNI. The GNI of the high income countries was 25½ trillion. So the extra 70 billion dollars a year would be less that three-tenths of a percent of the GNI. Not much, but evidently too much. Official development assistance in 2003 of 69 billion was the highest ever in nominal and real terms, but that would be consumed if all of that went to education.

There are lots of other obstacles, and they are listed here, economic obstacles, competing demands, lack of information - I emphasize this because a university has a role in producing information, the statistics are totally inadequate for us to know about the quality and distribution of education - cultural barriers, and historical context.

Let me leave you with four big questions about education in the 21st Century. Age and youth, how will the aging population share the increases in resources of an expanding economy with the young? Will today's elderly invest more in the young now for the benefit of the elderly in the next generation, because we know that education in youth is associated with better health in age, or will today's elderly exploit the resources for the benefit of today's elderly at the expense of today's young?

…education in developing countries, or will alternative models exploit new informational technologies and opportunities and a post-industrial vision of learning? Third question, is education the best use of the marginal dollar of government expenditure in a developing country? Should the dollar be spent on education, health, physical infrastructure, or applied research? There are no adequate models to answer this question. The same fundamental lack of knowledge applies to the trade-offs between primary, secondary and tertiary education. Fourth and last question, will education instill values that divide people, or bring them together? Will education foster national, ethnic and religious identities that are exclusive, competitive or hostile to others, or will education foster a global consciousness that embraces national, religious and cultural diversity and give skills to cope with that diversity?

Well, it's possible to do this, but we're not getting there fast enough. And here are a set of changes that are needed. The first one I think is very important. We have to talk about the goals of education, what do we want from education? Nobody is talking about that, it's not on the international agenda. We need more effective and economically efficient education. We need to include education at the secondary level for everybody. We have to recognize the diversity of educational systems, and we need more money, but that's not all we need.

So there have been no oversimplified remarks made up to this point in the conference, and I need to make one so that you feel you've got the full range of possibilities, so I'm going to characterize the last two and the next century. For the leading edge of the global economy, I claim that the 19th Century was the century in which the leading sectors of the global economy mastered materials, through chemistry and the industrial revolution. The 20th Century the leading edge of the economy mastered energy, oil and atomic energy. What's coming in the 21st Century? It will be a century of the mastery of information through biology and computing. If we don't prepare our young children to master information, they are prevented from participating in the leading edge of the 21st Century.

Thank you very much.