NN40, May 2008
Education for Sustainable Development? Or The Sustainability of Education Investment? A Special Issue
A growing demand for secondary and tertiary education ill-adapted to the possibilities of most countries today
By Dakar Pôle, BREDA, UNESCO
[From the Pôle de Dakar, Education for All in Africa, Chapter 6: Financial Sustainability in the development of secondary and tertiary education. Ed]The increasing number of pupils completing primary education today and their desire to continue education beyond this level1combine to place mechanical pressure on post-primary education that few African countries are sufficiently prepared for today. Indeed, most African countries experienced an upward trend in enrolments in secondary and tertiary education, after primary completion, towards the end of the 1990's, but this was not accompanied by the construction of more classrooms and lecture halls and the recruitment of new teachers on the same scale at these levels of education. This has resulted in conditions deteriorating in these levels of education. In addition, the (quite legitimate) accent placed on attaining Universal Primary Education (UPE) has been accompanied in some African countries by poor anticipation of the consequences of the massification of primary schooling on post-primary levels in sectoral programming and/or in the implementation of educational strategies in some sub-Saharan countries.
Today, many arguments are put forward to justify, not only an expansion in universal education to nine or ten years, but also the access of more young people to tertiary education in Africa. Regarding universal education of nine or ten years, some of the arguments, related to the constitution of human capital and economic development, are similar to those expressed several years ago to justify the promotion of UPE insofar, as the social effects after six years of schooling are further enhanced and consolidated with ten years schooling (cf. chapter 7). At the same time, some observers consider that UPE could, in time, carry the seeds of its «own destruction», thus putting the development of the educational pyramid as a whole at risk if it were to turn out that many young people could not go beyond primary education. In addition, today's society, based on information and knowledge, requires each country to have a critical mass of qualified human resources in order to ensure its development. Indeed, tertiary education produces fundamental expertise for the key development sectors (health, education, governance, private sector development, research development).
Will post-primary education in Africa be able to respond positively to a large share of this potential demand as it has done so far? In other words, are these rates of expansion (especially in upper secondary and in tertiary education) appropriate (considering the already unsatisfactory conditions of education and of supervision of students in many countries), realistic as to the economy (considering the low job opportunities available in the productive sectors3 on the one hand, and national development priorities on the other hand), and financially sustainable and possible in real terms (considering the number of places to be created and of teaching staff to be recruited and trained) even if the financial resources were to be available? Such are the questions that this chapter tries to answer.
This chapter draws on earlier work carried out by the Pôle de Dakar with the intention of providing factual information based on the latest available data on rates of expansion in post-primary education and the financial consequences of same per country, in order to enlighten national policy decision-makers as to relevant choices to be made in programming development policies for their education system. The different questions will be broached in turn for general secondary education6in the first part of this chapter and for tertiary education in the second part.
Reference:http://www.poledakar.org/IMG/pdf/Chapitre6_Dak7_en.pdf. This valuable source on the sustainability of education in Africa was drawn to my attention by Norberto Bottani, formerly of CERI, OECD. [Ed.]
Back to full contents of NORRAG NEWS 40.
Download the full issue of NORRAG NEWS 40 in pdf.