“Saber” – Telephone Charges For Education
by Margrit Kennedy, August 2008.
[ This is part 3 of the article series on alternative currency systems. Back to part 1 | part 2 ]
Another example of an alternative sectoral currency is the Brazilian education currency “Saber”. 40 percent of the Brazilian population is below the age of fifteen, hence, there is a great problem regarding education. At the time of the privatisation of the cellular communications industry some years ago, it was decided to introduce a one percent fee on all phone bills and to use these for educational purposes. In a budget designated by the Ministry of Education for this specific purpose, more than three billion reais (approx. one bn U.S. dollars) had been collected by the middle of 2004. Now the decision had to be made, as to how this money should be spent.
For this purpose, Bernard Lietaer and Gibson Schwartz devised a model, which they called “Saber” (knowledge), to provide as many adolescents as possible with an education leading up to the baccalaureate. The ministry decides the use and the circulation of the “Saber”, from its issuance up to its redemption, and distributes the educational vouchers in areas that are weaker from an economic point of view and where the money required for attending secondary school is lacking. The schools distribute the “Sabers” among their youngest students, work with them to improve their weaknesses and encourage their strengths.
This way, seven-year-old students for example could pay with their vouchers for the private lessons offered them by older students. These will, in turn, use it to pay older students and so the offer carries on to the 17-year-olds, who are then able to pay their college tuition with “Sabers”. The universities are the only institutions that are able to change “Sabers” into reais in order to cover material and staff expenses. The Ministry of Education negotiates with the universities on how many university places can be provided without any additional expenditures and pays around 50 percent of the regular costs for these places.
Since the vouchers lose 20 percent of their value at the end of each academic year, they are passed on as quickly as possible. If one estimates the vouchers being handed down 5 times and a 50 percent reduction of the tuition fees, 3 billion reais would be transformed into an educational profit of 30 billion reais.
Apart from additional expertise – upon hearing something, one keeps five percent of what was said, upon passing something on, one keeps 90 percent – new social connections are being created, which would otherwise never have come into being. Everything amounts to an almost “playful” expansion of the spectrum of teaching and learning, in which additional costs can hardly be generated and which can thereby serve as an ideal model for many other countries.