Africa is collapsing into a nightmare of mass illiteracy
from Sunday Observer, December 19, 1999

An outlook on the falling education standard in africa
Education in Africa is in crisis. Commitments made a decade ago by the international community have failed to materialize. The continent is falling deeper into illiteracy and poverty, becoming further marginalised from mainstream economic and democratic developments.

With much fanfare, the 1990 World Conference on Education For All, saw 155 governments promise to ensure that all the world's children would, by the end of the decade, have the opportunity to receive basic education. In the mid-90s, at a United Nations summit at Copenhagen attended by 185 countries, the target date was moved to 2015. This was also made the UN's target date for having ended poverty.

This goal had special reference to Africa, as nearly half the region's 600m people live below the poverty line. But in sub-Saharan Africa, there are more children out of school now than in 1990. The gap between boys and girls remains the same, the rural-urban divide is widening, and most of those in school receive education of bad quality. Without intervention these trends will worsen.

There are now 40m African children - half those in the age group- not attending primary school. By the new target date for full primary education there will be 57m children of primary age not in school. By 2015 three out of four for all the school-age children in the world not attending school will be African, when the continent has only 12% of the world's children.

To be in school in Africa is not quite the experience you would expect. It is an international scandal that at the end of the 20th century, children in Angola, rich, oil-producing country, gather on the grass under a tree with not a book or pencil in sight. In rural Tanzania one book is shared among 30. A recent study of 10 African countries showed that, one in three children was in a classroom with no blackboard. More than a third who start school drop out, and many of those who complete their studies are functionally illiterate.

In Mozambique and Burkina Faso, boys get three years of schooling and girls just two. Less than 10% go on to secondary school. Teachers are under-qualified, overworked and forced to hold down several jobs to ensure their families survive. Pupils are often so undernourished they cannot concentrate on schoolwork.

It was not always like this. In the first 20 years after independence, there was the political will to triple school enrolment and dramatically cut illiteracy. Julius Nyerere, first president of independent Tanzania, spoke for a whole generation when he wrote, "Education is not a way of escaping the country's poverty, it is a way of fighting it." Nyerere, who in those optimistic days spent his spare time translating Shakespeare into Kiswahili, lived to see the great fight being lost, with one-third of African men and two-thirds of women illiterate.

This is a rising trend, with several million extra illiterates added in the past decade.Why have things gone so wrong since 1980s? Among the reasons are: cuts in public spending imposed y the International Monetary Fund; the costs of debt servicing; rising demographic pressure; the impact of Aids; west and central African wars over control of mineral and oil resources. Angola and Sudan have been devastated by just such wars for 20 years or more.

Two decades of economic stagnation have also seen the weakening of the state and a squeeze on social spending. Since 1980 outlays on education fell by one-third per pupil. Across Africa twice as much has been spent on debt servicing as on primary education. In the 1990s, 13 African countries have cut their education budgets under IMF programmes. And lack of commitment to education by governments such as Mali, Zambia, Burkina and Chad have seen education budgets fall to 1%or less of gross domestic product.

One effect of under-investment has been the privatization of education. Education systems are becoming two-tier; children of the poor often cannot go to school. They are also particularly hard hit by Aids as they usually end up being the carers of sick parents or orphaned siblings: There are 8m children in Africa who have lost one or both parents to Aids.

The link between education and the chance of ending poverty, increasing child life expectancy, cutting population growth and improving farm production is beyond question. Oxfam has given the international community a blueprint of what to do in order to bring all African children into primary school. What is now needed is political commitment.

The charity proposes a Compact for Africa to the value of $3.6bn a year over 10 years, offering financial backing for governments serious about improving education. It is proposed that $2.6bn of this come from international aid and debt relief. But $1bn a year would come from African governments themselves, requiring them to redistribute their resources, including the obscene $7bn spend each year on arms.

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