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Abstract
This article considers the contribution of memoir as a method for understanding complex early childhood issues. It recounts the author’s first visit to Tanzania, a low-income country with a chequered history of independence from colonial rule. The article uses memories from that initial visit to reflect on the changing interpretations of colonial history and early childhood interventions. Looking back, it also considers the impact of that visit on the author’s own work trajectory, as an epiphany which led to new areas of work and conceptualization.
Interdisciplinarity has become an important consideration in addressing complex social research issues. For instance, the 2015 call for research bids from the UK Economic and Social Research Council stressed interdisciplinary research as one of its key criteria for bids. James C Scott, the Yale-based political scientist, has also argued in a recent interview that the most innovative and important work has come from those whose sources are much wider in scope and method than anything usually seen as permissible as research within their discipline:
I am truly bored by mainstream work in my discipline, which strikes me as a kind of medieval scholasticism of a special kind … So it’s kind of sobering that most of this [innovative] work is produced by, I wouldn’t say outsiders, but quasi-outsiders. So, the trick is, how can you make yourself a quasi-outsider and see with fresh eyes all the things that your discipline takes for granted and one of the things you can do of course is to reverse every assumption that your discipline teaches you and see how it looks upside-down. (West and Plender, 2015)
Interdisciplinarity benefits academic and research work generally, but I would argue that it is especially important in the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC), which has been a small and relatively narrow field. ECEC has become over-reliant on particular kinds of empirical evidence to substantiate its existence – on economics and human capital theory (investing in early childhood, etc.) and on neurosciences linked to child development (what brain research tells us about young children, etc.).
In this article, I want to pursue a particular angle on interdisciplinarity – that of memoir. In teaching ECEC students, I have used memoir and recollection as a teaching aid, asking students to reach into their personal and collective pasts to try to centre and ground the new knowledge they are acquiring about teaching and caring for children (Penn, 2014). Ideas and convictions do not just exist in an academic vacuum; they are based on an accumulation of insights gained through life experiences. Now I am interested in doing this for myself, writing a work memoir which encompasses a career of over 40 years as a teacher, a policymaker and a researcher in ECEC.
Memoir is a difficult genre. It is almost a rite of passage for older people, like myself, who want to look back, to explain their life contribution and to make sense of years of involvement in a particular cause. It is also social history, a way of recording the many shifts of circumstances and public attitudes that occur over time. For some, it is a way of coming to terms with and trying to understand, at last, their difficult childhoods (Oakley, 2014; Segal, 2007; Tizard, 2010; Wollheim, 2004). Detailed arguments have been put forward for the validity of ‘auto-ethnography’ as an approach (Ellis et al., 2011; Ellis and Bochner, 2006). These authors describe a method that emphasizes moments of epiphany, and layered accounts of an event, in a postmodern analysis that also promotes the idea of multi-vocality. The emphasis in this article is also on an epiphany – the jolts I experienced in Tanzania – but also on time and change, and on the importance of a long (and wide) view.
Memoirs also raise difficult questions about disclosure – of oneself and others – and indeed about truth. The economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote several memoirs, spoke of the need for ‘violent and ruthless truth-telling’ to expose injustice and to puncture the complacent and lazy narratives of those in power, but not everyone can be so sure of what truth is (Davenport-Hines, 2015: 107). Memoirs are necessarily reconstructions, carefully chosen selections and highlights from amongst a plethora of experiences. Memoirs are not simple or straightforward accounts of a life but involve many kinds of intellectual trade-offs – not least the range of resources which one draws upon to prompt one’s memory. For instance, I have diaries going back over 30 years, somewhat erratically compiled, and when I match them with archival research, or published research, they do not tally very well, but instead offer competing versions of events.
Not least, in memoir writing, there is the question of style. Research writing is deliberately dry in order to try to remove ambiguity; but in memoir writing, as in literature or poetry, rich and allusive writing is attractive and valued. Literary style counts, and the most successful memoirs – in terms of critical reviews and prizes – are also those that are stunningly well written – for instance, Lorna Sage’s (2000) account of her childhood, Bad Blood, or Edmund de Waal’s (2011) family history, The Hare with Amber Eyes.
Knowing and struggling with the difficulties of the genre, and encountering more of them as I go on, nevertheless I have been trying to write a memoir of working in the field of ECEC, from my earliest days as a teacher to my current persona as a professor emerita. What follows are two extracts from my diaries, which recount my first visit to Africa, to Tanzania, in 1992 – a visit which profoundly shaped my understanding and thinking about childhood and the circumstances in which young children grow up. The first extract describes some of my impressions of Dar es Salaam, the capital city. The second extract describes a visit to a teacher training college, near the Zambian border, in a town called Sumbawanga in Rukwa Province. For the year previous to my visit, we had a Tanzanian postgraduate student, Edith, living with us in London. My daughter had then just finished university and, at Edith’s suggestion, decided to spend a year working with a government census team based in Dar es Salaam. I went to join her and Edith for a month in December.
Dar es Salaam
It is very hot and the flame trees are in flower. Edith and my daughter and several other people who are relatives of Edith meet me at the airport in a truck with a driver. I learn that arrivals and departures at the airport are regarded as a ritual event, rather like a baptism. I know that Dar is a coastal city, near the equator, but the heat and the humidity, the scorching sunshine are an assault. I move and I sweat. I stay still and I sweat. Later, on the plateau and in the mountains, the heat is more manageable, but in Dar, without air conditioning, the sweat trickles down my back all the time.
We jolt along a dual carriageway which at its edges fades into a sandy track. ‘This is the best road in Tanzania’, Edith says. We turn off the highway, and the road disintegrates, becomes entirely sand, with many craters, some filled with stagnant water. Dar is a sprawling city and, off the ‘main’ roads, the road has no obvious boundaries and becomes part of the provisional space of the shanty towns. Pedestrians intermingle with vehicles. Women carry bundles on their heads and babies on their backs. Most have a perfectly balanced carriage as they walk. Hardly anyone slouches or hunches or sidles – the body is a tool which needs to be used economically. We arrive at a white wall topped with broken glass. There is a tin sign saying ‘Car Repair Enterprise’. Edith and the assorted crowd leave – we arrange to meet later at her house. My daughter and I go into the large concreted courtyard. On the left side is the rusting chassis of a large lorry; in the centre of the yard there are several small cars, variously disintegrating and dismantled. Beyond the cars, the surface of the yard ends abruptly, and there is a 10-foot drop to a lower level, and the ground becomes sandy scrub. Built into the right courtyard wall there is a lean-to with a row of doors, connected by a small veranda. We unlock one of the doors. There are two bare concrete rooms, one leading into another. Each has a very small window high up, but is otherwise dark. In the first room, there are two beds. There is also a puddle on the floor, and the room is heavily tenanted by insects.
My daughter explains the lodging she has rented for us. ‘There is a bathroom’, she says, pointing to the second room, ‘but it has no water and mysterious drainage. I’ve filled the buckets from the cistern. The roof leaks when it rains, which is why there is a puddle. White people don’t live round here, but it is privileged accommodation by Tanzanian standards. There are only two of us. I thought you might like to try it out. I’m sorry there is no fan but, anyway, if there was one, you would need a generator to run it. Be careful of the mosquitos. They swarm after dark. Cover up your arms and legs and put some cream on. You’ll get bitten whatever you do, but try to minimize it. The mosquito nets are a bit torn’.
In the evening, we walk to the main road to catch a local bus to Edith’s house. In the shanty town, now it is dark, the only light comes from many fluttering fires outside the shacks, small pits where people are burning their rubbish. The smell is acrid. It is still very hot. The ‘buses’ are vans or lorries run by private operators. The government has imposed price controls, so there is a standard charge for a ride. The operators compensate by cutting on vehicle maintenance and cramming in as many people as possible, quadruple or more than the number for which the vehicle is intended. The accident rate in Tanzania is very high, a leading cause of death for children and young people.
Edith lives in comparative luxury, in a bungalow in its own grounds, with a night watchman and mangy dog. It has its own generator, which produces a weak light and powers a fan, and there is running water. The two-bedroomed bungalow is shared with many people: her cousin Angel, who works at the Bank of Tanzania, another sister on leave from the army, and there are several family retainers who stand against the wall in silence; one is the driver, but I do not know who the others are and they are not introduced. There is a house girl, a very young, distant relative, who peels the vegetables and sweeps up. Edith tells me she is allowed to go to school in the daytime. There are some much younger children in the room, nieces and nephews. The children are silent and obedient, with the exception of Winnie, a beautiful five-year-old who has been damaged by cerebral malaria, and who is restless and shouts inarticulately. She is treated with great kindness and affection by everyone.
At the breaker’s yard, at 5 a.m., when the imam wails from the minaret of the local mosque, the scrawny, wizened nightwatchman lifts the lid of the cistern at the side of the yard. Women and children from the neighbourhood come to fill their water carriers before the evaporation becomes too rapid. A blind man, led by a small, frail girl, pulls up a bucket on a rope, then places it very carefully on her head. She walks out with him, her balance so perfect that the water barely seems to move. The nightwatchman sees me hovering on the veranda and shouts hoarsely to the women waiting to get out the way, then wrenches my buckets away from me and fills them, and hauls them to my door. He holds out his hand to me. I give him some money.
In the following days, we go to the market (ankle-deep in rotting rubbish), to the UNICEF office where Edith works (clean and air-conditioned), and we discuss early childhood policies with their specialist, someone called Hassan. They are not, at that stage, more than paper policy doodles. We go to the tourist shops and cafes (also clean and air-conditioned). There are deformed beggars on the street outside the tourist shops, lacking limbs or eyes. I cannot any longer tolerate being rammed into the local buses, and we take taxis. I visit a Montessori nursery run by Austrian nuns. It is in a two-storey building sited in a green courtyard. The classroom is light and airy and spacious and immaculately clean. The children wear uniforms, and each sits at a desk. I also visit a school nursery class. This is dark and crowded, and the children sit in rows on the earth floor. In both cases, the children are silent, attentive, waiting for instructions. We also go to Zanzibar. I am attracted by wonderful harmonic singing from the Anglican cathedral, which was built in 1873 and is dedicated to Livingstone. I go inside. The young black choirmaster has a beautiful alto/countertenor voice. He is dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, and he is coaxing warm, rich sounds from the mainly female choir. One woman sings with a baby on her hips. Two men are polishing brass panels behind the altar. Birds are twittering and their sounds dovetail with the crescendos of the choir.
Swahili, the regional language, is the everyday language of the marketplace and the buses, although for many people it is a second language. When we are addressed, it is always in English, a third language. It is so hot; I wipe my face continually.
Sumbawanga
Sumbawanga is a town in the remote Rukwa district in western Tanzania, not far from the Zambian border. We have an invitation, through a cousin of Edith’s, to visit the local teacher training college. We travel by train to Tadoma, a border town. Because transport is so problematic, the train is packed, and almost all the passengers are carrying large bundles of goods. One woman gets off the train with us, and carries a large armchair on her head up the hill.
There is no onward transport that day and the only accommodation is a brothel frequented by lorry drivers. The shops have names such as ‘Upto Date Shop’, ‘Stop in Café’, ‘Bush Baby Restaurant’ and ‘Fresh Chip Shop’. We are followed by a troupe of children, begging and laughing and shouting in English. We visit the local Catholic mission house, which is spotless and cool, and has plumbing. The nuns offer us tea and banana cake, and escort us back to our accommodation.
We travel the 60 kilometres on to Sumbawanga in the bus, a proper coach. There is a young man on the bus, emaciated, filthy and stinking, yellow-red eyes and feet wrapped in terrible makeshift bandages. He does not have a seat, but is too ill to stand and sits dumbly on the floor of the aisle. The countryside slowly becomes more prosperous-looking: donkeys, bikes, bullocks and ploughs, brick kilns, recognizable fields. We see children mostly dressed in cast-off clothes, rarely with shoes, yet every township we pass through appears to have basic school buildings.
In Sumbawanga, we find the teacher training college. The message announcing our arrival has not arrived, and the dignified principal, Mr Guyisha, is slightly bemused to see us, but very hospitable. At present, it is holiday time and there are no students. He explains the college retrains and upgrades poorly qualified primary teachers. We are shown to the guest house, and the domestic science teacher, Esther, is assigned to look after us. The room we are staying in is very clean, and the rooms are decorated with antimacassars, embroidered bedspreads, embroidered napkins and other decorated linens. The garden outside is also very neat and pretty and well tended. We have a meal which Esther has prepared. The table is laid with the spoons at the exact same angle beneath the handle of the cup; little nets weighted with beads are spread over the food. Esther brings hot water in bowls for us to wash our hands. Following Esther’s lead, we eat our bread and butter with knives and forks.
Mr Guyisha shows us around Sumbawanga, the government offices, the accommodation for government officials, the Catholic mission and the churches, the two secondary schools and the market. He tells us that Sumbawanga, far from being the remote and isolated district it now is, was once part of a medieval trade route across Africa, and remnants of Chinese porcelain have been found nearby. The market is relatively prosperous by Tanzanian standards, and much cleaner than in Dar. It sells a range of second-hand western clothes. We are shown the Nelson Mandela stadium, Olympic-sized but unfinished, since the official in charge of the project was transferred somewhere else. Later on, when my daughter and I go for a walk near the college, through the shambas or smallholdings, people are very polite and always greet us. Then they ask, ‘Where is your journey to?’ Walking without fetching or carrying is incomprehensible.
We go on an expedition to Lake Rukwa in the college truck. Sumbawanga is on an escarpment, and the track to the lake, about 20 kilometres, is downhill, precipitous and in a very poor state of repair. We pass a Norad [Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation] encampment; the Norwegians have a big aid project to improve the infrastructure of Rukwa district, and are creating an access road to and from the lake for the fishermen, which entails building bridges, drainage and supports against erosion. At the beautiful lakeside, we consume the packed lunch Esther has made us. She has included china teacups, saucers and a sugar bowl, and a tiffin basket of six layers of metal disks, each containing chapattis. She tells us that she has a diploma in food and nutrition, and she wants to find a sponsor so she can do a degree in cookery. She also asks us to buy her a radio so she can listen to Zaire mama bands, and a sewing machine so she can make herself some dresses.
The lake is hot, and the fishermen are using dugout canoes. The fish, some kind of perch, are wrapped in straw, but transporting them along the track is very difficult. We give 10 people and their bags and baskets a lift in the back. Because of cattle disease, the lakeside is more or less uninhabited.
It is evident that Esther has a colonial notion of domestic science as a kind of domestic service to the more powerful. We have several discussions during our short stay about women’s rights. Esther is shocked at the suggestion women may have an independent perspective. ‘It is our culture; it is African culture’, she says of the status quo. We have supper with Mr Guyisha, which is served, but not eaten, by his wife and daughters. Esther comes with a six-year-old niece, who, like most of the Tanzanian children we have seen, is very polite and well behaved. We discuss gender again, and relationships between North and South. Mr Guyisha chuckles. ‘You westerners’, he says. He is delighted to be able to discuss and instruct.
Looking back
I have included these brief snapshots to give an indication of (to me) the strangeness of my experiences. I have exhumed these memories, partly, to clarify their influence on my working life in ECEC and, partly, to try to address the question of the relevance of memoir as a method of enquiry for ECEC.
I went to Tanzania after many years of teaching and being involved in a variety of management and advocacy jobs. I had just become a contract researcher at the Institute of Education, University of London (now part of University College London). As a person new to research, I was struggling with definitions of research, what constituted research and what kinds of methodologies were acceptable. The small projects I had been undertaking in my new role were based on comparative observations in nurseries (Penn, 1997). They were interesting but undertaken within a common European framework of expectations and understandings of childhood, family life and the kinds of services that were needed for women to be able to reconcile work and family life (European Union, 1996).
Going to Tanzania, to use a colloquialism ‘blew my mind’. Tourists and aid workers in poor countries must all, to a certain extent, have had similar encounters with poverty, as well as experiencing rich, unexpected vignettes such as the choirmaster in Zanzibar, but reactions vary from regarding poverty as part of the picturesque landscape to a deep offence that such conditions exist (Singer, 2015). I was deeply shocked but also very puzzled by encountering such inequalities and such differences. Globally, a majority of young children live in such impoverished conditions, and the expectations about what young children can and should do, and how they cope, are extremely variable.
One aspect of poverty is the highly problematic relationship between the poor and (for want of a better word) the rich. The expectation from the poor is almost always that white/middle-class people will own/expect/take/deserve the best of what is available. Esther’s outright requests to us for sponsorship and material goods were a sign of this uneasy and degraded relationship between rich and poor. As Scott (1985) suggests in his landmark book Weapons of the Weak, the poor are acutely aware of what they are lacking. And because it is so difficult to change their circumstances or express their views to those who are wealthier or more powerful, they develop strategies to appear compliant whilst acting in subversive ways. In my many experiences of overseas trips since that first time in Tanzania, I have found that it is very rare indeed for aid staff or tourists to experience local conditions directly. They are almost always shielded from them, and, as a result, their understanding tends to be limited. The poor say what they think the more powerful want to hear, and the rich do not understand what is wrong.
As a result, much of my subsequent career has been spent exploring, documenting and theorizing these inequalities and differences, particularly in Africa and central Asia (e.g. see Penn, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015; Penn and Demberel, 2006; Penn and Maynard, 2010). Whilst the cultural differences have to an extent been explored in the early childhood literature, deep poverty and its causes and effects have been mainly ignored, perhaps because the global politics and economic conditions which produce and perpetuate such inequality are much harder to understand and tackle. The analysis and the possible solutions are very broad and complex, and mostly lie outside the classroom or group setting. They are policy issues rather than the interactions between adult and child which are under the practitioner’s direct control.
From that initial impression in Tanzania, and over many subsequent years of reading and working in countries, I have realized how little aid workers or development consultants or researchers typically know, and how much they rely on impressions and dismiss historical detail. As Steiner-Khamsi (2014) points out, colonial history and its legal and political legacy have shaped education (and care), and without background knowledge of past interventions, understanding is limited.
But it takes a long time to get to know a country other than one’s own, and understand its history. Technical expertise (the phrase used by aid agencies to describe the use of consultants and external advisers) is more often than not ahistorical, universal and progressive, and deemed to be relevant for any country, irrespective of circumstances (Steiner-Khamsi, 2014). Many early childhood specialists (including myself!) are used (or allow themselves to be used) as technical advisers in this way. We are plucked from the USA, UK or Australia and similar countries to dispense advice to low- and middle-income countries we may never before have visited, and know little about.
In the case of Tanzania, one obliterated/suppressed/forgotten aspect of the past is the Ujamaa policies promoted in Tanzania by Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania after independence. I heard Nyerere mentioned frequently in Tanzania and often referred to affectionately as mwalimu or ‘teacher’. As Edith said to me: ‘Our most outstanding contribution as a nation is Nyerere’. Like Mandela, he was regarded as a transfiguring personality, a wholly good person. Nyerere put forward the idea of Ujamaa, of African self-reliance and communal, self-sustaining village communities, sharing resources and running communal childcare, education, health and agricultural projects. He defined Ujamaa as the values of the extended family unit, whereby everybody had a right to be respected, an obligation to work, and the duty to assure the welfare of the whole community. Ujamaa villages were once hailed as the ideal African model of development. Ibbott (2014) discusses an early attempt, post-independence, to set up a federation of small villages run along these lines. In 1967, in Ruvuma Region in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 17 such Ujamaa settlements formed an organization called the Ruvuma Development Association to coordinate their activities, educate their children, market their produce and, crucially, emancipate women. Nyerere visited them and was impressed, and used them as the example for the national Ujamaa policy. But by 1998, only one of these 17 villages – Matetereka – still remained, and the wider policy had been abandoned (Edwards, 1998).
The failure of the Ujamaa model had a variety of causes, including the heavy-handed operation of the state (ironically, operating unchanged from its colonial predecessors) in forcing the model on reluctant villagers in a top-down way (Scott, 1999). The hostility of the wider world, especially amongst non-governmental organizations, to such an innovative and communal self-help model of economic development also played a considerable part in its demise (Ibhawoh and Dibua, 2003; Jennings, 2008). Ironically, one of the documents I collected whilst in Tanzania is a book of poetry published by the (now defunct) Tanzania Publishing House. There is a poem by Kuni Faraja entitled ‘Saluting Ujamaa’, which gives a caustic account of the Ujamaa policy. One verse reads:
I salute you
Ujamaa
You are a lump of ugali [maize porridge]
Stuck
In the throat
Of a man
Product of colonial times
He can neither vomit
Nor swallow. (Mabala, 1980: 68)
Lal (2015) argues that reanalysis of the Ujamaa project ‘restores a sense of possibility and process to the early years of African independence, refines prevailing theories of nation’. Revisiting my memoirs gives me another sense of possibility, too. The meagre attempts by the World Bank, UNICEF and others to establish ‘early child development’ and ‘school readiness’ (UNICEF, 2012) in Tanzania and other African countries might well have gone in other directions.
Tanzania was also an introduction to the fundamental nature of cultural and linguistic differences. I was struck by how obedient, docile and helpful most of the Tanzanian children seemed to be. Robert LeVine, the cultural anthropologist, and his team have made many studies of East African childhood. He has attributed this docility to a particular set of necessities – an ecological niche concerning modes of agricultural production and reproduction, in which it is mutually beneficial to parents and to children to emphasize obedience and cooperation. He comments:
African infants are never alone and are often present as non-participants in situations dominated by adult interaction, while the American infant is often kept in solitary confinement when he is not the centre of adult attention. This creates (for the American) a bifurcation between the extremes of isolation and interpersonal excitement that is unknown in Africa and may underlie some of the striking differences in interactive style between peoples of two continents. (LeVine, 2003: 94)
In addition, trilingualism is common amongst ordinary people in Tanzania. Swahili is the regional language of East Africa, but many people will have a local language as a first language. English is the language of the mzungu (foreigners of European descent), and most people will have a few words of it if not fluent. People in many low-income countries demonstrate a degree of linguistic competence that is impressive but undervalued in a world in which English is now the master language. Most of my Tanzanian friends and acquaintances, Edith, Mr Guyisha and Esther were trilingual in this way, but the intellectual competence required of children to learn in this way is all but dismissed in the conventional early childhood literature. In English-speaking countries, where there is little incentive to learn other languages, given the dominance of English, it seems important not only to respect bilingualism or trilingualism, but to encourage English speakers to do the same as ‘the natives’ and learn one or more of the native languages of their country.
Dar es Salaam, when I visited, had a population of just over a million. Nyerere had prioritized rural over urban development. Since his policies were abandoned, Dar es Salaam has swelled to 4.5 million inhabitants, mainly because of internal migration from the countryside. Seventy percent of the inhabitants live in ‘informal’ housing or shanty towns with very few or inadequate services (Sturgis, 2015). In 1992, there was a very small number of well-to-do Tanzanians. Now, there is an identifiable elite who (like most of the expatriate community) live in an outlying suburb which is relatively well serviced. There are a number of skyscrapers and prestige buildings in the city centre, but the city does not have the infrastructure to cope with the expansion. The traffic jams are legendary (Kikeke, 2015).
Part of this phenomenon of rural–urban migration is what is called ‘the feminization of poverty’ (Razavi, 2011). A common feature of women’s migration is that families break up, and women are left on their own with children and without the networks of support they might have had in the countryside. In Tanzania, as almost everywhere else, the gap between rich and poor has widened. The poor, by all the standard indicators, are worse off than in 1992 – with the exception of mobile-phone usage!
In preparing this article, I came across an account of the Norad project I had briefly noticed on my trip to Lake Rukwa (Jerve and Ntemi, 2009). The authors returned to Tanzania in 2007–2008 to interview people who had been involved in the project, in order to try to give a detailed account of the changes that had happened as a result of the Norad intervention and, subsequently, since 1996, when Norad pulled out. In 1992, Rukwa was one of the most remote and poorest regions of Tanzania. The Norad project amounted to US$70 million in total and constituted about 15% of the total budget of the Rukwa region. It was a generic project, aimed at providing water and sanitation, health and childcare, education, infrastructure support and economic development. Integral to the project was the promotion of women’s participation and gender equality. Norad came to Rukwa to support the Ujamaa village ‘self-help’ policy of Nyerere’s government, and it was intended to be a long-term commitment, but when the government policy was abandoned in favour of World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans and structural adjustment, Norad aborted the project in 1996. Ten or so years later, when the follow-up was done, almost all the projects had failed or been abandoned. Of 135 boreholes that had been dug, only 25 were still functioning because of failure to maintain them. The roads had partly collapsed, for the same reason. Health and education services had also gone backwards. The one lasting effect seemed to be in terms of women’s participation – women were more strongly represented on village councils and in local government.
This kind of failure is, unfortunately, very common in aid projects (Edwards, 2013). The Guardian newspaper, for example, initiated a similar three-year community development project in Katine, a district of northern Uganda. One of the aims of the project was exceptional transparency and widespread media coverage about the process of aid. But, in the end, the project was far less successful than hoped, partly because the process of aid-giving is so complex, and partly because the tax income of the district – and of the government – was so low that there was no way to replace the aid income once the project had finished (Jones, 2010). This is the story over and over again, repeated with many early childhood projects I have subsequently seen (Penn, 2008; Penn and Maynard, 2010). Donors are so rich, comparatively speaking, and local people are so impoverished that the gap cannot be bridged between what is needed and what can be paid for. Project aid is rarely a solution, just a very temporary stopgap, which in the long term may make matters worse.
The early childhood community, led by UNICEF, has been mobilized to lobby for goals for early childhood on the agenda of the latest round of global goal-setting – the Sustainable Development Goals (which update the Millennium Development Goals). The lobbying was partially successful. The two goals that mention ECEC (although they are listed in separate sections) are:
4.2 By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education …
5.4 Recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate. (Division for Sustainable Development, 2015)
Global goals and aspirations articulated by the ‘global development community’ (the definition of which is a thesis in its own right!) are necessarily problematic, since they are schematic attempts to deal with extraordinarily complex issues, and do not address the fundamental inequalities between rich and poor nations. The early childhood goals are rudimentary indeed. One of the things you understand as you get older is the briskness of change – ideas and assumptions are continually being remodelled, yet they are treated as being freshly minted. Memoir, at best, offers a kind of grounding on the nature of progress – an insight into the provisionality of the present. With regard to such goals, I can reflect on how much (or how little) things have changed, what avenues have been pursued and which have been left unexplored. And, hopefully, others can benefit too from the long view.
The vividness and immediacy of those first experiences in Tanzania have been a benchmark for me. My experiences were kick-started in Tanzania, and they have been a mirror for me ever since.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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Author biography
Helen Penn worked as a teacher and administrator before becoming a researcher. She has worked in over 40 countries, including the European Union and low- and middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia.
