Artículos

Por Kevin Watkins

Africa’s education crisis seldom makes media headlines or summit agendas and analysis by the Brookings Center for Universal Education (CUE) explains why this needs to change. With one-in-three children still out of school, progress towards universal primary education has stalled. Meanwhile, learning levels among children who are in school are abysmal. Using a newly developed Learning Barometer, CUE estimates that 61 million African children will reach adolescence lacking even the most basic literacy and numeracy skills. Failure to tackle the learning deficit will deprive a whole generation of opportunities to develop their potential and escape poverty. And it will undermine prospect for dynamic growth with shared prosperity.

If you want a glimpse into Africa’s education crisis there is no better vantage point than the town of Bodinga, located in the impoverished Savannah region of Sokoto state in northwestern Nigeria. Drop into one of the local primary schools and you’ll typically find more than 50 students crammed into a class. Just a few will have textbooks. If the teacher is there, and they are often absent, the children will be on the receiving end of a monotone recitation geared towards rote learning.

Not that there is much learning going on. One recent survey found that 80 percent of Sokoto’s Grade 3 pupils cannot read a single word. They have gone through three years of zero value-added schooling. Mind you, the kids in the classrooms are the lucky ones, especially if they are girls. Over half of the state’s primary school-age children are out of school – and Sokoto has some of the world’s biggest gender gaps in education. Just a handful of the kids have any chance of making it through to secondary education.

The ultimate aim of any education system is to equip children with the numeracy, literacy and wider skills that they need to realize their potential – and that their countries need to generate jobs, innovation and economic growth.

Bodinga’s schools are a microcosm of a wider crisis in Africa’s education. After taking some rapid strides towards universal primary education after 2000, progress has stalled. Out-of-school numbers are on the rise – and the gulf in education opportunity separating Africa from the rest of the world is widening. That gulf is not just about enrollment and years in school, it is also about learning. The ultimate aim of any education system is to equip children with the numeracy, literacy and wider skills that they need to realize their potential – and that their countries need to generate jobs, innovation and economic growth. From South Korea to Singapore and China, economic success has been built on the foundations of learning achievement. And far too many of Africa’s children are not learning, even if they are in school.

The Center for Universal Education at Brookings/This is Africa Learning Barometer survey takes a hard look at the available evidence. In what is the first region-wide assessment of the state of learning, the survey estimates that 61 million children of primary school age – one-in-every-two across the region – will reach their adolescent years unable to read, write or perform basic numeracy tasks. Perhaps the most shocking finding, however, is that over half of these children will have spent at least four years in the education system.

Africa’s education crisis does not make media headlines. Children don’t go hungry for want of textbooks, good teachers and a chance to learn. But this is a crisis that carries high costs. It is consigning a whole generation of children and youth to a future of poverty, insecurity and unemployment. It is starving firms of the skills that are the life-blood of enterprise and innovation. And it is undermining prospects for sustained economic growth in the world’s poorest region.

Tackling the crisis in education will require national and international action on two fronts: Governments need to get children into school – and they need to ensure that children get something meaningful from their time in the classroom. Put differently, they need to close the twin deficit in access and learning.

Why has progress on enrollment ground to a halt? Partly because governments are failing to extend opportunities to the region’s most marginalized children. Africa has some of the world’s starkest inequalities in access to education. Children from the richest 20 percent of households in Ghana average six more years in school than those from the poorest households. Being poor, rural and female carries a triple handicap. In northern Nigeria, Hausa girls in this category average less than one year in school, while wealthy urban males get nine years.

Conflict is another barrier to progress. Many of Africa’s out-of-school children are either living in conflict zones such as Somalia and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, in camps for displaced people in their home country, or – like the tens of thousands of Somali children in Kenya – as refugees. Six years after the country’s peace agreement, South Sudan still has over 1 million children out of school.

The Learning Deficit

Just how much are Africa’s children learning in school? That is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Few countries in the region participate in international learning assessments – and most governments collect learning data in a fairly haphazard fashion.

The Learning Barometer provides a window into Africa’s schools. Covering 28 countries, and 78 percent of the region’s primary school-age population, the survey draws on a range of regional and national assessments to identify the minimum learning thresholds for Grades 4 and 5 of primary school. Children below these thresholds are achieving scores that are so low as to call into question the value-added of their schooling. Most will be unable to read or write with any fluency, or to successfully complete basic numeracy tasks. Of course, success in school is about more than test scores.

It is also about building foundational skills in teamwork, supporting emotional development, and stimulating problem-solving skills. But learning achievement is a critical measure of education quality – and the Learning Barometer registers dangerously low levels of achievement.

The headline numbers tell their own story. Over one-third of pupils covered in the survey – 23 million children – fall below the minimum learning threshold. Because this figure is an average, it obscures the depth of the learning deficit in many countries. More than half of students in Grades 4 and 5 in countries such as Ethiopia, Nigeria and Zambia are below the minimum learning bar. In total, there are seven countries in which 40 percent or more of children are in this position. As a middle-income country, South Africa stands out. One-third of children fall below the learning threshold, reflecting the large number of failing schools in areas servicing predominantly low-income black and mixed race children.

Disparities in learning achievement mirror wider inequalities in education. In Mozambique and South Africa, children from the poorest households are seven times more likely than those from the richest households to rank in the lowest 10 percent of students.

Unfortunately, the bad news does not end here. Bear in mind that the Learning Barometer registers the score of children who are in school. Learning achievement levels among children who are out of school are almost certainly far lower – and an estimated 10 million children in Africa drop out each year. Consider the case of Malawi. Almost half of the children sitting in Grade 5 classrooms are unable to perform basic literacy and numeracy tasks. More alarming still is that half of the children who entered primary school have dropped out by this stage.