Indigenous peoples didn’t benefit from Latin American growth, book by World Bank researchers found.
The authors contributed royalties and gave their expertise to start project to aid Mexican poor.
Book’s words are transformed into community-focused project to educate children of rural families.
November 8, 2007–– World Bank researchers Harry Patrinos and Gillette Hall have written the book on the inequities faced by Latin America ’s indigenous peoples not once but twice.
The first time was in 2004 with their co-authored Indigenous Peoples, Poverty and Human Development in Latin America. The second time had a direct and practical application. It occurred this year when the Parental Empowerment Program, which Patrinos and Hall helped finance and design with their book’s royalties and its findings, opened its doors in Mexico.
The program is a community-based response to the education inequities that Patrinos and Hall documented among indigenous people. It provides small amounts of funding—$600 to $1200—directly to parents’ associations in rural schools that the groups can use to cover whatever they view as the priority expense in the school.
“Half the funds are spent in school supplies such as pencils, notebooks—things that are generally used for homework. The other half is spent to repair the school, such as our classrooms—and we miss many things because we do not have much,” said Mirna Barrios de la Cruz, a mother and member of the parent association in Guerrero.
But the program goes beyond infrastructure and empowers parents in unintended ways. “We also discuss together with teachers how our children advance, every two months,” says Benjamín Espinoza Guillén, from Chiapas. It is this interaction between parents and teachers that can lead to solid academic progress. Researchers will test the results in a robust impact evaluation that has been designed to measure the changes in education outcomes resulting from the program.
Recycling Royalties
Patrinos and Hall met when they sat down together coincidentally at a 2002 staff retreat. Patrinos had co-edited the first regional study documenting poverty among indigenous peoples in Latin America (1994). Hall had realized that nobody had carried out any follow-up to Patrinos’ work.
Indigenous Peoples, Poverty and Human Development in Latin America is the first book to track indigenous socioeconomic indicators over time. It profiles poverty, education, health, and labor market trends for the five Latin American countries with the largest indigenous populations (Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru ).
The book hit front-page news and television across Latin America upon its release in May 2004. This was because of its principal finding that across the region, indigenous peoples benefited less from reductions in national poverty rates, and in fact, in most countries poverty levels had remained stagnant for indigenous peoples despite national improvements.
“Poverty rates among the indigenous population are higher and fall more slowly, which is particularly bad news for a continent that has set its sights on meeting the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015,” said Patrinos.
When Palgrave McMillan signaled interest in publishing the work, the standard book contract arrived in the mail. Patrinos, an accomplished author, was used to signing away royalties as required by Bank rules. However, Hall, new to the publication world, had other ideas. “The book’s results really surprised us—we were expecting to write a positive story about how the gap between indigenous peoples and the rest of the population was closing. Finding that this was not the case was a strong motivator to turn our research into part of the solution,” Hall said.
The Project Takes Shape
Hall and Patrinos agreed to try to donate the royalties from the book to indigenous organizations in Latin America. Obtaining a waiver of Bank policy was a challenge that took months to resolve. But Evangeline Javier, World Bank Human Development Director for the Latin America and the Caribbean Region, supported the idea, and Maria Borrero of the Ethics Committee provided the final approval. “In fact,” Borrero wrote, “I commend your initiative to benefit the non-profit group that the book and your department advocate.”
In deciding how to use the royalties most effectively, the team considered their research findings and focused on the fact that educational quality is a serious constraint to improved living conditions among indigenous peoples. Moreover, emerging evidence suggests that one of the most effective ways of improving school outcomes is via parents' associations. Patrinos collaborated with Mexican counterparts and international experts to design the project.
Through partnerships with private donors—Televisa, Cinepolis, Lazos, Deutsche Bank Mexico, and Western Union—the $5,000 in royalties has catalyzed more than $100,000 in resources. The program is a public-private partnership combining efforts by the government’s Secretariat of Public Education and the National Council for Educational Development (CONAFE), the executor of the project, to improve accountability and quality in poor and indigenous rural primary schools.
Arturo Sáenz Ferral, director of CONAFE, explained that “the project represents a unique effort of collaboration between the private sector and the public sector to contribute towards the improvement of the quality of education in Mexico.”
The impact evaluation itself is collaborative, involving the Investing in Education Foundation and researchers from University of California, Berkeley, and Universidad Iberoamericana. Manuel Felix, President of the Investing in Education Foundation, indicated that “the transformation of the educational system in Mexico requires the participation of all sectors of society, and this program is an example of that collaboration.”
Patrinos and Hall are now working on a global study of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities, due out in 2009.
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