A question of motives
USAID grants to develop two crucial sectors -- education and health -- came up for debate in parliament last week, with interesting results. Gamal Essam El-Din reports
Tempers flared during a parliamentary debate of two USAID grants last week. Opposition and Islamist MPs claimed the grants -- which are earmarked for health and education development to the tune of $251 million -- aim to promote American values at the expense of religious teachings and the tenets of Islamic culture.
The People's Assembly debated the grants in the final days before its summer recess, which begins next week. The fast and furious debate took place late on 11 June, and ended with the grants being overwhelmingly approved by the assembly. That, however, did not diminish the vociferousness of opposition and in particular Islamist MPs' gripes.
The first grant, a six-year $64.6 million project, is targeted at reforming the education sector by upgrading the quality of education services, providing teachers with advanced training in the US, and offering greater educational opportunities to rural children and girls who are deprived of such a basic service. The grant also involves promoting private sector and NGO (non-governmental organisation) participation in providing education services, and the decentralisation of control over various school activities.
Although most parliamentarians agreed that the education system in general is in dire need of an overhaul -- parliament's own education committee research reveals the sector's need for many of the reforms contained in the grant -- the fact that the reform effort originated with American funding posed its greatest problem.
MP criticism was fuelled, perhaps, by the fact that Education Minister Hussein Kamel Bahaaeddin, along with the governors of Cairo, Minya and Qena, visited the United States last month, in order to -- according to many MPs -- coordinate with America on the need to purge the Egyptian school curricula of extremist and intolerant ideas. Some opposition MPs claimed that the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) plans on adopting new initiatives aimed at modifying the educational curricula provided by Al- Azhar, the world's top Sunni Muslim religious institution.
Adel Eid, an independent MP with an Islamist orientation, said the USAID grant has both explicit and implicit objectives. "The explicit objective is improving the quality of basic education services, while the implicit goal is to restructure Egyptian and Islamic values and traditions in an American way," Eid said. As evidence, Eid cited the grant's stated goal of changing "some critical health practices of poor rural girls. I want to know what critical health practices this grant aims to change," he asked, "and why it is concerned with this when it is earmarked for upgrading education services." In Eid's view, the Egyptian teachers that the grant will send to the United States for training will come back to fulfill the grant's primary objective: Americanising the Egyptian education system.
Responding to Eid's criticism, Hossam Badrawi, chairman of Parliament's Education Committee, said the grant aims at providing both formal and informal education. "The informal education will provide poor rural girls with best health practices needed to deal with the physiological changes they undergo at such a critical stage of their life," Badrawi said, emphasising that all such instruction would be handled by Egyptian schoolteachers.
Ali Laban, a Muslim Brotherhood MP, called the grant one of many aimed at "poisoning the minds of the Egyptian people". According to Laban, a group of American and international agencies will implement the grant in a way that ensures Egyptian curricula's radical transformation to a pro-Western, and particularly pro-American worldview. Laban said it was "essential that all of these adjustments be entirely handled by Egyptian experts".
Mohamed El-Azabawi, another Brotherhood MP, said the grant is "a flagrant American intervention, making use of local education systems to change the lifestyles of the Arab and Islamic world". El-Azabawi said the grant had not appeared because "America had suddenly fallen in love with us, but rather because they want to make sure that the coming generations are more loyal to them, than to Islamic values".
Both El-Azabawi and Laban were dismissed from their stewardship of Gharbiya governorate's El-Geel El-Muslim (The Muslim Generation) schools last year after a governorate supervisory body, in cooperation with the Education Ministry, accused these schools of promoting extremist Islamist teachings.
Parliamentary Speaker Fathi Sorour downplayed Eid and Laban's worries regarding the grant. "As a former education minister, I emphasise that the Americans have no role to play in changing school curricula. That function belongs solely to the Education Ministry." Badrawi also confirmed that Egyptians would handle the upgrading of school curricula from A to Z.
American Ambassador to Egypt David Welch, addressing the American Chamber of Commerce on 28 May, had said there was an acute need for educational reform in Egypt. According to Welch, American educational grants are aimed at decentralising control over many aspects of school operations, and encouraging a critical-thinking approach to education that encourages excellence. Welch said that Education Minister Bahaaeddin and several provincial governors visited Washington in May to discuss these ideas.
The second grant, worth $168.65 million, aims at improving health services, with a focus on birth control and family planning. The grant also targets the restructuring of national health policies, and the fight against endemic diseases. While NDP MPs emphasised that the grant was important "in light of the pressing need for family planning and birth control projects in order to curb the runaway growth of population," they simultaneously sounded a note of caution regarding previous USAID health sector grants which were rife with misspending, and had little to show for when it came to actual reductions in birth rates.
Islamist and leftist MPs also called attention to the fact that the grant would be used to tackle sensitive issues like female genital mutilation (FGM), and reducing fertility rates. Again, much of the opposition's criticism seemed to reflect a knee jerk reaction to where the project's funding was coming from.
"The Americans might be interested in helping us with family planning, but why should they be interested in reducing our fertility rates," asked one leftist MP.
