Sara Longwe: “adult education for women means education for freedom”

Sara Longwe is a feminist activist based in Lusaka, Zambia, who has pioneered the use of international human rights laws in the fight for women’s rights in domestic courts. She faced her first battle, as a young secondary school teacher, when the government refused to give her maternity leave, despite Zambia’s ratification of an ILO labour convention that required the school to provide 90 days of maternity leave. This led to her becoming a prime mover in a lobbying group that successfully pressed the government to introduce, in 1974, a provision for maternity leave in the teaching service.

In 1984, she was a founding member of the Zambia Association for Research and Development, which was instrumental in pushing the government to ratify CEDAW: the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. In 1992, she won a landmark battle against the Lusaka Intercontinental Hotel, which had refused to admit her because she was not accompanied by a man. Zambia’s ratification of CEDAW was part of the basis of the high court’s ruling.

Former chair for the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), she developed her own gender conceptual analytical tool popularly known as ‘Longwe Women’s Empowerment Framework’ in the global feminist and gender literature. She has used this framework in her numerous consultancies undertaken with African government gender departments, development agencies and civil society organisations on how to identify and address gender issues for sustainable women’s empowerment.

She is a co-laureate of The Hunger Project’s 2003 Africa Prize for Leadership based on her feminist work. A member of the ICAE’s Executive Committee, she will act as convenor – together with Robbie Guevara – for one of the main themes in the upcoming ICAE’s World Assembly to be held in Malmö, Sweden, from 14-17 June: “Lifelong Learning for sustainability in a climate changing world”.

Could you give us a glance on the state of adult education in Africa? What remain, in your opinion, the major challenges?

Let me talk of adult education in Sub-Saharan Africa, with which I am more familiar. With the massive expansions (in most countries) in school education in recent years, we are now seeing a trend away from the situation where adults sought to gain the school qualifications which they had missed when they were in school age. This earlier situation has now been largely superseded by three rather different types of adult education:

I)    An increasing tendency for mature adults to pursue tertiary education, enabled by the expansion of university education and more especially by the development of private universities, open universities and local branches of foreign universities. In other words, much adult education now takes the form of adults who had ‘missed out’ on university education directly they left school, and who now seek university degrees in later life, especially by correspondence or in open universities.

II)    Adults who already have university degrees, but now seek postgraduate qualifications.

III)    An increased trend towards shorter courses in specialized vocational education, especially in the form of workshop training. This may be in courses as short as two or three days, provided by international, government and other development agencies concerned to provide new work orientation and skills for the implementation of new projects and project methods.

What I see as notably missing in these trends is the earlier concern with mass education and grass roots education which was rooted in the earlier emphasis on literacy and numeracy. In many countries it was considered that problems of literacy would naturally be phased out in the older population as successive generations gain literacy from expanded primary education. This has not happened, largely because literacy has ‘fallen away’ from school graduates in poor rural areas where there is virtually nothing to read, and where literacy has little useful social or economic function.

Increasingly the developing trends in adult education are not based on social investment in mass education, but on two more narrow purposes:

I)    The personal advancement of the individual, for wage employment and promotion by obtaining further paper qualifications.

II)    The concern of individual agencies to provide the skills for project implementation.

As I shall discuss later, such adult education aimed at personal advancement does not automatically multiply to form social advancement. Nor, obviously, does it have any focus on addressing particular social or global issues.

The challenge, therefore, is how adult education can address overarching problems such as poverty, unemployment, the marginalisation of women, and climate change. The challenge is how adult education can contribute to the development of more equitable social systems, rather than individual advancement within an existing system which is inequitable.

How would you describe the importance of youth and adult education in the context of gender discrimination in Africa?

The search for personal advantage relative to others may actually be dysfunctional and counterproductive. The result of the pursuit of certificates for employment results in unnecessarily high qualification requirements unrelated to the actual skills needed in the workplace. Even worse, it results in the production of very large numbers of highly educated young people who are unemployable. (We may here take note that this was perhaps the main cause of the current revolutions in North Africa and beyond).

In such a situation, recent trends in adult education do not lead to a solution of the problem of youth unemployment, but merely aggravates the problem. This is only partly a problem of youths who cannot find wage employment. It is equally a problem of youths who cannot find sufficient productive and remunerative self-employment on the land, or in the non-formal sector in town, especially because their education curricula were directed at equipping students for white-collar employment in town.

By comparison with the independence era, most of the youths in Sub-Saharan are now highly educated. More education has not led to higher employment; it has led to the unemployed having much higher levels of education. In this situation, increased adult education for paper qualifications does not lead to more employment, development or prosperity. It merely feeds the arena of fierce competition for higher qualifications, as more and higher certificates compete for the same small number of jobs available.

In this desperate competition, which takes place even amongst the elite class of leaders and managers, as it does amongst wage labour, women tend to get pushed out. They are discriminated against in access to education, and then in access to jobs. Therefore, across all of Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a depressing trend of diminishing proportions of females in successively higher levels of education, and  equally in the higher levels of employment. As women have moved towards parity in the lower levels of schooling, these levels have become increasingly irrelevant for gaining access to wage employment.

It might be thought that the answer to this problem, as far as women are concerned, is to ensure equality of access for women into all levels of education and adult education, and into all levels of employment. In practice, this would mean removing the discriminatory practices presently being used to ensure male preference, for both education and employment, or otherwise to enforce quotas to ensure gender equality until such time as discriminatory practices have been eliminated.

This overlooks two problems. Firstly, from a social point of view, there can be very limited purpose in giving women equal place in an educational system which is presently counterproductive. Secondly, and more fundamentally, in the very patriarchal societies of Sub-Saharan Africa, who is going to remove the discriminatory practices against women?  The answer, of course, is only the women themselves! This means that, in order to get power, they must already have power!

For me, adult education for women means education for freedom. It means collective action to recognize and remove discrimination, as a means towards social and economic equality, and gaining equitable control of resources, and therefore over their own lives.

Similarly, with other general social problems such as poverty and unemployment, adult education can be an essential part of the means towards freedom from oppression, and taking collective action against impoverishment and marginalization (not taking individual action to improve your position at the expense of your neighbour!)

These considerations must return us to the original ideas of Paulo Freire, whose notion of ‘conscientization’ was the process of ideological reorientation which Freire saw as the essential element in adult education. This element is not only basic to literacy education, which was where Freire happened to be practicing, but to all forms of adult education concerned with mass action against oppression and marginalization.

And yet I sometimes read papers on adult education where ‘conscientization’ is referred to as no more than a method for literacy education. Such an approach reduces the work of Freire to nothing. Conscientization is a way of reinterpreting the world, and to better understand your place in it. It is a way of rejecting the given ideology, where the oppressor is represented as benefactor, and instead recognizing the practices of discrimination, oppression and injustice which have caused your poverty and marginalization. Conscientization is not merely a method for literacy education; it is a method, as Freire himself explains, for the ‘practice of freedom’.

There might be more women’s interest in adult education at the grassroots level if women’s adult education were directed at re-interpreting the world of patriarchy and gender discrimination which women have previously been educated to accept, but which they can take action to overturn.

How is your perspective on the follow-up process after CONFINTEA VI?

Following along this train of thought, I see ICAE as being involved in strategic thinking on how we can better promote education for social rather than individual advancement, and on the type of education interventions needed to address pressing global issues at the national and local levels. The problems of discrimination against women provide a good paradigm example for such different thinking, and might make a good starting point for re-thinking adult education on other global issues such as poverty, unemployment and climate change.

But ICAE is a broad coalition of many interests and involvements in adult education. Moreover, we are not an implementing agency, any more than was CONFINTEA VI. We may agree to broad ‘platforms for action’, but we are left with little to do afterwards except to collect data to see how adult education is actually developing in the hands of all the independent actors – international organizations, governments and civil society.

We need to get away from the concept of adult education as a ‘good thing in itself’. As I tried to explain in answer to your first question above, some forms of adult education can be quite useless, even counterproductive, not only to most of the individuals who are educated, but more especially to society as a whole. We need to stop talking about adult education as a ‘good thing in itself’, and instead value adult education in terms of its usefulness as part of a larger strategy for overcoming well defined social and global problems.

What expectations do you have regarding the next ICAE World Assembly in June, particularly in relation to the theme in which you are a Convenor (Lifelong Learning for sustainability in a climate changing world)?

As the Convenor, my job is merely to try to bring out the best in the ideas from those who participate in this Theme at the next World Assembly. Here I see us needing to prise out the different main aspects of the problem of climate change, and from there to see what sort of educational interventions might be directed at saving the human race from impending extinction.

As with my previous example of discrimination against women, climate change has inevitable political dimensions. It is no good trying to pretend that these do not exist, and instead to treat the problem only at the level of technicalities, such as substituting fossil fuels for solar energy. Let me point out some of the political issues which immediately come to mind once we look at the problem of climate change:

I)    People have been educated to believe that they are entitled to consume more resources for a more comfortable life, and that this is a legitimate ambition.
II)    The poor do not take kindly to being told by the rich that they should consume less, or make sacrifices.
III)    Human happiness, in economic theory as in political party manifestos, is defined in terms of increased incomes, public services and private consumption – all involving increased use of resources and energy.
IV)    Governments in democratic countries typically run on four or five year mandates, and their economic promises are consequently also short term. By the same token, it is difficult for any democratic government to commit tax revenue to improvements that will be seen only in 50 or 100 years time. This built in short term perspective means that the political party promising the voter personal benefits by next year is more likely to win an election. This is therefore a system for editing climate change out of the political discussion.
V)    Underlying the above four issues is the belief in a constantly rising Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the main strategy for addressing the problem of poverty. In other words, poverty is to be addressed by constantly increasing the size of the national cake rather than by ensuring more equitable distribution of the present cake. It is this constant quest for increasing GDP, even in countries which are already extremely rich, that provides the engine for blowing more carbon into the atmosphere.

And yet, once we face up to the political problems in addressing climate change, it would seem that education should have an obvious role in addressing these five political issues. Rather like the problem of youth unemployment which I discussed earlier, in climate change we need to look for much more than change of individual behaviour within the present system, even if that might be of some limited use.

Addressing the issue of climate change means addressing problems which exist mainly at the level of society, at the level of governance, and at the level of political power. It is an area where we are looking for collective change in the political and economic system, its values and its aspirations. We are looking for much more than change of individual behaviour within an existing social system. Instead, we are looking for transformation of the social and economic system which has brought the human race to the brink of self-destruction.

And if we don’t think out of the envelope, we’ll soon be out of the universe.

By Enrique Buchichio
ICAE