Analysis in brief: Dedicating 2024 as the Year of African Education, the African Union has drawn attention to the continent’s primary developmental need: to increase access to quality education for its children. Demonstrable progress has been made towards this end in the 21st century, but there is much work yet to be done.
Africa needs an educated population for economic growth and sustainability, political stability and to create a brain trust to compete globally. Education is also the only way for the continent to find solutions to crises like climate change. Towards this end, earlier this year, the African Union declared 2024 ‘The Year of African Education.’ To ensure that this goes beyond a slogan, the World Bank, UN agencies and public-private partnerships are focusing on education reform. These endeavours will also support concrete and obtainable means to expand the education system and improve the quality of existing schooling. On 16 June – the Day of the African Child, with its motto of ‘Education for All Children in Africa: The Time is Now’ – the NGO Human Rights Watch noted that legal, policy and practical barriers must be removed to make education available to millions of African children, especially girls, who are denied schooling at present.
Education goals and the means to meet them
Aside from the millions of uneducated children, millions of children who are in schools are not receiving adequate education as they, along with their underpaid teachers, struggle with deteriorating buildings and inadequate basic services and learning tools. Poorer children are hardest hit, because while most African governments now underwrite school tuition fees, they define free education as tuition-free education. Books, uniforms, transportation and many other necessities required by students must be paid by families. Poorer families face the greatest challenges in providing these necessities.
A lack of financing coupled with a shortage of qualified teachers present the barrier to an educated African populace. Africa hosts the largest out-of-school population in the world. At present, 98 million school-aged children do not see the inside of a classroom. For those students who are in school, nearly nine out of 10 cannot read and understand a simple text by the age of 10, testifying to the inadequacies of primary education and the paucity of pre-school options. What is more, the gender gap continues to thwart Africa’s ability to exploit its human capital to the fullest. More boys attend school than girls in most parts of Africa, and girls drop out before completing primary or secondary schools at levels higher than boys. To address the gender imbalance requires cultural and societal changes. For instance, an end to child marriages will lower the number of pregnant school girls, who are forced to drop out of school because of government policies against pregnant students, while those policies should be augmented to provide alternate education opportunities for pregnant girls. Additionally, general education reform must recognise the dangers that discourage scholarship for girls, such as for those in Senegal. Human Rights Watch reports that the high school dropout rate of girls there is driven by fears of sexual violence from teachers, bus drivers and others.
Data source: Brookings Institute
A holistic approach that incorporates pre-primary education is essential to education reform. In 1997, Uganda announced free primary education and, in 2007, free secondary school education – both with the expectation that these measures would make education more attainable. However, students who have the advantage of pre-primary school education are the ones thriving academically, and they are from affluent families who afforded the country’s expensive private pre-schools. Consequently, since Uganda’s education reforms were implemented, human rights groups have documented more and not less inequality in learning, particularly in rural areas.
Gauging recent educational reforms shows real progress
Regardless, efforts in the 21st century to expand education access for African children have achieved positive results throughout the continent. These efforts have seen the percentage of Sub-Saharan African children of school age who are not being educated descend from 44% in 2000 to 29% in 2020. During these decades, the youth literacy rate in Sub-Saharan Africa increased from 66% to 77.5%. Further programmes aimed at the general population have increased the region’s adult literacy rate from 52.6% to 64.3% in those same decades. To further this progress, African nations have committed to rectifying the shortage of teachers. They have agreed to UNESCO’s goal of ensuring that 79% of pre-primary teachers and 85% of primary-level teachers are trained and possess the necessary professional qualifications.
Education policy is set on a country-by-country basis. In 2022, Madagascar introduced one year of compulsory but free pre-primary school education. That year, Zambia began its policy of offering free education from early childhood up to secondary education students in all public schools. In 2023, Sierra Leone reformed its education system by offering one year of pre-primary schooling and 13 full years of free education to all children.
Looking at the education of African children in terms of graduations prompts further hope that education reforms can be effective. Completion rates in Africa between 2000 and 2022 rose from 52% to 69% at primary school level, from 35% to 50% in middle school and from 23% to 33% in upper-secondary education. The UN child welfare organisation UNICEF reports that there are currently more children in school than ever before and that completion rates have increased at all levels. Moving forwards, however, UNICEF and educationalists are advocating a different approach that recognises the importance of pre-school. At least half of national education budgets should be invested in pre-primary education to ensure a solid foundation for academic achievement and to boost levels of education equality. This earliest level of education was found to be essential for the development of a learned individual as they progress through their education and graduate with an ability to solve real-world problems.
Image courtesy: Henry Trotter/WikiCommons
The critical points:
- Africa has made demonstrable and significant progress in growing the number of children in schools and ensuring students complete their primary and secondary level educations
- Africa still faces challenges to enrolling all its children, overcoming educational inequity and guaranteeing the level of female enrolment matches male enrolment
- The importance of pre-primary school education is now recognised in educational policies