The World Bank Should Study Deteriorating School Systems in Africa

There is no doubt that the World Bank played a major and vital role in enhancing and supporting educational programs in Africa. Some African countries have benefited from the overall educational policies of the Bank and its financing of education-related programs and reinforcing projects in the Continent. However, despite the Bank’s positive endeavor in promoting African education, a dismal failure in African schooling have been witnessed and encountered by many African nations. The Bank must make sure that its educational projects meet success in anticipation, before implementation ever takes place. The Bank must also make sure that local African policies and indigenous initiatives are respected and considered in tandem with its overall educational development package. The Bank, of course, should not superimpose conditionality on African educational reform initiatives. It should, as a matter of historical challenge, encourage African countries to lead their own educational programs based on their needs assessment and place it on the right track, and ultimately gear the specific education programs toward and in favor of economic development.

As per the World Bank recent ‘Overview,’ “promoting education is central to the Bank’s mission of poverty reduction. The World Bank has been helping advance education in developing countries since 1963 and remains today the world’s single most provider of external funding for education.” Furthermore, the Bank claims: “as of March 2004, 87 low-income and middle-income countries were implementing a total of World Bank-financed projects, worth about $9.4 billion.”

To all the good intentions of the Bank, however, some criticisms have been advanced and IDEA likes to share some of the critique for the benefit of its readers by way of creating some form of dialogue with the Bank. The Bank and other international institutions such as UNESCO know very well that since the heyday of independence in the early 1960s, African countries have tried various models and strategies mostly borrowed either from the Western world or proposed and submitted [in some instances superimposed on them] by the world institutions. In due course of the last four decades, African countries have tried the technocratic model, the market model, and the neo-institutional model in which highly skilled manpower for economic transformation were emphasized but all from the perspective of the West and with disregard to the African culture, indigenous knowledge, and most importantly economic development and national interests of respective African countries. On top of this, African countries were torn apart between priority in primary education and higher education, and in some instances, professional education, again proposed by the international institutions.

In the middle of all these confusion, African countries, have failed miserably in forging bridges between education and economic development. While very few countries have witnessed an appreciable degree of educational development, a significant number have experienced deteriorating school systems. A case in point are the ‘schools without desks’ of South Africa (see article on this website), dramatic school dropouts in Ghana, and a collapsing Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia. These examples are not isolated incidents; they are epitome of a grand educational degeneration across the board in the Continent. A serious examination of the problem and rethinking of some educational strategies by the World Bank and other institutions is imperative. The Ghana dropout phenomenon was preceded by lower enrollment in schools in the mid-1980s; the Bahir Dar problem is a continent-wide problem where we have schools without books and libraries and other educational technologies; and the South African experience is a clear testimony that ten years after apartheid the country is still unable to improve the squalid conditions of its indigenous black population.

IDEA has learned that many African countries, despite Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP), have witnessed a lower standard of living coupled by deteriorating schools, increasing rates of illiteracy, and social inequalities engendered by the SAP that made them poverty-stricken nations. IDEA’s findings are corroborated by a joint ILO-UNDP report of 1997 indicating, among other things, that African nations indeed encountered “economic contraction, high unemployment and massive poverty.”

The World Bank should seriously rethink its SAP projects, especially in educational development, in Africa and  must support the African (Economic Commission for Africa) initiative known as African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programs for Socio-economic Recovery and Transformation (AAF-SAP).