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Poor Places, Thriving People
Using Spatial Planning Techniques to Improve the Spatial Efficiency of Infrastructure The race to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of full primarylevel completion has given strong emphasis to school construction across the MENA region; however, insufficient attention has been given to spatial planning. • As the goal of universal primary enrollment and completion comes close to being achieved, the focus of attention is shifting from primary to secondary and from lower secondary to upper secondary. Secondary schools are significantly more expensive than primary schools, and they must be in full use for 30 years to amortize their cost. Moreover, secondary schools are fewer in number than primary schools, so distance from home to class has an even greater impact upon enrollments and retention. Therefore, deciding where to put secondary schools is an increasingly important spatial policy issue. • Population distributions are changing rapidly with urbanization and the spread of the demographic transition from leading to lagging areas. The Republic of Yemen, for example, has the second-highest total fertility rate in the world, the fastest growing city in the world, Sana’a (Economist 2005), and a shift in the demographic center of gravity from the highlands toward the coastal cities. The spatial allocation of education assets therefore has to reflect not only the current needs but also the demography of future decades. • There are powerful and user-friendly Geographical Information Systems (GIS), which enable the optimization of school catchment areas with respect to population trends. For example, the Republic of Yemen faces a number of spatial imbalances in education. Twenty-five percent of rural schools had fewer teachers than the prescribed minimum, while about 205 urban schools had overcrowded classes in the “unmanageable” range of 70–150 children per class. Only 21 percent of secondary schools met the minimum school size of 180 students specified by the Ministry of Education. Consequently, there were not enough classes for the full range of subjects to be taught; only half the schools had a science stream. Therefore, the government is planning for future needs using GIS. An assessment of all existing first-level schools (grades 1–6) identified their physical condition and the needs for maintenance, renovation, or reconstruction. The survey also identified the potential for building additional classrooms on the current site. The assessment of building requirements took account of projected growth of the population ages 6 to 14, by village. Geo-referenced GIS maps were developed for potential new school sites and for