Education for all by 2015 : a utopia for Africa ?
Letter n°15, June 2004

There are 115 million children in the world today without access to education and close to 40% of them, for the most part girls, are found in Africa.

During the Jomtien Conference, in 1990, countries agreed to insure basic education for all by the year 2000.

 

According to UNESCO, human rights and human dignity have regressed in much of the world. This translates into an increase in poverty, violence, war and terrorism, and a decrease in tolerance, dialogue, democracy and good governance. The advances in science and technology, it adds, have led to extraordinary progress, “but with dramatic inequalities between peoples, countries and continents.” It concludes that this situation confronts us with new challenges linked to the right to education and it makes the old challenges all that more difficult.

A recent study published by the “Institut de recherche sur l’éducation” (IREDU), in France, shows that the education of children remains problematic, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where the picture as a whole seems to remain the same as in 1990. This study aims to consider the realism of the objective of education for all in light of the recent initiatives supported by the World Bank.

An initial finding of the work reveals that the politics of structural adjustment have not led to the virtuous circle expected, but rather have led to a “vicious circle”. The promise of Jomtien was not met, and in fact the numbers of uneducated children tended to increase during the 1990’s.

A second finding considers that the “existence of great diversity in African educational systems permits the supposition that applying the same recipe within such diversity could lead to upsetting educational politics, disadvantaging old politics which might be just as efficient as those advocated by the Bank.”

Before what he calls “the reductive and unduly strict prescriptiveness of the World Bank regarding changes in the area of education”, the author of the study, Nadir Altinak, underlines a strong paradox; given that sub-Saharan Africa is a very diverse region why should we impose homogeneous changes on all these countries, without taking into account their past politics and the differences which characterize their institutional structures?

Another paradox expresses itself in the contrast between the objectives of the Bank, on the one hand to make their projects profitable and on the other hand to fight against poverty. In effect, it is said, the World Bank’s economists are forced to obtain “results” when the institution puts up money. “This explains why the Bank has always been skeptical when concerned with financing teachers’ salaries. In effect, building a school was more “profitable” than paying bureaucrats. Thus, the weakness in educational quality in Africa is not surprising, above all when one observes the constant erosion in teacher’s salaries. This “results-oriented” logic, typical of all banks, will never permit a way out of the short term/long term dilemma: like the classic opposition between bureaucrats and business managers, the former prefer long-term success.”

Moreover, in the majority of African counties the leaders or more often, the leader, never feels really pressed to see the objective of education for all attained. “We touch here, it is said, the thorny problem of corruption and the absence of democracy. The countries of the North have never really worried about whether an African government was corrupt or not, except when the western media seized upon some embarrassing affair. But lets not delude ourselves, in these cases, “bilateral aid” did not disappear, it was simply disguised.”

Quite pessimistic and doubtful that the objective of education for all by 2015 is achievable, the study proposes in other respects “to make planning in education popular once more, but this time over the long term”, in order to study what progress has been achieved and what developments are necessary. The principle change that must be made, it is thought, would be to “change the administrative apparatus from top to bottom”. Certainly, it is mentioned, massive dismissals or an introduction of greater bureaucratic flexibility will not result in the problem being resolved. Rather one should ask oneself how to better form the personnel and to motivate them to produce more, to carry out their functions.


References

UNESCO (2004) International Meeting of experts on educational politics and evaluation of education. Paris. 19 – 23 April.
Altinok, Nadir. (2004). “The World Bank and education in Sub-saharan Africa. Big words for small deeds?” Les Cahiers de l’IREDU. Paris :CNRS
http://www.u-bourgogne.fr/IREDU/cahier64.pdf

Verspoor, Adriaan, Angel Mattimore and Patrick Watt (2001). “A Chance to Learn: Knowledge and finance for education in sub-Saharan Africa” Washington D.C. World Bank.
http://www.unicef.org/sowc04/sowc04_regional_issues.html

See also Issues 1 and 2 of “Vues d’Afrique”
http://www.cifedhop.org/publications/perspectives/
" Education for all is not possible ", states the Nigerian minister.
For Fabian Asuji, the Nigerian Minister of Education, the objective of eradicating illiteracy in the country by 2015 is “unfeasible”.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200405130597.html