Equipping Africas

Primary School Learners

for the Future
Constance Berry Newman
 Equipping Africas
Primary School Learners
for the Future
Constance Berry Newman

ISBN: 978-1-61977-398-1

Cover photos, from top left to bottom right: Students at Miga Central Primary School in Jigawa State, Nigeria,
photo credit: Global Partnership for Education/Kelley Lynch; Schoolchildren in Sierra Leone, photo credit:
bobthemagicdragon/Flickr; Students at Janbulo Islamiyya Primary School in Jigawa State, Nigeria, photo
credit: Global Partnership for Education/Kelley Lynch; Students at a BMCE Bank Foundation-supported
Medersat.com school system participate in class, photo credit: BMCE Bank Foundation.

This report is written and published in accordance with the Atlantic Council Policy on Intellectual
Independence. The authors are solely responsible for its analysis and recommendations. The Atlantic
Council and its donors do not determine, nor do they necessarily endorse or advocate for, any of this
reports conclusions.

November 2017
About the Atlantic Council Africa
Centers Education Initiative

With generous support from BMCE Bank of Africa, the Atlantic Councils Africa Center set out to assess the
current state of primary education in Africa. While for many years this issue has rested with the international
development community, the Center sought to use its convening poweran ability to reach into academia,
the non-profit and private sector worlds, and the policy sphereto raise the profile of the issue, given the
centrality of education policy to solving the economic and security challenges presented by Africas youth
bulge. In particular, the Center focused on innovative examples of countries and organizations working
to set up quality primary education institutions, often in the private sector, and asked whether these
successful models could be replicated and scaled. This report is the initiatives final product.

Atlantic Council Vice President for Research and Regional Initiatives and Africa Center Director Dr. J. Peter
Pham travelled with Africa Center Senior Fellow and former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs
Constance Berry Newman to Morocco in 2014 to observe this phenomenon up close at the BMCE Bank
Foundations Medersat.com school system. Newman, who also served as assistant administrator for Africa
at the US Agency for International Development from 2001 to 2004 and was President George W. Bushs
personal G8 representative on Africa, is exceptionally well-suited to head this study.

In February 2016, the Atlantic Council convened a high-level workshop on its draft report, seeking input
from a diverse array of practitioners, policymakers, and academics with experience in primary education
in Africa. The comments, conversations, and data from those two days have been integrated into the final
report.

The Atlantic Council is grateful for the visionary generosity of the Chairman of BMCE Bank of Africa,
Othman Benjelloun, for supporting the Africa Centers Education Initiative, as well as the hospitality and
encouragement of Dr. Lela Mezian Benjelloun, Chair of the BMCE Bank Foundation, one of whose principal
missions is promoting education integrated into sustainable development.

Thanks, too, to Dr. Brahim Benjelloun-Touimi, Group Executive Managing Director of BMCE Bank of Africa,
for the assistance given by him and his team.
Table of Contents

List of Acronyms................................................................................................................................ 1

Executive Summary.......................................................................................................................... 3

Introduction.......................................................................................................................................... 4

Background: The Evolution of Educational Goals................................................................. 6

Performance: The Current State of Primary Education in Africa.................................... 10

Key Challenges.................................................................................................................................... 14

Key Strategies for Providing Effective Primary Education................................................ 18

Conclusion............................................................................................................................................ 23

Case Studies........................................................................................................................................ 24

About the Author............................................................................................................................... 31

 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

List of Acronyms

AAI Africa-America Institute

AEC African Economic Community
BMCE Banque Marocaine du Commerce Extrieur
BREDA UNESCO Office in Dakar and Regional Bureau for Education in Africa
CAR Central African Republic
CEPD Primary school leaving certificate (Certificat dtudes du premier degr)
EFA Education for All
EFA FTI Education for All Fast-Track Initiative
GDP Gross Domestic Product
GTZ German Technical Cooperation Agency
IFI International Financial Institutions
ILO International Labor Organization
ICT Information and Communications Technology
IMF International Monetary fund
LDC Least Developed Countries
MDGs Millennium Development Goals
MNC Multinational Corporation
NGO Non-Governmental Organization
ODA Official Development Assistance
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
SACMEQ Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Measuring Educational Quality
SDG Sustainable Development Goals
SEIA Secondary Education in Africa
SOE State of Education
SSA sub-Saharan Africa
TI Transparency International
UIS Institute for Statistics
UN United Nations
UNECA United Nations Economic Commission for Africa
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
UNICEF United Nations Childrens Fund
UPE Universal Primary Education

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE
Executive Summary
E
ducation remains a crucial component
of economic development and poverty
reduction. Primary education, in particular,
provides students with the literacy,
numeracy, and communication skills necessary to
continue education at a more advanced level and
to participate in the local and global economies.
Further, these benefits extend beyond individuals,
as increases in education tend to benefit the broader
community.
Despite its importance for development, primary
education in Africa remains in a persistent crisis. Of
the sixty-one million primary school age children
out of school globally in 2016, over half were in sub-
Saharan Africa.1 In addition to low enrollment, the
quality of primary education in Africa is some of the
poorest in the world. Far too many African learners
drop out of primary school before completion, or
finish without having obtained the skills necessary
for success at higher educational levels. African
primary schools, especially those in rural areas,
lack funding, materials, qualified teachers, and
pedagogies that make learning accessible to the
student body.
This report gives an overview of the state of primary
education on the continent, detailing the evolution
of primary education in the post-independence
period, before discussing the key challenges
impeding better learning among African primary
students.
This report identifies the following key strategies for
improving primary education in Africa:
1 Return to educational basics. Too many
African students leave primary school without
an adequate acquisition of reading, writing,
and mathematics. These skills are a crucial
foundation for continued learning. Curricula and
pedagogy should be recalibrated to emphasize
these basic skills.
2 Teach in mother tongue. Despite wide
acceptance of the benefits of mother-tongue
instruction, many African primary learners are
1 Jenny Perlman Robinson and Rebecca Winthrop, Millions Learning: Scaling Up Quality Education in Developing Countries,
Brookings Center for Universal Education, April 2016, 8.
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still taught in dominant, unfamiliar languages.
Instruction exclusively in the dominant language
both impedes the apprehension of core primary
concepts and exacerbates inequalities within
national education systems.
3 Invest in teacher training. While enrollment rates
in Africa have increased, requisite employment
of qualified teachers has not. The shortage of
qualified primary teachers remains a key driver
of the continents education crisis. Efforts should
focus on both training and retaining qualified
primary teachers.
4 Demand good governance and transparency.
African educational systems remain susceptible
to corruption at both national and subnational
levels. Efforts to improve the transparency of
budget allocations, as well as capacity building
for staff responsible for managing budgets, are
critical to ensuring efficient management of
budgets.
5 Incorporate technology, when appropriate.
When correctly introduced to complement
strong existing educational foundations,
information and communication technology
(ICT) can enhance curriculum delivery and
improve the quality of education.
6 Involve the community. Parental involvement in
primary education is a key determinant of the
effectiveness of primary education. Additionally,
including community leaders in schooling
reinforces local appreciation of education and
helps instill a sense of local ownership in the
success of students.
7 Take steps to ensure gender equality in every
aspect of primary education including full
participation of girls in school and in the
classroom.
This report concludes with several case studies,
including the Medersat.com model in Morocco, that
illustrate the effective implementation of these key
strategies.
3
 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

Introduction

P
rimary education provides students with
the fundamental skills in reading, writing,
and mathematics that serve as an essential
foundation for consecutive levels of
education.2 In many countries, the right to primary
education is legally guaranteed and has been
recognized as a basic human right since the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 3
Education is an essential element of development
and has a positive impact on individuals, families,
and countries. Access to quality education creates
the opportunity for people to gain the literacy,
numeracy, and communication skills necessary to
engage in the global economy and break the cycle
of poverty. The link between education and poverty
alleviation is well established, and the holistic
benefits of education extend beyond economic
aspects to include improved health outcomes, as well
as increased equity and empowerment, particularly
of minorities and marginalized communities.4
Government and donor investment in education has
significant economic benefits. The global private
rate of return for education is 10 percent for every
year of schoolinga rate calculated by equating
the value of a persons lifetime earnings to the
net present value of their education. In essence,
this means that a persons income increases by
10 percent for every additional year of education
they have. The economic benefits of education
extend beyond the individual, impacting societies
and countries on a broader level. It is estimated
that each additional year of education in the adult
population of a country is positively correlated with
an 18 percent higher gross domestic product per
capita.5
The correlation between education and poverty
alleviation is particularly magnified in low-income
countries. World Bank data drawn from 139
economies show that the returns for investment
in education are highest in sub-Saharan Africa.6
Different levels of education have different
increments of impact on a country, depending on
the countrys income status. The United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organizations
(UNESCOs) analysis of research shows that in
low-income countries, primary education has the
most significant impact on economic growth at a
national level.7 In contrast to both secondary and
tertiary education, primary education is accessible
to a much more diverse group of people across all
levels of society. In Africa, where twenty-seven out
of fifty-four countries are low income, investing in
primary education is a strategic move to accelerate
development.
In particular, education has a profound impact on
reducing gender inequality. Educated mothers know
firsthand how important education is for their own
children, and they are thus more likely to ensure that
their children attend school. Educated women are
also better equipped to control their own fertility,
acquire prenatal health care, ensure the health of
their children, and avoid underage marriage.8 In
sub-Saharan Africa, women who have at least a
primary school education have mortality rates 14
percent lower than women who have less than a
primary school education.9 Womens participation
in family decision making is also impacted by level
of educationwomen who do not have a primary
education are 35 percent more likely not to play a
part in financial decision making than those who do.

2 Etor R. Comfort, UsenF. Mbon, and EkpenyongE. Ekanem, Primary Education as a Foundation for Qualitative Higher Education
in Nigeria, Journal of Education and Learning 2, no. 2 (2013): xx, doi:10.5539/jel.v2n2p155.
3 UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Children Out of School: Measuring Exclusion from Primary Education, (Montreal: UNESCO
Institute for Statistics, 2005), PDF, 3, http://www.uis.unesco.org/Library/Documents/oosc05-en.pdf.
4 UNICEF, The Investment Case for Education and Equity, 2015, https://www.unicef.org/publications/files/Investment_Case_for_
Education_and_Equity_FINAL.pdf; UNESCO, Reducing Global Poverty Through Universal Primary and Secondary Education,
June 2017, http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/reducing-global-poverty-through-universal-primary-secondary-
education.pdf.
5 UNICEF, The Investment Case for Education and Equity, 2015, http://www.unicef.org/publications/files/Investment_Case_for_
Education_Summary.pdf.
6 Harry A. Patrinos, Trends in returns to schooling: why governments should invest more in peoples skills, World Bank Education
for Global Development Blog, last updated on August 1, 2016, http://blogs.worldbank.org/education/trends-returns-schooling-
why-governments-should-invest-more-people-s-skills.
7 UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Children Out of School: Measuring Exclusion from Primary Education.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

Better education is key to Africas economic
prospects. The continent started from a very low
baseline: In 1975, the World Bank reports that the
net primary enrollment ratio in all sub-Saharan
Africa was only 45 percent, about half of the levels
then found in East Asia and the Pacific (88 percent)
and Latin America and the Caribbean (82 percent).10
Despite significant improvement in primary school
enrollment numbers in recent years, African nations
lag behind the rest of the world in terms of access
to and quality of primary education. In 2014, net
primary school enrollment was reported at 78
percent, a dramatic improvement. However, despite
the increased enrollment, 121 million children are not
attending primary school or lower secondary school.
This ongoing education crisis will continue to have
devastating effects on the continents development
until the trend can be reversed. This crisis is a two-
part problem: Policy makers are challenged not
only with the task of ensuring that more of Africas
128 million school-aged children have access to
education, but also with improving the quality of
education available to them.
Understanding the unique social, political,
economic, and historical contexts of the individual
education crises facing African nations is, of course,
a prerequisite for designing successful, national-
level interventions. But, as the case studies at the
end of this report suggest, some useful conclusions
can be drawn from a study of sub-Saharan Africa
as whole. The following examination of the nature
and quality of primary education on the continent
reveals a variety of generalizable trends highlighting
areas for intervention and finds that, despite the
difficulties faced by African nations, the news is not
all bad. Several innovative education initiatives are
worth studying and replicating on a larger scale.
The 2016 Brookings Millions Learning report details
examples of successful scaling of quality education
in the developing world. The report found that
successful scaling of quality learning often occurs
when new approaches and ideas are allowed to
develop and grow on the margins, and then reach
many more children and youth.11
This report identifies internationally recognized
elements of a successful primary education and
investigates four such innovations on the margins:
Medersat.com in Morocco, the public-school
system in Botswana, the SOS Childrens Villages in
the Central African Republic (CAR), and the Early
Grade Reading Assessments developed by Concern
Worldwide in Somalia. The recommendations
concluding this report are designed to inform policy
makers seeking to best assist the African continent
as it moves toward improving educational outcomes
for primary school learners.
This report is based on a literature review, field
visits to primary schools in Africa, and interviews
with primary education experts. The report draws
inspiration from the observations of Lord Paul Yaw
Boateng, who addressed a group of education
experts at the Atlantic Council.12
In his remarks, Lord Boateng summarized the
essence of Africas education crisis:
A real and ongoing crisis in education on
the continent of Africa, in which the tension
between access on the one hand and
attainment, is acute and as yet, unreconciled.
Demand outpaces resources, and a youthful
population finds itself literally fit for nothing
unemployed, often unemployable despite
years at school. And that in itself represents
a threata real threat I would argueto the
peace and stability of the continent from Cairo
to the Cape.

10 UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Net enrollment rate, primary, both sexes (%), The World Bank, 2014, http://data.worldbank.org/
indicator/SE.PRM.NENR.
11 Eileen McGivney, Jenny Perlman Robinson, and Rebecca Winthrop, Millions Learning: Scaling Up Quality Education in
Developing Countries, Brookings Center for Universal Education, April 13, 2016, 8, https://www.brookings.edu/research/millions-
learning-scaling-up-quality-education-in-developing-countries/.
12 The Atlantic Council convened a one-day conference in February 2016 to draw on the expertise of education experts from the
Washington, D.C area.

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

Background: The Evolution of

Educational Goals

I
n most African countries, children enter primary
school at age six or seven and graduate by age
eleven or twelve.13 Typically, African children lag
behind their global peers in access to quality
primary education. Of the sixty-one million primary
school age children out of school in 2016, thirty-
four million of these were in sub-Saharan Africa.14
Approximately 50 percent of all out-of-school
African children will never attend school.15
Pre-colonial Africa had strong indigenous norms
of training and learning. There were forms of
traditional education, but these mostly revolved
around the family unit, which served as the
primary mechanism for instruction.16 This transfer
of knowledge was particularly concerned with
instilling a sense of communal responsibility and
reciprocity in children and youth, respect for their
culture and ancestry, along with fundamental skills
such as subsistence farming practices. Teaching
methods often involved dance and song, oral
storytelling, as well as cultural or spiritual rituals.
African traditional education was closely tied to
the community, and its primary objective was to
encourage children to take up productive roles in
their immediate surroundings.
Colonial education: assimilation
and control
Colonial conquest fundamentally reshaped the
foundations of Africas education systems. The
diversity of the African nations, combined with
the variety of colonial powers that controlled
the continent during different historical periods,
makes it difficult to generalize about the impact
of colonialism on institutionalized education.
For example, the two most significant colonial
powers on the continent, Britain and France, had
different approaches to their expansion in Africa,
which in turn affected the education systems
that each established. The French employed an
assimilation strategy, which aimed to create
an elite group of French-speaking Africans who
embodied the values of French culture and society.
In contrast, the British governed through a policy
of indirect rule, in which existing structures of
traditional society were amalgamated with those
of the colonial power.17 Traditional authorities were
expected to maintain their community role while
simultaneously serving as administrative agents of
the British government.
A study of the comparative impacts of British and
French colonization on African education reveals
that in 1960, British colonies had higher average
levels of education.18 This is partially because
the British colonial authorities outsourced the
responsibility of providing primary education to
religious missionariesa cheap mechanism for
delivering basic education, which also assisted in
promoting Western cultural ideals. Africans who
successfully completed their missionary educations
and acculturation could expect to find relatively
lucrative jobs within the colonial administration,
but they missed out on the richer cultural and
communal dimensions of the traditional African
learning experience. This had corrosive social
effects. According to Acha Bah-Diallo, former
director of UNESCOs basic education division:
Africans were [] asked to accept a system of
education that was systematically destroying the
very values that traditional education had sought
to promote and preserve.19

13 Comfort, Mbon, and Ekanem, Primary Education, Primary Education as a Foundation for Qualitative Higher Education in
Nigeria. Journal of Education and Learning, Vol.2 No.2 (2013).
14 UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Leaving no one behind: How far on the way to universal primary and secondary education?,
2016, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002452/245238E.pdf.
15 The Africa-America Institute, State of Education in Africa Report, 2015, http://www.aaionline.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/
AAI-SOE-report-2015-final.pdf.
16 Dama Mosweunyane, The African Education Evolution: From Traditional Training to Formal Education, Higher Education
Studies, Vol 3. No. 4 (2013).
17 Remi P. Clignet and Philip J. Foster, French and British Colonial Education in Africa, Comparative Education Review, Vol. 8, No. 2
(Oct., 1964), pp. 191-198.
18 Denis Cogneau, Colonization, School and Development in Africa an Empirical Analysis in Development et insertion international,
2003, http://www.eldis.org/vfile/upload/1/document/0708/DOC20078.pdf.
19 Acha Bah-Diallo, International Seminar on Basic Education and Development Assistance in Sub Saharan Africa, JICA Research Institute,
1997, https://www.jica.go.jp/jica-ri/IFIC_and_JBICI-Studies/english/publications/reports/study/topical/sub_sahara/keynote_1.html.

6 ATLANTIC COUNCIL
 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

Students at Zanaki Primary School in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania attend English class. In 2016, the public school
received a World Bank grant for increasing student performance on the national Primary School Leaving
Examination. Photo credit: World Bank/Sarah Farhat.

Both the British and French colonial educational
systems were designed to select out the most
gifted students and educate them to a very high
level, rather than to provide equal access to all
students.20 When, following independence, most
African nations chose to pursue a model of universal
education, their colonial-based educational systems
struggled to accommodate the change.
of which were newly independent or in the final
throes of securing their freedom. The conference
was dedicated to examining the development
of education in light of Africas unique cultural
and socio-cultural factors. Ngugi wa Thiongo,
renowned Kenyan author and a strong voice for the
decolonization of education in Africa, recognized
the alienating effects of the education system:

As educational systems in Africa were no longer
geared toward attracting only the most gifted
and elite children, opening their doors instead to
all children, the educational infrastructure was
overwhelmed by the dramatic increase of students
and could not keep up with the growing demand.
Post-independence liberalization of
the education sector
In 1961, the Conference of African States on the
Development of Education in Africa was hosted by
UNESCO in Addis Ababa to establish an inventory
of educational needs of the assembled states, many
Education, far from giving people the
confidence in their ability and capacities to
overcome obstacles . . . tends to make them
feel their inadequacies, their weaknesses and
their incapacities in the face of reality; and their
inability to do anything about the conditions
governing their lives. They become more and
more alienated from themselves and from their
natural and social environment.21
Many African economies were hit with stagnation
in the 1970s, which impacted budget allocations
for education. Recognizing that import substitution

20 Joel Samoff, Everyone Has the Right to Education, African Studies Review 51, no. 1 (2008).
21 Ngugi wa Thiongo, Decolonizing the mind: the politics of language in African literature (East African Educational Publishers:
Harare, 1981), 54

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE
Though access to education
had improved by the 1980s
as a result of these programs
and increased financing,
the quality of education
remained poor.
policies and state-led investment had failed to sustain
the growth of the 1960s, international financial
institutions (IFIs) began promoting liberalization
policies in an attempt to stimulate economic growth.
Alongside the push for economic liberalization, a
new focus on bilateral and multilateral education
financing came to the fore. With increased primary
school enrollment and the inability of many African
governments to meet the high demand on resources
due to structural financial deficits, the need to
finance the development of inclusive education
infrastructure became obvious. During the 1980s,
the IFIs encouraged government investment in
educationand especially in universal primary
educationwhile concurrently setting new loan
conditions to include better public management
benchmarks. In an evaluation of the impact of
structural adjustment programs on the employment
and training of teachers, the International Labor
Organization (ILO) found reductions in overall public
spending were strongly correlated with reduced
budget allocation for the education sector. The
report noted that because most countries spend
much of their government budgets on schooling
and a very high fraction of educational spending
goes for teachers salaries, these cuts in public
spending had major implications for education and
teachers.22
Though access to education had improved by the
1980s as a result of these programs and increased
financing, the quality of education remained poor.
At the primary level, systematic assessment of
student achievement was rare, and the assessments
that existed were not encouraging.
Establishing global consensus on
the importance of education to
development
In 1990, the World Conference on Education for All
(EFA) launched a global commitment to provide
quality basic education for children, youth and
adults.23 At a conference held in Jomtien, Thailand
22 International Labour Office, Impact of Structural Adjustment on the Employment and Training of Teachers (Sectoral Activities
Programme: Geneva, 1996), ISBN 92-2-109763-3.
23 Education, UNESCO, accessed July 24, 2017, http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the-international-
agenda/education-for-all.
8 ATLANTIC COUNCIL
that was sponsored by UNESCO, the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP), the United
Nations International Childrens Emergency Fund
(UNICEF), and the World Bank, delegates from
the governments of 155 developing countries and
150 different nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) convened in an effort to build consensus
on the importance of education for development.
Conference participants affirmed the World
Declaration on Education for All through which
they intended to make primary school education
universally available to school-aged children and
to drastically reduce illiteracy by the year 2000.
This goal was not achieved, but the declaration
was reaffirmed at the World Education Forum
held in Dakar in 2000, in which 164 government
representatives pledged to target six predetermined
education goals. The Dakar Framework for Action,
as it became known, was a comprehensive effort to
address a variety of different levels of education,
from early childhood development to adult literacy.
The goals included a focus on early childhood
development, empowerment of marginalized
children, and the monitoring and evaluation of
education quality to ensure that learning outcomes
were met. The framework mandated UNESCO to
coordinate global efforts to meet these goals.
Quantifying the consensus through
the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs)
Just a few months after the Dakar Education for
All conference, a total of 189 countries from around
the world committed to a set of eight goals aimed
at reducing extreme poverty and addressing
poverty-related human rights issues such as health,
security, and shelter. The Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) were the first time-bound goals
adopted by the international community and
world governments, with quantifiable outputs and
definitive deadlines for implementation, rather
than just guiding principles for the development
community. The MDGs largely eclipsed the EFA
goals, and in effect folded the six targets set out in
the EFA goals into two substantially reduced goals
spanning education (MDG 2) and gender (MDG 3).
The quality of education has historically been
measured primarily by evaluating inputs (for
example, the amount of money governments spend
on schools), or sometimes outputs (for example, the
number of girls who graduate from primary school),
but it has seldom been focused on outcomes (for
example, what the girls who graduate from primary
school have learned). Criticism of the MDGs for
 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

education has centered on the way in which the
UN proposed to measure whether the goals had
been achieved. The metrics that have been used to
describe the status of primary education in Africa
have largely measured the inputs to education and
not what those inputs have achieved. One aspect
of MDG 2, known as target 2A, was to ensure that
girls and boys everywhere were able to access a
complete primary school educationbut what was
to be achieved during that period of education was
not specified. MDG 2 narrowed the focus of the EFA
goals, and focused its measurement of the goals
objectives strictly on the indicators available through
preexisting surveys conducted by UNICEF and the
ILO. In many regards, MDG 2 has been considered
an MDG triumphprimary school enrollment has
increased dramatically, narrowing the proportion
of Africas children who remain out of school. Key
factors in achieving increased primary enrollment
include widespread abolishment of primary school
fees and the introduction of incentives, such as
cash transfers or food subsidies, that have led to
increased demand for education.24
However, as before, this success in primary school
enrollment has not been matched by equally
improved access for minority groups or coupled
with a steady increase in education quality. In
fact, the focus on increasing enrollment may have
exacerbated the poor quality of education in some
places where the growing demand for education
has not been accompanied by the appropriate
increase in the number of qualified teachers in
schools, and learning environments remain critically
under-resourced.
Quality and equity: The Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs)
Fifteen years after the formulation of the MDGs,
the international community took stock of progress
made and reassessed development priorities
in light of recent scholarship and experience
with promoting the global development agenda
summarized in the MDGs. In contrast to the
formation of the MDGs, there was special emphasis
on a people-centered approach to developing the
SDGs, leading to a global consultation that engaged
UN member governments, civil society, citizens,
academics, scientists, and the private sector. Given
the ongoing education crisis in the developing
world, and accounting for the oversights of the
MDGs, the SDGs contained an expanded education
goal under the title of quality education. The
goal admitted that despite positive progress, the
universal enrollment component of MDG 2 had still
not been met. In addition, the goal admitted that
the previous development agenda had failed to
appropriately emphasize the need for education
equity or to delineate the meaning of quality
education. Although both these elements are
important, Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG
4) also expanded the vision of education for all to
include promoting lifelong learning opportunities
for alla phrase that obfuscates the exact intention
of the goal and makes it more difficult to measure.
The idea of lifelong learning opportunities is
difficult to define, and thus hard to measure in any
quantifiable sense.
In relative terms, Africa has made spectacular
leaps in primary education enrollment. Between
1990 and 2011, for example, net enrollment rates
in sub-Saharan Africa increased by 24 percent.25
In fact, since the MDGs were established, sub-
Saharan Africas improvement in primary education
enrollment is the most significant of all the regions
in the developing world.26 From 2000 to 2015, the
net enrollment rate increased by 20 percentage
points, while between 1990 and 2000 the rate
only increased by 8 percentage points.27 However,
Africa still has significant numbers of out-of-
school children, and most African countries still
did not meet the international education standards
regarding coverage and content of primary
education programs.

24 UNESCO, Education for All Global Monitoring Report (GMR) (Paris: UNESCO, 2015), 77, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/
images/0023/002322/232205e.pdf.
25 As an example, according to the Ministry of Education (2013), Ghana improved its net enrollment rate by 81.7 percent in 2012
through a productive focus on pre-primary education, and mandatory primary school expansion.
26 Tosin Sulaiman, More Children are Going to School in African Countries, but There are Still 30 Million Who Are Not, Quartz,
April 9, 2015, https://qz.com/379709/more-children-are-going-to-school-in-african-countries-but-there-are-still-30-million-who-
never-will/.
27 SDG Blog Series, Know Your SDGS, Chemonics, United Nations Statistics Division, September 25, 2015, http://blog.chemonics.
com/know-your-sdgs:-your-guide-to-what-the-un-is-doing-this-weekend.

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Performance: The Current State

of Primary Education in Africa

A
frica is facing what has been described as
a twin deficit in education: not enough
children are in school, and those who are
in school are not learning enough.28 Since
the adoption of the MDGs, most African nations
have made major improvements in gross primary
school enrollment rates. Although this progress
is to be commended, the continents education
systems are still in crisisthe number of out-of-
school children remains unacceptably high, and the
increase in enrollment has not been accompanied
by an improvement in the quality of education.
Between 2000 and 2015, the number of out-
of-school primary school age children in Africa
decreased by more than ten million.29 However, sub-
Saharan Africa is the region with the most out-of-
school children in the worldthe African continent
is home to 52 percent of the overall total of out-
of-school children, approximately 31 million children
are currently not in school. The UNESCO Institute
for Statistics (UIS) categorizes the total estimated
number of out-of-school children into three groups:
children who will never attend school, children
who have enrolled in school at some point and
then dropped out, and those who will eventually
enroll in school at some point in the future. Of the
out-of-school children in sub-Saharan Africa, 45
percent are expected never to enroll, 18 percent
have enrolled but later dropped out, and 38 percent
are expected to enroll in school late. Globally, the
five countries with the highest percentage of out-
of-school children are in Africathese are Liberia
(62), Eritrea (59), Sudan (45), Djibouti (43), and
Equatorial Guinea (42).30
It is well established that a childs presence in the
classroom does not necessarily reflect learning.
In order for human capital investments in primary
education to reap their anticipated benefits, there
are several other important conditions that must be
met. One such condition is that children who are
enrolled in the education system actually acquire
the numeracy and literacy skills required for them to
continue to secondary education. Microeconomic
literature is clear that the correlation between the
positive externalities (e.g., improved health) created
by primary education is directly linked to acquired
cognitive skills and not merely school attendance.
Justin van Fleet, in a Brookings Institution report,
asserts that of Africas ninety-seven million children
who enter school on time, thirty-seven million will
learn so little in school that they will not be much
better off than those who do not attend school.31
While very few quantifiable indicators exist, the
Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for
Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) has
provided some insight into the level of learning
achieved by primary school learners in its sixteen
member states.32 SACMEQ assessments found that
only 28 percent of Tanzanian grade-six students
are reading at the appropriate grade level.33 The
situation is more dire in Kenya where only 19 percent
of grade-six students read at grade level, and even
worse in Uganda where this number is less than 10
percent.34
Within nations, of course, access to and the quality
of education can vary widely according to several
factors: poverty, geographic location, and gender
are three major determinants of variation in access
to and the quality of education.
Poverty
There is a correlation between the wealth of
the population and the education levels of its
children. Despite the fact that education is widely

28 Justin W. van Fleet, Africas Education Crisis: In School but Not Learning, Brookings, September 17, 2012, https://www.
brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2012/09/17/africas-education-crisis-in-school-but-not-learning/.
29 Van Fleet, Africas Education Crisis.
30 UNESCO, Global Education Monitoring Report, Education for people and planet: Creating Sustainable Futures for All, 2016,
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002457/245752e.pdf, 222-236.
31 Van Fleet, Africas Education Crisis.
32 SACMEQ, Accounting for Variations in the Quality of Primary School Education, 2011, http://microdata.worldbank.org/index.
php/catalog/1246/download/22688.
33 Germano Mwabu and Xanthe Ackerman, Education Plus Development: Focusing on Quality Education in Sub-Saharan Africa,
Brookings Institute, May 28, 2013, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2013/05/28/focusing-on-
quality-education-in-sub-saharan-africa/.
34 Mwabu and Ackerman, Education Plus Development.

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Children raise their hands to answer a class question at the St. Louis Primary School in Kinshasa, DRC.
Photo credit: World Bank/Dominic Chavez.

acknowledged to be a basic human right, when
it comes to schooling, some children clearly face
greater disadvantages than others. Opportunities
for education in sub-Saharan Africa are marked by
deep inequalities linked to wealth, gender, and other
social divisions.35 A 2011 study of the relationship
between education and poverty in Kenya concluded:
The direction of causality between poverty
and education linkages has been shown to
flow both ways. On one hand, poverty acts as
a factor preventing people from getting access
to education. On the other hand, those with
education are considered to be at less risk of
poverty. Overall, the effects of education on
the probability of being poor were found to be
very strong.36
School enrollment and household income have
been found to have a significant correlation in many
African countries. A 2010 case study in Uganda
illustrates this point.37 The researchers designed
the study to investigate the relationship between
parents educational level, income level, and
occupations, as well as the primary school students
grades in their preliminary school leaving exams.
The study revealed a positive correlation between
these three factors and a pupils educational
performance.38

35 Kevin Watkins, Justin W. van Fleet, and Lauren Greubel, Africa Learning Barometer, The Brookings Institute, September 12,
2012, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/events/2012/9/17-africa-learning/africa-learning-barometerfinal.pdf.
36 Mayo K. Julius and Jyoti Bawane, Education and Poverty, Relationship and Concerns. A Case for Kenya, Problems of Education
in the 21st Century, Vol.32(2011), http://www.scientiasocialis.lt/pec/files/pdf/vol32/72-85.Julius_Vol.32.pdf.
37 Robert Onzima, Parents Socio-Economic Status and Pupils Educational Attainment: A Case Study of St. Jude Primary School
in Malaba Town Council, Uganda, http://www.academia.edu/407935/PARENTS_SOCIO-ECONOMIC_STATUS_AND_PUPILS_
EDUCATIONAL_ATTAINMENT_CASE_STUDY_OF_ST._JUDE_PRIMARY_SCHOOL_IN_MALABATOWN_COUNCIL-UGANDA.
For a more general look at this subject, see Raja Kattan and Nicholas Burnett, User Fees in Primary Education, World Bank,
2004, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/278200-1099079877269/547664-1099079993288/EFAcase_
userfees.pdf.
38 See also Kakuru Doris Muhwezi, The Effect of Universal Primary Education on the Gender Gap in Education in Uganda: A
Case of Kumi and Kapchorwa Districts, 2002; Debroah Kasente, Gender and Education in Uganda, Education for All Global

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Children who live in rural
areas are twice as likely to be
out of school as children who
live in urban areas.
Poor nutrition, often correlated with poverty,
continues to threaten Africas chance of improved
primary school education. Hunger is often
overlooked in international efforts to improve
primary education, despite well-documented
evidence that children who do not have good
nutrition in their pre-primary years suffer many
irreversible developmental setbacks that limit their
ability to learn once they are attending school. In
2013, 40 percent of African primary school children
began their education without being able to
meet their daily nutritional needs.39 The effects of
malnutrition on cognitive ability eventually translate
to reduced earningsthe World Bank estimates that
malnutrition can result in 10 percent lower earnings
later in life.40
Disparities between rural and urban
communities
The offering of basic services differs in rural and
urban areas in Africa. Urban areas have lower poverty
rates and better access to basic amenities including
education compared to rural areas. Children who
live in rural areas are twice as likely to be out of
school as children who live in urban areas. This is
largely due to the broader implications of proximity
to urban areas, such as the level of education
obtained by parents, labor market conditions, and
household income.41
The African continent is rapidly urbanizing at a rate
topped only by Asia; however, despite this level of
growth, sub-Saharan Africa is still forecasted to be
the least urbanized region of the world by 2050.42
Currently, 63 percent of the population of sub-
Saharan Africa reside in the rural areas. Africas
poverty is concentrated in non-urban areasmore
than 70 percent of the continents poor population
live in rural areas.43 Whether a child lives in a rural
or urban area, primary education improves their
opportunity to join the global workforce. Education
is positively correlated with increased agricultural
productivity, and Individuals who have completed
a primary education are better equipped to take up
formal employment if they move to an urban area
than if they had no education at all.
There are many factors that contribute to the
disparity in primary education access and quality
between rural and urban areas. The opportunity
cost for rural children to attend school is often
higher than that faced by urban children. In rural
areas, children play an important role in agricultural
labor and food production and attending school
takes them away from helping their parents in
the fields. Due to the structure of the academic
year, school terms may overlap with planting and
harvesting season, two periods of the year during
which all able-bodied members of the community,
including children, are engaged in farming.44 Often,
parents in subsistence-level rural communities
prefer to equip their children with subsistence
farming skills rather than sending them to school
for formal education.45 Furthermore, the homes of
the rural poor generally lack electricity, which can
make studying exceptionally difficult.

Monitoring Report, 2003, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cfbe/7a9cb08b989b36e22ba5933952676a0bca77.pdf; Martina

Bjorkman, Income Shocks and Gender Gaps in Education: Evidence from Uganda, Center for Global Development, 2005,
https://www.cgdev.org/doc/event%20docs/Job%20market%20paper%20M%20Bjorkman.pdf; Joseph Bugembe, Children
in Abject Poverty in Uganda, UNESCO, 2005, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001414/141482e.pdf; Muhammed
A. Yinusa and Akanle O. Basil, Socio-Economic Factors Influencing Students Academic Performance in Nigeria: Some
Explanation from a Local Survey, Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences, Vol 5, No 4, 2008, http://docsdrive.com/pdfs/
medwelljournals/pjssci/2008/319-323.pdf; Harriet Nannyonjo, Education Inputs in Uganda: An Analysis of Factors Influencing
Learning Achievement in Grade Six, World Bank Working Paper No. 98, 2007, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/
en/445131468310730593/pdf/405290UG0Educa101OFFICIAL0USE0ONLY1.pdf; and Ibrahim Mike Okumu et al, Socioeconomic
Determinants of Primary School Dropout: The Logistic Model Analysis, 2008, http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/93855.
39 Clignet and Foster, French and British Colonial Education in Africa.
40 World Bank, Repositioning Nutrition as Central to Development: A
strategy for large scale action, 2006, as cited in Save the Children, Food for Thought: Tackling child malnutrition to unlock potential
and boost prosperity, 2013, http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/sites/default/files/images/Food_for_Thought_UK.pdf.
41 Joseph Nkurunziza, Annelet Broekhuis, and Pieter Hooimeijer, Free Education in Rwanda: Just One Step towards Reducing
Gender and Sibling Inequalities, Education Research International, Volume 2012 (2012),
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/edri/2012/396019/.
42 Foresight Africa: Top priorities for the continent in 2016, Brookings Institute, January 5, 2016, https://www.brookings.edu/
research/foresight-africa-top-priorities-for-the-continent-in-2016-2/.
43 Rural Poverty in Africa, Rural Poverty Portal, http://www.ruralpovertyportal.org/region/home/tags/africa.
44 Aidan Milkeen and Dandan Chen, Teachers for Rural Schools: Experiences in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and
Uganda, (Washington: The World Bank, 2008), PDF, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTAFRREGTOPEDUCATION/
Resources/444659-1212165766431/ED_Teachers_rural_schools_L_M_M_T_U.pdf.
45 Nkurunziza et al, Free Education in Rwanda.

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Primary school curricula often have little relevance
to the occupations of parents and what they may
perceive as beneficial to the future prospects for their
children. The basic literacy and numeracy learned in
the classroom may not appear to translate into skills
that can be easily transferred into the informal-sector
work environment that these children will probably
enter.46 Parents with low levels of education are
unable to assist their children with homework or to
provide any value-added supplemental teaching to
assist their children in school achievement. Though
many parents prize education, other parents may
feel threatened or embarrassed by their childrens
exposure to topics or concepts with which they
have little or no familiarity.
In 2011, a Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium
for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ) study
identified school location as a common contributor
to the variation in student performance across
fifteen primary schools in sub-Saharan Africa.47
Unsurprisingly, students in primary schools located
in urban areas outperformed students in schools
located in rural areas. Schools in rural areas are also
often less concentrated, resulting in children having
to walk long distances to get to class. Research
unequivocally shows that the proximity of a school
to school-age children has a direct impact on
enrollment. According to Serge Theunynck:
Evidence from African countries suggests that
enrollment and retention decline significantly
beyond a distance of one to two kilometers,
or a 30-minute walk, particularly for younger
children.48
Gender
The gender gap in out-of-school rates in sub-Saharan
Africa is significant: 23 percent of all girls are out of
school compared to 19 percent of all boys. Fifteen
million girls of primary school age will never learn to
read in primary school, compared to approximately
10 million boys.49 Socioeconomic class also has a
heavy impact on girls school attendance: Studies
have shown that the wealth of a girls family is a key
determinant to whether a girl completes primary
school. World Bank research using data from
twenty-four low-income countries shows that while
72 percent of girls in the richest quintile of homes
complete primary school, only 34 percent of their
counterparts in the poorest quintile do.50 Girls are
also adversely affected when it comes to learning
outcomes. In Malawi, 52 percent of girls do not
finish primary school with basic competencies in
literacy and numeracy by the end of primary school,
compared to 44 percent of boys.51

46 Ibid.
47 Njora Hungi, Accounting for the Variations of Quality on Primary School Education, SACMEQ, Working Paper 7, September 2011,
http://www.sacmeq.org/sites/default/files/sacmeq/publications/07_multivariate_final.pdf.
48 Serge Theunynck, School Construction Strategies for Universal Primary Education in Africa: Should Communities Be
Empowered to Build Their Skills? (Washington: The World Bank, 2009), https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/
handle/10986/2637/488980PUB0prim101Official0Use0Only1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.
49 Theunynck, School Construction Strategies for Universal Primary Education in Africa.
50 The World Bank, Girls Education-Overview, 2016, http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/girlseducation/overview#1.
51 Germano Mwabu and Xanthe Ackerman, Focusing on Quality Education in sub-Saharan Africa, Brookings Institute, May 28,

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

Key Challenges

P
overty, disparities of wealth, the
concentration of resources in urban areas,
and gender discrimination are problems
that can be mitigated partially through
educational initiatives, but require the intervention
of broader economic development programs to
fully address them. Within the educational sphere,
however, other key challenges arise. The topics
listed here are by no means comprehensivethe
diversity and vastness of the continent renders a
generalized or exhaustive list an impossible task.
The proliferation of private schools
Education should be accessible to all children
irrespective of wealth or social status. Africas
embattled education systems struggle to cope with
surging demand, so private for-profit companies
have stepped into the gap to provide education
to those that have the money to pay for it. While
attractive private sector salaries have drawn more
education experts to the for-profit education field,
NGOs and education activists have expressed
concern about the implications of burgeoning
private schools for low-income populations who
cannot afford an alternative to the public system.
In his report to the secretary general, for example,
the UN special rapporteur on the right to education
observed that the increase in private schools is often
correlated with a governments lack of sufficient
provision of education and underperforming
public schools.52 The 2015 Education for All Global
Monitoring Report identified two main problems
with the increased reliance on the private sector for
the provision of education services: firstly, access
to private education implies paying fees, which
is simply not possible for many of the poorest
members of society; secondly, for-profit private
schools rarely locate to rural areas, and thus access
is restricted to better-off families living in urban
areas.53
Private schools are not a homogenous category
and speaking about them in generalized terms can
be unhelpful. There are a wide variety of non-state
actors involved in the provision of basic education,
and many of them play an important role in making
the best of a persistent bad situation. In rural
areas where the state fails to establish schools,
community initiatives do what they can to provide
educational opportunity to children in these areas. In
many countries, well-established networks of faith-
based schools provide better quality education than
many of the public options that are concurrently
available. Most controversial is, of course, the trend
of affluent, urban parents seeking out elite private
schools for their children, which often leads them to
opt out of advocacy efforts to improve the public
education system. Without the support of these
private organizations, primary education would be
worse off.
Shrinking international support
At the Education for All conference hosted in
Dakar, Senegal in April 2000, international donors
agreed that no government seriously committed
to ensuring universal primary education for its
children should have this objective thwarted due to
lack of finances.54 However, despite a commitment
to funding universal primary education as a priority,
many international donors have reduced funding
for basic schooling to favor funding of health and
higher education programs and therefore bear
some responsibility for impeding the progress of
obtaining quality universal primary education on the
African continent.55 A study conducted by Steer and
Baudienville of the Overseas Development Institute
in 2010 noted that the main obstacles to greater
funding of basic education programs include donor
priorities, a lack of evidence of the positive impact
of funding basic education programs, and a dearth
of innovative approaches to raising and delivering
financing.56

2013, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2013/05/28/focusing-on-quality-education-in-sub-saharan-
africa/.
52 Kishore Singh, Right to Education (A/69/402), United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 2014, https://
documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N14/546/82/PDF/N1454682.pdf?OpenElement.
53 UNESCO, Education for All Global Monitoring Report, Education for All 2000-2015: Achievements and Challenges (Paris:
UNESCO, 2015), http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002322/232205e.pdf.
54 A World at School, The Evidence is Clear: Financing for Education in Inadequate, Global Campaign for Education United States,
April 17, 2015, http://campaignforeducationusa.org/blog/detail/the-evidence-is-clear-financing-for-education-is-inadequate.
55 Joel Samoff, Everyone Has the Right to Education, African Studies Review 51, no. 1 (2008).
56 Liesbet Steer and Geraldine Baudienville, What drives donor financing of basic education? Overseas Development Institute,
Project Briefing No. 39, February 2010. https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/5838.pdf.

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A World at Schools 2015 Donor Scorecard showed
a dramatic decrease in donor investment in basic
education and called on world leaders to reverse
the decline in funds allocated to the education
sector in the developing world.57 The World Banks
International Development Allocation (IDA) funding
for basic education remained the same in 2015 as it
was in 2002. While many donors cite shrinking aid
budgets and a lackluster global economy to justify
the limited availability of education financing, it
is clear that such reductions have not been made
across the board. Donor funding for health has risen
58 percent since 2008, while education financing has
decreased by 19 percent.58 This is perhaps indicative
of the increasing concern that infectious diseases
will spread beyond the developing world and pose
a threat to developed countries. In reality, while the
spread of infectious disease (especially in the wake
of the Ebola crisis) is a major threat to international
security and stability, an uneducated population in
the worlds poorest continent poses an arguably
greater long-term threat to regional and global
stability. In addition, the impact of health funding is
much easier to quantify, making the benefits of the
aid more visible and thus more politically palatable
to donor nations. Evaluation mechanisms are more
frequently built into the design of health programs
than into education interventions, primarily because
measuring the effectiveness of aid for education is
a highly problematic endeavor: education serves a
multiplicity of purposes and its outcomes are often
contingent on factors outside of the classroom.59
In a highly competitive aid environment, education
innovations requiring an increase in funding would do
well to emulate the success of health sector projects
in documenting impact and tracking outcomes.
The extent to which international donors are
supportive of country-led efforts at education
reform is mixed. For example, the quality education
agenda in Ethiopia has been led by the government,
and yet donors have been slow to support all
elements of the reform, partially because of
concerns about democratic freedoms. Donors
rejected the programs civic education provision for
being too political and were uncomfortable with
the governments proposed information technology
strategy.60
Ineffective public education
spending
African governments invest substantially in
education. Overall, sub-Saharan Africa spends
$1.5 trillion, approximately 5 percent of its gross
domestic product (GDP), on education. This
percentage is virtually on par with North American
and Europes public education expenditure of 5.3
percent of GDP,61 and above the global average of
4.7 percent.
According to the Africa-America Institutes 2015
report on education in Africa: African countries
have allocated the largest share of government
expenditure to education at 18.4 percent.62 In
addition to this state expenditure, donors, non-
governmental organizations, and private businesses
also help to finance some of the cost of primary
education in Africa. Nongovernment funding in the
region accounts for about 5.6 percent of spending
on education, with the exception of countries such
as Guinea and Mali in which almost 50 percent of
the governments education budget is development
aid.63 The single largest nongovernmental funder of
education in Africa is individual households, which,
according to a UNESCO survey of sixteen nations,
contribute about 25 percent of the total national
education expenditure.64
Quantity does not equal quality. Though public
spending on education is increasing in a majority
of African countries, in one-third of sub-Saharan
African countries, 50 percent of all children will
not finish primary school. This is partially due to
demographics: Governments have not kept up with
the rapidly increasing number of children eligible
to attend primary school. But there is a need for
smarter spending, too. African governments
must be realistic about the most pressing areas
for investments that will reap long-term benefits
and should foster innovations that will accelerate
the process of building a skilled and educated
workforce. 65

57 A World at School, The Evidence is Clear.

58 Ibid.
59 Abby Riddell and Miguel Nino-Zarazua, The effectiveness of foreign aid to education: what can be learned? International
Journal of Educational Development, Vol 48, May 2016, 23-26.
60 Chris Berry and Solomon Shiferaw Bogale, Quality Education Reform and Aid Effectiveness: Reflections from Ethiopia,
International Education, Vol 40, Spring 2011, 85.
61 The Africa-America Institute, State of Education in Africa Report, 2015, http://www.aaionline.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/
AAI-SOE-report-2015-final.pdf.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Financing Education in sub-Saharan AfricaMeeting the Challenges of Expansion, Equity and
Quality, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0019/001921/192186e.pdf.
65 Education in Africa: Where does the money go? Guardian, April 27, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/
apr/27/africa-education-spending-aid-data.

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Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are one way
to accomplish this, and have the potential to
supplement insufficient public education budgets
and contribute to improving the overall education
system.66 However, while PPPs offer many
opportunities for positive collaboration between
the public and private sectors, the exact nature of
this joint approach must be carefully designed to
ensure that the right of every child to access quality
education is kept as the central goal of the PPP.
There are a variety of different models of PPPs.
In some cases, the government guides policy and
provides financing for education, while private
sector delivers the service to students; in other
arrangements, the government contracts a private
organization to design a curriculum and train
teachers, while continuing to deliver services
directly to students. PPPs can create competition
in the education services market, encouraging
improved efficacy among providers. In many cases,
PPP contracts are more flexible than government
contracts, allowing for more responsive hiring
processes for teachers, which can also lead to an
increase in risk sharing between private and public
sectors that, in turn, can help to improve efficiency
in the delivery of services.
Despite the many benefits of PPPs for education,
they can lead to increased privatization and thus
a decrease in government control over what has
long been established as a public good. This
reduced government control is in turn likely to
lead to an increase in socioeconomic segregation,
with poorer students being left behind in below-
average public schools.67 If African governments
are to benefit from the innovations and improved
efficiency of education service delivery offered by
the private sector, a delicate balance must be struck
between encouraging private sector investment
while maintaining unrestricted access for the most
vulnerable children.
Competing priorities: funding
primary, secondary, and tertiary
education
As they strive to keep pace with global development,
African governments are acknowledging the need
to place greater priority on investing in secondary
and tertiary education.68 In sub-Saharan Africa,
university enrollment rates are some of the lowest
in the world, exacerbating worries about the
regions economic competitiveness. There is clear
evidence that returns to investment in higher
education have positive dividends for Africa; in fact,
the 21 percent rate of return is among the highest
of its kind in the world. However, many African
economies are not creating the kind of jobs suited
for college graduates, and even more importantly,
the quality of primary education on the continent
is not adequately preparing students to progress to
higher levels of education.69
There is a need for increased support for education
at all levels, even in this time of dwindling resources,
especially from the international donor community.
While secondary and tertiary education plays an
important role, the most effective way to raise the
average education level of low-income countries is
to expand primary education, which provides the
necessary foundation for students to succeed at a
secondary and tertiary level. Adequate funding for
all levels of education, therefore, must be prioritized
simultaneously.
In previous years, analysis has shown that investment
in primary education resulted in higher individual
benefits than did equal investment in university
education. However, this trend has now been
reversed: a dollar spent on university education
returns more than a dollar spent supporting primary
schools. World Bank economist Harry Patrinos
argues that this may be due, in part, to the growing
prevalence of primary education access, or perhaps
more plausibly to the lower quality of primary
education that has resulted from increased primary
enrollment, which is not matched by consistent
improvements in quality. Poor quality primary
education in turn restricts access to secondary and
tertiary education, increasing the rate of return for
more advanced levels of education and exacerbating
inequality levels.70
Corruption
According to a 2013 Transparency International
Report, corruption in education in Africa and other
parts of the world is a serious problem. Transparency
International observes that education systems are
especially susceptible to corruption, due in part
to the nature of government structures. Education
budgets in developing countries are often a
significant portion of the gross budget allocation,

66 The Africa-American Institute, State of Education in Africa Report.

67 Harry Anthony Patrinos, Felipe Barrera-Osorio, and Juliana Guaqueta, The Role and Impact of Public-Private Partnerships in
Education, The World Bank, March 30, 2009, http://www.ungei.org/resources/files/Role_Impact_PPP_Education.pdf.
68 Geraldine Simonnet and Jacob Bregman, Whats next: How to Cope with the Success of Primary Education for All? Secondary
Education in Africa (SEIA): Engine for Economic and Social Growth, The World Bank, November 2004, http://siteresources.
worldbank.org/INTAFRREGTOPSEIA/Resources/whats_next.pdf.
69 The Africa-American Institute, State of Education in Africa Report.
70 Patrinos, Trends in returns to schooling.

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE
Students in an Ethiopian classroom. Photo credit: United Nations.
and these resources are disbursed through multi-
layered administrative processes. Because of the
large swathes of rural areas in many countries,
governments do not have adequate measures in
place to monitor the passage of funds from central
governments to schools in far-flung rural districts.71
The impact of corruption in schools affects a broad
range of functions, from construction procurement
to ghost teachers and nepotism in teacher be construed as an added tax on the poor, who
appointments.
In 2010, Transparency International conducted a
study to map transparency, accountability, and
integrity in primary schools in South Africa and
Cameroon. The study identified main governance
challenges through administering a survey to school
71 Transparency International (TI), Global corruption report: Education, 2013, http://www.transparency.org/whatwedo/publication/
global_corruption_report_education.
72 Transparency International, Global Corruption Report, 21.
73 Ibid.
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administrators, head teachers, parents, and parent
leaders across representative school districts. In
both countries, the embezzlement of education
funds was overwhelmingly listed as a significant
challenge facing the effectiveness of primary
education. A lack of timeliness and transparency in
budget allocation, along with teacher absenteeism
were also major concerns. Essential corruption can
are frequently plagued by demands for bribes,
particularly when they are trying to access basic
services such as education.72 Corruption reduces
resources for the implementation of quality primary
education programs and erodes the confidence of
parents and community leaders in the education
system.73
17
 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

Key Strategies for Providing

Effective Primary Education

I
n the post-MDG era, the focus on education
has dramatically shifted from access to quality,
and education experts consistently emphasize
the need to get back to basics. While getting
children into school is a necessary first step, it does
not guarantee effective learning. Earlier this year,
Brookings Africa Learning Barometer released
some staggering statistics concerning the number
of school-going children who are simply not
learning. Of the twenty-eight sub-Saharan countries
surveyed, 40 percent of children do not reach the
minimum standard of learning by grades four and
five. Analysis of the barometers results show that
if current trends persist uninterrupted, sixty-one
million children (or half of Africas sub-Saharan
population of primary school-aged children) will
reach adolescence without the basic skills they
need to enter the workforce.74
Given the vast number of challenges facing primary
education in Africa, combined with the continents
diverse socioeconomic and geopolitical contexts,
it is impossible to construct an exhaustive list of
strategies for accessible quality education. However,
education researchers and policy makers agree
that several determinants stand out, and these are
summarized below. Four case studies of innovative
education interventions in Africa then illustrate how
these elements have been combined to address
specific contextual constraints.
Back to basics: reading, writing, and
mathematics
A 2011 Brookings Institution report deplored the
quality and effectiveness of primary education in
Africa and highlighted the importance of developing
literacy and numeracy skills at the primary school
level. The report noted the following:
Often, those who are in school do not master
the foundational skills, including literacy
and numeracy, that would enable them to
successfully continue in school. Only 24
percent of young people in Africa continue to
secondary levels of education.75
Investments in secondary education do not have
adequate impact if children have not acquired basic
literacy and numeracy skills in the early grades.76
Giving greater priority to early-grade literacy and
numeracy can involve a number of strategies, which
include recruiting or reassigning effective teachers
to the early grades rather than later grades, as well as
teacher-training initiatives that focus on improving
students acquisition of reading and mathematics
skills. Students who master the foundational skills
are also less likely to become discouraged in the
upper grades when the content becomes more
complex, and therefore more likely to continue with
more advanced secondary and tertiary studies.
Teach in the mother tongue
Despite wide acceptance of the benefits of mother-
tongue instruction (UNESCO first appealed for
mother-tongue primary instruction in 1953),77 at
least 40 percent of the worlds population does
not have access to education in a language they
understand.78 This problem remains particularly
pronounced in Africa. As African countries tend
to favor the colonial language for government,
business, and higher education, dominant language
instruction remains widespread.
However, primary-level instruction in a dominant
language, which is unfamiliar to a primary learner
impedes the apprehension of basic numeracy and
literacy, the core objectives of primary education.
The introduction to core concepts in the childs
mother tongue should precede the introduction of
a second language. These concepts will then be well
established for the child before the introduction of an
additional language. Once the medium of instruction

74 Justin W. van Fleet, Africas Education Crisis: In School but Not Learning, Brookings Institute, September 17, 2012, https://www.
brookings.edu/2012/09/17/africas-education-crisis-in-school-but-not-learning/.
75 Rebecca Winthrop, Education in AfricaThe Story Isnt Over, Current History (2011), vol. 110, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/06/05_current_history_winthrop.pdf.
76 Ibid.
77 Children Learn Better in Their Mother Tongue: Advancing research on mother tongue-based multilingual education Global
Partnership for Education, Global Partnership for Education, February 21, 2014, http://www.globalpartnership.org/blog/children-
learn-better-their-mother-tongue.
78 UNESCO, Global Education Monitoring Report Policy Paper 24: If you dont understand,
how can you learn?, February 2016, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002437/243713E.pdf.

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

is expanded to include an additional language, then
children can learn the terminology to describe the
concepts they have already understood.79
Empirical studies validate the importance of mother-
tongue primary learning. Children instructed in a
bilingual or multilingual setting that includes their
mother tongue are more likely to enroll and remain
in school.80 Parents are more likely to take an active
role in their childrens education when conducted
in their mother tongue. In addition, a child who first
attains fluency and literacy in their mother tongue
benefits from a solid foundation for acquiring a
second language later in life.81
Dominant language instruction, on the other
hand, tends to exacerbate inequalities in access
to education. Mother-tongue education is more
inclusive of disadvantaged groups, including rural
children, girls, and children of indigenous ethnic
groups, who tend to suffer from less exposure to
official languages.82
A childs transition from home to the classroom is
a significant adjustment in and of itself. The stress
induced by this transition is exacerbated when
children are forced to move to an environment
in which they do not understand the language of
instruction. When children are unfamiliar with the
language of instruction, they are unable to interact
with their teachers and classmates in a way that is
conducive to the development of critical thinking
skills.
The shortfall in the number of primary teachers
remains a global problem. In 2011, the Education for
All Initiative called for a focus on teachers to be the
number one priority for improving education in the
developing world. In 2014, global estimates showed
that an additional four million teachers would be
needed to achieve the MDGs universal primary
enrollment target by 2015, the year that the MDGs
aimed to be completed. That goal was not met, and
current estimates suggest that an additional 28.5
million teachers must be recruited in order to meet
the goal by the SDGs target year, 2030. The teacher
shortage remains most acute in sub-Saharan Africa,
where the pupil-teacher ratio in primary schools is
42:1.83
However, simply increasing the number of teachers
in the education system is not enough to improve
education quality. Teachers need to be well-trained,
motivated, and willing to remain in their posts. In
many rural areas, teachers in primary schools do not
have teaching qualifications. This is due, in part, to
the fact that many skilled teachers do not want to
relocate outside of urban centers. Salaries currently
offered to teachers are very low, and in some cases,
teachers are forced to live below the poverty line.84
Many African governments have established a
policy to provide rural hardship allowances for the
teachers in rural areas, but rural teacher recruitment
and retention remains problematic due to the
following reasons: 85
Difficulty in finding accommodation

Invest in teacher training, The distance from public services, in general,

motivation, and professional
fulfillment
As the focus of the discussion on education in
Africa has shifted from access to quality, so has
the recognition of the importance of competent,
committed teachers. The dramatic increase in
primary school enrollment rates on the continent
since the MDGs has not been mirrored by a
comparative rate of qualified teachers being
recruited and retained in the system. This shortage
of qualified teachers remains a key cause of Africas
education crisis.
and health services, in particular
Poor quality of the working environment,
including the lack of textbooks and other
teaching materials, along with overcrowded
classes
Limited opportunities for upgrading professional
skills
Difficulty with local languages
Limited opportunities for supplementing income

79 UNESCO, Global Education Monitoring Report.

80 Jessica Ball, Enhancing Learning of Children from Diverse Language backgrounds: Mother tongue-based bilingual or
multilingual education in early childhood and early primary school years, UNESCO, 2011, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/
images/0021/002122/212270e.pdf.
81 Ball, Enhancing learning of children from diverse language backgrounds.
82 Ibid.
83 Pupil-teacher ratio in primary education (headcount basis), The World Bank, last accessed June 29, 2017, http://data.worldbank.
org/indicator/SE.PRM.ENRL.TC.ZS.
84 Teachers generally prefer urban to rural schools because urban areas offer greater opportunities and higher incomes. There
is also a better quality of life in urban areas, with better access to good infrastructure, other services (such as healthcare) and
general public goods.
85 UNESCO, Universal Primary Education in Africa: The Teacher Challenge, 2009, http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/
documents/universal-primary-education-in-africa-the-teacher-challenge-en.pdf.

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

Students in Mabanga Primary School in Bungoma, Kenya use laptops that integrate public health curriculum
with IT skills. Photo credit: STARS/Kristian Buus.

Demand good governance and
transparency
Resources allocated to the education sector should
be managed efficiently and effectively, with a
special focus on ensuring transparency at every
level. African education systems remain susceptible
to corruption at the national level, but also at the
district level. In recent years, many countries have
adopted a decentralized approach to education
management with the purpose of increasing
efficiency and local accountability, shifting the
proximity of resource decision making closer to
implementation sites. While this is a necessary
reform, it has not generally been accompanied by
financial and administrative capacity building for
staff at the sub-national level.86 Thus, staff at the
sub-national level struggle to correctly implement
educational programs.
Transparent budget allocations, as well as capacity
building for staff who are responsible for managing
these budgets, are essential for ensuring that
school resources reach their intended beneficiaries.
The increased participation of parents in the school
governance system could also serve a watch-dog
role in budget allocation and spending. In some
cases, school staff may be unfamiliar with the rules
and procedures governing resource allocation, and
these guidelines should be communicated in a clear
and concise manner so they are accessible for those
who intend to implement them, as well as for those
independent community members holding them to
account.
Use information technology as a
teaching and analysis tool
If correctly introduced, information and
communication technology (ICT) in teaching and
learning at the primary school level can assist
teachers to deliver curriculum more effectively and
thus improve the quality of education received by
children in the classroom.87 However, in developing

86 Transparency International, Africa Education Watch: Good Governance Lessons from Primary Education, 2010, http://image.
guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2010/02/23/AfricaEducationWatch.pdf.
87 Moira Bladergroen et al., Educator Discourses on ICT in Education: A Critical Analysis, International Journal of Education and

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

countries in Africa, large-scale integration of facilitating and improving the training of

information technology remains elusive due to
severe infrastructure and resource constraints.88
It is difficult to identify the extent to which ICT is
currently being used in African primary schools.
The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) found
that the most significant obstacle in measuring
ICT in education in sub-Saharan Africa is the lack
of systematic data collection, noting that a number
of nations (including Somalia, Benin, and the
Democratic Republic of the Congo) reported that
there was no systematic data collection at all in
their countries.89 A review of available data on the
subject reveals inconsistencies and missing data,
even for recent years. UIS states that the existence
of a data collection effort related to this topic often
correlates with whether ICT use in education is
considered a priority area of policy and investment
interest in a country and that, generally speaking,
ICT use in education is at a particularly embryonic
stage in the majority of countries in sub-Saharan
Africa.90
What is clear, however, is that internet connectivity
in African primary schools remains uneven. Figures
below 5 percent (and sometimes effectively 0
percent) in places like Niger and Liberia contrast
with situations found in Botswana and Mauritius,
where virtually all schools are connected.91
Policy makers agree that ICT can play an
important role in equipping people to compete
in a global economy through the development of
skills necessary to facilitate social mobility. They
emphasize that ICT in education can have what is
described as a multiplier effect 92 throughout the
education system by:
enhancing learning and providing students with
new sets of skills;
reaching students with poor or no access
(especially those in rural and remote regions);
teachers; and
minimizing costs associated with the delivery of
traditional instruction.93
However, it is important not to overemphasize the
realistic impact of ICT in African primary school
education. To date, there exist very few rigorous
evaluations on the impact of technology on
educational outcomes. Further, in the near future,
ICT implementation will remain problematic in the
many African contexts lacking regular access to
electricity. 94
As is too often the case with technology, ICT should
not be considered an educational panacea in
Africa. ICT alone will not likely improve educational
outcomes. Instead, ICT should complement a strong
pedagogical foundation, and technology should be
tailored to fit and assist the existing educational
structure. Instructors should be adequately trained
on both teaching and the introduction of the
technology. Without strong existing education
structures, it is unlikely that the implementation of
ICT will dramatically or sustainably improve primary
educational outcomes.
Involve parents, guardians, and
community leaders in primary
education
Studies widely recognize the importance of
parental involvement in primary education, both
in industrialized and developing countries.95
Parental involvement is a key determinant of the
effectiveness of a primary education program.
Parental involvement in a childs education leads
to improved school attendance and appreciation
for the value of education. Teachers report that
increased parental involvement is highly beneficial
for parent-teacher relationships and the overall
morale of school employees. When parents are
more involved in their childrens education they
tend to be more confident in their own parenting,

Development Using Information and Communication Technology, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2012), http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1084168.pdf.
88 Ibid.
89 UNESO Institute for Statistics, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: A
comparative analysis of basic e-readiness in schools, 2015, http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/information-and-
communication-technology-ict-in-education-in-sub-saharan-africa-2015-en.pdf.
90 Michael Trucano, 2015, Surveying ICT Use in Education in Africa, http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/surveying-ict-use-
education-africa.
91 According to Trucano 2015, even when schools are connected, slow bandwidth speeds tend to impede internet access.
92 Abdelrahman Ahmed and Alkoud Oman, Managing Information and Communication Technology in Sudanese Secondary
School, 2015, http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1083485.pdf
93 These policy recommendations are taken from Peter Wallet (2015), Measuring ICT in Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Call for
Action, http://www.uis.unesco.org/Communication/Documents/report_elar15-3_update.pdf.
94 Peter Wallet, Measuring ICT in Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Call for Action, 2015, http://www.uis.unesco.org/
Communication/Documents/report_elar15-3_update.pdf.
95 Chuck Dervarics and Eileen OBrien, Back to School: How Parent Involvement Affects Student Achievement, Center for Public
Education, http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Public-education/Parent-Involvement/Parent-Involvement.html.

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

and also place a higher emphasis on continuing or
beginning their own education.96
Finally, effective primary education in the schools
is assisted by a three-way partnership among
educators, parents, and the community.97 Traditional
community leaders play a pivotal role in shaping
community life and ordaining and enforcing
unwritten rules among their constituents.98
Including community leaders in the life of the
school, an institution that serves as an important
pillar of society, promotes local appreciation for the
importance of education and helps instill a sense of
local ownership of education. Several preliminary
studies show that an increase in community
participation and accountability, coupled with
increased transparency, has a positive effect on
learning outcomes and can drastically reduce the
number of children who do not complete primary
school.99

96 Garry Hornby and Chrystal Witte, Parent Involvement in Inclusive Primary Schools in New Zealand: Implications for Improving
Practice and for Teacher Education,International Journal of Whole Schooling6, no. 1 (2010).
97 James Poon Teng Fatt, Innovative Curricula: Involving the Community in Novel Ways,Journal of Instructional Psychology(1999)
26, no. 3.
98 Carolyn Logan, Traditional Leaders in Modern Africa: Can Democracy and the Chief Co-Exist? Afrobarometer Working Paper
No. 93, Cape Town, http://www.gsdrc.org/document-library/traditional-leaders-in-modern-africa-can-democracy-and-the-chief-
co-exist/.
99 UNICEF The Investment Case for Education and Equity, http://www.unicef.org/publications/files/Investment_Case_for_
Education_and_Equity_FINAL.pdf.

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE
Conclusion
P
rimary education systems on the African
continent face a multiplicity of challenges.
Already scarce resources are stretched to
the breaking point in an effort to ensure
that all African children have access to primary
education, while public institutions simultaneously
grapple with maintaining an acceptable quality of
the content imparted in the classroom. Educational
equity is a major challenge: girls are less likely than
boys to be in school, children from minority groups
or extremely poor families/areas are less likely to
have access to a primary education, and rural schools
are at a disadvantage compared to schools in urban
areas. When governments fail to provide adequate
educational opportunities, private schools
unaffordable to mostfill the gaps. International
financial support for education is dwindling, and
even governments that spend a significant portion
of their budget on education are not reaping the
desired results. Additionally, primary, secondary,
and tertiary educational institutions are forced to
compete constantly for government resources.
Amid these challenges, the case studies in this
report highlight examples of countries across the
continent that are proving that sustainable progress
in primary education is possible. The Medersat.com
schools in Morocco have shown what can be done
when a back to basics approach is combined with
technological innovation. Prioritization of mother-
tongue instruction has given many Amazigh
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children the opportunity to gain a solid educational
foundation in their primary school years, while having
access to languages such as Mandarin through
ICT curriculum delivery. In Botswana, government
spending on education has an impressive impact
on educational outcomes. Teachers are trained and
retained in the public system, and transparency and
accountability in the public education system helps
ensure that resources are distributed equitably.
In Somalia, Tangerine software and hardy tablet
devices equip teachers to better evaluate the quality
of their students education. Early identification of
reading difficulties gives students the opportunity
to have their needs addressed and their skills
consolidated before they progress to high school.
In the Central African Republic, curriculum is
specifically adapted to meet the needs of some of
Africas most vulnerable children, like those housed
in the SOS Childrens Villages.
Embracing a back to basics approach with
integrated innovations in primary education can
help to ensure that Africas children have equal
access to quality basic education that will serve
as a solid foundation for further tiers of study, and
better equip them to thrive in their local contexts
and beyond. The recommendations included in
this report are a cursory offering for policy makers
seeking to better understand reform priorities for
primary education in Africa.
23
 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

Case Studies

F
our case studies are presented in this report to
illustrate quality primary education programs
in which the strategies for promoting
effective primary education outlined above
have been effectively implemented. The case
studies were also selected to highlight the following
factors and elements of primary education: location
(rural versus urban); school funders and managers
(public and private schools); environment (conflict
versus non-conflict); curriculum emphasis (e.g.
mother-tongue instruction); use of technology; and
an indication of a positive impact on the children
(generally given by internal assessments).
Medersat.Com Schools: Morocco
Background
Medersat.com100 was established by the BMCE
Bank Foundation to address the persistent
underperformance in primary education in the rural
areas of the Kingdom of Morocco. Working with
the Moroccan Ministry of National Education, the
program has assisted 22,000 students (more than
50 percent of whom are female), of which nearly
12,000 are in high school or have begun their
university studies. Today, the foundation has sixty-
two schools located in disadvantaged rural regions
across the country, from Nador to Dakhla. The model
has also been scaled up to address underserved
communities in Senegal, Mali, Congo-Brazzaville,
and forthcoming in Rwanda.101
Created in 1995, the BMCE Bank Foundation
for Education and Environment concentrated
its educational interventions on preschool and
elementary school in village regions where
education is minimal or nonexistent and fragility
prevails. Through the foundations Medersat.com
program, children from these communities receive
instruction for preschool education in their native
tongue of either Arabic, Amazigh, or French.102
By elementary school, children learn simultaneously
in three languages: Arabic, Amazigh, and French.
The vision for Medersat.com is to give children
and adults in rural areas a chance to reach a level of
education that will enable them to become positive
forces for development and to be able to contribute
to an environment of openness and tolerance in
their owncommunities.103
The modern and functional architectural designs of
the schools have been used to produce buildings
well suited to the milieu by using local materials.
Program description
Medersat.com schools are run through a public-
private partnership between BMCE Bank
Foundation and the Moroccan Ministry of National
Education. Despite this, the pedagogical approach
and curriculum are different from that in most
government schools. The differences are not only
that instruction is given in the mother tongue,
but also in the advanced program content, which
includes reading, mathematics, languages, and
logic. In some schools, children are taught Mandarin
in addition to instruction in Arabic, Amazigh, and
French.
Notably, Moroccan primary school-age children
are taught reading and mathematics in their
mother tongue in a school facility located walking
distance from their homes. The children also receive
education about their cultural heritage.
The schools employ capable, well-trained teachers
and school managers, and are well equipped with
school furniture, information technology equipment,
textbooks, and libraries. One of the biggest
challenges of the program is the availability of a
sufficient number of teachers who meet specific
academic, occupational, and social criteria and
who are willing to work in villages.104 Medersat.com

100 Medersat.com, the name chosen by BMCE Bank Foundation for its network of rural community schools, is rich in associations.
The term medersatkoum means our school in Arabic. Medersat.com also evokes the medersa, the place of learning in traditional
Arab society; the Mediterranean locale; connection to satellites and new communications technologies, hence the dot.com; and
the assets shared by the village community. Medersat.com Brings Schools and Community Development to Rural Morocco,
Synergos, 2004, http://www.synergos.org/globalgivingmatters/features/0403medersat.htm.
101 Medersat.com, Wise Qatar, http://www.wise-qatar.org/medersat-morocco.
102 Medersat.com Brings Schools and Community Development to Rural Morocco, http://www.synergos.org/globalgivingmatters/
features/0403medersat.htm.
103 Medersat.com, Wise Qatar.
104 Fatima Achour, Medersat.com: Elevating the Amazigh Language and Its Speakers, trans. by Anthony Goode, Al-Monitor,
November 5, 2013, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/culture/2013/11/moroccan-amazigh-education-project.html.

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

A student at the Medersat.com school system in Morocco practices Arabic. The innovative public-private
partnership between BMCE Bank Foundation and the Moroccan Ministry of National Education seeks to
overcome the divide in performance between rural and urban students. Photo credit: BMCE Bank Foundation.

has supplied housing and other incentives to these
teachers.
One of the program priorities is to engage and
retain all children in the program. There is particular
interest in ensuring that the girls in the community
come to school and complete their studies. The
parents and other members of the community are
not only encouraged by the school in sharing their
ideas, but they also participate in their own reading,
writing, mathematics, computer literacy, and
financial literacy programs. In some communities,
Medersat.com, through a partnership with the
Tawada Association, has established microfinance
programs that support the small businesses of
parents and others. The association provides
parents and guardians of students in the schools
with opportunities to improve their quality of life,
for example, with microloans and a program that
offers them activities to supplement their income
and projects to fight illiteracy.
Before creating any schools in the Medersat.com
network, an educational map study is carried out to
assess the areas that are in greatest need. Once a
place has been identified, residents are contacted to
discuss the most appropriate place to build a school
and to include them in its administration after it has
been built.105
Importantly, the Medersat.com program emphasizes
reconciling the school with its environment using
an architectural design that is harmonious with the
local heritage and its cultural environment.
The Moroccan Ministry of National Education
tasked Medersat.com with expanding its preschool
program to other public schools. In response, the
BMCE Bank Foundation built and eqipped 112
preschool units within existing public schools.
Medersat.com trained additional teachers to staff
these schools, resulting in an additional 10,000
children with access to preschool education.

105 Fatima Achour, Medersat.com: Elevating the Amazigh Language and Its Speakers.

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 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

Medersat.com teachers also have had the
opportunity to interact with the broader community
in which they are situatedreaching approximately
3,400 mothers and girls who were previously out of
school.106
examination written by students at the end of the
seven-year primary school program. The exam
results measure a learners proficiency in important
knowledge and skills within the primary education
program.110

Medersat.com won one of the World Innovation

Summit for Education awards in September 2013.
There, the BMCE Bank Foundation was recognized
for its outstanding quality and its innovation in the
teaching of language Arabic, Amazigh, French, and
Mandarin.107
Public Primary Schools: Botswana
Background
The Botswana Ministry of Educations primary school
system has demonstrated a strong commitment to
universal primary education, taking steps to address
both access and quality constraints. As of 2015,
there were 812 public and private primary schools
in Botswana, of which 800 are public schools.
The United National Economic Commission for
Africa highlighted Botswanas admirable primary
education progress.108 In 2013, 93.1 percent of
school-age children (seven to thirteen years old)
were in school in 2013. The teacher-to-pupil ratio in
primary schools was 1:23 between 2012 and 2013,
and the gender parity index is 0.97 in primary
schools.109 Botswanas successful provision of free
basic education has hinged on a few key policies,
including the adoption of an inclusive education
policy in 2011 and adequate public expenditure on
education.
Botswana participates in a regional comparative
study known as Southern African Consortium for
Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ). Findings
of the study indicate that while Botswanas
performance in the SACMEQ tests is average, the
countrys participants perform better than most
of Southern Africa in Mathematics and Science.
Botswanas Primary School Leaving Examination
(PSLE) is a seven-subject criterion referenced
Program Description
Since Botswanas independence from Britain in
1965, education has been consistently prioritized
in national budget allocations. Discovered in 1967,
diamond resources have transformed Botswanas
economy and rendered the country both able
and inclined to invest in education.111 Education in
Botswana is free for the first ten years, of which the
first seven years are at primary school level where
the pupil-teacher ratio is approximately 13:1.112 The
language of education is Setswana for the first four
years, thereafter English. Even though Botswana
has made great strides, the primary schools in
particular still lack resources (especially books). In
2007, Botswana began working with the African
Library Project. Now, more than one third of the
primary schools have libraries. Over 80 percent of
children who start primary school are likely to reach
grade five. In Botswana, 11 percent of children of
official primary school age are out of school.
The Botswana Ministry of Education and Skills
is the official government body responsible for
public education. The vision of the Ministry is that
all children and youth of Botswana have a right
to education regardless of disability, gender, social
class, or ethnic group.113 Of Botswanas 805 primary
schools, 745 are public and a mere 60 are private
schools, commonly called English Medium schools
(largely limited to urban or peri-urban areas).114
Twenty-seven of the 745 public schools in remote
areas are boarding schools, specifically aimed at
providing education for children who live in areas
that are far from urban centers or difficult to reach
due to poor infrastructure.115
The responsibilities for the public education system
are split between the Ministry of Education and Skills

106 Fatima Achour, Medersat.com: Elevating the Amazigh Language and Its Speakers.
107 Wise Awards 2014, WISE Qatar, http://www.wise-qatar.org/sites/default/files/2014_wise_awards_brochure_0.pdf.
108 Botswana Country Profile, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, http://www.uneca.org/sites/default/files/uploaded-
documents/CoM/com2016/Country-Profiles/botswana_eng_final.pdf.
109 United Nations Development Program, Pupil-Teacher Ratio, Primary School, Human Development Reports, http://hdr.undp.org/
en/indicators/46206; Work Bank, School Enrollment, Primary (Gross), Gender Parity Index (GPI), 2014, https://data.worldbank.
org/indicator/SE.ENR.PRIM.FM.ZS?locations=BW.
110 Botswana Examinations Council, Summary of Results, 2015, http://www.bec.co.bw/2015-psle-summary-of-results.
111 Rodrick Mukumbira, Report Card: Botswana a model for Africa?, 2005, Africa Files, http://www.africafiles.org/article.
asp?ID=8379.
112 Ibid.
113 African Library Project, Library Partner - Botswana Ministry of Education, 2016, https://www.africanlibraryproject.org/our-
african-libraries/library-partners-in-africa/31-african-libraries-overview/african-library-pages/139-library-partner-botswana-
ministry-of-education.
114 Nkobi Pansiri and Philip Buwara, Parents Participation in Public Primary Schools in Botswana: Perceptions and Experiences of
Headteachers, International Education Studies, (2013) Vol. 6 No. 5, http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1068400.pdf.
115 Ibid.

26 ATLANTIC COUNCIL
 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

Students at Therisanyo Primary School in Gaborone, Botswana welcome George W. Bush, former president of
the United States, for a 2017 visit. Botswana has made commendable progress in getting more children into
its public school system, keeping its student-to-teacher ratio low, and striving for gender parity in education.
Photo credit: Paul Morse for the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

Development and the Ministry of Local Government.
Local Government is responsible for everything to
do with infrastructure from school feeding to the
provision of stationery. The Ministry of Education
develops curriculum, handles teachers salaries and
professional training, and provides textbooks to
schools. The public education system in Botswana
relies on the following principles for its success:116
Well-Built Classrooms: Botswanas education
officials believe that classroom accommodation
is central to learning, because it shields
students learning experience from the external
environment (weather and events in the
community) and facilitates the organization
and effective use of learning tools such as
chalkboards, teaching aids, and furniture.
Basic Learning Materials: Pupils should have
sole use of a textbook (especially for the
core subjects, such as English, Setswana,
mathematics, and science).
Academically Approved Textbooks and
Learning Materials: Before any teaching-learning
materials and textbooks can be published
or used in schools in Botswana, they have to
be evaluated and approved by a Textbook
Evaluation Committee comprised of teachers,
education officers, and trade union members.
Qualified Teachers: Through the European
Union Human Resource Development support
program, the Ministry has committed to
improving the quality of education by upgrading
the minimum qualifications of teachers from
certificate to diploma. The target performance
indicator set in the agreement with the European
Union was to increase the number of teachers
at diploma level by 2 percent annually from a
baseline of 75 percent in 2013.

116 Universal Primary Education, Government of Botswana, http://www.gov.bw/en/Ministries--Authorities/Ministries/Ministry-of-

Agriculture1/Teachers/Universal-Primary-Education/.

ATLANTIC COUNCIL 27
 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

SOS Childrens Villages supports hundreds of students in the Central African Republic capital of Bangui, where
prolonged conflict has made childrenespecially those who have been orphaned or displacedespecially
vulnerable. Photo credit: SOS Childrens Villages International.

SOS Childrens Villages:
Central African Republic
SOS Villages in the Central African Republic has as
its primary mission to provide homes, health care
centers, playgrounds, and importantly, schools for
children living in conflict-torn communities. SOS
has established childrens programs in 134 countries
around the world with its program founded in the
Central African Republic (CAR) in the 1990s. As of
the last report, the program was serving over 800
children in primary school in the capitol of Bangui.
Background
Children have been orphaned, abandoned, and are
vulnerable for many reasons during and after wars
and conflicts around the world. That is what led
Hermann Gmeiner, in 1949, in Austria to found a
childrens charity, the SOS Childrens Villages. SOS
has established childrens programs in 134 countries
around the world; its program was established in
the Central African Republic (CAR) in the 1990s.
During prolonged recent conflicts in CAR beginning
in 2012, more than 625,000 people had been
displaced because of the fightingmost of them
women and children. At least 6,000 children have
been recruited into armed groups. More than half
(62 percent) of the citizens of the CAR are living
on less than $1.00 a day. In 2015, GDP per capita (in
current US$) in the country was $323.117
According to the Global Partnership for Education,118
30 percent of primary school-age children (six to
eleven years old) in CAR have never been to school,
and the pupil to teacher ratio is 89:1. Before the
crisis, 40 percent of teachers were unqualified.
SOS Schools follow the local curriculum and employ
teachers from the regionwho are familiar with
the local cultureto deliver the curriculum. The
underlying philosophy of the SOS primary schools
is that the schools are child-centered; SOS believes

117 World Bank, GDP Per Capita (Current US$) Central African Republic, February 5, 2017, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/
NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=CF.
118 Global Partnership for Education Central African Republic, 2015, http://www.globalpartnership.org/country/central-african-republic.

28 ATLANTIC COUNCIL
 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

that Education policies, curricula, and schools must
respond appropriately and in the best interest of
the individual child to her/his emotional, intellectual,
physical, social, and spiritual development.119 The
work of SOS Childrens Villages focuses on children
who have lost or are at risk of losing parental care.
Resources must be directed to this same target group,
as well as to children whose rights to education are
being violated. Below is detailed information about
the SOS primary school in Bangui.120
The ultimate goal is to provide equal experiences
of education that address the needs of all
children.
Recognizing the challenges presented by a child-
centered approach, SOS Childrens Villages offers
support to teachers in the form of continuing
professional development. As part of this training,
teachers should develop an understanding of the
social context of their work.

The SOS primary school is near the capitol, based
about six kilometers away from the center of Bangui,
in the Gbangouma district. The school has over 800
students, divided into two groups, with over 400
coming in the afternoon from the SOS community
programs. The education system is based on the
French system with adjustments incorporated
into the curriculum based on local needs. There is
a particular emphasis on including more classes
in Sango. Students sit for the Certificat dtudes
Fondamentales 1 at the end of grade six. A high
standard of learning is maintained at the school,
exemplified by the 100 percent Primary School
Diploma pass rate (compared to the national
average of 86 percent).
Concern Worldwide Early Grade
Reading Assessments: Somalia
Background
Somalia has been a source of instability in the Horn
of Africa for nearly three decades; after the fall of
dictator Siad Barres regime in 1991, Somalia entered
a chaotic, violent political vacuum. Although
attempts at governance and peacekeeping
existed through interim governments and United
Nations peacekeeping missions, Somalia was
essentially ungoverned until very recently. Even
now, the nascent Federal Government of Somalia
exerts control of only the limited territory around
Mogadishu and parts of the Somali coast.

The educational philosophy that guides the SOS village
primary schools includes the following principles:121
Education enables children to strengthen
their capacities, to enrich their lives through
knowledge, and to develop a set of ethics and
values. Education then means guiding curiosity,
creating individual learning options, and
allowing children to experiment.
Educational curriculum should be determined
by context, economy, and culture.
One of the most efficient ways of acquiring
literacy is to start by reading and writing in your
own language (mother tongue).
What counts as relevant is everything that is not
limited by gender, faith, ethnicity, or economic
situation. Relevant is what expands thinking and
learning beyond todays knowledge and beyond
taboos.
Teachers have to respond to their students
diversity and vary the curriculum accordingly
the content, the delivery method, and the way
in which performance is assessed and recorded.
Although a semblance of government has been
restored, the Somali people still suffer from
widespread poverty, a lack of safe drinking water
and sanitation, and a low enrollment in school,
especially for girls. The Somali terrorist group al-
Shabaab menaces large swathes of the country,
making internal displacement the norm for many
school-age children. The resettlement of Somali
refugees from neighboring Kenya, moreover, means
that an increasing number of children living in
Somalia have experienced some kind of disruption
in their education.
Program Description
In collaboration with the Somali Ministry of Education,
Concern Worldwide conducted an Early Grade
Reading Assessment (EGRA) in five Mogadishu
schools in 2013.122 The assessment aimed to draw
attention to early grade literacy levels in Somalia and
to measure change affected from an early literacy
intervention. Behind its creation was the idea that
if practitioners had measurable data on students
reading abilities, they could give teachers feedback
on how to improve instruction. Somalias insecurity
and displacement issues greatly affect the ability

119 SOS Kinderdorf International, Learning for Life: Formal Education Policy, 2008, http://www.sos-childrensvillages.org/what-we-
do/education/going-to-school.
120 Central African Republic SOS Schools, SOS Childrens Villages, http://www.sos-schools.org/africa/centralafricanrepublic.
121 SOS Childrens Villages, What Type of Education?, Forum (2010), 7, January 31, 2017, https://www.sos-childrensvillages.org/
getmedia/46aa7021-34e0-45ac-8813-6dded20304c6/100903-Forum-en-web.pdf?ext=.pdf.
122 Concern Worldwide, Conducting an EGRA in a Complex Conflict Environment: Is it Worth it? Lessons from Somalia, http://
www.uis.unesco.org/StatisticalCapacityBuilding/Workshop%20Documents/Education%20workshop%20dox/Montreal%20
2014/19.Conducting%20EGRA%20in%20a%20complex%20conflict%20environment_EN.pdf.

ATLANTIC COUNCIL 29
 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE
of children to become literate even at the most
basic levels. Recognizing a lack of data on students
progress in literacy and a need to improve literacy
instruction, Concern Worldwide implemented the
EGRA to better inform teachers on how to intervene
early where there are gaps in a childs literacy.
It targeted Somali medium schools and a group
of children unlikely to attend school without the
support of nongovernmental organizations due to
extreme poverty and an inability to pay school fees
in grades two, three, and four. The assessment has
since continued, becoming an annual process after
its roll out in 2013.
Somalias education ministry is extremely limited in
scope and size, supporting only thirteen schools, all
of which lie within Mogadishu. This means that most
schools are run by UN agencies, private institutions,
or NGOs. A lack of consistency, because of the
multiple actors involved in education, means there
are not standard curricula or exams. The elimination
of phonics from the national Somali curriculum
means that most teachers did not learn to read using
phonics, and this continues for current students.
Concern Worldwide overcame these challenges in
insufficient data and instructor knowledge gaps by
training teachers in phonics and implementing the
use of tablets and a software platform, Tangerine,
that allowed for better data analysis and provided a
digital version of the EGRA.123
123 Concern Worldwide, Conducting an EGRA in a Complex Conflict Environment.
124 Concern Worldwide, Lost for Words, An Analysis of Early Grade Reading Assessments in the Most Vulnerable Communities in
Five of the Worlds Poorest Countries from 2012-2014, September 15, 2014, https://www.concern.net/sites/default/files/media/
resource/g2569_lost_for_words_report_final_2.pdf.
30
The EGRA is written in Somali and consists of four
subtasks designed to assess childrens reading
abilities. These subtasks connect to different skills
related to reading acquisition. Although results of
the EGRA conducted in Mogadishu schools were low
due to a number of factors, the EGRA successfully
identified literacy gaps, informed Concern and other
stakeholders of where to offer teachers in-classroom
support and how to better train teachers to design
interventions, and introduced reading materials into
the curriculum that were more relevant for children
learning how to read. Because of the many challenges
Somali children face, including displacement and
short-term migration, inconsistent living situations,
and overall poverty, the EGRA better informs
teachers, principals, and policy makers how to
make education more responsive and flexible. This
encompasses successful characteristics seen in
education programs elsewhere, including mother-
tongue instruction, a focus on quality teacher
training, using technology as a tool to support
instruction rather than replace it, and providing
relevant curriculum based on students needs and
environments.124
ATLANTIC COUNCIL
 EQUIPPING AFRICAS PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS FOR THE FUTURE

About the Author

Constance Berry Newman is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Councils

Africa Center.

Newman currently serves as special counsel for African affairs at the Carmen
Group and in2016 served as the interim president ofthe US African Development
Foundation where she had been for the previous four years as an advisor on Somalia.
She is best known for her work in addressing issues related to poverty and civil and
human rights, as well as advancing democracy around the world.

From 2004 to 2005, Newman served as assistant secretary of state for African
affairs. From 2001 to 2004, as the assistant administrator for Africa at the US Agency for International
Development, she oversaw the US governments economic development in Africa and was a key participant
in the launching of the African Education Initiative to expand childrens access to basic education and
increase the number of teachers, especially at the primary school level, across the continent. From 2002
to 2005, Newman acted as President Bushs G8 personal representative on Africa. Throughout her career,
Newman has held seven presidential appointments, five confirmed by the Senate, in both Republican and
Democratic administrations.

Newman holds an undergraduate degree in political science from Bates College and a law degree from the
University of Minnesota Law School. In 2012, Government Executive magazine selected Newman as one of
the twenty all-time greatest civil servants.

The author is grateful to then-Africa Center Visiting Fellow Chlo McGrath for her contributions to this
study.

ATLANTIC COUNCIL 31
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