Education is considered a universal human right and an issue of public good and responsibility. However, many children, particularly in developing African countries, do not enjoy this right. In many African nations, those who can afford education send their children to private schools in the city. But that is not an option for many in rural areas or for poorer families.

 

Over 400 million children live on the African continent – and the number is rising. The United Nations estimates that Africa’s population will double to 2.4 billion by 2050. That’s one-quarter of the world’s population. 40% of all children under the age of five would live in Africa in the middle of the 21st century, according to the prognosis. According to the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), over one-fifth of African children between the ages of 6 and 11 are not in school, while nearly 60% of youth between the ages of 15 and 17 are not enrolled. It is still common in many areas to find children on farms or playing on the streets instead of attending school. According to UNESCO, ninety-eight million children and youth between six and 18 are still out of school in sub-Saharan Africa. 

 

Girls’ education is of particular concern: 9 million girls on the continent between the ages of 6 and 11 will never attend school, compared to 6 million boys. By the time they reach adolescence, girls have a 36% exclusion rate compared to 32% for boys. Differing attitudes towards the value of formal education cause major challenges. Skepticism of Western-style learning and the belief that girls don’t need an education, compounded with regional instability, have created a challenging environment for learning to thrive.

 

In South Africa, at least 40% of all students drop out of school before completing grade 12. Girls make up the majority of this group. Between 2018 and 2020, Seychelles was the country with the highest adult literacy rate in Africa, at around 96 percent. South Africa and São Tomé and Príncipe followed with a literacy rate of approximately 95 percent and 93 percent, respectively. The average rate on the continent stood at roughly 67 percent. Moreover, Southern Africa had the highest literacy levels among African regions.

 

Nearly 8 out of 10 children who begin school in grade 1 in most African countries experiencing conflict and fragility do not transit to tertiary education. Recent gross enrolments at tertiary levels were estimated at 9% in SSA compared to 42% in the Middle East & North Africa compared to 52% in Latin America & Caribbean, 70% in Europe & Central Asia, and 86% in North America. Tertiary enrolment rates are particularly low, as low as less than 3%, in many fragile countries such as Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Chad, and Central African Republic.

 

There are also significant infrastructural challenges on the continent (insufficient school buildings, too few school buildings with electricity, and insufficient books and available learning materials). The educational attainment profile in Africa is also not helped by the fact that roughly 60% of all Africans live in rural areas and are engaged in subsistence farming. School-age children in these environments are also part of the expected labor pool of rural African families, and as such many fail to complete primary school as their families require them to work their land.

 

One reason for these shortfalls is that government spending on education in sub-Saharan Africa falls short of international benchmarks in several countries. The median education budget was equal to about 3.5 percent of gross domestic product in 2020, which is below the international recommendation of at least 4 percent of GDP. However, a recent IMF analysis reveals that achieving the key Sustainable Development Goal of universal primary and secondary school enrollment by 2030 may require doubling education expenditures as a share of GDP, including from both public and private funding sources.

 

Greater spending to improve access is important, but equally important is the effort to ensure that funds are efficiently used. Indeed, for the median country in sub-Saharan Africa, only 15 percent of students in primary and secondary school achieve more than the minimum learning outcome, while teacher training rates have fallen steadily for two decades.

 

African nations, through the African Union and the African Union Development Agency – NEPAD have re-doubled their efforts to strengthen the educational systems across the continent to address the myriad of challenges. Computer and internet-assisted distance education has been identified as an important tool to support learning at all levels on the continent. Stakeholders such as UNESCO, the World Bank, and several bilateral donors have developed programs to connect African primary and secondary schools to the internet. Distance learning has also been adopted at the tertiary educational level.

 

Several nations are adopting universal free education for all primary students, and efforts to close the gender gap in education are yielding increasing success. The efforts by African nations to receive increased debt relief and accept creditors adhering to structural adjustment repayment prescriptions allow the countries to allocate more of their budgets to education. However, for the foreseeable future, there will be a serious battle waged to educate, in particular, African youth.

Globally, Africa’s share of the world’s 18,772 higher education institutions remained low at 8.9%, compared to 37% for Asia, 21.9% for Europe, 20.4% for North America, and 12% for Latin America and the Caribbean. Africa has an estimated 1,650 higher education institutions, many facing challenges that require the intervention of various stakeholders, national governments, and development partners for the students to maximize their learning outcomes and contribute effectively to the workforce.

 

Higher education in Africa is underdeveloped and has been a low priority for the past two decades. Access to higher education for the relevant age group remains at 5%, the lowest regional average globally, just one-fifth of the global average of about 25%. Women are underrepresented in higher education, particularly in science and technology. The total number of students in African higher education institutions in 2017 stood at 14.6 million out of 220.7 million worldwide, or 6.6%.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated educational inequalities in Africa, where a significant portion of students could not transition to online learning due to lack of access. As of 2023, Internet connectivity in African schools remains low, with only 40% of primary, 50% of lower secondary, and 65% of upper secondary schools connected to the Internet. This digital divide hampers efforts to provide quality education across the continent.

 

Regarding quality, not a single Western and Central African university features in the rankings of the world’s best 500 academic institutions. Further, a backlog of reforms has accumulated over the last decades. A key consequence of underdeveloped higher education institutions is high rates of talent migration out of Africa in pursuit of training and research opportunities abroad.

 

While graduates of many African higher educational institutions go unemployed, substantial skilled labor shortages persist. The challenge is to increase graduates’ quantity and quality through investments in laboratories and human resources for these disciplines, improve the link with employers to raise relevance, and foster strong international collaboration to raise quality. Lack of investment has meant that higher education institutions in Africa cannot respond to the immediate skill needs or support sustained productivity-led growth in the medium term.

 

More broadly, there is an inadequate regional specialization of the higher education systems in Western and Central Africa, as well as other regions of Africa. Higher education in Africa faces severe constraints in attaining a critical mass of quality faculty. The average percentage of staff with PhD in public higher education institutions in Africa is estimated to be less than 20%(Soucat et al., 2013; Chronicle of Higher Education, 2013). Many departments do not have more than 1 or 2 senior professors, and many are close to retirement age. This prevents departments and universities from being able to provide relevant higher education training (in part to develop faculty themselves) and establish vibrant research environments.

 

Moreover, low faculty salaries, lack of research funding and equipment, and limited autonomy provide disincentives for professors to stay in African universities. Academic disruptions due to strikes by staff and students arising from several factors, including poor administrative leadership and lack of resources, are other challenges confronting African higher education (ACE Report, 2016).

As the African economies started to recover, coupled with the recent recognition by the World Bank Group and other development agencies of the important role higher education can play in the socio-economic development process of Africa. With a resurgence of interest in African higher education, it became imperative to accelerate the recovery and revitalization of higher education institutions across the continent.

 

The Association of African Universities (AAU) and its partners, while playing a catalytic role in the revitalization process, designed a series of interventions meant to ameliorate the difficult situation higher education institutions face.

 

These interventions have been the key areas of:

 

• Institutional leadership and management
• Academic mobility, including the African diaspora
• ICT development for teaching, learning, and research

• Making African theses and other scholarly works available to the wider audience in and outside Africa
• Graduate fellowships and small grants for PhD support
• Linking universities to the productive sectors of the economy, supporting African higher education institutions to assist their host countries in achieving sustainable development goals through policy research. 

The Africa Centers of Excellence project (ACEs) is the first large-scale regional program funded by the World Bank in the higher education sector in Africa. It addresses higher-level skills development needs and innovative research requirements for the continent’s priority development sectors in five main areas: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); agriculture; health; environment; applied social science and education. Since its start in 2014, the program has supported over 80 centers in more than 50 universities across 20 countries across the continent.

 

Under the program, thousands of students, more than one-third of whom are female, are enrolled in postgraduate programs geared towards international standards in delivering quality training and regional specializations that are helping to fulfill labor market demands on the continent. The ACEs are undertaking high-impact research addressing the region’s most pressing development challenges, such as food insecurity, climate change, and infectious diseases.

 

In 2019, in order to increase the impact of existing ACEs and extend the program to more centers, the World Bank, together with the French Development Agency, launched the third phase of the program: the “ACE for Development Impact project, ACE-Impact.” A total of 53 centers in 35 universities across 11 countries –Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Togo—participate in the ACE-Impact project to improve and accelerate the quality, quantity, and development impact of postgraduate education. These ACEs have developed strong partnerships with universities and industries locally, regionally, and worldwide, helping to generate support for students’ research programs, offering internships, and facilitating their access to the job market. The ACEs are key in increasing the number of science graduates needed to support Africa’s fast-growing economy.

 

Investment in education provides clear long-term economic gains that more than justify the cost. Greater government spending on education offers economic benefits such as higher productivity and foreign direct investment, as shown in the latest Fiscal Monitor. Governments in sub-Saharan Africa should protect education budgets amid tighter fiscal constraints and the ongoing funding squeeze, and implement best practices in public financial management on raising domestic revenue and ensuring that funds are well-spent.

 

For their part, donors and international organizations should maintain or expand education funding support across the region. This will ensure the supply of a productive labor force that will be needed more and more urgently by a rapidly aging world, and help the region become one of the world’s most dynamic sources of new demand for consumption and investment.