Discuss USE IN NIGERIA OR TANZANIA, GHANA OR CUBA IN RELATYION TO UGANDA.
THE IMPACT OF EDUCATIONAL DECENTERALIZATION IN LATIN AMERICA
ACASE STUDY OF PERU
The term “decentralization” embraces a variety of concepts which must be carefully analyzed in any particular country before determining if projects or programs should support reorganization of financial, administrative, or service delivery systems (The world bank group, 2002). Decentralization, wich denotes to a process or situation of transfer of authority and responsibility for public functions from the central government to intermediate and local governments or quasi-independent government organizations and/or the private sector, is a complex multifaceted concept. Different types of decentralization should be distinguished because they have different characteristics, policy implications, and conditions for success.
Decentralization can be broadly defined as the process of devolution of political, economic and administrative power from the central to the intermediate and local levels of government (Carranza and Tuesta , 2003). A key feature of a decentralized country is that SNG can make autonomous decisions (Baskaran, 2009), which usually entails that subnational authorities are elected by the citizens of their respective jurisdiction (World Bank, 1999). This is to be distinguished from a process of deconcentration, which is the redistribution of decision making among different levels within the central government; or delegation, which is the transfer of responsibilities and power from the central government to semi-autonomous organizations not wholly controlled by the central government but ultimately accountable to it (Prud’homme, 1995). In turn, countries can be defined as more or less decentralized depending on their position along the continuum
PERU
The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Peru was worth 192.09 billion US dollars in 2016. The GDP value of Peru represents 0.31 percent of the world economy. GDP in Peru averaged 50.81 USD Billion from 1960 until 2016, reaching an all time high of 201.22 USD Billion in 2013 and a record low of 2.57 USD Billion in 1960.
EDUCATION IN PERU
Education in Peru is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, which is in charge of formulating, implementing and supervising the national educational policy. According to the Constitution, education is compulsory and free in public schools for the initial, primary and secondary levels. It is also free in public universities for students who are unable to pay tuition and have an adequate academic performance. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has placed Peru at the bottom of the ranking in all three categories (Math, science and reading) in 2012 compared to the 65 nations participating in the study of 15-year-old school pupils’ scholastic performance.
Decentralization in perus education
General opinion of school quality in Peru is that students are not achieving the desired standards and that there is a wide dispersion in educational outcomes. This view has been ratified by different international studies in which Peru has participated, in the national “sample” assessments performed by the Ministry of Education and in last year’s census-evaluation in reading skills of second graders. A general consensus has emerged regarding the country’s need to improve its educational outcomes, a that education quality has to increase to boost productivity and foster growth and at the same time that the country needs to reduce the education gap between top-bottom achievers as a way to reduce income inequality among Peruvians.
Emerging from a thirty-year period of highly centralized, authoritarian regimes, and
resting on a centuries-long tradition of state centralization, the decentralizatio
n m
ovement that
began in the 197
0s
in Latin America and took off in the 198
0s was
wrongly
perceived as a
panacea for all of Latin America’s democratic failings.
A
dvocates
overstated the power of
decentralization by stating
that it would bring about strong, co
nsolidated democracies by
promoting social capital and citizen participation in politics.
It was certainly reasonable to claim
that
, by bringing government closer to the people and empowering local government with
meaningful governance tasks, citizens woul
d have a greater stake in government, hold their
officials accountable, and in the process, gain such democratic qualities as interpersonal trust
and tolerance
–
a la Tocqueville, Rousseau
, Putnam
and company (Grindle 2007; Montero and
Samuels 2004). Other
proponents of the decentralization strategy viewed it as a way to
strengthen the grassroots bases of political parties, increase government transparency, and
improve governance across the many emergent democracies of Latin America (O’Neill 2005). In
short
, by the end of the 1990s, a description of a prior
“New Federalism”
movement in the United
States during the late 1960s rang equally true for Latin America in the 1990s, “Decentralization is
rapidly replacing God, Country and Motherhood
in popular favor”
(Furniss 1974:
958).
