Blog

By Dave Silvestri

[Names changed to conceal identity]

[DATE] – ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA: Triza was not just a hotel receptionist, though I first met her in that role. As I would learn, she was also a primary school teacher of Amharic language, and a student attending a distance learning program at Addis Ababa University. Her mother had passed away during her childhood, and her dearest brother had fallen to leukemia just one year earlier. She has a complex story, a sad story, and one that unfortunately highlights many of the challenges of life in a nation that is starting to run before ever learning to crawl.

When Triza’s brother first fell ill, they took him to Black Lion Hospital. Emotionally, physically, and financially, they drained themselves to look after him during his inpatient stay, to provide for his chemotherapeutic medications, to watch him at bedside. In the end, he died of a hospital-acquired infection. It was perhaps just one of several unnecessary deaths in a hospital still lacking adequate isolation precautions (see my post on rounding at the hospital), but for Triza and her family it was tragedy. They had not wanted to bring him to Black Lion Hospital—they knew it remained grossly underfunded despite being affiliated with the country’s preeminent medical school—but they had no choice. Leukemia was expensive, and like so many other Ethiopians, this was the only place they could afford.

Triza was noticeably saddened when she talked of her brother. There wasn’t a day that passed when she did not think about him, and most days she wept with his memory. Even a year after his passing, it was clear she was still flirting with depression, and her inability to express her sorrows at home likely exacerbated her pain. Her younger sister was the boy’s twin and even more devastated by the death than she. Her father was too stoic, emotionally hardened since the passing of his wife a decade earlier. Her mother’s friend—Triza’s best and perhaps only true friend—urged her to ‘be strong.’ Like so many others, she had only the church. Every morning she would rise early to go to the icon-laden Cathedral of St. Mary to pray and to pour out her sorrows to the consoling church Father. Just weeks earlier, the Timket holiday (Ethiopian Orthodox Epiphany) had not just been a time of joy and celebration, but one of spiritual revitalization as well. Faith for her was real and dynamic, an essential foundation for a life seemingly too difficult to endure without it.

Triza’s older sister had moved to Dubai to work as a house maid. Nevertheless, Triza still talked to her nearly daily. It was her second job since leaving Ethiopia two years earlier. At that time, she had lined up like so many hundreds of others in front of the Immigration Office in downtown Addis, just a stone’s throw from the very hospital wards where their youngest brother would ultimately breathe his last. She had waited patiently all day in that enormous queue, only to finally receive her passport and approved paperwork needed to depart. After her first contract in Beirut ended, she had returned to Addis for two months before departing for Dubai. It was a life shared by many of Ethiopia’s women—many of them rural, uneducated, and without any English background, but soon to self-teach themselves Arabic—headed to oil-fueled capital centers of burgeoning wealth across the Middle East: Bahrain, UAE, Lebanon, and Yemen (see my post on Dubai’s Mall). Although she did not enjoy her work particularly, the family was nice, and it paid her well enough that she could continue to support her family back home in Addis. It was this sister who paid for Triza’s distance education, and after their father’s retirement, it was she who also put food on their table. She did not get to shop at the Dubai Mall; the Burj Khalifa’s sky deck remained out of reach as she sent earnings back to Africa.

Unlike her sister, Triza did not want to leave Ethiopia—though in desperation she had nearly sought employment in Nairobi after her brother passed. Instead, her dream was to become a journalist. Toward the end of secondary school, she had joined every other senior across Ethiopia in taking the nationwide standardized exam that would determine university admission. Like all of them, she had then submitted her ranked list of her eight preferred university departments, and like all of them, she had waited in anticipation for the results. Most students had inevitably selected medicine as their top preference, while others had opted instead for ‘other health sciences’, ‘engineering,’ or ‘veterinary medicine’. Triza joined the masses hoping to make the university cut-off altogether. In a nation where the first university was founded in 1950, where tertiary enrollment totaled just 4,500 in 1970, and where not until the 1990’s did the government finally develop a comprehensive action plan for higher education reform, university seats remain limited.

Triza did not make the university cut-off, though I imagine she must have been close. Instead she took a position at a technical college offering training in teaching. It was not what she wanted, but at least it would prevent her from remaining idle; she intended to try again for university entrance after completion of college. Yet, when she did, again she was again denied entrance to the journalism degree program—this time because they were not accepting students from teaching colleges. She was instead assigned as a primary school teacher in Amharic language—a difficult and undesirable job for her, not anywhere near how she wanted to spend her life. Yet she complied, and has been working in this role for two years. Although she plans to quit at the end of the year, she is uncertain where to go next. All her options seem equally distant from her dream. With a sigh of resignation, she accepts that she had missed her opportunity by way of a secondary school exam, and would never see another chance.

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It made me sad to hear Triza’s story—not the least because I grieved for her family at the loss of her brother, or was angered by her accounts of senior clinicians objectifying him as a ‘fantastic teaching case’ even in the final days of his short life (a problem that plagues medical education around the world, I might note). Equally tragic, I felt, was the fact that even such a bright and motivated individual like herself (or the tens of thousands of high-achieving individuals like her across the nation) might never be given the opportunity to pursue a career that brings her joy.

Whereas across America we take for granted that tertiary education students can select from an entire menu of ‘majors’ or ‘minors’ (often with the opportunity to switch at least once thereafter, and not infrequently also with the opportunity to pursue careers in entirely unrelated fields), in Ethiopia eighteen year old secondary school seniors watch and wait as their entire livelihood gets dictated by the singular outcome of a single-day standardized exam. For some, the outcome is positive; the top scorers receive their first choice of field. But for most others like Triza, the news is disappointing—a second or often third choice, or sometimes no admission altogether. Transfers are possible for the brightest students, but immobility is the rule for the rest—stuck doing ‘education’ instead of ‘journalism’, ‘engineering’ instead of ‘medicine,’ ‘veterinary medicine’ instead of ‘dentistry.’

Although as an outside observer it might be easy to cast blame on the rigidity within Ethiopia’s higher education system, to the government’s credit, they have come a long way. A very long way. After long-time Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed by a military coup in 1974, he was replaced by a council of junior military officers (the Derg) who systematically either killed, imprisoned, or scared into exile the vast majority of the nation’s educated elite and educators. On the university campus, security surveillance increased, student organizations were outlawed, and mandatory courses on Marxism were instituted. Dissent was repressed, campus intellectual life withered, and those who could flee usually did. It was not until 1991 that dictator Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam was finally ousted by a unified Ethiopian People’s Democratic Revolutionary Front, but by this time, the nation’s higher education system had become crippled, short-staffed, and largely isolated from the western world. When the newly elected government took office in 1994, it was faced with the challenge of rebuilding one of the poorest higher education systems in the world.

And yet, the Ethiopian government has responded. Recognizing the importance of highly-trained individuals for Ethiopia’s long-term economic growth strategy, the government put expansion of higher education at the forefront of its national agenda, devoting nearly a quarter of its education budget to higher education (surpassing even the World Bank recommendation of 15-20%). As a result, in the first decade after the fall of the Derg, Ethiopia posted the world’s highest growth rate in higher education enrollment (28% annual average), fueled by a large increase in the number of universities and technical training colleges, including the nation’s first private institutions. Ethiopia became the first country to form a Ministry of Capacity Building; its newly-founded University Capacity Building Program has broken ground on thirteen new universities (mostly rural) to bolster enrollment another 120,000 students once completed. Since the 2003 Higher Education Proclamation, reforms have been made to enhance the autonomy and managerial environment of tertiary training institutions, as well as their long-term financial solvency, staff mix, and student demographic make-up.

Nevertheless, despite the government’s colossal achievements—indeed, in some cases because of these efforts—significant problems remain. Despite rapid macroeconomic growth in recent years (>8% annually since 2004), the vast majority (85%) of Ethiopia’s labor pool still engages in agriculture (much of it subsistence), with just 15 % engaged in industry or civil service. Thus, with the rapid enlargement of tertiary student enrollment, demand for Ethiopian university and college graduates has not been able to keep pace with supply. Moreover, as class sizes have swelled, quality of education has consequently waned—since facilities and staff have been slower to build. As a result, the job market remains highly unfavorable in most fields (health sciences being a notable exception), as employers seek higher-quality applicants with significant work experience.

So what do graduates do? Some wait. Others try to emigrate. Most do both. Nearly all of them have applied for a ‘Diversity Visa’ to the United States, hoping to be among the lucky ~3000 selected each year for entry to the US (a lottery only open to individuals with a tenth-grade diploma). Triza is among them. She has missed it two times now; this year will be her third attempt. For those who don’t make it (nearly everyone, given the odds), like Triza they accept unrelated or low-paying jobs with little other alternative. The result is felt nationally, as well; as university and college degrees go under-utilized, the nation reaps a poor return on its sizable higher education investment.

The Ethiopian government should be commended for reviving its crippled higher education system and bringing it to new and remarkable heights, such that it is now producing some of Africa’s and the world’s brightest leaders and professionals. Yet, as Triza’s story exemplifies, it should not stop wondering how many more of these leaders might be produced if the existent quality gaps, inefficiencies, and rigidity can be reduced—nor should it stop working to achieve such important reforms.

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