While school enrolment has expanded dramatically over the past 40 years in most of the developing world, this has not been the case in many African countries. Unable to stem the steep downward enrolment trends that became manifest in the economic crisis years of the 1980s, these countries in the late 1990s have disturbing educational profiles: only half of their children are going to primary school, adult literacy rates are below 40 per cent, and over 50 per cent of women are illiterate. Such a profile has grave implications for Africa's development. "Only through education," President Abdou Diouf of Senegal told an October 1997 meeting of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), "will the continent and its sons and daughters be able to meet the demands and challenges of the 21st century."
As a first step toward a long-term solution to the continent's education problems, the UN System-wide Special Initiative on Africa is placing a major emphasis on facilitating basic education for all African children over a 10-year period. It has identified 15 countries with enrolment rates of less than 50 per cent (Angola, Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal and Somalia) as the targets of its initial focus. In these countries, enrolment of boys ranges from 23 to 49 per cent, but of girls, from only 13 to 31 per cent.
Photo : UNICEF / Cindy Andrew
Action plans are being prepared for each country, analyzing the fundamental constraints on expanding access to basic education. The lead agencies of the Initiative's education component -- the World Bank and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) -- along with the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) as cooperating agencies, will then help the countries prepare sector investment programmes (SIPs) with ambitious targets for progress toward universal primary education. The countries will also be supported in efforts to mobilize resources for the implementation of these programmes.
The Special Initiative is also working at the sub-regional level to identify the major impediments to achieving basic education for all. Workshops on constraints, such as the financing of teachers' salaries and languages of instruction, are being organized with a view to devising sustainable solutions.
The objectives of the Special Initiative's education component are directly linked to the outcome of the 1990 World Conference on Education for All, held in Jomtien, Thailand. There, countries pledged to take the necessary steps to provide primary education for all children and to massively reduce adult illiteracy. While the record since Jomtien has been uneven across sub-Saharan Africa, the region in fact had made faster progress over the 1960s and 1970s in increasing primary enrolment than Asia and Latin America, tripling the number of children in primary school.
A majority of sub-Saharan African countries, uniquely among developing nations, now have a smaller proportion of their children in school than they did in 1980.
But this progress was reversed in the 1980s under the weight of structural adjustment. Net and gross enrolment ratios fell to such an extent that in 1992, only about half of sub-Saharan Africa's primary school-age population was in school. According to a study prepared by Professor Christopher Colclough of the University of Sussex for the ADEA meeting in Dakar last October, a majority of sub-Saharan African countries -- "uniquely among developing nations" -- now have a smaller proportion of their children in school than they did in 1980.
"If you don't have educated people, you cannot develop," says Mr. Henri Lopes, UNESCO's Deputy Director-General for External Relations. "Basic education is necessary even to make progress in such areas as health and population."
Among the myriad problems plaguing education in Africa is the low quality of schooling in much of the region, with overly large class sizes and the average number of students per teacher higher than in any other world region except South Asia. "Teachers are often unqualified, teaching aids are few and textbook provision is desperately poor," says Professor Colclough. As a result, learning achievement is low. There are unequal opportunities for rural children and the urban poor, and the gender gap yawns ever wider, with female literacy rates of below 30 per cent in 19 sub-Saharan countries.
In an interview with Africa Recovery, Mr. Mamadou Ndoye, Senegal's deputy minister for basic education and national languages, also pointed to financial constraints. "In today's context of structural adjustment, insufficient material and financial resources" have had a "very severe impact" on improving basic education. He added that the cost of the educational model which Senegal inherited from the French "has not been adjusted to our resources." And given the rate of population growth, schools have been adapted neither to the demand for education, nor to the needs of developing societies, Mr. Ndoye commented.
But according to Mr. Jean-Louis Sarbib, World Bank Vice-President for Africa (see interview), inefficient use of existing resources is more of a problem than an absolute shortage of funds. External partners will never be able to supply more than 10 to 15 per cent of the education budget in any country, he told Africa Recovery.
"It is clear the needs in the education field in Africa are enormous, but it is also clear that [resources] need to come from the countries themselves," he said. "For a very long time, African governments have been saying education is a priority. Yet their budgets were in such disarray that they were not able to allocate the resources to education."
Better performance and better management of African economies as a whole means that more resources can be devoted to education and health than has been the case in the past, Mr. Sarbib argued. Absorptive capacities have to improve, and in terms of gaining better budgetary allocations for education, it helps if the ministries of finance and education become "allies." There is also a widely acknowledged need for greater donor coordination and for African government "ownership" of educational development, said Mr. Richard Sack, executive secretary of the Paris-based ADEA. Founded in 1988 as Donors to African Education, ADEA now is led by a steering committee of 10 African education ministers and 18 donor agency representatives.
Photo : Sebastião Salgado
"The best way of working together to improve education is under the eyes and impetus" of African ministers of education, said Mr. Sack. ADEA has been working to foster a process which empowers African ministries of education and strengthens the policy dialogue with donors to gain agreement on the need for country-led coordination of donor assistance.
Mr. Sack noted there has been an evolution in African governments' approach to basic education. In the past, he said, "politicians didn't have a lot of incentive" to favour basic education because "primary school students don't riot if you cut their scholarships." But such views have changed in the post-Jomtien period, helped by a "professionalization" of the ministerial corps and the priority placed on the sector by donors. The ADEA mechanism, which has been used for "real live coordination" among donors, has provided a useful forum for the Special Initiative on Africa to present and mobilize support for its education component from African ministers.
As the lead agencies of the Initiative's education component, the World Bank and UNESCO are working with other external partners on helping African countries achieve a consensus on the reforms required to boost low enrolment rates by defining the major constraints on basic education.
The Initiative is also working to identify what kinds of support can be provided by donors to help develop sustainable sector investment programmes (SIPs) at the country level. Alongside a special $7 mn trust fund set up by Norway to support the formulation of SIPs, the Bank has allocated resources under its administrative budget for this purpose and UNDP is also providing support.
Several countries, meanwhile, are moving ahead with formulation of education SIPs.
Education SIPs are also under way or in preparation in Guinea, Ghana, Mauritius, and Malawi.
In addition to encouraging national leadership and a coordinated donor approach, stronger partnerships with "all the key players" -- including parents, students, civil society and teachers unions -- need to be built in support of education, says Mr. Armoogum Parsuramen, former Minister of Education of Mauritius and now an education policy specialist and basic education coordinator of the Initiative for the World Bank.
Representatives of these groups and ministries of education and finance took part in a workshop organized by the Bank within the framework of the Special Initiative in January in Dakar, Senegal, on the financing of primary teachers' salaries -- an issue identified as one of the key constraints to improving basic education.
Other future sub-regional workshops will focus on:
"Under the joint leadership of the World Bank and UNESCO," says Mr. K.Y. Amoako, Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa and one of the co-chairs of the Initiative steering committee, "substantial progress and synergy" have been demonstrated in the education component of the Initiative. UN system agencies agree, however, that the real test of the Initiative's impact is on the ground, at the country level.
Commenting on his own country's
experience, Minister Ndoye of Senegal said, "We never shared the views
of those who looked at the Initiative with pessimism or skepticism, and
wondered where the resources would come from. We rather asked what we could
make of this opportunity provided by the UN to mobilize people around the
priority of basic education. And that is what we tried to do, to take the
ideas at the root of the Initiative -- a strong mobilization behind the
development of education, and donor coordination -- and see how they could
be applied in support of our own nationally defined policies."
"Donors had a habit of defining our priorities for us, but more and more we have achieved a better sharing of roles and responsibilities," Mr. Ndoye said.
This is a key point, adds Mr. Parsuramen. "We cannot substitute for national leadership -- we can only work as full-fledged partners. The challenge is for the governments to take the lead and get it done, and the UN Special Initiative on Africa can be considered a good opportunity for that."
**Box 1**
The UN Special Initiative on Africa stresses the need to improve opportunities for those most likely to be deprived of education -- in particular girls and women. Nineteen sub-Saharan African countries have female literacy rates below 30 per cent and less than half of 6-11 year old girls are estimated to be in school. These negative trends persist, despite the overwhelming evidence that investing in female education has a high return -- in greater earning ability for families, reduced fertility and infant mortality, and increased levels of public health.
UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank are all actively working to promote greater access to education for girls. One interesting effort is collaboration with the Forum of African Women Educationalists (FAWE), a pan-African non-governmental organization based in Nairobi, Kenya. Dr. Mamphele Ramphele, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, led a FAWE delegation for a meeting with the World Bank in January.
She explained that FAWE is "a statement made by African women about their determination to have women drawn into policy development, implementation and evaluation at the national and international levels."
She said, "Africa has failed to develop in the way it could have, given the resources directed at it, because it left out an important sector. FAWE is tackling a major constraint to development; our mission is to ensure that women and girls are an integral part of the intellectual and technical resource base of Africa."
The idea for FAWE came from five African women education ministers who came together in the early 1990s with shared views on the poor status of female education in Africa and the slow progress towards the goal of education for all children. They agreed that to achieve universal education, political commitment was necessary. But equally important was the process of identifying obstacles to female participation and developing solutions. After gaining the support of 19 other senior women policy-makers in education, FAWE was launched in 1992.
Today, FAWE is working through 31 national chapters across the continent in advocacy and information dissemination on female education, strategic resource planning, and strengthening female leadership at the tertiary level. It also provides small grants for innovative pilot initiatives in female education.
Dr. Eddah Gachukia of Kenya, FAWE's executive director, said the organization today is "a strong force to move education policy forward and to reach beyond advocacy to ensure expanded access for all to education." World Bank Vice-President Jean-Louis Sarbib agrees. "Since 1992, FAWE has done a lot to sensitize from inside Africa the male ministries of education about the importance of girls' education and to achieve partnerships for the effective use of resources. That is no small accomplishment."
**Box 2**
Mozambique, which emerged from a destructive civil war only six years ago, is drawing up a strategy under the UN System-wide Special Initiative on Africa to achieve universal primary education by 2006 from an enrolment of just 50 per cent today. The World Bank and UNESCO are teaming up with bilateral donors and other UN agencies to provide technical support and other resources.
With 2.2 million children of primary school age, Mozambique's strategy aims at increasing enrolment to 86 per cent in five years and to 100 per cent during the 10-year Special Initiative. According to UNDP Resident Representative Emmanuel Dierckx de Casterle, about 66 per cent of school-age boys and 33 per cent of the girls are actually in school today in a country where most schools -- up to 80 per cent in some areas -- were destroyed during the 17-year civil war.
After the war ended in 1992, Mozambique had to resettle more than 4 million displaced people before it could concentrate on economic reconstruction. Many Mozambicans had little access to basic education or health. The goal of universal education seemed hopeless, Mr. de Casterle said, in light of other pressing problems, such as repairing all types of infrastructure.
When Mr. de Casterle arrived in Maputo in 1996 -- the year of the Special Initiative's launching -- he set about establishing a dialogue with the government, African ambassadors and donor countries. He soon discovered that Mozambique could utilize the Initiative particularly for the education and health sectors, which are critical to the country's rehabilitation. A series of discussions and contacts with the relevant ministers followed.
The ministers took the Initiative "very seriously," but had reservations about committing Mozambique, already 60-70 per cent reliant on foreign aid, to further dependency, Mr. de Casterle told Africa Recovery. However, the UN country team helped to resolve a number of problems and produce a strategy tailored to the specific needs of Mozambique. At one particular meeting, the government, the UN team and representatives of donor countries examined how best to harmonize their various programmes.
Resource mobilization efforts in the country led to a consultation on education, organized by UNESCO and held in Paris in July 1997, that generated bilateral support for government efforts to place primary education firmly within a framework for overall development. The results were excellent, commented Mr. de Casterle, who accompanied the government team to Paris. Mozambique is now working with a coalition of UN agencies and donor countries to finalize strategies for curriculum review, girls' education, distance learning, and other reforms and innovations to enable more children -- particularly girls -- to go to school. The government has also increased its budgetary allocation for education by 27 per cent.
The Mozambican experience has inspired the authorities in neighbouring Zimbabwe to request the UN Resident Coordinator to liaise with UNESCO towards a similar consultation on their education sector strategy.
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Representatives from seven Sahelian countries -- Burkina Faso, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Chad, Mali, Niger and Senegal -- met in Dakar, Senegal, from 18-21 January to exchange ideas on ways to reverse declining or stagnating trends in primary school enrolment, focusing on the recruitment and training of teachers and financing of their salaries.
The World Bank-sponsored workshop was among the first of a series of subregional activities planned within the education component of the UN Special Initiative on Africa to address constraints on achieving universal primary education.
Photo: UNDP
According to Mr. Birger Fredriksen, the World Bank's Africa Regional Technical Director for Human Resources, these countries were targeted because school enrolment has remained virtually unchanged for the past 15 years. This is a dangerous situation, warned Mr. Fredriksen, because "no country has been able to develop with a majority of its population illiterate."
Mr. Djimangar Dadnadji, Chad's director-general at the Ministry of National Education, said his country faces an uphill task unless a decisive break is made with an educational system in which the state funds everything from teachers' salaries to housing and school materials.
Mr. Dadnadji attributed Chad's increased enrolment rate to "spontaneous schools" created voluntarily by civil servants who fled the war in Ndjamena to the rural areas. The schools are staffed by "community teachers" paid by parents' contributions.
Expressing the Bank's frustration that enrolment is not rising in spite of substantial donor assistance, Mr. Fredriksen said, "We have difficulty in countries with low enrolment like Mali, which has had rates of around 30-35 per cent since the 1970s. We have come to a stage where we cannot lend them any more money because they cannot afford to recruit the teachers that they need to put into the classrooms." It is not the Bank's role to finance the recruitment of primary school teachers, he said.
In an interview, the UNESCO Director for Basic Education, Ms. Aïcha Bah Diallo, a former minister in Guinea, expressed optimism that the situation will change under the UN Special Initiative on Africa, which coincides with the launching of the African Education Decade by African leaders. "Under the Special Initiative, it is African governments themselves that will specify their needs. Donors will only accompany them with financial or technical support. What was wrong in the past was that they were told 'do this'," she said.
A positive sign, Ms. Diallo noted, is "home-generated" ideas by several Sahelian countries to increase the number of primary school teachers by tapping the growing reservoir of jobless graduates, reallocating civil servants to teaching and transferring teachers from secondary to primary schools.
The UN Initiative's success will depend on basic education becoming an affair of all stakeholders, said Mr. Armoogum Parsuramen, the World Bank's education policy specialist. "That's why we tried to bring several categories of people to this meeting -- trade unionists, parents' associations and others," said the former Mauritian education minister.
The involvement of the African Federation of Pupils and Students' Parents (FAPE) was one example at the Dakar workshop. FAPE, which has branches in 13 francophone countries, suggested the creation of a fund for the development of education and training, stressing that since an educated populace is of benefit to the entire society, contributions should come from all sectors, including parents, governments and private business.
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