Commentary

As many African countries work to end extreme poverty and have the youngest population structures in the world, these societies must deliver quality education for all children for their nations to flourish. When accompanied by other reforms, education can be the primary tool for improving students’ abilities to be productive members of society, which in turn gives individuals the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty.

Education improves the lives of the very poor. Evidence shows that women with more years of education have dramatically lower fertility rates which is very important for reducing poverty. Furthermore, the positive effects of education are intergenerational: the children of educated mothers fare much better on well-being indicators than the children of uneducated mothers.

In poor countries, as the quality of education rises, the returns on going to school also rise. Many studies show a strong relationship between educational quality and wages. In a study in South Africa, a one standard deviation increase in test scores accounted for 35.5 percent higher wages. In Sierra Leone, learning outcomes are very low. Thus, quality matters. Improving quality is urgent. As it is, millions of poor families sacrifice scarce family income to put their children in school in the hope that education will put them on a pathway out of poverty. Ensuring a return on these investments is now imperative.

True, significant numbers of the poorest children—especially girls and other educationally disadvantaged groups—–are going to school, but too few are learning. Many of these come from the poorest households, are often the first in their families to go to school, and come disproportionately from rural areas. While such rapid growth is laudable and unprecedented, this massive expansion of schooling has significantly strained existing education systems. Teacher and facility shortages are acute. Government first of all needs to recruit more new to keep pace with current levels of enrollments.

Classes one, two, and three often hold the most students – some schools have as many as 100 students in one room. There are other structural issues more threatening to provision of quality than the shortages of teachers and facilities. Among these are the lack of effective teaching practice and very little attention to and accountability for student learning among teachers and education managers.

As it is, many are entering the doors of school for the first time, but too few are learning. Although children are expected to be able to read fluently by the end of three years in school, grade-level testing indicates that even by Grade 6, the m ajority of students still cannot read or do basic math, demonstrated minimum literacy, unable to copy a single word or punctuation mark correctly from a five-line passage.

Improving quality is urgent but resources are scarce and imprudently used. Thus, the amount of money for education and the way in which it is spent will ultimately determine how successfully changes can be made. However, both government resources and international aid are insufficient and inadequately oriented toward quality. Equally troublesome is that there are few accountability mechanisms for how money flows through the system and gets spent. Evidence abound that a significant amount of the money allocated for education does not reach the schools.