The reality about Transforming Education in Africa

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 full title is [To] “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and provide lifelong learning opportunities for all”. In such a short sentence the UN has outlined one of the most important targets that faces humanity today. The reason this is the case is that everything that we achieve as a human race is dependent on the quality of education that our young generations are experiencing today. With such enormous challenges facing us all, the only option we have is to focus heavily on the rapid improvement of education on a global scale, especially in those areas where current systems are falling behind and no longer meeting the real needs of their students.??

By the year 2050 Africa’s population will represent a quarter of the global human population, compared to 10% in 1950. This is a huge proportion of the human potential that we can harness in facing our challenges. It makes absolutely no sense, therefore, to ignore the current state of African education, but rather to embrace the fact that we have an existing challenge on our hands, that of making sure that Africans have access to excellent quality of education from this moment onwards.?

So how do we translate the UN’s SDG 4 into something that is meaningful and workable in Africa? To start off with we need to understand what strong education systems look like and how these are manifested in an African context. Up until now the majority of education systems that have existed in Africa have all been built on ‘western’ ideals. The leadership structures represent western leadership, the curricula are modelled on western curricula, and the teachers and students are largely measured against western benchmarks.

In this article we aren’t going to delve into the reasons for this, but will focus on this as a starting point for discussion. We need to understand what should be in place to make our schools better able to provide students with a lifelong learning attitude, because this is what will ultimately lead to transformation on a sustainable level.?

Let’s look at what good schools provide. And to be clear, a school can only regard itself as ‘Good’ if it is adequately preparing students for their futures. There are three pillars of good schools. They possess opportunities for their teachers to continually develop themselves as professionals so that their ability to educate students is continually being improved. They are properly systematised so that they can operate efficiently, negating the need for teachers to be distracted by operational and technical issues. And finally, they listen to their communities, to make sure that they are harnessing the wisdom and knowledge that exists in all communities about how they know their children need to grow.

Gone are the days where shipping books over from Europe is seen as an enhancement to children’s education, or where well meaning NGOs are building classrooms for children to sit in. These may be important for schools to become operational but neither represents true focus on what it is that students need.?

What the modern student needs is a teacher that will understand them and be dynamic enough to provide them with the tools that they need to become economically viable contributors to the economy and their communities. Today’s students need to exist in schools where there is a strong sense of purpose which is organised and efficient and where expectations are clearly outlined and communicated to them. And they need to understand that their communities are behind them in their learning endeavours.??

If we can achieve progress along these three lines of improvement, and continually be cognizant of the context of each individual school, we stand a chance of transforming education on a small scale at first and rapidly scaling this up as time goes on. In the end we will be left with schools that understand their communities and their students, and operate in tune with both; we will have created a cohort of teachers who value their own learning as well as their students’ learning, and we will have built systems, both on a macro and localised scale that are efficient and effective in facilitating good learning for students. Only then will we be able to honestly say to ourselves that the UN’s SDG4 is on the road to being achieved.?