The Beautiful Tree by James Tooley Read Free Book Online

questions, and I couldn’t convince people like Sajitha Bashir at the World Bank that I was really on to something. Fortunately, Jack Maas of the International Finance Corporation gave me additional consultancies in a range of developing countries; now when I visited a country, I took time off from my evaluation of posh private schools and colleges whenever I could and went into poorer areas to see if I could find the same thing I’d witnessed in Hyderabad.
    In Ghana, taking time away from evaluating a proposed computer training franchise, I met the elderly but sprightly Mr. A. K. De Youngster, who looked on with pride as the children in De Youngster’s International School began their day with a hearty rendition of “How Great Thou Art,” in the school he started from scratch in 1980. Then there were 36 children in a downstairs room in his house, and he, an experienced headmaster, opened his doors after pleas from township folk, unhappy even then that public schools “were not doing their level best” for their children. When I met him, 22 years later, he had four branches to his school, with 3,400 children, charging fees of around $50 per term, affordable for many of the poor. And for those who couldn’t afford it, he offered free scholarships. Seated in his office beneath a rickety fan that blew the sweat across his forehead, he chuckled as he told me that at age seven he had written to President Eisenhower from his village in West Ghana asking for help with his studies. “The Americans wouldn’t help me,” he smiled, “so I learned to help myself.”
    And I flew to Somaliland, the bit of northwestern Somalia that has declared independence from that troubled state but is recognized by no international agency. In stark contrast to my first trip to India, I traveled from Dubai in a 1950s’ vintage battered Russian snub-nosed, four-propeller plane, which had to stop to refuel in Aden. Outside the battle-scarred town of Boroma, a city of 100,000 souls on the road to the Ethiopian Highlands, I met with Professor Suleyman, the vice chancellor of Amoud University, the first private university in Somaliland. Boroma had no water supply (donkey carts delivered water in leaking jerry cans), no paved roads, no street-lights, and apparently no way to dispose of the numerous burned-out tanks left over from its recent civil war. But it did have two private schools for every public school.
    From the top of a rocky hill, Professor Suleyman pointed out the location of each private school in the town below. He told me: “The governor asked me, ‘Why are you putting your energies into building schools? Leave it to the Ministry of Education.’ But if we waited for government it would take 20 years. We need schools now.” “Anyway,” he continued, “in government schools, teacher absenteeism is rife, in our private schools we have commitment.” We visit one at the foot of the hill, Ubaya-binu-Kalab School, with 1,060 students, charging monthly fees of 12,000 Somaliland shillings, about $5. The owner told me that 165 of the students attended for free, the poor again subsidizing the poorest.
    These were all useful insights into something that seemed remarkable to me happening around the world, but I needed more evidence. I needed to do a larger, global study to explore the nature and extent of private schools for the poor. Who would possibly be interested in funding this work? I submitted proposals to the international aid agencies and was turned down. Then I got lucky. I was to present the results of my small-scale Hyderabad research at a conference in Goa, India. Present was Charles (“Chuck”) Harper, senior vice president of the John Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic organization that gave most of its grants for research on the overlap between science and religion. But, it turned out, it was also interested in exploring “free-market solutions to poverty.” The bad news, I realized with a sinking feeling, was that