Diagnosing the Problems of Education in Africa

Good education in Africa presently seems impossible if you are poor; it’s so expensive that it is only available to those that can afford it. The poor are left marginalized with substandard government schools 

After looking at the trend across Africa, and most especially in Sierra Leone where I have taken a critical look at the present system, I believe that the insistence on education based on meritocracy (students advance purely on merit) should be encourage as this will lead to equity. To make this work, the education system needs to be insulated from politics and this is one of the major problems of education in Africa.

The influence of politicians in formulating policies about education without consulting educators and bureaucrats’ does not help in tackling the issues education is facing. As Tharman Shanmugaratnam (Finance Minister and former Education Minister of Singapore) once said, “the role of political leaders is to keep politics out of education.”


How many African universities can overcome the political resistance to charging fees? Singapore has also done well with teacher training because it has been linked with pay-for-performance for teachers. Without the latter (which if often resisted by teachers’ unions across Africa), it is difficult to get results and accountability from the former.

Few parents can look forward with much glee to an evening spent poring over the accounts of their child’s school at the monthly Parent Teacher Association meeting. Even fewer have the financial expertise to know what fiddled figures look like, or the courage to challenge the head teacher’s excuses for why there are no textbooks. But maybe it’s time Africa’s parents stood up and challenged the endemic corruption across their children’s educational system.


But why are some parents still paying when education should be free? In some places, particularly in rural areas, schools receive such sporadic and minimal funding from the local and district authorities that parents have clubbed together and reinstated registration fees – as a way of simply providing some resources for their children’s classrooms and money to pay teachers.


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Parents need to be made to realise how they, and their children’s futures, are being cheated by the system. Our kids are the disadvantaged, how will posterity judge us in the future