2021 was a difficult year for higher education in Myanmar. COVID-19 and the military coup compounded to effectively halt any and all progress. The task of this article is to gauge the impact of COVID-19 on higher education in Myanmar. This is achieved by first sketching the state of higher education by the time COVID-19 arrived, followed by a review of the Ministry of Education’s response to the pandemic. The current operational status of the higher education sector is then briefly identified, from which lessons can be learned for Myanmar’s higher education sector regarding pandemic shocks. This is done while keeping in mind that the true impact of COVID-19 and the ability of Myanmar’s higher education administration to apply lessons learned are both made difficult due to the military’s dissolution of the country’s civilian government for the foreseeable future.
Higher Education at the End of the NESP
The past 10 years has seen a number of significant developments in Myanmar’s higher education sector, due in large part to the National Education Strategic Plan (NESP). Although the NESP has run the course of its five-year timeline (2016-2021), the second instalment was expected to be released circa 2021 to ensure a smooth transition from 2022 onwards. However, due to the double dilemma of COVID-19 and the military coup that have crippled the country in 2021, the second iteration of the NESP is unlikely to be immediately forthcoming either in documentation or implementation.
In the context of higher education, the NESP (2016-2021) had three strategic objectives: (1) to strengthen higher education governance and management capacities; (2) to improve the quality and relevance of higher education in Myanmar; and (3) to expand access to equitable higher education. In view of these objectives, a number of successes and challenges can be identified.
Successes include, for example, establishing the decentralising National Education Policy Commission (NEPC), which served as a point of coordination between the Ministry of Education (MOE) and higher education institutes (HEIs). Additionally, regarding funding, an increased percentage of the national budget was allocated to the education sector. According to the World Bank, in 2011 education received 3.9% of the budget (US$230M), and in 2019 received 8.4% (US$1.5B), of which 17% was assigned to the Department of Higher Education. In terms of GDP, this translated into an increase from 0.79% in 2011 to 1.93% in 2019 — still well below the global average of 4.5% of GDP (in 2017) and still the lowest performer in Southeast Asia, but nevertheless an upward trend. A further success is that, according to the Statistical Yearbook released by Myanmar’s Ministry of Planning and Finance, between the 2010–11 and 2017–18 academic periods student enrolments increased by 55.9%, the number of teaching and research staff increased by 40.5%, and education college enrolments in the same period went up by an astronomical 800+%. It is also worth noting increased multilateral support in terms of digital infrastructure, teacher training, and curriculum development. These initiatives tended to focus on urban HEIs in lower-Myanmar, though not exclusively.
Challenges for the NESP’s strategic objectives in higher education include, for example, the 2021 military coup. The impact of the coup on Myanmar’s education sector as a whole, including higher education, has been systematic, deep, and will likely be long-lasting. With domestic stability not yet a reality, it is unclear how long it will take the education system to recover. Another challenge is the fact that traditional, rote-focused teaching methods that prioritise obedience rather than participation remain the standard pedagogy. And, of course, a third challenge is the impact of COVID-19 at the tail-end of the NESP’s project cycle.
The impact of the coup on Myanmar’s education sector as a whole, including higher education, has been systematic, deep, and will likely be long-lasting.
MOE’s COVID-19 Response and Recovery Plan
When COVID-19 reached pandemic status, Myanmar’s MOE was quick to respond with health and safety measures for all public schools. These measures were swiftly followed by nationwide school closures from primary through to tertiary levels. These closures remained in place for the majority of 2020 and 2021, punctuated with brief opening periods, and HEIs apparently having access to remote learning. However, those opening periods proved brief due to an increase in COVID-19 cases in 2020 and national civil disobedience in the face of military violence in 2021. Additionally, while remote learning is identified as an option for HEIs in Myanmar, the reality is that in the current military climate internet access and power supplies are unreliable, and HEI educators are unlikely to have the pedagogical training and skills to facilitate online learning for the estimated 932,000 HEI students (per the World Bank’s 2018 estimate). These factors, combined with the fact that Myanmar has comparatively fewer resources at its disposal, translate into a very low vaccination rate, so that a coordinated and safe reopening of schools and HEIs is unlikely.
Source: https://covid19.uis.unesco.org/global-monitoring-school-closures-covid19/country-dashboard
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
In May 2020, the civilian government formulated a COVID-19 Response and Recovery (R&R) plan. The goal was to ensure quality, equitable education in the short, medium, and long-term during COVID-19. The provisional timeline spanned from May 2020 to October 2021, though this was open to the changing dynamics of the pandemic. Pandemic-related risks to education identified in the plan include: reduced government spending due the to the associated economic slowdown; closure of TVET schools and HEIs for approximately 1.5 million students; increased student dropouts as a result of limited experience with distance learning; increasing educational inequalities due to rural-urban and socio-economic divides; increased child labour as a result of those divides; and a negative impact on student mental health and well-being.
Specifically regarding higher education, and in-line with the NESP, the R&R plan expected an impact in the areas of access, quality, equity, and management. Access concerns focused on fair and transparent admissions, departmental challenges for distance learning, online access, and data affordability challenges for students. Regarding quality, concerns focused on a lack of professorial capacity for distance learning, learning materials not being suitable for distance education, students often being limited to mobile phones for online interaction, and onerous online training requirements for teacher educators at education colleges. Equity issues revolve around vulnerable demographics, such as persons with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and women. Management issues point to challenges in data collection, effective communication channels, remuneration, and private sector relations.
The R&R plan was based on two key assumptions. The first assumption considered the time-sensitive nature of responses to, and recovery from, the impact of COVID-19. The second assumption was that international assistance and funding would be available for the R&R plan to be implemented. Both assumptions are reasonable, yet the second assumption may now prove problematic. With the second assumption comes a deeper assumption of political stability, a stability that has been destroyed by the 2021 coup, which puts international assistance and funding at risk because bilateral and multilateral support has wavered in response to the coup, including international sanctions directed at senior military members and a redirection of funds by selected donor agencies can be expected. In addition to an economic slowdown, spending on education may be further hampered by limited access to international assistance and funding. It is worth recalling that in 2019 the Department of Higher Education received 17% of the national budget for education, while in the R&R plan higher education was allocated 12.1% of the budget, a proportional decrease of 28.8%.
A monitoring and evaluation framework was prepared to track the success of the R&R plan. Key indicators for the response phase include the continuity of education during school closures, training and support for educators, and student health and well-being. Key indicators for the recovery phase include the return to safe learning environments for all stakeholders, a transition back to face-to-face teaching and learning, continued training and support for educators, and civic engagement and communications. At the time of writing (October 2021), a monitoring and evaluation report based on the targets stipulated in the R&R plan has not been released. At this stage of COVID-19, with schools still closed and a military junta in control, it is reasonable to conclude that these proposed targets will not be achieved anytime soon. Information regarding plans for higher education to resume amidst COVID or post-pandemic is not forthcoming from the junta, and when such information does become available there is sufficient cause to question its validity.
Current Status
When COVID-19 arrived the capacity of Myanmar’s education sector was much stronger than it was 10 years prior. Currently, HEIs remain closed in Myanmar ostensibly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, Reuters reported via the Myanmar Teacher’s Federation that in late May 2021, 19,500 university staff had been suspended by the military due to staff involvement in the nationwide civil disobedience movement. Such COVID closures and military suspensions can only be debilitating to the public higher education sector and the more than 930,000 students it serves. A key learning point from the R&R plan is the need for an emergency preparedness strategy to be included in the NESP II, should it materialise. In the context of COVID-19 and looking to the future, deeper and more exhaustive capacity building and infrastructure investment is required to ensure that the higher education sector is more resilient to pandemic shocks should they occur in the future.
In the context of COVID-19 and looking to the future, deeper and more exhaustive capacity building and infrastructure investment is required to ensure that the higher education sector is more resilient to pandemic shocks should they occur in the future.
Reforms After COVID-Coup
By October 2021, the World Health Organization reported 475,885 cases of COVID-19 in Myanmar, with 18,068 COVID-related deaths. With a fragile healthcare system and weak public administration, these numbers likely underreport the true medical impact of COVID. Bolstering this claim is that, subsequent to its coup, the military was widely believed to be inactive to the point of using the surge in COVID cases during the third quarter of 2021 as a strategy to dampen civic dissent against coup. The result of COVID-19 and the coup combined is that the NEPC was suspended in May 2021, an 18% economic downturn is predicted for Myanmar’s 2021 financial year, therefore a decrease in higher education funding can be expected, from which student enrolments and teacher engagement in public higher education can also be expected to drop, and international partners are wavering. Successes achieved by the ambitious NESP were certainly challenged by COVID-19, with setbacks expected, but a way through the pandemic was envisioned with the civilian government’s R&R plan. The military regime makes no mention of the R&R plan, from which we can infer that it has been abandoned, and with it the prospect of a return to safe learning environments for education stakeholders.
Currently, what we might minimally hope for and what is realistic appear as two divergent questions. We might hope for a cessation of hostilities, meaningful dialogue between competing military-political interests, a return to diverse investments in education, and Phase 2 of the NESP being taken up in earnest by a civilian government. The reality is that reports indicate continued protests amidst widespread street-level violence, arbitrary arrests, shootings, and bombings. Concerns over COVID have largely been overshadowed by the coup. For higher education, the way forward is unclear. The dilemma facing higher education today — to acquiesce for peace or to resist for justice — is a dilemma to which there is no attractive solution yet.
MARK BROWN
Mark Brown is a member of the social sciences faculty at Parami University (Yangon, Myanmar). He previously served as the director of research at Parami’s Centre for Education Policy Research.
FEBRUARY 2022 | ISSUE 11
Riding the waves of change
