Robin Hood's brand of wealth redistribution could help turn around the fortunes of Liberia, where the education system was recently described as a "mess" by its president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
In August, the west African country made headlines around the world when all 25,000 students who sat the entrance exam for the University of Liberia failed. Reactions ranged from denial to despondency. While some challenged the results, others lamented the impact of civil war on the education system.
Amid the political rhetoric and knee-jerk reactions, the paucity of concrete solutions offered was striking. I think Liberia should employ a "Robin Hood" approach, redistributing its resources and prioritising education.
In 2007, Liberians were asked to rank their major development concerns. They unanimously listed better roads, better education and better health, views that merit a national response.
While parents, teachers and students must work to improve the quality of education from early childhood to university, national government, the private sector, and the donor community must set quantifiable investment benchmarks. Education should be allocated at least 15% of the country's $553m (£346m) cash-based 2013-14 budget. This is the minimum amount advocated by the Education for All (EFA) initiative. Apart from salaries for teachers, the education sector absorbs a meagre 3% of Liberia's existing national budget, with huge spending cuts often made at the legislature.
This is where Robin Hood comes in. Wealth must be moved from the clutches of political appointees and elected officials, and into the hands of those who educated them. While a member of the Senate or House of Representatives collects more than $5,000 a month in Liberia, teacher salaries start at $140 a month. When the salary of a politician far exceeds that of an educator in a post-conflict country, something is seriously wrong.
The legislative budget should be halved, and the money saved used to incentivise promising recent graduates of Liberia's universities who make a commitment to teaching in rural areas. In neighbouring countries such as Ghana and Nigeria, recent graduates are required to leave the capital cities to work in a number of sectors.
Liberia should institute a similar national service scheme for education, paying these volunteers/educators a living wage and also providing housing. Minimum standards should be set through a rigorous three-month teaching course, regular evaluations, and in-service training. After a year or two of national service, these recent graduates should be given a tuition-free waiver for pursuing masters degrees.
The national government must also impose a Robin Hood tax on multinationals, while insisting that extracted resources such as iron ore and timber are reinvested in the education system. In 2007, the government introduced county development funds – and later social development funds – to give a percentage of concession revenues to the regions of the country where large-scale extraction was taking place.
While this is a laudable effort, the process of derivation has been hijacked and stalled by reported cases of mismanagement and graft. Annual audits need to be conducted followed by punitive measures to ensure development funds are used for training teachers, supplying schools with resources, and feeding students who otherwise would not have a decent meal at home.
Donors also have a responsibility. Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo has argued that "dead aid" is a self-perpetuating phenomenon. Yet I would argue that when aid is harnessed responsibly to improve social services such as education and health, it can have transformative results in Liberia.
Instead of using donor dollars to fly in overpriced expatriate consultants to conduct assessments and write long, cut-and-paste reports that no one in Liberia will ever read or implement, administrative fees should be used to transport, feed, and house qualified Liberian educators from the diaspora. Encourage these people to volunteer their time and talent on short expeditions to the country and, more times than not, they will end up staying.
The problem with Liberia is not that it is poor, but that it is poorly managed. Rather than lament the civil war and its destruction of physical infrastructure and human capacity, Liberia must put its money where its mouth is by adopting a Robin Hood approach to education reform.