Introduction: quality education in Africa – international commitments, local challenges and responses

TLDR: In this article, the authors report that most students in Sub-Saharan Africa leave primary school without mastering the 3 Rs, and grade repetition and drop out are estimated to consume about 25% of the financial resources allocated to primary education in this region.

Abstract: Background and objectives The Education for All (EFA) campaign emerged as a global imperative as a result of the International Conference on Education held in Jomtien in 1990. Ten years later, at the Dakar Summit, it was established that remarkable progress had been accomplished in terms of access (e.g. increase in gross enrolment ratios and in the number of literate adults), but that quality, as measured through various indicators, left much to be desired. Such indicators included alarmingly low student achievement and high drop out rates, resulting in system inefficiency. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was reported to be the region where the picture was the gloomiest. Indeed, various evaluations showed that in this part of Africa, most students left primary school without mastering the 3 Rs. 1 In addition, school did not seem to help pupils ‘‘learn how to learn’’. These findings are all the more preoccupying as primary schooling is an involuntary terminal stage of education for many children in SSA. In other words, these children are potentially the future illiterate adults. Worth mentioning also is the fact that grade repetition and drop out are estimated to consume about 25% of the financial resources allocated to primary education in this region. In response to the foregoing, the international community pledged to support the achievement of quality universal primary education (UPE) in lowincome countries by 2015, especially in SSA. Five years after Dakar, there were indications that progress was still very slow with respect to quality (see for instance UNESCO 2004). Two years earlier, in the framework of its 2003 biennale, ADEA commissioned an ambitious study of quality improvement in basic education in SSA. This study helped to identify knowledge gaps, new challenges, promising policies, programmes and practices, as well as unresolved questions (see Verspoor 2005). ADEA subsequently opted to maintain quality as a key focus of its activities, while remaining cognizant of the fact that a large number of eligible children in the region are still deprived of their right to formal basic education. In fact, the great challenge that SSA faces is to attend to access and quality simultaneously, as the two sides of the same coin, in a context of economic hardships, inadequate