In some village primary schools, textbooks, teaching equipment, and teachers were all in desperately short supply. This was obviously detrimental to the development of basic education, whereas merging several village schools into the town could greatly alleviate the problem.
This was also closely related to the layout of East African rural areas. East African villages generally clustered around a town, with several nearby villages packed closely together in a layout like stars circling the moon. Conversely, if villages were too far apart, concentrating educational resources would clearly do more harm than good. After all, no one would feel at ease letting their child walk more than ten li to school.
Of course, if concentration was truly impossible for special reasons, they could continue to retain their qualifications to operate schools. This mainly depended on local circumstances, to be handled at the discretion of local authorities before being reported upward.
Ernst continued, "Healthcare is East Africa's weak point—or rather, modern medicine is. In this regard, East Africa must vigorously promote traditional Chinese medicine clinics in rural areas, as well as localize East Africa's traditional Chinese medicine industry."
The good thing about traditional Chinese medicine was that many medicinal ingredients could be grown right in the fields, allowing it to hold an advantage in price.
Modern drugs, meanwhile, were more efficient, but East Africa was, after all, a latecomer in the field of modern medicine. Moreover, such drugs carried enormous uncertainty and were not easy to decipher.
The advanced pharmaceutical and chemical companies of Europe and America monopolized modern drug patents. East Africa could not simply dismantle and analyze those modern chemical medicines like some knockoff "machine." A tiny discrepancy could lead to a thousand-mile error; lives were at stake.
Thus, modern medicine could only be explored gradually, with no shortcut to