| For One Small Education Company, Iraqi Schools Are a Huge Challenge Firm Gets $62 Million Pact to Rebuild System Set Up to Honor Saddam Hussein By NEIL KING JR. Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WASHINGTON -- Charito Kruvant has just enlisted in the next battle the U.S. will fight in Iraq: Remaking the country after 35 years of Baath Party rule. Her assignment: Get every Iraqi child behind a desk with notebooks and other school supplies in hand before Oct. 1. As looting and near anarchy spreads across much of Iraq, Ms. Kruvant and her small team of nation-builders for hire -- housed in a warren of offices in a leafy Washington neighborhood -- now have lofty marching orders. Her company, Creative Associates International Inc., last week landed a one-year, $62 million contract from the U.S. Agency for International Development, nearly twice the size of the AID work it did last year in places such as Serbia and Senegal. The U.S. has audacious ambitions for a democratic, free-market Iraq -- ranging from a new currency and banking system to a reconstituted police force and health care for all. While the U.S. will bring in big corporate players to rebuild Iraq's devastated infrastructure, many of the things meant to help transform Iraqi society will be done by low-profile, private companies such as Creative Associates. The firm has been working in developing countries, often with U.S. government money, since 1977. None of the firm's previous assignments -- delivering 50 tons of textbooks to Afghanistan, writing radio scripts to promote human rights in Guatemala, using popular theater to promote girls' education in Zambia -- have been as daunting as this one. But then the U.S. hasn't tried to rebuild a nation the size of Iraq since it helped get Germany and Japan back on their feet after World War II. Reconstruction of Iraq is being orchestrated by a new Pentagon office led by Jay Garner, a retired Army general. The Pentagon's heavy role in leading the effort has raised concerns within the Bush administration, particularly at the State Department, and has alarmed U.S. humanitarian groups that don't want to be seen as appendages of the U.S. military. Other countries, including France, Russia and Germany, are pressing to put the United Nations in charge. In Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, dozens of countries and international organizations jumped in to lend specialized assistance. U.S. plans for rebuilding Iraq are drawing fire at home and abroad both for the secrecy with which they were devised and for the heavy reliance on U.S. companies. Starting with $1.7 billion, the Bush administration initially plans to sign about a dozen contracts. The biggest early award, expected this week, will be a $600 million assignment to begin rebuilding Iraqi roads, highways, power plants and other infrastructure. It is likely to go either to Bechtel Group of San Francisco or Parsons Corp. of Pasadena, Calif., two big engineering groups. But that's just the beginning, U.S. officials acknowledge. The infrastructure contract alone could easily grow to tens of billions of dollars, these officials suggest. And while President Bush and his aides have repeatedly said the U.S. plans to stay in Iraq for as short a time as possible, nearly all of the AID contracts for Iraq can be extended to up to three years. AID, a unit of the State Department and the government's main handler of overseas contracts, has preselected bidders for the jobs over the last two months, a process it defends as the only way to get the work going in a hurry. Agency chief Andrew Natsios insists the process is immune to political influence, but members of Congress last week called for investigations into how the agency has handled the Iraq bids. Rebuilding bridges and power lines is an urgent task in a country that was starved by sanctions for a decade and then bombed by the U.S. But the U.S. figures it must act just as quickly to get the schools up and running if Iraq is to succeed as a prosperous, peaceful democracy. One concern is that Islamic schools, imported from neighboring Iran or Saudi Arabia, could soon begin to siphon off Iraqi students from the secular, government-run system the U.S. hopes to reinvigorate. Ms. Kruvant concedes she must now work miracles to fix an estimated 25,000 schools with an enrollment of about 4.2 million, according to Unicef's most recent -- though admittedly rough -- estimates. Iraq's dropout rate among secondary-school children is more than 65%, among the highest in the Arab world. Almost half of all Iraqi girls over 15 have no schooling at all, while the average boy over 15 has spent fewer than five years in school, according to United Nations estimates. Most of the country's schools lack electricity, water and heat. Carel DeRooy, head of the Iraq office of Unicef, says that a lucky student in Iraq is one "who studies in an overcrowded school that hasn't seen paint or any maintenance since the mid-1980s, has no fans or electricity, and a teacher that earns $5 a month." He estimates that to diminish overcrowding, Iraq needs at least 5,000 new primary schools, while 8,000 existing ones need substantial rehabilitation. And then there's the curriculum, which worshipped Saddam Hussein and his party while vilifying Israel and the United States. Zainab al-Suwaij, a 32-year-old Iraqi exile who will work alongside Creative Associates in Iraq, just received a shipment of fifth-grade Iraqi history books. "Every other page is about Saddam and his great works," she says. English-language textbooks found in a school in Karbala offered the following conversational exercise: "Can't you stay a little longer?" "No, I'm afraid I have to go to the General Union of Iraqi Women." "What for?" "To design a picture there for the President's saying: The revolution led by our party is seriously determined to liberate women." Ms. Suwaij remembers teachers beating high-school students and lecturing about the Baath Party. One of her teachers conducted a class on the greatness of Adolf Hitler. "She said he was great because he put the Jews in a room and burned them. I stood up and said, 'How does that make a man great?' The teacher told me to sit down and shut up," she said. Khaled Ibrahim, an ophthalmologist and parent in the city of Basra, says that revamping Iraqi schools and getting rid of such material is a priority. "All the books should be changed and the kids should learn how to be free," he said. "They used to be taught how to be slaves." Still, Ms. Suwaij and others are concerned that the U.S. not overly impose its stamp on the Iraqi school system. AID originally intended to have whoever won the contract deliver new textbooks, but it pulled that requirement at the last minute. The plan now is to wait until the Ministry of Education is able to help advise in the process. Several companies then might be hired to help compile and publish new textbooks in cooperation with Iraqi officials. Creative Associates, which in the end was the sole bidder for the contract, has 82 employees in Washington and about 200 elsewhere in the world. Ms. Kruvant is the majority owner, at 69%, with the remainder owned by a partner at Creative, Mimi Tse. Ms. Kruvant says the work they do isn't highly profitable. "Our profit margin for this sort of work is rarely over about 4%," she said. In Iraq, Creative Associates plans to rely largely on a team of U.S. subcontractors, most of which also happen to be run by women, Ms. Kruvant says. The core of the work will fall to two small U.S.-based Iraqi groups and a team of educational specialists from American University in Washington. One group, the Boston-based American Islamic Congress, is run by Ms. Suwaij, a Shiite Muslim who fled Basra in 1991. The other, the Iraq Foundation in Washington, is led by the daughter of a once-prominent Baghdad family, Rend Rahim Francke, who left the country in 1978. The American University effort is led by Carole O'Leary, a political scientist with extensive contacts in the Kurdish north of Iraq. American Manufacturers Export Group, a Texas-based company also owned by women, will supply millions of student book bags, pencils, pads of paper -- even shoes for needy children. Research Triangle Institute of North Carolina will work as a subcontractor to help form educational policy within the Iraqi Ministry of Education. The institute, a nonprofit with 2,100 world-wide employees, has also been picked by AID as the prime contractor to identify local leaders and prepare for local elections in Iraq's 180 municipalities. Creative Associates will be a subcontractor, in turn, on the institute's contract, valued at $162 million in the first year. What's less clear is how Creative Associates and its team can accomplish its huge task on the schedule the Bush administration has in mind in a country the size of California, much of which could remain dangerous for months. Creative Associates initially plans to send about 10 technical specialists within a few weeks to work with a team of about 50 Iraqi exiles recruited in the U.S. and the Middle East to work for its subcontractors. Once in the country, the Iraqi groups are to recruit teachers to serve as mentors for a huge teacher-training program. The American University team is to concentrate on assessing the state of the country's schools, district by district, using Iraqis hired within the country. Unicef estimates 70% of Iraqi schools need renovation, and many pose health hazards to students. Under its AID contract, Creative Associates and its subcontractors are to launch an accelerated learning program by midsummer in at least five areas of the country. The program, meant to cram a year of schooling into a few months, would go nationwide within the year. As regions become safe, the group is also supposed to assess the condition and needs of every school. By early fall, at least half of Iraq's schools are to receive the "equipment and supplies needed to function at a standard level of quality," according to the contract. Within nine months of entering Iraq, the group is to have provided training to half the country's primary and secondary teachers. In Afghanistan, where Creative Associates won a $16.5 million education contract in January, the U.S. goals are less ambitious -- launching a few pilot programs in accelerated learning and training some of the country's teachers via radio broadcasts and cassette tapes. "The Iraq project is on a much different scale," Ms. Kruvant says. Indeed, several prospective bidders were scared off by the U.S. government's goals. "We decided not to bid because we felt that it was not possible to meet the requirements of the time frame and because of security considerations," says Mary McGuire, a spokeswoman at the Washington-based Academy for Educational Development, a longtime AID contractor. None of this is being made easier by war damage and now the looting of hundreds of schools, many of which were turned into makeshift armories before the war. In the southern city of Nasiriyah over the weekend, looters at the municipal education office tore out air-conditioning units, carted off furniture and destroyed school-examination records. U.S. military forces have taken over various school buildings as well. In Karbala, a company of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne moved into a school near the Shrine of Ali, setting up heavy machine guns and Javelin antitank missiles amid the Arabic literature textbooks decorated with portraits of Saddam Hussein. "Everything must be changed," said Malath Naji Haidar, the Baath-appointed head of the Nasiriyah province education department. As an ambulance used its loudspeaker to beg looters to return expensive equipment stolen from the hospital's cardiology department, Mr. Haidar fretted about school exams coming up at the end of the month. "We have no government -- no American and no Iraqi," he said. TIGHT SCHEDULE The U.S. plan to rebuild Iraq's school system calls for contractors to get children in schools quickly. Key benchmarks: " July: Contractors must assess conditions in 2,500 of Iraq's 25,000 schools " August: Five pilot projects in accelerated learning must be up and running " October: All children back in school, 2.1 million children must have new school supplies " January: Half of Iraq's "teaching cadre" must have received new training " February: Accelerated-learning program must be nationwide Source: USAID education contract Neil King, Jr. staff writer Wall Street Journal For One Small Education Company, Iraqi Schools Are a Huge Challenge April 14, 2003 |