Experts Tackling Education in Africa

February 17, 2012

Pupils at the Toi Primary School in Nairobi, Kenya, sit in a classroom and study, September 6, 2011.

How do you fix education in Africa, where students have far fewer opportunities than their counterparts in other parts of the world? There are two schools of thought on the subject: do you invest bottom up? Or top down?

The statistics are hard to ignore. Sub-Saharan Africa is the lowest-ranked region in the world on the United Nations' education development index.

The U.N. education agency (UNESCO) says a quarter of all children in sub-Saharan Africa do not go to school, and account for 43 percent of the world's out-of-school children.

Meantime, the African Union (AU) has said the continent will need to recruit more than 2 million new teachers by 2015, just three years from now.

While the U.N. and the AU agree on the scope of the education challenges facing the continent, they are from two separate schools of thought on how to remedy the situation.

UNESCO, for instance, develops individual programs catering to each country's needs based on the U.N.'s Education for All initiative (EFA).

"Every country or every region, we look at those and see what is important," said Joseph Massaquoi, director of UNESCO's East Africa office. "For instance in Uganda they have decided that teacher training is what is important, in Sudan it is literacy that we are emphasizing, similarly we are doing the same for Rwanda. So every country we pick an area that we strive to emphasize."