EDUCATION: Lessons For Providing Adequate Schooling in Africa

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Joyce Mulama

BERGEN CITY, Norway, Oct 1 2004 (IPS) - Various African governments received a stinging rebuke this week for failing to live up to promises to improve children’s education in their countries.

This took place at a conference held Sep. 29 in Bergen City, southern Norway, which brought together 70 education specialists from Africa, Europe and Asia. Governments, civil society and donor agencies were represented at the meeting, entitled ‘Quality in Education for All’.

The conference was organised by the Centre for International Education at Oslo University College, with the help of the Norwegian ministry of foreign affairs and the World Bank.

Kenyan officials were criticized for neglecting education in rural areas, some of which lack even the most basic of facilities.

“The government is very good in providing lip service to its electorate (but) all you have to do is walk in the rural areas and see the situation for yourself. There are schools there with few or no teachers at all,” Penina Mlama, executive director of the Nairobi-based Forum for African Women Educationalists, told IPS.

“How will these pupils learn if there are no teachers?” she asked. Mlama’s remarks come in the wake of media reports decrying the situation at a school in north-eastern Kenya, where two teachers were discovered to be managing about 2,500 pupils.

Government has acknowledged that teachers are concentrated in cities and towns – but claims that its attempts to deploy them to remote areas have been opposed by certain teachers’ organisations.

“Last year, we started a programme where teachers were to be taken to rural areas, but there has been resistance by some teachers. Nevertheless, we are being very tough on this, and we are going to stand firm,” Kilemi Mwiria, Kenya’s assistant minister of education, said in an interview with IPS.

“By the end of this year, the exercise should be complete,” he added. “There is no way pupils can continue suffering just because teachers do not want to work in certain areas.”

Mwiria cited the introduction of free primary education early last year as evidence of his government’s commitment to education. As a result of this initiative, 1.3 million children who were previously denied access to schools have been enrolled.

However, the programme has also experienced its fair share of teething problems, such as teacher and classroom shortages. Certain schools have more than a hundred pupils to a class, while others are forced to teach students in morning and afternoon shifts. Some children even find themselves being taught outdoors, irrespective of weather conditions.

Various education observers claim that one of the keys to addressing these problems is providing more incentives for people to join and remain in the teaching profession. However, teachers’ salaries already consume about 80 percent of Kenya’s education budget – which accounts for 30 percent of the national budget, according to Mwiria.

At first glance, neighbouring Tanzania appears to have done a better job in attracting people to the teaching profession. Reports indicate that government has increased the number of schools in the country from 11,654 in 2000 to 13,689 – and that 8,000 houses have been built to accommodate teachers under the Primary School Development Plan.

However, certain delegates at the Bergen City conference dismissed these figures as misleading.

“They are…painting a rosy picture which is completely different (on) the ground. It is a fact that there are no schools in the rural and hard-to-reach areas. The education gap between rural and urban areas is so wide,” Titus Tenga, a Tanzanian who is assistant professor at the Centre for International Education, told IPS.

Other education initiatives highlighted at the conference included Burkina Faso’s drive to increase enrollment through teaching students in their home languages – rather than French.

While government claims some success with this programme, sub-Saharan Africa continues to have one of the lowest school enrollment rates in the world.

According to the Paris-based Association for the Development of Education in Africa, 35 percent of the 115 million children around the globe who are not in school live in sub-Saharan Africa.

The deficiencies in education policies of African governments come even though many have committed themselves to pursuing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which include a pledge to have universal primary education in place by 2015.

The eight MDGs were adopted by world leaders in 2000, at the Millennium Summit of the United Nations in New York. The goals provide a framework for tackling poverty and under-development, by dealing with matters such as education, maternal mortality, environmental degradation and hunger.

A good many African governments are also signatories to the Dakar Framework for Action that was adopted at the World Education Forum – held in the Senegalese capital in April 2000. This document, ‘Education for All: Meeting our Collective Commitments’, also commits world leaders to achieving universal primary education by 2015.

In addition, delegates to the forum pledged to achieve equal enrollment of girls and boys by 2005 – this in acknowledgement of the fact that girls continue to be discriminated against as far as access to education is concerned.

In part, this stems from the fact that parents may have a traditional view of the position of men and women in society, and see schooling as inessential for girls’ future roles as wives and mothers. The AIDS pandemic has also created a situation where many girls are forced to abandon their schooling in order to take care of ailing parents or orphaned siblings.