Educational development in Africa is based on the widely held
belief that formal education is a prerequisite to development. This faith in the ability
of education to contribute to development has its roots in the postwar experience of
Europe and parts of Asia and Latin America, where development was achieved through
industrialization. The industrialization model of development assumes that the inculcation
of a set of skills, attitudes, and values borrowed from the Western world is a necessary
first step. Schooling is a useful, if not ideal, means for this transformation. But
because schools have been promoted as meritocratic institutions, they have encouraged
individual achievement rather than structural changes needed to bring about development. Nevertheless,
the belief that education would bring economic and social benefits to newly independent
African countries validated both African governments' and citizens' investments in
schooling. Many people viewed education as the means to a better life - a perception
supported by the rise of educated Africans to leadership positions at independence.
Education was viewed as a basic right of citizenship and the fruit of independence.
Governments saw education as necessary not only for building modern, productive economies
but also for building national unity. Campaigns to "Africanize" national civil
services by replacing Europeans with newly educated citizens served both economic goals
and popular demands.
Quite apart from the promised economic and political returns, education became
internationally recognized as a "basic human right" along with food, shelter,
and health (see Human Rights in Africa). As development strategies emphasizing "basic
needs" gained currency in the 1970s, governments looked to mass education to help
fight poverty.
Western-modeled education has received strong criticism in parts of Africa for assuming
the centrality of "modern" Western values. It has been called elitist and
neocolonial. Some countries have experimented with alternatives, such as "Education
for Self-Reliance" in Tanzania, and the mass adult literacy programs in Mozambique.
Still, there have been remarkably few efforts to radically restructure educational systems
in Africa. Attention has centered on "reform" rather than restructuring, with
the focus on particular elements of the system, such as curriculum, pedagogy, or teacher
training.
Postindependence Expansion
In independent Africa, ministries of education became responsible for the provision,
management, inspection, and support of preprimary, primary, and secondary schools,
universities, and colleges, including teacher training colleges as well as vocational,
technical, and other training institutions. The education systems inherited from the
colonial era were highly centralized, and African governments kept them centralized in
order to develop a sense of national identity and to ensure control over resource
allocation. In line with the centralized model, many governments made education
compulsory. The duration of compulsory education varies across countries, from five years
in Madagascar to ten years in Gabon. Between six and eight years is most common.
African educational systems expanded tremendously in the first years of independence.
Primary enrollment rose from 11.8 million in 1960 to 20.9 million in 1970 (not including
South Africa and Namibia). Secondary enrollment increased from 793,000 in 1960 to 2.5
million in 1970. This expansion was buoyed by popular demand for education, and by
governments' and international organizations' faith in education as a prerequisite to
economic development. Yet while the expansion opened school doors to segments of the
population who had no previous access to formal education, it was not egalitarian. Most
national educational systems served only about 50 percent of the school-age population
and, like colonial educational systems, typically favored urban populations.
Overall, Africa's adult literacy rates have improved significantly: approximately 56
percent of all adults were considered literate in 1994, compared to only 27 percent in
1970. When looking at female adults, however, only about 46 percent are literate, and that
figure masks a huge range, from a 7 percent female literacy rate in Niger to a rate of 72
percent in South Africa.
The function and structure of African countries' educational systems continue to
reflect their colonial heritage, particularly in their examination and certification
systems, medium of instruction, and school inspection systems. Generally, Francophone
African countries have lower participation rates than Anglophone countries at both primary
and secondary levels. While former British colonies approached universal entry to primary
schooling in the 1980s, in former French colonies only 70 percent of children received at
least one year of primary schooling. Differences in human resources are also evident.
Anglophone African countries have fewer pupils per teacher (less than 40 at primary level)
compared to more than 48 pupils per teacher in Francophone Africa.
Research indicating that educated women had fewer children focused considerable
attention on improving female access to education in the 1970s and 1980s, a period when
both male and female enrollments increased in Anglophone and Francophone African
countries. However, even in 1980 there was still a 23 percent "gender gap"
between male and female enrollment, only slightly better than the figure of 24 percent in
1960. Female enrollment rates in 1980 were the worst in the former Portuguese colonies and
in Italy's former colonies in the Horn of Africa, where on average only 38 percent of the
female age group were in school.
The Sahelian countries (Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, the Gambia, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina
Faso, Niger, and Chad), most of which are former French colonies, perform less well than
the rest of the continent on many education indicators. These indicators include public
expenditure on education as a percentage of either gross national product (GNP) or
government expenditure, female gross enrollment rates, and male and female literacy rates.
Education Reform Under Fiscal Crisis: Quality and Quantity Concerns
In the 1980s economic crisis struck much of Africa. Most countries suffered a decline
in real per capita income, and living standards fell back to (or below) 1960 levels. The
impact of the crisis continues to be felt in education, where many African governments
have been unable to sustain previous levels of funding. Although they have continued to
build schools in order to meet the demand of growing populations, inadequate resources
have led to a decline in the quality of education offered.
African governments have turned to external funding to help finance the recurrent as
well as the capital costs of education. Today it is taken for granted in most African
countries that any type of education reform will require external support. Now that most
countries have undertaken structural adjustment reform programs that limit government
spending on social services such as education, the influence of foreign funding agencies
has grown. Increased external control over the planning and running of Africa's education
systems perpetuates the continent's dependence and poverty.
While per capita expenditure in education has declined seriously since the 1980s,
relative government investment in education remains significant. African governments today
allocate between 12 and 20 percent of the recurrent budget to education; Nigeria spends
only 7 percent of its budget, while Namibia spends 27 percent. For sub-Saharan Africa as a
whole, this equates to 5.5 percent of the GNP - comparable to public expenditures on
education in industrialized countries. Most African governments in recent years have
allocated an increasing proportion of their education budgets to primary and secondary
education, and a decreasing amount to tertiary education. Public expenditure figures for
adult literacy are difficult to ascertain. In most African countries, between 80 and 90
percent of the recurrent education budget goes toward teachers' salaries, leaving very
little for teaching and learning materials. The lack of materials has contributed to the
declining quality of schooling.
The World Conference on Education for All in 1990 resulted in an agreement to increase
participation in quality primary schooling and adult literacy training. Among the African
countries that drew up educational Plans of Action, most are unlikely to reach the
Education for All goals by the year 2000. In fact, since 1980 there has been a decline in
primary education participation rates. For boys of primary school age, 78 percent were in
school in 1993 compared to 90 percent in 1980. Female participation declined less sharply,
with 65 percent of primary-school-age girls in school, compared to 68 percent in 1980.
High annual population growth rates (averaging 2.8 percent per year for sub-Saharan
Africa) account for some of the drop.
Despite the decreased rate of participation and the decline in per capita expenditure
on education, the gender gap at the primary school level in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole
has been halved in the period since the economic crises began, dropping from 23 percent in
1980 to 12 percent in 1993. At the secondary level, growth in enrollment rates has
continued, especially for females. While in 1980 only 10 percent of the female age group
were in secondary school, by 1993 the figure had risen to 22 percent. For males, the
figures increased for the same period from 20 percent to 27 percent. The gender gap at the
secondary level therefore was also halved from 10 percent to 5 percent.
The Evolution of Planning and Policy Formulation Approaches
Approaches to education planning have evolved since the early years of independence,
when planning was in principle guided by an approach referred to as "social
demand." This term became meaningless once governments made education compulsory, and
thus created a legal demand for schooling. In the 1970s African governments experimented
with "manpower planning," reflecting their view that the future was predictable,
and that an education system could be designed to fulfill labor market needs. As
development economists as well as international agencies such as the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank have come to exercise greater influence over African
governments' overall economic planning, investment analyses for education have gained
saliency. In addition, educational policymaking in Africa draws increasingly on the
findings of educational research.
Since the economic crises of the 1980s, critics have reflected on how African education
systems, while expanding quantitatively, have failed to bring about higher employment
rates, more equitable societies, or more accountable governments. The narrowing of
education reform agendas in Africa, and the tailoring of these agendas to fit the
neoliberal economic policies prescribed by foreign assistance agencies, has generated
increasing dissatisfaction. The emphasis on efficiency, critics argue, comes at the
expense of equity and accountability to internal constituencies - in other words, the
citizens, including students.
This critique has in turn generated greater appreciation for the complexity of
educational problems. Poor retention and low achievement in African education systems - as
indicated by high repetition and school drop-out rates - are no longer seen strictly as
"internal efficiency" problems but as symptoms of deeper problems that must be
better understood if education in Africa is to improve.
In recent years a number of African countries have made changes in their historically
top-down, centralized education policy and planning processes. Some of these efforts have
been stimulated by the introduction of multiparty democracy, such as in Benin and Ghana,
or by the transition to majority rule, as in Namibia and South Africa. In addition,
structural adjustment and education sector support programs have placed greater emphasis
on "getting policy right," stimulating greater internal reflection on approaches
to education policymaking.
There is a growing recognition of the need for a more participatory policy formulation
process, involving a broad range of stakeholders. Under the old approaches, education
planners tended to be divorced from school conditions. Indeed, it was considered
desirable, for the sake of objectivity, to avoid close links between planners and the
schools where plans were implemented. Participatory planning, on the other hand, requires
that planners play a more pragmatic role and keep in mind the reality of schooling
processes when they formulate policy. This is proving challenging as Africa's government
education planning units struggle to move from crisis management to long-term strategic
planning. This process involves the setting and weighing of priorities and ongoing
consultation with stakeholders.
As part of this search for alternative policy processes, relationships between
governments and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are changing. In some
situations, governments have solicited the assistance of NGOs to provide services once
provided by the governments themselves, such as preschool education. In other cases,
relations between governments and NGOs have been more contentious.
Opportunities
Exploration of the relationship between education and social-economic change in Africa
is ongoing. This is good news, provided the exploration looks for answers to the questions
"Education for whom?" and "Education for what?"
The growth of a number of African organizations focused on education is a promising
development in this regard. These include regional research networks such as the
Educational Research Network for Eastern and Southern Africa (ERNESA), the Southern
African Comparative and History of Education Society (SACHES), the Forum for African Women
Educationalists (FAWE), and the Association for the Development of Education in Africa
(ADEA). FAWE has 30 national chapters throughout Africa and is focused on supporting
girls' and women's education. ADEA is a partnership between African education ministers
and international funding agencies and aims to coordinate the agencies' assistance to
education in Africa. It now strives to provide space for African-defined diagnoses and
solutions and operates through 11 working groups.