NN37, May 2006
Special Theme on Education and Training out of Poverty? A Status Report
CHALLENGES AT THE INTERFACE BETWEEN EDUCATION AND POVERTY IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA
By Tim Unwin, Royal Holloway, London
Education clearly matters! It features prominently in all of the ?right places?: in the Millennium Development Goals, in the Commission for Africa?s report, and the Education for All annual monitoring reports. It matters too for young people eager to get on the employment ladder who need to show that they have the ?right? kinds of qualifications for a particular job.However, all too often we fail to ask the really difficult questions about African education. We take it for granted that education is somehow a positive thing. From a ?development? perspective, the most fundamental of all of these questions is whether expanding formal education, as it is currently practised, will actually lead to the enhanced ?development? that most people wish to see in Africa. Will achieving universal primary education and eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education, therefore, actually help Africans achieve their ?development? aspirations, however these are defined? Much of the evidence adduced in support of these arguments is based on macro-level indicators. Countries with high percentages of people in formal education do generally have higher levels of GDP per capita, and this apparent correlation between education and economic growth is used to justify further expenditure in formal education. Yet, we actually know remarkably little about precisely how, at an individual or family level, enhancing the availability of formal education in practice actually lifts people out of poverty. In this brief note, I want to suggest that investments in formal education systems alone will not have the impact on poverty reduction that many people are hoping for, especially in the African context, and that if this is indeed our aim we urgently need to pay attention to three particular issues.
My first point is that however much we invest in formal education systems there will always be those who do not participate. Even where primary education is officially free, many people cannot afford to participate, because they cannot travel to school, they cannot afford the additional costs of uniform or books, they have to look after parents or siblings, they have disabilities, they need to work to buy enough to eat, or their parents fear that they will be raped on the way to school. Poverty will remain in Africa as long as such people are deprived of access to relevant learning opportunities. Indeed, it might just be that economic growth will be the critical factor that actually enables such people to participate in the education system rather than the other way round; growth could help more people to have jobs and therefore be able to afford for their children to participate in educational opportunities that are currently impossible for them. We need much more micro-level research on the precise interplay between education, poverty and economic growth so that appropriate and sound practical policies can be developed and implemented.
Second, we need to explore the extent to which the curriculum and content, at all levels of the educational system, are actually relevant to the needs of African people in reducing poverty. One of the undoubted reasons why poor people do not participate in education is that either they, or their parents, see little value in it. It fails to provide them with the skills or expertise that they think can make a significant difference to their lives. Many African education systems are thus still broadly based on those of the colonial and imperial powers who politically dominated the continent a century ago. Recommended texts for junior secondary school children in Ghana today thus include R.D. Blackmore?s Lorna Doone, Charles Dickens? Nicholas Nickleby and Henry James? The Turn of the Screw. If only young people in the UK were encouraged to read other books on the list, such as Chinua Achebe?s Things Fall Apart! A challenging question that therefore needs to be asked is the extent to which African formal educational curricula really do provide for the practical development needs of the continent?s young people. What are the content and skills that could beneficially be introduced to help young African people to be empowered?
Finally, there is a crucial role for new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in helping to deliver these agendas. To date, far too much emphasis in Africa has been placed on giving people ICT skills rather than on using the potential of ICTs to transform their learning experiences. There are excellent examples of educational radio and TV programmes that provide high quality and relevant content (see for example Soul City?s work in South Africa, but as yet far too little truly African content has been developed across the continent. Computers are indeed being introduced into schools, teacher training college and universities, but until African communities are able to develop substantial amounts of relevant local content themselves, the true potential of this resource will remain to be fulfilled. ICTs have the ability to reach those beyond the limits of the formal education system, providing out-of-school youth, those with disabilities, and people of all ages who wish to learn new skills, the possibility to gain ?any-time any-place any-speed? education. Truly to deliver on education for all, we thus need to focus not only on formal education systems, but to use ICTs to empower those whom most existing global initiatives are leaving far behind. Only then will we be able to claim that we are using education to make a significant difference to ?poverty?.
Education does matter, but not only for economic purposes. We need to provide the opportunities for everyone to learn things that can enable them better to fulfil their lives.