Africa’s Education Crisis: In School But Not Learning

2 novembre 2017 Entry Filed under: Blogs - Étiquettes: Africa education, Baza, Baza Education, Eunice Mawussi

It’s unfathomable that of Africa’s nearly 128 million school-aged children, 17 million will never attend school. Perhaps even more shocking is the fact that another 37 million African children will learn so little while in they are in school that they will not be much better off than those kids who never attend school. As a consequence, the prognosis for Africa’s future economic growth and social development is poor.
These numbers come from the new Africa Learning Barometer created by the Center for Universal Education at Brookings. Our objective was to identify a baseline assessment of learning in Africa by using the existing data. Using data from regional examinations, such as Programme d’Analyse des Systèmes Educatifs de la CONFEMEN (PASEC)and Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) , and national assessments of 4th or 5th grade students, the barometer provides a picture of the state of learning for 28 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In each of these assessments, we identified a cutoff point at which students scoring below that level were learning so little that they had no value added to their education. While these tests do not even begin to scratch the surface on the values, knowledge and skills that children should learn in school to live healthy, productive lives, they do provide some basic indications about the state of learning in the region.
Justin W. van Fleet

Entry Filed under: Blogs. Posted in  Blogs Étiquettes: Africa education, Baza, Baza Education, Eunice Mawussi.