The coalition government through the Ministry of Education has announced that it will discontinue, indefinitely, the ‘Because We Care’ $10,000 cash grant that was instituted last year October by the former administration. It has done so amid dissatisfaction expressed by some beneficiaries and to a cacophony of criticism from former government officials. It has, through Minister of Governance Raphael Trotman deemed the initiative “fiscally unsustainable.” It was that and much more besides.
The cash grant, for which $1 billion had been set aside in the 2014 budget, was finally launched in October ostensibly to allow for parents to register their children for school and therefore be eligible for the grant. The only criterion needed to access the money was that the parent’s child or children must be on the school register. The APNU and the AFC, then in opposition, as well as numerous observers had felt that the timing of the grant was an image-repair gimmick and allowed for a distraction from the former government’s woes which were mounting. Faced with a no-confidence motion brought by the AFC that was almost bound to be passed, then president Donald Ramotar prorogued the Parliament on November 10, 2014.
Meanwhile, the distribution of the vouchers to parents, who could later encash them at Western Union outlets was undertaken in many instances by members of the then government, including the now former president and former attorney general Anil Nandlall, who had denigrated himself, his government and Guyana in a recorded conversation with a Kaieteur News reporter in October. In that recording, Mr Nandlall was heard attempting to procure a female reporter for a relative, issuing warnings of possible violence to be meted out at KN and proclaiming himself a Kshatriya (warrior).
Back in December last year, when she had deemed the ‘Because We Care’ programme a success, then education minister Priya Manickchand had said that it had “challenges”. Among these challenges were that some of the 15,000 officials tasked with assisting with the distribution were lazy or simply did not care; there was a limited amount of encashment areas for parents; there was the non-submission of names and inaccurate data. But still Ms Manickchand was upbeat about the fact that truants who had been out of school had returned because the cash grant was imminent. And she had said that what was needed was to keep them in school, but did not say how this would be done.
There was nothing in the grant programme that demanded continued attendance and no mechanism to monitor whether children stayed in school beyond the end of the grant collection period in December. Chances are that they didn’t.
Poverty is almost always the reason children do not attend school, but even this is not as clear cut as it seems. In some cases parents are simply unable to afford to send their children to school every day – they don’t have the resources for transportation or for meals or to replace the cheap shoes purchased on the government’s paltry $1,500 uniform voucher which lasts only two weeks. And given the school’s insistence that only black shoes can be worn, the child is kept at home until funds can be found to purchase same, much to that child’s detriment.
A recent study done in the US and published on Monday last said there was compelling evidence to suggest that growing up in poverty has detrimental effects on the brain. The study, titled ‘Poverty’s most insidious damage: The developing brain’, found that low-income children had irregular brain development and lower standardized test scores, with as much as an estimated 20 per cent gap in achievement explained by developmental lags in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. However, the researchers also found that nurturing can offset some of the negative effects on brain anatomy seen in poor children. “The findings suggest that teaching nurturing skills to parents ‒ particularly those who live below the poverty line ‒ may provide a lifetime of benefit for children,” the study said.
There is also much documented evidence which shows that children learn better when they are not hungry, hence the institution of school feeding programmes. In some other countries, schools offer free hot breakfasts as much to encourage children to attend school as to ensure that they can actually concentrate on their studies while there. In other places too, free hot lunches are provided to children after a means test is conducted on their households.
Here in Guyana, breakfast is never provided and lunches are only available in some schools and in many instances only on some days. In several cases, school lunches are provided by NGOs and churches and sometimes children who must go to the church or community centre to receive the lunches, don’t bother to go to school.
A case in point is a city church, which runs a school feeding programme, and insists that the children showing up for the hot meals should be uniformed. They are. Except that there are some who put on their uniforms at midday, collect the meal and go right back home. And this has been happening for a while. The fact that these children have uniforms indicates that they are on some school’s register, but they do not go to school.
A $10,000 cash grant which could have been used for anything from funding children’s school attendance to buying milk for the new baby, paying debts, gambling, drinking, smoking, paying for hairstyles and makeup, depending on the parents’ priorities, was just the thing to make them stay in school? Right. Scrapping the cash grant and using those funds for programmes that will see a rise in attendance, as opposed to simply registration will truly demonstrate care and is the right way to go. The general consensus is that the former government did care, but more about its image in this instance than anything else.