CHANGING THE METRICS – “Alternative Educating” The Worlds Out of School Children

I first heard about the Millenium Development Goals [MDG] in 2013 as a ten-year-old girl, working in perhaps what some might have called an adult space. The truth was I was preparing to meet with President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania in New York, to include him in a short documentary I was making about education and social development challenges on the African continent, as a young film maker. I had just done the same session a few weeks earlier with President Rakeshwur Purryag of Mauritius and President Joyce Bada of Malawi. A frightening figure I saw being bounced around whenever the theme of school children was mentioned as spart of the 2015 MDG’s, was 50+ million children of primary school age alone the UN said were out of school worldwide, and mostly girls too. That’s more than the population of Belgium, Malta, Portugal, Sweden, Greece and Hungary put together. As a young schoolgirl from California, I couldn’t reconcile that huge number, when I was used to seeing through the window every morning school children, giggling as they dotted the street to board the many ubiquitous yellow buses to school every day. President Kikwete had mentioned in one of our sessions the progress they were making in Tanzania towards universal primary school education – as part of the MGD’s. There was that MDG phrase again.

Weeks later, I was now reading more UN reports and similar papers from UNESCO and other global bodies, about the growing number of out-of-school children across the globe. Then, I had an idea – a bright one perhaps, at least so I thought. As a self-taught documentary film maker, I was convinced that if given the opportunity, young children and older out of school teenagers could perhaps learn very quickly the simpler art of film making. In effect, they would be acquiring a basic skill they could use to be commercially active online, a platform to tell their stories, and perhaps, also tell the stories of those who couldn’t speak for themselves for whatever reason.

Putting Things To A Test

Three years later aged 13 and in February of 2016, I was conducting a basic film making class for 25 young adults aged between 14 and 24 in Windhoek Namibia. Many thought it was but just a ‘mist’ of an idea, that would disappear as quickly as it came. Nine months after that first film class, a student had made her first full length film using a borrowed camera and was shopping it to local TV networks in her country. I knew I had discovered something, but I needed more certainty. SHARING MY ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION IDEA AT THE 2021 WISE SUMMIT  At the December 2021 WISE Education Summit in Doha – QATAR, I was invited to share my Alternative Education idea, having now taught the basic film class for over 480 students in 6 countries, including Namibia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mexico, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. It was very important for me to share this concept with the world because the last UNESCO data from 2018 indicated that there were now more than 250 million children out of school worldwide. That is a huge jump from the previous years. The problem was indeed now burgeoning, and perhaps incredibly frightening too.

Changing The Metrics

There are thousands of places around the world where there is not even a semblance of any kind of school for a myriad of reasons, and thousands more, where even when there is a school, and usually in a poor state, the children had to work miles each day to such establishments. As such, an out of school children only solution-agenda, cannot solve the problems facing kids across the globe. It if could, the numbers would not have ballooned to more than 250 million today. So instead of focusing on the number of out of school children – now in the hundreds of millions, perhaps we should change the metrics by which we project and measure the development of children, from out of school, to not educated. That way, the concept of alternative education such as a skill transfer program like film making, entrepreneurship or coding, can begin to significantly reduce that seemingly insurmountable number of ‘out-of-school-children worldwide. But more importantly, practical and usable skills can get transferred to older out of school children sooner, and possibly reduces the number of unemployed youths all with the same stroke. 

BIO

Zuriel Oduwole is a 19-year-old full-time University student from Los Angeles California, and co-founder of the DUSUSU Foundation [Dream Up, Speak Up, Stand Up]. She was honoured by US Secretary of State John Kerry at the State Department in January 2017, for her education development work across Africa and the Caribbean. Since her advocacy work began at the age of 10, she has spoken to more than 48,160 youths across 19 countries about the power of an education, and along the way, she has sat down with more than 30 Presidents and President to share and proffer solutions on various social development challenges across the globe, mostly those affecting children. A major impact of her work was helping end girl marriage in Mozambique in June 2019, 16 months after meeting personally with President Felipe Nyusi in Maputo.