Education," wrote Julius Nyerere, "is not a way of escaping the country's poverty. It is a way of fighting it." Those words of the late president of Tanzania captured the mood of a whole generation of post-independence African leaders who saw education as the key to human development, democracy and prosperity. But four decades on, as governments prepare for the World Forum on Education for All, to be held in Dakar, Senegal, in late April, educational deprivation threatens to consign Africa to an increasingly marginal and impoverished future.
Photo: UN
Africa Recovery / Betty Press
The Dakar conference will review progress achieved since the World Conference on Education for All in Thailand in 1990, when over 155 governments pledged to ensure that all people would have access to a good quality basic education by the end of the decade. The record in sub-Saharan Africa speaks for itself. Over half of all women and one-third of men in sub-Saharan Africa enter the new millennium in a state of illiteracy -- and the numbers are going up. Meanwhile, over 40 million children of primary school age -- almost half of the total age group -- are out of school. Millions more drop out before having gained basic literacy skills. Across much of the region, the basic education infrastructure is in a dilapidated state, providing a poor quality learning environment that produces poor results and the developing world's lowest rate of transition to secondary and higher education.
At the UN Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995, governments established universal primary education as one of the key human development targets for 2015. But if current trends continue, Africa will miss this target by a wide margin. It is now the only developing region in which the number of children out of school is going up. By 2015, there will be around 57 million out of school. These children will account for 12 per cent of their global age group, but for three-quarters of all children worldwide not in school.
The human costs of the education crisis in Africa are incalculable. Each additional year of primary education for a country's girls is associated with an 8 per cent decline in the national child mortality rate. Education also helps generate the patterns of inclusive growth on which poverty reduction depends, and it provides the foundations for accountable governance.
There is no shortage of culprits for the education crisis in Africa. Protracted civil wars in countries such as Angola and Sudan and bad education policies have contributed. But under-financing is perhaps the single most pervasive problem. Economic stagnation and rapid population growth has reduced real spending per pupil by over 20 per cent since 1980, with devastating implications for the quality of education. One recent study covering 10 African countries found that one-third of children were sitting in classrooms without blackboards.
Misplaced domestic priorities are partly responsible for such problems. Governments such as Zambia, Chad and Mali spend less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product on basic education. Military budgets continue to claim a larger share of public revenue than primary school budgets. But international factors also have contributed. Contrary to donor pledges, aid budgets for Africa have been cut by $3 bn in the 1990s. Meanwhile, debt servicing has been absorbing twice as much revenue as investment in primary education. There are half-a-million Zambian children out of school, but for every $1 the country spends on primary education another $6 are spent on debt servicing.
Structural adjustment programmes have also borne heavily on education budgets. Around 14 African countries have cut per capita spending on education under programmes proposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, in some cases -- such as Zambia, Zimbabwe and Niger -- by more than 3 per cent per annum.
When public investment collapses, the quality of education inevitably deteriorates -- and households pick up the bill in the form of school charges. Private spending by households now covers more than two-thirds of total education spending in countries such as Mali and Tanzania. This process of privatization by default has placed education beyond the means of the poorest households, with girls the first to suffer as financial pressures bite.
The education picture in Africa is not entirely bleak. Over the past two years Uganda has increased school enrolments by over 2 million by withdrawing school fees and, with donor support, massively increasing public spending. Far-reaching reforms also have been initiated in Mozambique and Burkina Faso.
The problem is that, even with good policies in place, many African governments lack the financing capacity to achieve the 2015 goal of universal primary education. What makes this situation so disconcerting is that universal primary education is an affordable option for the international community. Total costs are estimated at around $3.6 bn a year for 10 years -- equivalent to about two days' worth of global military spending.
The Dakar conference provides a real opportunity to back the international community's commitment to the development goal of universal primary education with resources. This is why Oxfam is proposing to the conference a Compact for Africa. Under the compact, $2 bn would be provided through increased aid and debt relief. These resources would help to underpin and accelerate national education programmes. But the compact also would provide a focal point for mobilizing the political will and the partnerships between governments and civil society needed to overcome what is arguably the greatest single human development challenge facing us at the start of the 21st century.
