Book Review: Schooling for Learning in Africa (the overview) by Sajitha Bashir, Marlaine Lockheed, Elizabeth Ninan, and Jee-Peng Tan.

Schooling for Learning in Africa (the overview) by Sajitha Bashir, Marlaine Lockheed, Elizabeth Ninan, and Jee-Peng Tan.

When President Kramer Nkrumah came to power he was asked: Are going to face East (as in China, Russia) or West (as in Europe, USA), he responded: I’m not going to face neither East nor West but I’m going to Face Forward.

What a great attitude that the whole of Africa should adopt and live by. And honestly that’s the only direction to face. The title of the book is based on President Kramer’s answer.

I believe there no better way of facing forward than investing in Education and learning, in training the people and giving them the tools to reinvent themselves at any point on the course of their lives.

This very interesting study reflects on the status of education and learning in Sub-Saharan Africa and gives a simple but clear understanding on what the challenges are, where countries are at in relations to them and more importantly what can be done to improve education and learning in Africa.

By help of multiples statistics and charts, the study does a comparative evaluation of learning in Sub-Saharan Africa by dividing countries in 4 groups, number 1 being the group that is doing better (Surprisingly despite its many challenges, my country the DR Congo is not doing as bad as I thought – it’s in Group 2). In general, there is urgent need to raise the learning and education levels across the continent, especially among the rural and poor populations.

Education and learning are the great equalizers as their give everyone the necessary tools to navigate this fast-changing world. While they are not the solutions to all the challenges but they constitute a major pillar in sustainable development.

Three extracts from the Book:
1. “A fundamental premise of this study is that although Sub-Saharan African countries might learn from high-performing and higher-income education systems, they should also look closely at other low- and middle-income countries, especially within Sub-Saharan Africa, that have made progress under conditions similar to or more challenging than their own. Such countries offer particularly relevant sources of inspiration. However, learning from them must not bypass the essential work of local adaptation— including careful consideration of local constraints and opportunities.”

2. “This study identified seven key challenges: large total population, rapid growth of the school-age population, low or stagnant growth of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, high income inequality, high poverty levels, high linguistic diversity, and frequent incidence of conflict. Based on the number of challenges faced in the early to mid-1990s, a country can be said to have faced few challenges, some challenges, or many challenges.”

3. “As this study shows, there is a new wealth of knowledge about how to improve learning in low- and middle-income countries. The challenge is to discover how to introduce and sustain reforms in individual country contexts. Such a process requires a permanent cycle of implementing, evaluating, and reforming for results. Education leaders and professionals in each country must gain mastery over the entire process, at all levels of responsibility, from ministries of education to school principals. If there is one thing to learn from high-performing countries, it is the need to build this kind of capacity to drive sustained gains in learning outcomes. Their experience also shows that countries that adopt a relentless focus on learning outcomes, and align their efforts systematically, are more likely to succeed.”