The Beautiful Tree (44 page)

The sun had been up for an hour or more; the day had got under way as normal. As the moon slowly, imperceptibly at first, began to move in front of the sun, one by one the hotel staff congregated outside where I was standing. Sharing our imported German sunglasses, we stared up at the sun and saw the tiny speck of dark moon slowly moving across it. The young female hotel staff, in their neat black short skirts and cream blouses, begin to get excited: “CNN mentioned Ghana,” a newcomer tells us, and her friend emits in delight, “Ghana is the gateway to Africa, CNN mentioned Ghana!”; they jump around with joy. A couple of young men gather in the shade of the outside bar. They are talking about science and how great it is that scientists have predicted this: “How did they know it would happen today? They said it would, and it did, exactly as they said!” Slowly it gets darker and slightly cooler. “It’s as if it’s going to rain,” says one of the young men, “but the sky has no clouds.”

The mood among the staff becomes increasingly excited as it becomes cooler and darker. One staring at the sun captures what all appear to be thinking—“God is great! Thank you, Jesus”—for they all join in; Ghana is a very religious country. The young men discussing science turn to this theme: “Scientists don’t usually believe in God,” says one, but his friend corrects him, “What about Sir Isaac Newton!” Yes, they agree, Sir Isaac Newton was a top scientist, and he believed in God.

And at the moment of total eclipse, when you can look directly at the sun without sunshades and see only darkness, with just the thinnest outline of light around the encompassed moon, the staff go wild, cheering, shouting, “God is great, Jesus is wonderful, thank you, God”; they cheer and dance, and ululate. And it’s not just “pets, nocturnal creatures and other animals” whose behavior changes. Inexplicably, I find myself weeping, moved by my fellow watchers’ response, acknowledging the somber beauty of these immense but predictable movements in the heavens. It’s suddenly dark and still—but everywhere people are alive with excitement. And then it’s all over, in exactly a minute, the light appears again suddenly—you can no longer look at the sun, but when you do in your dark glasses, you see that only the smallest sliver of sun has actually appeared—no matter, this tiny piece of sun has made it light again. It is totally memorable.

Later that day, I catch the flight home from Ghana, my journey over. And I think about the eclipse. As I eat my airline meal and drink the accompanying wine, I can’t help feeling that there is a metaphor here for what I’d found over the years of my travels. At first I think it is obvious: the sun is like public education; the moon like private education moving slowly, imperceptibly at first, eventually blotting out the sun, eclipsing the state. But that wouldn’t do, because of course then the moon moves away and the sun regains its preeminence. That metaphor didn’t seem quite right. That was not what I thought I was seeing, a revival of private education that would eventually give way to the state again. A few drinks later, a different interpretation occurs to me. Wasn’t the sun like the entrepreneurial spirit that I saw among the people, the spirit of self-help? And wasn’t the moon like the state, apparently succeeding in blotting it out, stopping its light from shining through? It succeeds, but only for a brief moment in time. Eventually, the power of the sun, the power of the spirit of self-help, breaks through again to reign supreme.

These thoughts filled my mind on the journey home, and I wrote them in my notebook, hoping that they wouldn’t seem too cheesy in the light of day—and without the accompaniment of a few glasses of wine. Probably they do, but perhaps it’s still an apt metaphor. Public schooling seems to many to be a permanent, timeless feature of human civilization. But it’s a temporary aberration; the revolution that is taking place in developing countries is seeing to that. The power and spirit of free enterprise are shining through again in the field of education. Will it eventually replace public schooling? I think the evidence shows that to be very likely. But will the state come around again, threatening to crowd it out, just as the moon will return to eclipse the sun? Perhaps it will. But the market in education is powerful. It builds on something that no central planner can possibly embrace, the strength of millions of decisions by individual families, the millions of bits of information grasped by the Searchers who relentlessly create and innovate, modify and develop what the people want. The power of educational self-help is strong, and you won’t need special glasses to observe its effects.

Postscript

Just as I was finishing writing the book, I heard about the First Annual Private-Sector Development Competition, jointly organized by the
Financial Times
and the International Finance Corporation. They were looking for essays based on research that would help move forward understanding of how the private sector could assist development, and how this might open up opportunities for investors. And they had assembled an impressive array of judges, including the authors of influential books on development, such as Martin Wolf (
Why Globalisation Works
), Hernando de Soto (
The Mystery of Capital,
) and C. K. Prahalad (
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.
) My team leader in Nigeria, Lanre, e-mailed me and said I should enter. So I thought I’d give it a go, with little expectation of success.

I condensed the last chapter of this book and my research findings into an essay, “Educating Amaretch: Private Schools for the Poor and the New Frontier for Investors.” While harvesting potatoes and onions in my garden in rural Northumberland in late August 2006, I received a phone call from the International Finance Corporation office in Washington. I had to get Thomas Davenport to repeat his message several times before I could believe what I’d heard: I’d won the gold prize! I was flabbergasted, excited, humbled. For a couple of nights I could hardly sleep, I felt so elated that these ideas on private schools had found a sympathetic audience. No longer was I to plow a lonely furrow.

I was flown to Singapore for a long weekend in September 2006 to pick up the prize at the annual Governors’ Meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. I was honored to meet with the judges, to discuss their ideas, and to hear about the other prize-winning entries. The day after the presentation, the
Financial Times
published an edited version of my essay, under the title “Private Schools for the Poor Seek Investors.” A day later, a message was waiting for me on my answer machine: “Professor Tooley, I’ve read your article in the
Financial Times
. . . well, I’m your investor.” It was Richard Chandler, the New Zealander founder and chairman of the Singaporean private investment company Orient Global. Over the course of the next two months, we met, in Newcastle and Dubai, exploring ways in which we could collaborate on our shared vision of how to improve lives and increase prosperity through market-based solutions. It was such an incredible opportunity, to do something practical based on all the ideas I had accumulated during the course of my journey.

In April 2007, I joined Orient Global as president of its newly created $100 million Education Fund, aimed at investing in private education in emerging economies. The Fund has given grants to several of the organizations and people mentioned in this book: to George Mikwa and the new Kenya Independent Schools Association, working in the slums of Nairobi; to AFED, the Association of Formidable Educational Development, serving low-cost private schools in the shantytowns of Nigeria; to Joy’s school in Zimbabwe after Mugabe’s troops bulldozed the shantytowns where her parents lived; and to scholarship schemes serving the remote village private schools in rural Gansu, China.

Most significantly, through the Fund I’ve laid the foundation for a chain of low-cost private schools. Closely following ideas set out in the last chapter. I’ve guided the initial research and development for curriculum, technology, and learning methods, acquired the first schools and built a strong team to carry the vision forward. The education entrepreneurs I’ve known longest are based in Hyderabad. So it is there for the last two years I made my home, and where I am writing this conclusion, working closely with Anwar, Wajid, and Reshma, all people I first met back in 2000, when my journey started.

And so this story ends in Hyderabad, where it began. The story of private schools serving the world’s poor is only beginning.

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